I wrote the article Make A Difference when I had bumped into a previous patient after they were doing well. This time I was tracked down on social media by the writer of this award. Because I moved into management at another hospital, I was not able to receive the award at work. They still honored the commendation by placing the story online that you can read by following the link on the picture or here.
The reason for work, and the result of work, are clearly separate for me. I work hard for the reason that I know I only have a few more days to do good work. I work computationally because I know that the people around me are real people with real lives and they deserve my best. I want to behave and act and speak in a way that is so firmly rooted in my values that they are clear to others now and across time. To protect myself from worrying about rewards, or allowing the desert of questioning the importance of my work as the oasis's of feed back seem to be galaxies apart; I try to disregard the result in the moment of action. When the result comes, a bad outcome or good; these are times of reflection and to recalibrate how my behavior and values impact the world. As a student of failure, I am familiar with digesting my mistakes and honing them down bit by bit.
Today caught me off guard. Unexpectedly, it appears that the decades of honing my craft is beginning to look like something to be proud of. As I wrote in Make A Difference, most of the time we never know what good or bad we have done. We hope for good, and prepare to correct the bad. This is a blessing, and undeserved and unexpected gift to refresh a soul that has spent so much time between the hammer and anvil.
I am not good enough. But I am getting better. And that was my only hope in the first place.