Battle

After arguing and complaining for years, I now find myself trying to quit. Or, at the very least, seeking to lower the wattage a bit.

Perhaps we all have the same memory of our battle with colleagues when we were young. The battlefield was bloody and nasty, the words loud, the air steaming with the smell of dynamite. I stood on one side of the battlefield and the doctor from emergency room on the other, each debating over trivial matters like whether one should have admitted a gentleman with very slow heart rate to the medical unit, instead of orthopaedic unit. With the arrogance of youth – I was fresh out of medical school – I thought to myself, "No such thing. As an orthopaedic intern, I won't give in, even to a senior medical officer who happens to make ill-reasoned decision."

I simply refused to admit the patient to the orthopaedic unit, and challenged the emergency room doctor to come up with one single orthopaedic condition that could have given rise to the problem of slow heartbeat.

Not any more.

Looking back, I have been growing out of this habit of arguing over these years. When I made an effort to clean up my electronic mailbox last week, to my amazement, those bloody (sent) messages with heated debate have been dwindling over the past ten years or so. In the end I am beginning to develop the skill to absorb and ultimately defuse those tumultuous emotions.

I do not wish to deny the importance of embracing one's ideologies and defending one's maxims. At the same time, I have come to realize that it's the quietest voice that speaks the loudest.