Deep Knowing
In our recent many trips back and forth to the endocrinologists at Seattle Children’s, we have heard stories and indications that, for some reason, incidence of Type 1 Diabetes is up. One diabetes educator mentioned that diagnoses are up 70% over last year at this time. When I heard that, my brain immediately jumped to the idea that our kids haven’t been sick for a year, maybe that lack of exercise is confusing the little ones’ immune systems? It’s a criticism of lockdown that I’ve heard before and one that I can understand.
But the problem is that the people making that criticism are not generally people with medically complicated lives. And I have to say that one of the privileges of being a family with lots of medical concerns is that I really don’t put much stake in the perspectives of people who don’t understand firsthand what it’s like to juggle risk. It’s easy to say, “Send them back to school right now!” if your kid doesn’t have to visit the nurses’ office a couple of times a day, maybe encountering sick kids. It’s easy to tell families like ours, “Just keep them at home if you’re so scared!” when you don’t have to make risk assessments every day. Overcoming my fear is the least of my concerns. Making decisions with imperfect data is hard.
Only people who don’t understand could speak with that level of apathy for the hardships of others. But, looking at these new diagnoses, I see how public health decisions can have far-reaching and unexpected consequences. Which is why I tend to trust the experts. Because only when you’ve learned enough, studied enough, thought enough about something, can you truly weigh the complexity.
I think we all have places where we’re the experts – places where we know it’s easy to make snap judgments but hard to acknowledge the imperfect data and messiness of life. It’s like that old adage, “I was a perfect parent…until I had kids!” Any parent who’s been around for awhile knows, there’s no perfect sleep plan, no perfect school, no perfect parenting style…there’s only good faith attempts and efforts to fix what went wrong.
I am continually amazed by the people I know. If you get them on the right topic, they have such depth of knowledge and feeling and understanding, the kind that comes from being immersed in both life experience and learning. And that knowing isn’t just about little things. Often it’s about the big deep tough things in life. Like how to sit with someone who’s dying. Or what will help a friend who is facing divorce. Or how to raise a child to both know their own mind and care about others.
These lessons come hard. And I’m realizing we only learn them if we refuse to make snap judgments or repeat pat answers to big questions. They come when those judgments and answers aren’t cutting it anymore.
We’ve been through a crucible, all of us, this past year, and it’s so, so easy to turn to black and white thinking. But nothing about this pandemic has been black and white. And we’re now the experts on what it is like to live a year apart, to act when there are only bad choices, to weigh mental health against physical health against community health. The question now is, what will we do with our newfound understanding?
