How is a hospital emergency room a metaphor for anything positive?
Emergency rooms
The rush to an emergency room: swift action, diagnosis, remedy, cures. Fragility is in the air like a china cup breakable if held too tight. Walk quietly, speak gently.
An emotional emergency room—invisible until someone winces, cringes, shouts in anger, or commits a violent act. Or simply cries. Or perhaps worse, makes no response to you at all.
Anne Lamott on empathy
In the pages of Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, she suggests we try to behave as if we are in an emotional emergency room with every other human being on earth, suffering alongside them, extending compassion and patience. Listening.
She points out the obvious: how we struggle, eat, pay bills, love, work, love again, read books, drive cars, give speeches, pull cereal boxes off grocery shelves only to discover they’re not the ones our kids wanted after all. Challenges, big and small, test us all day. Every day. Our fortitude slackens. A thoughtless word takes us down. Or worse, an incomprehensible crisis.
Siren trigger
We live on a busy street not far from a hospital. Sirens are part of almost every one of my days. In my childhood, the nuns at St. Francis de Sales trained me to do something when I heard a siren (in between reprimanding me for talking too much): say a Hail Mary for the injured.
Empathy response
Confession: I am no longer a Roman Catholic, so I simply send a good thought, but the influence of those nuns has stuck. That small act of empathy, that ambulance-prayer-response to crisis, has survived into my adulthood.
Sirens? Someone, somewhere, is having an emergency, and someone in that ambulance is racing to help.
When I hear the wail of rushing vehicles, I often remember Ann Lamott’s admonition. Treat each other gently, she says. To say it another way, stop. Imagine yourself in the injured person’s shoes for a second. Send healing, positive, hopeful thoughts tucked inside that passing ambulance.
Have a happy and safe holiday season.
See you next time!
Rob Ruff
A timely reminder that all of us can make a difference. Thank you, Charlene…
Charlene L. Edge
Hi Rob, thanks for the reply. Like most, I feel pretty helpless whenever I hear about the latest tragedy … positive thoughts, I trust, really can make a difference.
Mary Coons
I love Ann LaMott, and I raised my boys to pray whenever they heard a siren. So this post resonated with me, in stereo.
Considered the way you’ve framed it, every siren is like a call to prayer. If we live in a city, an almost constant reminder. As much as I believe it will help the one in the ambulance, the constant reminder to think upward at the siren’s wail benefits me, as well.
Charlene L. Edge
Hi Mary, it’s lovely to hear from you. I think Anne’s book on writing speaks to many levels of life besides scribbling words on the page. Thank you for sharing.