What Does a Good Day Look Like? 

We continue, in this month of August, to reflect on those wise people who serve as inspirations to us in the work and service we offer every day. 

Today, we are thinking of Krista Tippett, Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, a National Humanities Medalist, and a New York Times bestselling author. Thirty years ago, she longed for intelligent public conversation about the spiritual, and moral aspects of human life. From that she launched On Being with Krista Tippett — as a weekly national public radio show, designed for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence. Ms Tippett avoids easy answers, embracing complexity and inviting people of every background to join her conversation about faith, ethics, and moral wisdom.”

We listen to her podcast On Being every week and always, always find great depth and meaning in every conversation she has with those who are experts in their fields. Ms Tippett’s recent conversation - on Mortality and Meaning - with Atul Gawande, a surgeon, writer, and public health official was one of the most profound we have listened to. Dr. Gawande currently serves as Assistant Administrator for Global Health in the United States Agency for International Development. He also practiced general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and was a professor at both Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. This conversation with him was one about which we as an executive team talked in depth about at our last team meeting. Dr. Gawande speaks from his vast experience caring for people at the end of their lives. He has learned so much about what is most important to all of us - and what is not. He has learned what we can do and need to do to enhance our own and one another's lives to be the best they can be. To be good, fulfilling, and full of rich and deep meaning. In this conversation, Dr. Gawande asks: What does it mean to be human - to be limited, flawed and mortal? He also adds: … yet, to be capable of doing great things? He believes that we as a species are capable of doing great things, and throughout time, have. He asserts that if we minimize the risks involved in accomplishing great things too much, we don’t and won’t accomplish anything great. He believes that we are often too timid and negative in believing and acting to do great things. He believes we need to embrace healthy positivity and take control over toxic negativity in trying to achieve life-changing, life-enhancing accomplishments. Dr. Gawande stresses that greatness is about embracing positivity and taking control over negativity. Even with incomplete information, he says, acting to enhance the life we have is better than doing nothing.

He asks the question, How do we scale positivity? We must learn to move forward without having all the answers, outcomes, and knowledge, he emphasizes. For acting is better than not acting to make a positive difference. Rather than only trying to save lives as a doctor, he has learned the inherent and dignity-enhancing value of asking patients, especially those with terminal diagnoses: What does a good day look like? As he has come to see, standing reverently before our mortality is an exercise in more intricately inhabiting why we want to be alive. How do you live a good life all the way to the very end, with whatever comes? Atul Gawande asks: What are we fighting for? He understands that people have priorities besides just surviving no matter what. “We have greater reasons you want to be alive”, he states in the podcast. “What are those reasons? Because whatever you’re living for, along the way, we’ve got to make sure we don’t sacrifice it; and in fact, can we, along the way, whatever’s happening, can we enable it?”

He goes on to say:

“And that sense that a conversation about the end of life is, ‘Do you want chest compressions? Do you want a ventilator? Do you want to be shocked?’ — that’s not the conversation. No one has, as their goal: ‘that I get shocked before I die.’ The conversation is, As you face what you’re facing, as you go through what you go through, what are you willing to sacrifice, and what are you not willing to sacrifice, along the way, for the sake of more time? What’s the minimum quality of life you’re really going for here that you would find acceptable?’ And then, ‘Can I make sure — to the extent of my abilities, the extent of abilities we have today in medicine, can we protect that for you?’ And the answer is often yes, and often the answer is — sometimes the answers are technological, but they’re often not. It’s often just a matter of being humane.”

He gives this example:

“Someone said to me, ‘Well, I want to take my children to Disney World, my grandchildren. One thing I want to make sure I’m able to do is take my grandchildren to Disney World.’ And she was telling that to me in the hospital, emaciated, on her last days. She would die 48 hours later. And we had missed that. We had failed. We had never asked her, to know that might have mattered to her — because we could have made that possible for her a month before.
“That’s right. And so it wasn’t about ‘Do we fight or not?’ It’s that we missed the fight. The fight was to make sure, among other things, that she got to go take her grandchildren to Disney.”
Dr. Gawande believes that medical workers’ jobs are to “enable well-being”, not just to prolong life.
The point is that life is meant to be well-lived. To be enjoyed. To be abundant in dignity, empathy, goodness, respect, … and love. Most especially, love.

So, what does a good day look like for you? How do you support those in your life by enhancing their days to help them actually be good? How do you enhance your own life to be able to have good days? We can do great things. We are capable of them. And one of the greatest things we can do is to live good, dignified, and satisfying lives. We can’t be afraid to try. The risk of trying almost always outweighs the risk of not trying to create goodness within and all around us. We owe our gratitude to Krista Tippett for sharing these profound conversations about life and what makes it meaningful to us all.

Photo Credit - OnBeing