For whatever reason, I have had more notable conversations than usual with some of my patients. I like that. I enjoy hearing my patients tell me something that makes me ponder a bit.
I was working with one of my elderly patients at the clinic. She and her husband used to farm, back in the day. But now she lives alone as he has since passed on.
I was setting up a piece of equipment for her to use for an exercise, but the last user had reassembled it incorrectly. I tinkered with the thing for a while as she watched, and then finally was able to put all the pieces back into place as they belonged.
"You're quite a mechanic. I have no ability to do anything like that," she said to me.
I told her no, I'm really not that mechanically talented. As is the tendency, one subject leads to another, and she was soon telling me a story from her days on the farm. She was the wife of a farmer, but not as much an active participant in the farming. Her knowledge of machinery was pretty much nil. She couldn't tell one part from the next.
Sometimes equipment broke down. If the men couldn't figure out how to fix it, her husband would ask her to come take a look and see if she could get the job done.
"I'd tell him, 'I don't know the first thing about what you're trying to do.' He'd say, 'That's why I want you to come look at it. You don't know the right way to do it like we do. Maybe you can find a new way that we haven't thought of.' "
For whatever reason, that struck me as incredibly profound and wise.
When I can't get something done, the last thing that occurs to me is to ask someone who knows absolutely nothing about what I'm doing to help. But this husband not only had the wisdom to think beyond his own method of getting the job done, he also had the trust and confidence in his wife to do something that he couldn't.
No huge epiphony or spiritual application here. Just something for me to ponder.
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