I have been reading a fascinating book called Body of Work: Meditations on Morality from the Human Anatomy Lab, by Christine Montross. It is, essentially Christine's journey through the human body and through medical school and her transformation from non-doctor to doctor. Her previous focus prior to medical school was poetry, so her writing and musings lack the cool demeanor I would have expected from a doctor. Instead she sprinkles poetry between her thoughts and writes about her struggle to alter her empathy without forsaking her humanity, as well as the beauty of the human body (literally and viscerally, as many of the observations take place on the dissection table) and what value and qualities a soul contributes to who a person is. She also includes her research about the history of anatomy, which I always find fascinating.

I am in the midst of a chapter entitled "An Unsteady Balance" in which she has begun to work with live patients doing rounds and participating more heavily in the practical side of medicine. One of the biggest struggles for her is learning to dial down her empathy and her feelings in relation to the patient. She notes the delicate balance between being a physician who is removed from empathy, and a physician who no longer has any empathy at all.

As she talked about the ebbing of her empathy, I had a moment of hmmmm. I have been taking some excellent Meisner classes over the past six months and while many things have been discovered and uncovered throughout the process, one of the most difficult challenges for me has been turning inward to discover the minute intricacies of my own emotions: What do I fear? What do I love? What do I hate? And when I am creating a character, how do I tunnel from the information given to me about that person, into my own person and connect the two? What I seek to do is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what Christine had to do. Where she seeks to pull away from the gamut of emotions and reactions, I seek to put them under a microscope and magnify them, discovering their origins and what they mean.

So as I read about Christine in her struggle, I somehow feel very connected to her. We both seek to depart from what is a normal connectedness, and whether you are zooming in or out of focus (so to speak) it is scary to leave the safe zone.

And further, it is an affirmation that while we are on opposite ends of the spectrum, if you combine our journeys we will balance each other out. If with lived in a world with only doctors, the world would be a cooler and distanced place. There must be art to balance the science. It's nice to find one more reason art is vitally important to our humanity.