The Power of a Day

Often I'll see bios of dentists that have been practicing for 25 years, 30 years, even 35 years. We love these dentists because they have so many years of experience, and they must be doing something right to be doing the same "job" all those years. I imagine, though, what that means in terms of a dentist's personal life and how one can have the stamina to perform consistently over the course of decades through the waves of love, loss, and liability. We're responsible for a lot of other things in our lives, and not only that, we're subject to many things around us we have little or no power over that can affect us dramatically- family issues, losing loved ones, health scares, market crashes, and existential crises. What does it mean to have years of experience when no one person's experience of the years is the same as someone else's?

We live our lives as clinicians in relation to our patients in weeks, months, and years. The typical healing time of bone is 4-6 weeks, the typical implant integrates after 3-4 months, some percentage of dental work fails after 5-7 years. Years of experience gives a dentist the ability to see how things do over time, and the reality is that some things can only be learned firsthand after being around long enough to see it fail. The difficult task is to remain heroic, to try things in the face of a sub-ideal chance of success, when you've been around long enough to see heroic things fail. We must find a way for the songs of Innocence and songs of Experience to coexist in us at the same time. 

Enter the concept of the Power of a Day. We have a finite number of days, but in the course of a day, we look backward, we look forward, we do things, and (hopefully) we make progress. Progress is rarely seen in a day, however. You have to take many steps before you realize you're in a new place. The dangerous tendency is to move on autopilot, and before you know it, an entire day has gone by and you don't know where it went. Then a week goes by faster than ever. Then a month, and so on. Brian Buffini urges us to not throw our days away, instead we are to seize them, to advance the ball down the field every single day. Sometimes we gain a yard, eventually we get a first down. Sadly we at times have to punt. But regardless, the Day gives us an opportunity to use our wisdom from years past and our ignorance of experiences not yet had to advance into the oblivion. Our path is often shrouded in a fog of sorts, and we never really know for sure that the way we're going is really how best we're going to get to where we want to go. The point though is to step forward, it may be the wrong direction, it may be fraught with perils that manifest tomorrow, but today, it's the best way we can see to get through the fog. Soldier on. Onward. 

Onward

Resolve with me then to move, onward. By it's nature, it has no specific direction but it represents advancement. Whenever there is a conflict, onward. Whenever there is resistance, onward. Whenever there is doubt, onward. This is the only way we can ensure that we revere that Power of a Day, we use it for onward movement towards our goals: experience determines the direction, innocence determines the speed. The fog will lift, the terrain will change, and we'll see how far we've come one day. Those with that 25, 30 years of experience are guaranteed to be in a different place than where they expected to be during year 1 if you ask them. The beauty is that not one of them would trade one for the other. There's no room for regret when you're focused on the power of Today. There is still a heroic way to live today, and it is to move, onward. 

-DOF