I recently asked my students this very question, after a playful discussion on a poem by e. e. cummings: maggie and millie and molly and may.
The poem, a simple yet not simplistic one, speaks to just that. That relationship – between human and that which is much bigger than us; unknown to us, separate from us while at the same time, not entirely. Each character is so different from the other, and as a result find different things at the edge of that vastness of the ocean. At the same time, they are all but interchangeable; each of those m-folly-personages could be any one of us.
With this poem and question, I’d wanted to push my students to reflect on the concept of having a confident relationship with the unknown.
The economist Rachel Bostman studies trust – she defines trust as just this: a confident relationship with the unknown.
An act of trust is a decision to engage, to suspend disbelief and give over to another world with curiosity. Trust in healthcare is one of the most important challenges of our age: how can we enable a base level of trust among collectives of humans engaged in the complexity of healthcare service?
What I wanted my students to see here that a relationship with art comes from that very same leap of faith.
Being in relationship with art or with nature is the central concept of aesthetic development: the kind of cognition that grows through exposure to art, interaction, reflection, and time. It’s the trajectory of artists, the territories of risk and love, and it’s deeply intertwined with wisdom.
“Aesthetic” is one of those wiley words that has a lot of different definitions, but arts educators know it as a “cognitive mode of perceiving” or “critical reflection on art or nature”. John Dewey once said that the word was not possible to define, except as the “opposite of anesthetic,” which, if you let that sink in a minute, is just…. exactly.
Aesthetic capabilities are the bedrock of excellence in patient care. Aesthetic capabilities are how a masterful cardiologist can recognize discrepancies within patterns in rhythms of heart rates, or how a neurologist listens to that signal that says something’s off upon sensing misalignments of symmetries in posture, or how a psychiatrist’s attunement to facial expressions are like the music behind the words of the story.
Radiologist Vickie Feldstein, who years ago was profiled in Jerome Groopman’s How Doctors Think as an example of how physician creativity and judgment works upstream of and in sync with technology, recently gave our class a riveting demonstration of the necessity of aesthetic capability in reading fetal sonograms. Anyone who thinks of a transducer as a simple tool of documentation needs to learn from Vickie about its capabilities for exploration, story-telling and co-creation. As ultrasound is increasingly available and more broadly used at the bedside, this is a perfect example of the kind of adaptive expertise that should be centered in the trainings that accompany the technology.
As technology digitizes the body, democratizes information, and adds paradigm-shifting capacity, the fundamental role of all clinicians is in exponential flux. The wisdom of masterful, adaptive, and diversified aesthetic thought needs to be supported by and integrated into our dashboards, tools, team configurations, and trainings.
As it turned out, my students had great answers to the question “why have a relationship with art or with nature?” They spoke of meaning-making, of mastery, of stillness, of companionship, of purpose.
As the semester draws to a close, the thing I want them to most remember, though, is that aesthetics are tied to pleasure. The knowing you get when something feels, looks, tastes, good — or feels right. Resonates. Even if it is not beauty per se–even if it is painful– it is that rightness: the clean vibration of truth.
Remembering this is the key to contact with our own souls, which is the key to contact with others, which is the key to not only to keeping on but to keeping the species.
And, remembering this is the key to the knowledge of the body itself, whose inklings and signals speak the truths that, at the end of the day, are the very thing true medicine strives to hear.
