Get a “spot”, solve the world’s problems…

One of the blessings I have had in my career has been the opportunity of working alongside my partners and fellow surgeons during long hours in the operating room over many years. In my career I have learned, and learned from, some of the best surgeons and finest people that I know.

The finest hours in an operating room are calm, relaxed, focused

I have gotten to know my partners well when working beside them in an operating room.

Some questions and some conversation linger with me.

One of my younger partners asked me the other day the following question, “Todd, do you have a spot?”

I was like, “what do you mean a spot…like a man cave?”

“No,” he said, “not a spot where you go to hang out, a spot where you go to WORK, study ,read, be quiet…a place you won’t let the kids touch…where you get stuff done. I have a spot, and I protect it”

I found this a strange conversation coming from one of my much younger partners. Here was a young man who already knew one of life’s secrets. You need a spot.

Here is a photo of my old iMac G5 computer. I am typing something for work because you can see the old Metro Urology logo. On the large desk are the essentials for getting work done, including the Bible and beer.

I first learned about this and heard the word “spot” when as a young surgeon I heard one of my older partners talking about his cabin on a lake “up north”. He was talking about his chair on the porch where he would sit and relax before dinner on warm summer evenings.  “That’s my spot,” he said, “that is where I am most at peace. In the few moments I get to sit there my mind is calm. That is where I can read, and think.” He then went on. “Everyone needs a spot.”

I was a much younger man then, and I for some reason thought that a “spot” was something that you earned as an older, wiser person, almost like a proverbial rocking chair, where you sat and did nothing. Or I thought that a spot was a place where you got away from your cares and concerns, and totally disconnected from your normal world.

But that’s not what a spot is.

There is a spot I have in my house where I can work in the warmer months, where I am writing this now that winter has finally come to a close here in Minnesota.  It’s a small desk I “built” using finished particle board board and cheap ikea table legs set up in a corner of the screen porch at my house.

If I were to say that I have a spot this is as leading a candidate as any.

It’s a small desk, and largely unadorned since it’s on a screen porch. There is a desk lamp that one of my sisters used when she was in college, a piece of petrified wood that my mother gave me, and a makeshift coaster I made for my coffee mugs. The ikea table legs you can buy for 4$ a leg and you screw them in to a piece of wood to create a table. Viola, a “spot”!

Here is a small desk in the corner of the room, with barely enough space for a laptop and keyboard. Here is where stuff can get done.

Which brings me to the desktop itself. Years ago my father made two large desktops for my sister and brother-in-law as they were building a new house with a large study. I grew up in a home that valued reading, studying, and working, and I was taught, rightly, that it helps to have a large desktop to get work done.  When my sister and her husband purchased other desks, I inherited the two desktops.

One of the desktops became a folding table in my laundry room. And the other desktop I put in my own study, where it took up much of the room. I worked there for years, typing nonsense into an imac until it went belly up with a puff of smoke, but I never felt that it was my spot.

A large desktop in the middle of the room never seemed to appeal to me. It just took up too much space.

I eventually moved the heavy slab of wood to the basement where I took a circular saw, and nearly escaping injury to my right thigh, cut it up into smaller pieces. Using two of the pieces I made two much smaller desks, one now in the corner of my study and the other where I sit now, in a corner on my screen porch.

I much prefer my little desk in the corner. I didn’t know why until I read Stephen King’s book ‘On Writing.’

In a later chapter of the book he describes moving his own work desk from the center of the room to a corner of his study. Having the desk in the corner, he describes, allows floor space in the room to allow for life to happen while he is working.

Here is a quote from Stephen King.

“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”

I love my spot at a small desk in the corner of my screen porch. I cherish the time I get to spend here. There I can sit, read, think and get away from the other stressors in my life.

But, but, but….

Here is a lesson from me and maybe from Stephen King

Our spots are not places where we pretend the everyday world doesn’t exist, they are not places we go to get away. Our spots exist on the fringe, on the edge or our troubles and concerns, places where we go not to get away from, but to solve the world’s problems, and maybe even some of our own. They are places we go to work, to get stuff done.

Having a spot is critical to our lives if we are professionals, We need places to be quiet. to THINK, to WORK, and to SOLVE the world’s problems and even some of our own.

And so it’s true, I think, that we should protect those place and we shouldn’t let our kids, literal and proverbial, mess up our spots.

But maybe, just maybe we should let the kids, literal and figurative play alongside, because isn’t that, after all what all the work is about?

Life does not exist to support our art. Its the other way around.

As physicians our “art” is medicine.

Life does not exist to support our practice of medicine. Our practice of medicine exists to support our lives.

And our “spots” exist to support our practice of medicine.

You should make a spot.

And…

“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”

-TB