Home from Greece, bearing the gift of letting go

Commentary. By Michael Greenberg, MD, amednews contributor. Sept. 11, 2000.

COMMENTARY

Observations on the state of medical practice and medical life

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I took the 176 paper-clipped pages from my carry-on bag and began to read them during a flight to Athens. It was a photocopy of a book given to me by Eloise. She's been a patient of mine for more than 20 years.

By a strange coincidence (the older I get, the less I believe in them), the book was a review of Greek philosophy. The main message was that the key to happiness is to stop fretting about events beyond our control and let circumstances play out naturally.

I wished I had had access to that wisdom earlier that day when I called the airline to check our departure time and learned our plane would be four hours late. "Who wants to leave at midnight?" I fumed to my wife, Geri. "We lose those hours from our first day in Greece." Geri's calm suggestion that my anger was wasted energy was prescient to the yet unread book and was dead-on correct. As it turned out, the recorded message was in error. Our flight departed and landed on time.

As I began to pay attention to the insight contained in those pages, I found myself responding with diminished anger and frustration to the inevitable snafus that occur on any vacation. The more I relaxed and let go, the more things worked out.

One night in Athens, friends with whom we were travelling asked if we wanted to visit St. George's, a church perched on the highest of the ancient city's hills. We hired a cab to take us to the funicular that carried tourists to the summit.

We arrived at 11:20 p.m. and asked the driver to wait. The sign in the ticket booth said the last ride down was 11:45. I asked the ticket seller to confirm the schedule. "We're closing tonight at 12:30," was his answer.

"We have lots of time," I told our group.

The view from the top was magnificent. We gazed down upon the city and the illuminated Acropolis. A half-hour later we were ready to leave. But the funicular that was supposed to be open until 12:30 was shut down.

We weren't trapped, however, because a path led down from the church to the base of the hill. But the idea of a long, steep descent on foot filled me with fear, causing me to forget, momentarily, the lesson I had been learning about letting go. Just over three short weeks before this trip, an acute cellulitis of my left leg (I, the doctor, ignored a cut on my foot), had cost me four days in the hospital and two weeks on IV antibiotics. My energy had yet to return to normal. My leg was still swollen. The heat was stifling, even at night, and I was wearing sandals -- a poor combination for an extended walk. But my momentary panic was quickly replaced by remembering that I only needed to let go and start down the path.

It took some time to walk down, and the descent was dangerous. The huge lights that illuminated the hill blinded us and handrails were almost nonexistent.

"We'll need to find a cab," said Phil, one of our friends, at the halfway point. "We're going to end up far from where our driver dropped us and he's probably gone by now."

"Don't worry," I said. "Things will work out."

I was right. At the end of the long climb down, in the middle of an isolated Athens neighborhood far from any of the tourist areas, it took less than a minute for an empty cab to drive by and stop. We returned safely to our hotel with only one small blister resulting from our escapade.

I took the lesson I had learned back home and shared it with my office staff. Also, as a souvenir, I bought for each of us a set of Greek "worry beads" to play with when we feel overwhelmed. "It's an insane world," I told my staff. "As medicine and managed care get even crazier, it's easy to become burned-out and frustrated. But if we don't let our problems overwhelm us, they seem to find their own solutions."

Most of my staff has been working with me for the more than 20 years since I opened my office. And, with what I've learned and shared with them from my trip to Greece, we've dedicated the next 20 years of practice to being happier by letting go of situations that we can't control. And now that I'm home and have had time to think about my trip, I've come to the conclusion that not only should I worry less about things I can't change, but I should schedule more frequent vacations and also make sure that Eloise returns to the office -- maybe she'll return with another book.

Dr. Greenberg is a dermatologist in Elk Grove Village, Ill. and author of the novel A Man of Sorrows (http://www.anovelvision.com/). You can contact him by email (offped@aol.com).

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