Live and Learn

My high school music teacher said a lot of profound things, and that's why I continued taking his classes and playing in ensembles and embarrassing myself on the music theory AP exam. But he said something that really resonates with me today, sitting here studying in the first month of my first year of medical school.

He said that adults who had never learned to read music or play an instrument before were less likely to learn it not because they didn't have the skills, but because it had been so long since they had been so so so bad at something. They didn't want to start by playing Hot Cross Buns. They didn't want to take moving on to Jingle Bells as a sign of their accomplishments. They didn't want to learn how to read a new language of lines and dots. They didn't want to be a fourth grader squawking on a trumpet at age 45.

I'm now at the bottom once again. I'm squawking loudly on my trumpet. My eyes are crossing as I consider that all of this knowledge will one day truly be mine.

The particular subject I'm studying now (well, I took a break from it to write these thoughts down), embryogensis, reminds me that this learning is possible. I distinctly remember learning about the three germ layers in auto tutorial biology in my first semester at Cornell four years ago. I was truly awed by the human body's ability to differentiate and orient its cells in such a way that most people come out with two arms at their sides and two legs beneath them and eyes on the front of their face. When I learned about the concentration gradients of signal molecules that set up front/back left/right and up/down axes of the body, I was filled with wonder. Could humans, with all our technology and advancements and self confidence, could humans have created such a system? Could we have designed a body that would develop perfectly and beautifully on its own?

Every day I marvel that the human body produces structures and systems that are far superior to any material replacement that we can create. Our plastics and our teflons and our magical mixtures of metals are no match for bone or tendon or tissue. I do hope that we get there someday. I hope that we are able to give people replacement body parts that outshine what nature is able to provide and improve the quality of life or extend the length of life for anyone and everyone who needs it.

Today, though, I stand humbled at my body's ability to continuously rejuvenate itself, develop, grow, strengthen, recover, and learn. I would like to say a special thank you (and apologize) to my brain for all that it has been up to the past several years and in the future. On one hand, I can't believe I've chosen of my own free will to go back to square one, feeling like I know absolutely nothing and perpetually overwhelmed by the idea that one day I will know all of this (the contents of the binder in front of me, or the contents of what I will learn in medical school and residency and beyond).

I did it before though, that's what college was for. It taught me that I could learn anything. I learned that I could learn to do a 4x4 Rubik's Cube, that I could learn how the eye transmitted sensory information to the brain, that I could start from zero and learn how the egg formed and how the sperm formed and how that made a human, that I could learn how to be a feminist or anything else I wanted to be. And now I want to be a doctor. So here I go. Pay no attention to the six year old squeaking on a violin behind the curtain.