Push Me Pull You

PushmePullu In Singapore I worked with some brilliant medical researchers. One of the study areas was a property called “tensegrity”. Biological structures such as muscles and bones, or rigid and elastic cell membranes, are made strong by the unison of tensioned and compressed parts. The muscular-skeletal system is a synergy of muscle and bone, the muscle provides continuous pull, the bones discontinuous push.

In fact, one of our exchange students from a high school in the Philippines used the Tensegritoy to explain this project to the medical faculty of the National University of Singapore. She stood in front of 30 doctors and nurses and was lucid, animated, and funny as she talked about the similarities between cells and the Tensegritoy. Seeing and hearing this young lady’s speech, I was immensely confident about our future as a species. I still am.

Jane I once visited Johns Hopkins in Baltimore as part of a proposal for some joint work in medical informatics. Part of this work required me to interview some of the staff of the Cancer Clinic, a center renowned throughout the world and one that takes the most difficult cases. While speaking with the head nurse on the floor — I’ll call her Jane, not her real name — I suddenly became aware of the patients surrounding me attached to IV’s, heart and lung monitors, or just reading quietly. They were all children. I found it difficult to concentrate and, sensing my discomfort, Jane asked if I wished to continue the conversation outside. I asked, how can you come to work each day? Doesn’t it get you down? She said a remarkable thing then, and I can hear her as though it was yesterday.

“Mike, this is the best job I have ever had and the best job I ever could have.”

She went on to tell me that, sad though it may be, work on the ward was also uplifting because we can only hope to know each other, to really know each other when all the masks are off and we are left with ourselves. Help given and help received. Push and pull; the ebb and flow of our tides.

Many years later I am in Seoul working with yet another company, my life a series of large Asian cities. On the way back from a shopping trip, I watched as a red balloon, freed from the hands of some child, bounced and rolled through the heavy traffic of this great city. I waited for the inevitable; after all it was just a fragile balloon in a harsh and unyielding place. But after a series of near misses and hard knocks, it caught a breeze and was lifted up above the turbulence below, flying higher and higher until it was just a crimson spot against the clear blue sky.

And I remembered Jane, quietly working to lift her friends above the chaos, to let them fly once again.

#Singapore