For
something I’m working on, I have been reading several books by the surgeon Atul
Gawande. At the end of Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Gawande
offers five suggestions on how to avoid being “just a white-coated cog in a
machine” and make “a worthy difference” in the world. Gawande is primarily
addressing other physicians and surgeons, and it would seem to many of us that
they do make a difference—a big difference if we’re sick and in need.
But his point is that work in medicine—well-paid and prestigious though it
is—can get routine and burdensome and requires some extra effort to avoid
feeling like you’re on a treadmill. Physicians I know who work in HMO settings
confirm this feeling.
Given the kinds of work most people
do for way less money and status but often with a good dose of repetition and
stress, it might be difficult to sympathize with Gawande, but I was interested
to see that two of his five suggestions were to “count something” and to “write
something.”
On counting, Gawande writes: “It
doesn’t really matter what you count… the only requirement is that what you
count should be interesting to you.” In Gawande’s case, counting obvious things
in the operating room contributed to techniques to improve performance and
avoid dangerous mistakes. “If you count something you find interesting, you
will learn something interesting.”
On writing, Gawande observes:
It makes no difference whether you
write five paragraphs for a blog, a paper for a professional journal, or a poem for a reading group. Just write.
What you write need not achieve
perfection. It need only add some small observation about your world.
Gawande
confesses that he did not write before he became a doctor. (I assume he means
for publication.) “But once I became a doctor, I found I needed to write.”
Writing, for him, helps him hold onto a “larger sense of purpose,” enables him
to “step back and think through a problem.”
For Atul Gawande, counting and
writing have high stakes and have contributed to his considerable achievements
as a surgeon and author. In this blog, I want to reflect on small-scale
counting and writing, everyday tallies and scribbles that can lift you
momentarily out of the flow of events, help you take notice and give you a tool
to think about what you perceive. How many are there of this object I’m seeing:
trees, cell phones, shopping carts, cracks and buckles in the sidewalk, books
and magazines? As I go through my day, are there more in one place than in
another? What about behaviors, casual ones? How often do people greet or
somehow acknowledge each other? Does this behavior vary by place?
Writing. With a pen or keypad record
a line from a song or t.v. show or from something you’re reading that touches
or informs you, or the surprising color on a burst of flowers, or an overheard
blip of conversation (this from a guy with a sad laugh on a cellphone: “Cuz I
messed up, that’s why”), or something lovely someone says to you. Especially
write that last one down.
I probably need to state what I
imagine is on some readers’ minds: I’m not asking that you count or write all
the time, certainly not encouraging an obsessive adding or recording. But I do
like the idea of momentarily focusing on the little things of the world that
peripherally catch our attention.
What I also value is that this
orientation to count and describe small, everyday objects and events becomes a
potent research tool when brought to bear on what one studies—for me and a
number of the readers of this blog that would be school and schooling. Bring
your writing and counting together. What kind of buildings surround the school—homes,
shops? How many of each? What about signage? Where and how do students enter
campus? Do they come alone, in pairs or groups, are they dropped off—on foot or
by car? As you walk to your destination (the administrative offices, a
classroom) what do you see and hear? The flow and clustering of students and
adults? Bits of conversation? What blares from the loudspeaker? Are there trees
and how many? Banners, flags, signs? Anything, anything that catches
your attention.
This
is just the start, of course. Counts can be reductive as can snippets of
description. You have to make sense of them—and try to understand what sense
the people in the school make of it all. But both modest insights and big ideas
can begin with a small amplification of our attention, kicking it up a notch,
and counting and scribbling down or tapping out what we might have missed
before.