Worlds Collide

If you’ve ever been to the Emergency Room late at night, you’ve experienced the awful lighting that makes everything look an ashen green hue. You know worry, fear, discomfort, pain, and the emotional tests of your patience.

But you’re also alert. Alert to any sound that could be your name being called. Alert to what your next steps might be. Alert to reviewing again and again how you got here and what went wrong. You’re alert to what you did right, how you made a snap decision that turned out to be a good thing. You’re also alert to the other people around you, and can diagnose them in an instant like it’s your new super power.

In moments like this, “just a few hours ago” is well beyond in the past. Those hours might as well belong in another lifetime as you have now jumped a track into this greenish gray world of bad coffee, Styrofoam cups, and overpriced vending machine food.

I’m thinking about all of this because, in a random conversation with my mom the other day, she suddenly said, “It doesn’t matter what you did to get into the Emergency Room, or whose fault it was. All that matters is that you need care.” My mom is retired medical, if you didn’t know. She said, “When you land in the hospital, what’s important is that you get the best care that can be given.”

So I’m putting some of that thinking into my world. It doesn’t matter if this world is all roses and sunshine or if it’s gray/green with fluorescent lighting. It doesn’t matter what anyone on the outside looking in might think of this world or our place in it.

We can review our steps again and again and try to learn from them, but stewing on fault or blame or lousy choices—those things belong in that lifetime that we left behind us, back on the old track. In times of crisis, it just doesn’t matter how we got here.

All that matters is that we’re here now, and that we deserve the best.