The Waiting Fields
Below is a picture out the back window of the Ob/Gyn clinic I have been rotating at up at the University of Michigan's East Ann Arbor medical complex, a picture of the rolling fields that form part of the 200 acre property UM owns up in Ann Arbor's north-east corner.
UM originally built an outpatient clinic up there, and has recently expanded two wings on either side of the original clinic, one for outpatient surgical procedures, and the other a new center to help care for and advance research to aid people with depression. But the future of that site is potentially far, far grander.
There is little room left on the U. Michigan core medical campus, which already includes six million square feet of operational research and clinical buildings, and another million to be added with the new Children's Hospital. During my work helping plan the new Children's Hospital, as a part of the planning visions of the future often came up. And among them, it is here to the East Ann Arbor site that some of the longest-range concepts propose placing the eventual successor to the current medical center. By the middle of this century, the current University Hospital buildings will be nearly more than six decades old, and even with successive upgrades will surely be as outdated as the Old Main was when it was replaced in the early 1980's. In some strategic visions, it is in these green open fields that one day might rise the Mark 4.0 University Hospital. A project so far into the future that the department chairmen, Deans, and University Regents who will execute and authorize it are probably only now being born.
Might even be some of the babies our team has helped bring into the world these past few weeks on Ob/Gyn. :-)
I am the son and grandson of soldiers and refugees. Men and women who were born in chaos and endured lives of hardship and terror in the seething cauldron that was the history of East Asia for much of the 20th century. My perspectives have no doubt shaped by the collective history my family -- my mother's and my father's sides both -- survived just to reach here, just to reach America. All my life, when I have looked at the future, my vision has no doubt been shaped by the experiences of my forebearer's past. The unthinkable and the unimaginable is merely a place my parents and grandparents came from.
And so I have been raised never to take the future for granted. Raised to never waste time dreaming or hoping -- and to spend it instead planning and fighting. Plan. Prepare. Work. Fight. A hope or a wish never changed the world. A plan and a will at least have a chance. Never be afraid to envision the worst, so that one can prepare to meet it with one's best. Make the best plans you can, cover as many possibilities as possible, treasure what one has while one has it and live so that one never has to regret; and after that, the future will be the future, win or lose, live or die. Once you've given it your honest all, once there is nothing left to give, what comes, comes.
There is nothing so terrible it cannot happen. Only fools ever forget that. But there is nothing so terrible it cannot be fought against, prepared for. Especially the farther ahead one sees it coming. Not every problem is solveable. Not every fight is survivable. Not every misjudgement or mistake is repairable or even atonable. But one might as well make the best mark and give it the best show one can, and if nothing else make the demons pay for every inch before they drag us down. Even if -- especially when -- the demons were ones we ourselves in our arrogance and our hubris, our selfishiness and our ignorance, raised.
The gulf of years between now and when great shining towers might rise from those green fields is, in many regards, difficult to imagine. Today's medical center leaders are likely to be in the very twilight of their lives by then. Even us entering the profession now will be moving into our retirements then. And history reminds us that, if you asked the Germans in 1910 what their world thirty years hence would be like, or Yugoslavians at the Winter Games in 1984 to envision their nation just a decade ahead, almost all of them would probably have been wrong, they all oblivious or dismissive of the signs we from the perspective of years can see all too clearly.
But whatever future will come for all of us, that future will be in large part from what we build today. In the political causes we choose to fight for, the things we create, the students we teach, the children we care for. The future will come. Our place, I think, is to give that future our all. And perhaps, if enough of us fight hard enough, give enough, share enough, sacrifice enough, and pay enough of a price, we might yet make a future when today's babies will build tomorrow's towers, no matter what Hells of our own creation we have to march through to do it. Whether any of us make it there matters not. It is a thing and a place worth trying for.
- The fields await. The future awaits.
- Plan. Prepare. Work. Fight.