I choose to write.

Self expression is a basic need for all human beings, which for me at least, has been a constant struggle, as I constantly find myself not quite fitting into categories in which other people seem to feel quite comfortable. Am I a conservative or a liberal? Am I more Egyptian or more American? The list goes on, and I’m sure the many juxtapositions that dwell within me will surface, to be discovered not just by you as a reader, but also by me as the writer.

This uncertainty that I face in being two different, somewhat opposite things at once, is quite similar to the particle-wave duality of quantum objects. For those of you that are not familiar with this concept, it is simply the reality that light and other very small things are both a particle (moving from one point to another like a soccer ball going from a foot towards a goal) and a wave (moving like sound waves leaving a speaker and spreading throughout a room). You may say this is impossible, but physics doesn’t really ask for permission to be true. It is just true the way that it is, that light coexists as a particle and a wave, and an experimenter is able to see what she wants to see, proving with the proper experiment that light is a particle, while a different experimenter can perform a different experiment proving that it is a wave. Neither experiment refutes the other, and it is not unless we suspend our own judgment on what light should be, that we are able to appreciate that it is both a light and a wave, until we collapse the wave function and force it to be one or the other with our own interventional perception.

By publishing this article on Medium, I collapse the wave function on my own possible means of self expression. I very well could make videos, podcasts, Facebook posts, or tweets that reflect my point of view, and it is possible that I may do one of these in the future. However, for now, I feel that I need to escape the uncertainty of the different possibilities, and choose one place to start. However, I have deliberately avoided collapsing the wave function on the question of who my intended audience will be, so that I may try to present my attempts to present a point of view that is a synthesis of seemingly disconnected perspectives.

I hope that I can write to my fellow surgeons about how being present and attending to patients is a way to connect with them as more than just a technician that “fixes them,” but rather as a fellow human being that cares for them. I hope that I can write to other parents and share with them that we are all “bad parents” in some way, and it is not until we recognize that we should not necessarily try to solve the problem of our mutual imperfections that we can truly love our children. I hope that I can write to other people that lead and serve in organizations to clarify for both of us the challenges we face, and perhaps get some feedback and insights from those with more exprience than I have. Perhaps the reader shares with the writer the perspective that Wisdom is generalizable, and those to whom I write will, like me, not necessarily fit into these neat categories I have presented here.

Thank you for reading my first article. I hope we enjoy collapsing some wave functions together, deciding to move forward on some choices we make, while keeping it open and living in uncertainty on other choices we choose not to make.