I recommend that you remain neutral. “Neutrality and patience” is my mantra. Don’t lose your equilibrium in some powerful attraction or repulsion. Don’t be too available or too remote. Don’t be either defended or eager. Use neutral language and gestures. Don’t defend against temptation, just don’t be available to it.

I moved gradually to this action. I had watched the connections among my delegates and their connection to their learning dissolve as soon as the breaks began and the phones came out. After a few years I had become unwilling to foster this loss any more. And I realized I was willing to lose business if necessary in order to stop this infiltration of the platform system of interruption. I wanted to restore the full, attentive, undistracted human mind to every minute of our study and practice. I have lost no business.

To this day, I wake nearly every morning at four-fifteen, though now I do it for selfish reasons: to have time to think and read and exercise before the demands of the day take over. Those hours aren’t for everyone, but however you find the time, it’s vital to create space in each day to let your thoughts wander beyond your immediate job responsibilities, to turn things over in your mind in a less pressured, more creative way than is possible once the daily triage kicks in. I’ve come to cherish that time alone each morning, and am certain I’d be less productive and less creative in my work if I didn’t also spend those first hours away from the emails and text messages and phone calls that require so much attention as the day goes on.

Jean is criticizing herself for doing something harmless while at the same time rebelling against doing the one thing she has to do to keep her medical license. She is proclaiming her innocence in regard to the opioid prescription but pleading guilty to watching too much TV. Things are all twisted, and I do my best to straighten them out. “There’s a big difference between turning off the TV because you are tired and turning it off because you are supposed to,” I say. Jean has every right to watch as much TV as she wants; it is her only pleasure these days, the only relief from the surveillance she is under. I continue to talk with her about changing the story she is telling herself, about treating this time as a retreat (with TV!) into which she can surrender. Surrender becomes a theme we can explore. Jean is a conscientious and experienced clinician. She is devoted to her patients, and she knows that clinical work is much more important, and meaningful, than the electronic medical records being demanded of her. But right now, for the next year and a half, the medical records have to have priority. Can she submit to that with patience? Can TV be her reward? Or will her sense of the injustice perpetrated upon her paralyze her even further?

The point here is not about superhuman endurance, endless self-inflicted suffering, awe-inspiring work ethic, or even self-discipline. I’ve come to see that for individual lives it is more about feeling intrinsically compelled than about being fanatically disciplined. I used to think of myself as a disciplined person, but the more I studied these lives, the more I came to see that I never really needed discipline to keep going. If you so love what you’re doing, and you feel so well encoded for it that you simply cannot stop yourself from doing it, then how is that discipline? I love the time of bliss in the hours of transition from night to dawn, and there is nothing in the world I would rather be doing than creative work as the light changes. I still hit nearly every single day excited by the work at hand, checking my watch in the middle of the night hoping that it is far enough into the morning to justify getting up, thinking to myself, “Please, oh please, let it be at least 4 a.m., so I can get going!” That’s not discipline; that’s love.