To Read & To Write

“At least two kinds of courage are required in aging and sickness. The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality – the courage to seek out the truth of what is to be feared and what is to be hoped. Such courage is difficult enough. We have many reasons to shrink from it. But even more daunting is the second kind of courage – the courage to act on the truth we find. The problem is that the wise course is so frequently unclear. For a long while, I thought that this was simply because of uncertainty. When it is hard to know what will happen, it is hard to know what to do. But the challenge, I’ve come to see, is more fundamental than that. One has to decide whether one’s fears or one’s hopes are what should matter most." - Atul Gawande The value of reading “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” (2014) is in the disclosure of one special surgeon’s experiences, trials, and research. Today, there is the tendency to to take for granted that death is a pa...