A Letter from Health Care’s Future

In the game of Operation, there is an edge you don’t touch.

That is the name of the game. Locate, extract, and stay clear of the margins.

Health care of the future will be different; it will be all about the margins.

For centuries we honed the craft of naming the parts and attending to them with surgical precision. We industrialized our thinking and specialized our practice. We reduced our relationships to organigrams and discrete policies that overlooked the complex people they were intending to serve. We lived in binaries: fixed/broken, diagnosed/treated, normal/abnormal.

We safeguarded ourselves from the edges– the messy in between, the murkiness of relationships, the ambiguities of life and death, the suffering that weaves itself in and around the pain, the data sets that never reveal everything we hoped from, the patients we were convinced would listen and always be patient.

We became so good at naming the healthcare game, we forgot that we were playing. The experience lost its luster.

The future was about our remembering.

We came home to each other. We noticed anew that any lines we drew around segregated ideas of health care were only provisional – they could be mercilessly swept away with one pandemic sized brushed stroke.

The health care of the future is about a different kind of attention and tending – one much more familiar with caring. It is honoring the ecology that expands through the edges of our experience. These edges that weave and relate to one another giving us a sense of solidity – continuity is in the ties that bind it all together.

We don’t specialize anymore. We have rendered all things special so nothing is set apart from each other.

We no longer wait because time is no longer our master – we have stopped measuring our limitless becoming – we heave like the tides and practice like a vast ocean.

We no longer have spaces to hold anyone. We are so very aware that we are all bound to each other like the tree whose roots run so deep that they permeate our lungs that dip into its life-giving oxygen. Nothing contains us.

We are a living system. A new ecology of meaning where all things have a place and that place is expressed through all things.

How did this future come to pass?

Sanctity.

We restored the sacred in our craft.

We got wise to the knowing that there is no problem that we cannot show up to together if in that showing we are clear on how we are collectively bound to that problem. Your health is my health. That is the sacred knowing. That is the new practice of health care. When we became present to this, health was made whole, again.