I used to think people were just born great, but then I thought about my mom.…
Make no mistake – moments of greatness were not too much for my mother – they were too little. She could not expect them to help her in the complex and unpredictable thrall of life. They could be neither called upon nor expected on demand. And when they came, they could only rarely be sustained. For an African immigrant mother of three children doing three degrees while caring for her sick mother, momentary greatness was good, but not good enough.
Instead, my mom turned to practice, process, and habits, which for her started every morning at around 7 am. Seated upright and attentive. Knees together. Eyes closed and heart open. Fears banished and hope welcomed – indeed her process itself was inherently aspirational. Prayer for my mother was no rote ritual, it was ad-libbed, artistic, self-expressive. Her frayed and tear stained devotional in hand, I would see her brows furrow as she rocked, heavy with the weight of a New World often unrecognizable to her older one. She spoke about racism. She spoke about loneliness. She spoke about peace. She spoke about sick kids and bad grades, doctors’ appointments and parent teacher conferences, newborns and deceased friends, moments of strength and moments of weakness.
Most of all, she spoke of things she wanted to become: a good teacher, a good friend, and most importantly to her, a good mother. When I was a kid, I always felt something strange when I heard these desires. To me, my mom didn’t get how this thing worked – she seemed to be meditating, praying, and focusing on ways to become things she already was. It was only when I got older that I saw this for what it is. Like everyone, my mother wasn’t born great, but she wanted to be, and somewhere along the journey she got there, so slowly and so imperceptibly that she never realized when it had already happened.
I’ve always felt that if I wasn’t where I wanted to be, it was a product of grossly insufficient effort – I simply wasn’t working hard enough. This led to a bit of a fallacy. If I just had more time in the day, I’d reason, things would look up, but where did that time come from? Other things I also cared about. Things I enjoyed. Places I wanted to experience. Things I wanted to understand. People I wanted to deeply know. I would go through phases of trading one priority for another, confusing momentary success as progress, decrying momentary weakness as failure. Understanding life as moments, as snapshots of the good and bad, can lead us to thinking that more good snapshots are all we need. But the lives of my mother and other great people conspire to suggest otherwise. The challenge is not that I don’t have enough time; I have plenty of time, I just don’t think about how I’m using it.
My mother’s greatness is in her goodness, and it is the same for everyone: good process is what makes us. It’s algorithmic, but just like algorithms, bad process can lead to the wrong outcomes. Insecurity, isolation, insufficiency – these feelings flow from a complex web of potential causes that are often out of our control, but sometimes they can be the product of bad process. An over-prioritization of social cohesion over honesty, the diminishing of our true selves in fear of rejection, comparing ourselves to peers we perceive as uni- or multidimensionally more distinguished, or even an expectation of poorer outcomes over more positive and even more likely alternatives can all lead to less comfortable, less happy, and less fulfilled versions of ourselves. I’ve seen these at times in my friends and family; I’ve felt them at times in myself. Simply knowing our maladaptive habits is rarely the answer by itself, but it’s always a part of the most enduring ones.
For me, plateaus are sometimes worse than the lows and prompt questions without obvious answers – am I getting better at learning? Am I making and maintaining meaningful relationships? Am I really more selfless, more generous, more diligent, or more compassionate than I was a year ago? What I believe are plateaus often stem from my own myopia – I’m too focused on discrete moments to see my larger story. Life understood as moments encourages me to think cross-sectionally, with the dreaded plateaus in-between. In contrast, life understood as process means I’m not so much fixed as I am constitutively drifting, following the winds of habits good and bad that at times imperceptibly take me to my next destination; it’s natural to feel stagnant when you can’t see the horizon changing. Unlike the metaphor, we need not be passive about or poorly reactive to the habits that guide us. Like my mom, we can pick our process to pick our future.
I once saw discipline as a panacea, or at least a prophylactic, for plateaus, but plateaus are a feature of habits, not their foil. They represent moments where habitual changes need a bit longer to accumulate before they can be made manifest. They’re like the temperature of a pan of water at its boiling point or the diligent caterpillar wrapped bashfully in its cocoon; just because the progress is hard to see, doesn’t mean it plans to disappoint. It can be easy to be frustrated when we can’t see the results of our efforts – trust me, I know – but it’s during these periods that the imperceptible power of transformation does its most important work, and frankly, we owe ourselves a chance to give ourselves a chance. The reason my mother achieved her goals wasn’t only because she knew where she was going, but because she pushed through even when it didn’t feel like anything was working. Maybe that’s why she always tells me “Nana, things done by halves are never done right.”
Even if perfect habits exist, an understanding of process allows us to recognize they need not be the goal; good habits will do just fine, better even, as long as we have a process for the hardest part: getting back on track when we make mistakes. Unlike my mom, I find myself more off track than on it – more often than not, it seems the gap between where I am and where I want to be is too large to cross. When this happens, I do something that embodies my own feelings of being lost; I just go outside and wander, grabbing the ear muffs that don’t mess with my curls and that winter coat with the dysfunctional zipper. Strangely, on these occasions the mask is welcome, my thoughts now incognito as I slip by passersby. For me, a walk after losing track is a form of good practice, the heel of my boots roughly greeting staircase, then sidewalk, then Schuylkill, then somewhere. There’s something therapeutic about the breathing, the warm mask, the mobile joints, and the windy path. It’s so full of life every time I go, everywhere I look. The size of my challenges are recalibrated, my blessings now back in mind. Though imperceptible, my reflexive smiles pull me out of myself and remind me of who I am when I like myself the most: a person guided by a relational nature, an open-handed and open-book optimism, an invested curiosity, and a playful mirth. It reminds me I’m moving forward, even though sometimes it’s hard to tell.
These walks do more than give me a change in scenery – they always remind me of something about myself that my successes or failures, no matter how big they are, never can, and so I choose to listen to what I hear. More often than things, I think of people: my family and my friends, my pastors and faith leaders, my models and coaches, my mentees and students. I think of my lessons from the past, my prayers for the present, my hopes for the future. It was in a moment like this I recognized something my mother always seemed to know, a lesson her living example had always been trying to teach me: Trust accidents, aberrations, and outliers, good or bad, and you may find yourself repeatedly off track. “Trust in the process,” the right process for you, and you can always get to where you’re going.
Moments of greatness inspire us but ultimately it is process that actually transforms us. The changes process can bring may be good or bad depending on its alignment with our ultimate goals and values. They can allow us to access fuller versions of ourselves or make them feel even harder to reach. I don’t have the answer to which are the best habits – it’ll likely take my whole life for a meaningful stab at a modest few – but the recognition of what has the potential to transform me helps me to ask different questions about what the flourishing life looks like. The answer to “why is my life not where I’d like it to be” has many answers, pages of answers, so many we have no control over, often subject to systems established in distant rooms with strangers I haven’t spoken to and may never get a chance to. Those effects are real and irreducible. But in my own life, with the agency I have in my own two hands, today and in the future, I can ask a different, at some times harder, but in all ways more intimate, more compelling, and therefore more powerful question: “what are my habits, and where are they taking me?”
Andrew-Siaw Asamoah is an MS1 at the Perelman School of Medicine.
