As a first-year student, I was so blown away by everything I was learning in school for Chinese Medicine, I couldn’t keep my mind straight. I was being rearranged, challenged on every level. I really couldn’t have blogged about the questions I was having if I tried. During my second year, things were less windswept but busier – that was my strongest blogging year during my tenure at NCNM. My third and fourth years were *much* busier in terms of work at school, work outside of school – the blogging clip declined. Also, while I was more able to formulate relevant questions, I was less likely to actually pose them. Why? Part bravado, part fear, part exhaustion.
Bravado might be the wrong word, let me explain. Learning something new, especially something as new as Chinese medicine was to me, is always a meandering path of discovery. You don’t know who to listen to, you don’t know how to even find the right information – it’s all just surprise after surprise. As you progress, things come into focus a bit. In a field as vast as Chinese medicine, even a little focus feels like an incredible accomplishment. However, if you’re a humble person (or even just a marginally intelligent person) you realize that this little bit of focus is a REAL little bit and you’ve got several lifetimes of work to do.
But imagine… you’re a second or third year student, a year or two to go. You’ve invested lots of time, energy and money into learning a profession. You’re looking to make a career of the thing. At some point you realize that you’re basically just going to escape school with enough knowledge to avoid killing people. This is scary, because you want to graduate with enough knowledge to be as good as your teachers. At least close, anyway.
You have a couple of choices at this point. First, you can act like you know more than you know. Many people take this approach. Ill advised. Second, you can become despondent and drop out. Equally ill advised. Third, you can become despondent and a pain in the butt to the school administration, your fellow students and the profession in general. Please don’t do that. Finally, you can do some version of what I’ve done – hunker down and get to learning.
The problem with how I’ve done the latter is that I stopped being vocal. I stopped asking questions, even when I had them. It’s sort of like this – as soon as I think of a question, I see how it is attached to a million other questions and I don’t even know where to begin. So, I shut my trap. This is NOT GOOD FOR BLOGGING. It’s only when I had a particularly crystal clear question that I was able to pull something together for a post. Those posts tended to generate a lot of discussion, but they were few and far between.
What I want more than anything is for Deepest Health to grow into a vibrant community for students and practitioners of Classically oriented Chinese medicine. A place where we can come together, discuss issues, get to know one another and get busy becoming the future of the medical profession. A place where we can exchange news, resources, advice and anecdotes. A place for the genesis of new ideas that will help our patients. I’ve been working the last couple of weeks to figure out how to make this vision a reality. If you read the last 30 or so posts on DH, you might see that I’ve actually been working on this for a couple of years! :D
In service of all of this, in service of the work I’m doing to write a book, in service of the work I’m doing to be a good teacher to my fine students at NCNM – I am going to try something. Each month, I will search my soul to find a topic that is most standing out to me and will focus on that for the majority of my posting during that month. I hope that this will help us, as a community, to engage more deeply with a topic while also keeping me focused and motivated to blog. In some ways, it’s an extension and development from the Year of Sagely Living and other “grand projects” that have been discussed here. In other ways, it’s just a representation of my own development as a scholar and practitioner. It seems like an interesting possibility. The timeframe may contract or expand, depending. The topic may be vast (reading Classical Chinese) or very narrow (Mahuang in Shanghan Lun formulas) – I will try to trend a little closer to the former. We’ll just see how it goes.
We’re a little far into January, but I have to start somewhere. This month is all about flavor, wei 味.
I’ll post some introductory thoughts shortly. Thanks, as always, for your support.
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