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| Photo by Olli Kekäläinen |
My husband is in his fifth year of medical training to be an emergency doctor. And as yet, not one of his patients has died. (I should clarify. Perhaps some of them have died since he's seen them. I mean, we all die sooner or later. Maybe one of them got hit by a bus. Or passed away in their sleep. Or died six weeks after J treated them, from the very same thing he was treating them for. What I mean to say is that none of the patients he has treated have died while they were his patients in the emergency department.)
They have a term for this. In the hospital they call him a white cloud. When a new batch of interns comes in each June, it quickly becomes evident to the nurses and other doctors whether a particular intern is a white cloud or a black cloud. When a black cloud comes on shift the patients tend to be more agitated, require more medication, their vital signs drop precipitously out of nowhere. Black clouds see a lot of action during their shifts: an unusually large number of accidents come into the Emergency Department (ED), existing patients require further intervention; they spend their time at the hospital putting out one medical fire after another. White clouds, on the other hand, tend to have a calming, stabilizing effect on their patients. Their shifts are boring. People get better, need to be discharged. White clouds struggle to get enough experience performing the different procedures they are required to master, because when they're around patients don't need them as much.
It is not uncommon for me to receive an email from J after a shift in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), perhaps the most medically stressful place in the hospital, that says, "All's quiet in the ICU tonight." Hours later, after my white cloud has signed out to a black cloud, a patient that was doing well takes a nosedive.
Though the medical community acknowledges this phenomenon, they treat it as coincidence, fairy tale, ghost story (anything that has not been subjected to a clinical double-blind trial funded by a pharmaceutical company is usually put into one of these categories). They do not see it as I see it: an opportunity to witness the powerful effect someone's energy can have on the well being of others. (Call it what you like: presence, vibe, mojo, consciousness, personality. It's all the same to me.) Imagine if they used this information for healing purposes, if they trained doctors not just in how to do procedures, but in how to be centered, calm, and hopeful when interacting with patients.
And, of course, the white cloud/black cloud phenomenon extends beyond the walls of the hospital. Don't we all have people in our lives who cause us to exhale when we spend time with them? And people who stress us out just by being in the same room with them? It is my experience that the black clouds of the world don't realize that they are black clouds. They don't have the benefit of the hospital's heightened circumstances to get feedback about themselves. People don't drop dead when they walk into a room (though we may want to).
As humans we have a tendency to look inward to figure out what kind of people we are. But J's experience at the hospital has taught me that if I want to know what kind of energy I'm putting out into the world, it's best to look at the people around me. And the truth is there are days when my cloud is white and days when it is black. On the black days, everyone I come into contact with upsets me in some way: they flake out, they don't live up to expectations, they are confrontational, they hurt my feelings, they cause me anxiety. I used to blame it on them. But now I know that it is me, that if I shift my perspective and the way I interact with them that their behavior will follow suit. So I try. I try to put positive thoughts out into the world. I try to put positive messages in my writing. I try to be positive when I interact with people, even when they hurt my feelings. I try, I try, I fail. I try some more.
[Dear reader: I wrote this three years ago and recently found it in the archives. Thought I would post it so it could see the light of day.]
