I am in the process, as many of you are, of helping to launch a young man into successful adulthood. One thing my husband and I decided a long time ago was to try to nurture our son’s true interests rather than force a path on him based on financial prospects. This has turned out to be wiser than we knew. Who could have predicted 20 years ago, when our son was 2, that his interest in computer games was just as likely to lead to a successful career than if he had been interested in business, or law, or even medicine? Of course, nurturing interests has its downside, too. Over the years, our home has been filled with multiple musical instruments: alto sax, tenor sax, EWI (electronic wind instrument), keyboards, synthesizers, guitar, drum set, erhu ( a Chinese bowed-string instrument), sitar, not to mention the electronic game controller “instruments”  for Rock Band and Guitar Hero (multiple versions of each). The point is, had we limited him, or if he had limited himself out of fear for the future, rather than his loves in the present, he wouldn’t be happy now or in the future.

In my parting comments as former president of the medical staff, I continued some of the threads I began in previous comments. In my first article, “Culture Medium,” I shared some of my own journey through adversity, in the forms of both physical illness and burnout and fatigue. I talked about the importance of self-care. My healing antidotes included mindfulness, music, and especially reading and writing poetry. I talked about trying to find an upside in our shared adversity as well, that as we move away from stressful but lucrative fee-for-service, that we rediscover how much we enjoy talking to our patients. As we give up autonomy, we have less loneliness and isolation, and our patients benefit as we act more as a team. In my second article, “Infinite Hope,” I again returned to the theme of self-care, but this time in the context of self-care groups that foster connection between colleagues.

In this, my final article about following your passion, I feel even more emphatic that the only way physicians will survive the upheaval in our industry, most of which hasn’t even occurred yet, is to stay connected to what we love in ourselves and in each other, rather than to allow ourselves to be panicked and anxious and fearful about the future. There’s always another chance to re-launch yourself into a happy, successful adulthood, no matter how old you are.