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I took an elective my M1 year called Medical Humanities. As part of that course we made a few trips to an art museum where we talked about the importance of learning to sit with ambiguity and uncertainty.

Perhaps this comes more naturally in art than medicine.

The docents helped us navigate how to meaningfully spend time with the pieces, which often included allowing space for a lack of answers. This is a skill I have always had to work at. I think most physicians (and patients) deeply want reliable answers.

It was a trait I had already that has been further cemented by my training- determination to sleuth out something definitive and definite. But I began to work consciously on my willingness to include the unanswerable. I spent a lot more time sitting with art pieces than before.

Right now the future of my entire career, my life, and the country feels uncertain, ambiguous and unknowable. It is stretching me so far it is painful. Even when I know there are no answers, I still crave them.

But I am grateful for the teaching of the docents.

Even though lately I frequently feel overwhelmed with anxiety, my best moments are enabled by what they taught me. That I can both want an answer and be denied, that the twin discomfort of the unanswered and unknowable are integral to art- and integral to life.

I am trying to let it inform my appreciation of the rest of things, of the rest of the work of beauty that is human existence. That which is art is art regardless of whether I understand it. It does not cease to be because I am uncomfortable.

So today I acknowledge my discomfort and validate it. I accept the answers may never come or when they do they may be painful. But I do not give it permission to demean the high beauty that is the gift of my life & of yours. That which is art remains art.