It’s been a thoughtful week in Tatamagouche. I had decided that ‘burn out’ was not necessarily something to be avoided or cured. Perhaps the better aim was to manage myself in my approach to work and expectations of life. To be healthier within my situation. But how?
I had been playing with the ideas of fire and ashes, looking at the idea ‘burnt‘ from different angles. Holding it up to the light, or the fire one might say. I grew up on British children’s literature, A. A. Milne, the Swallows and Amazons, Geoffrey Trease, and had read them to my own children. In many of these books, especially those set in rural areas, charcoal burners hold an important if peripheral place. I remembered there was a poem about charcoal burners and hunted it down. It is in ‘Now We Are Six’ by Milne. It reads simply
‘The charcoal burner has tales to tell
He lives in the forest, alone in the forest
He sits in the forest, alone in the forest
And the sun slants through the trees’
Charcoal burning was an ancient occupation turning wood that burned quickly and unpredictably into charcoal that could be better controlled as a heat source. The charcoal burner would cut wood, often beech, and create a mound of wood with a central chimney, then bury the whole pile under sod, then light the chimney. They then would sit and watch. There was skill and experience in allowing occasional flares to bring oxygen into the mound. They were experts at reading the smoke to know when to feed the mound, when to flare the mound, and when the process was finished. Because of this they were dirty, smelled of smoke and sweat, and were thought to be spiritually suspect, as diviner’s of smoke. They were admired from a distance but avoided. They lived a lonely life … hence Milne’s poem.
Charcoal burning may hold some keys to a healthy ‘burn out’, namely the fuel, the flare, and the wait.
The fuel. To be healthy in my burn I need to find the appropriate fuel to keep me going. This involves me filling my fuel needs physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I recently read a challenge about bucket lists. The writer challenged us to not create a remote bucket list of future, in the far distance, one-off adventures… The circumnavigation of Mont Blanc, a pilgrimage, building fine furniture, writing a novel… instead he encouraged a ‘weekly bucket list’. He stated that a remote goal was not daily fuel, if anything it made the day-to-day seem more arduous. Rather plan something attainable each week that is challenging, peaceful, brings joy, helps recreate the person you aim to be. This blog has become part of my weekly bucket list, my charcoal burners fuel management.
The flare. Just as the charcoal burner allows and encourages flare-ups to encourage the embers in the mound to keep smouldering, we need to have flare-ups in our life. There need to be points of fire and passion, but they need to be controlled to prevent a conflagration of destruction. This can be a part of my occupation, maybe I develop an expertise in something that I see as an unmet need or develop a skill in something of interest. I become passionate about it, it becomes my flare that feeds my productive embers. But I can’t let the flare become my sole purpose, then it becomes a fire that burns out and I’m back to the same problem. We are healthiest, I believe, as generalists with specific interests. Our productive embers are kept alive with controlled flares. This is likely true both in medicine and in life itself.
The wait. Much of medicine is waiting. We wait for birth, for death, for results, for consultants, for treatment responses, for ‘the rush’, for pages, for change. And while we wait, even if we think things will work out, we expect the worst. Our training has hard wired the low hum of dread into our day. This anxious waiting is often a solitary, and lonely, time. But while we wait, as A.A. Milne writes in his poem, the sun slants through the trees. There are moments of peace and beauty. Our jobs and our lives are so much more manageable when we notice them. You may call this mindfulness, or charcoal burning, but it is healthy.
