Back, again.

Having made the transition into year four of medical school, taken and comfortably passed Step II of the board exam, and wrapped up a couple of the harder rotations scheduled for this academic year (yep, and it's only August), things are slowing down finally, and with that I thought I'd revisit the blogging world. Appropriately enough (in the context of previous posts), I've been rereading David James Duncan's The River Why for the past month or so. I'd wanted something comfortable, familiar, and hopeful given the scarcity of free time available to me over the past few months, and The River Why perfectly fits that bill. So I thought I'd throw in a quote from the book . . . both because it is pertinent to my current thoughts on life and how to live it, and because it somehow seems appropriate that a return to this blog should begin with a return to Mr. Duncan.

". . . Now, who do you suppose made you from a configuration of molecules into the living fisherman you are today?"
"I wish I knew," I said.
"Excellent!" said Titus. "And who controls your destiny, decides whether you shall be happy or miserable, long-lived or short, infamous or famous, erudite or acrimonious and so on and so forth?"
"Wish I knew that, too."
"Very good!" he exclaimed. "And who will decide when your body has become an unfit habitation for that which enlivens it and will one day consign it to a crematorium, river bottom, or wormy grave?"
"Wish I knew that, too," I said, "but why do you holler 'excellent!' and 'very good!' when I say I wished I knew? Don't you expect me to say 'God does it' or 'My soul does it'?"
Titus looked aghast. "Gus! I'm a philosopher, not an evangelist! It's the 'wish I knew' that's crucial. To say 'God does it' and leave it at that is to abandon the search before it's begun. To really want the truth, to long for it desperately, is to reject every formulation and theory and dogma and opinion right up to the time you see and touch and unite with the Being or Thing itself! Nobody ever discovers truth by barfing up sunday-school answers to questions . . . but where were we?" (181)