Gentle Persuasion

The essence of meaningful change is best sought in the gentlest of approaches.

Everyone of the littles is adorable.
Thank you to Grace and Britt for helping

I have found this to be true with every patient that I encounter and every endeavor in medicine I stumble upon. There is very little too gain with brute force. Nature punishes unwilling interventions. She is the only one of us that is permitted disastrous force with unmerciful annihilation and no apologies for her unexpected wrath.

I am currently bottle feeding three 3 week old kittens that my sister rescued.  They are tiny balls of fluff with only two preferences; eat and sleep. They are helpless, fragile, and adorable. If there is a core of all of humanity for such innocence it is spawned from the twitching of ears, the rhythmic kneading of open paws and the purr of suckle on a bottle. If mankind has one central weakness it is the precious life that littles elicit. These three kittens as tiny, meek and vulnerable that they are, were also born with some primitive, compulsion to survive. The first time I offered a bottle they were angry. They wanted what they knew, what was working just fine for them in the past, and, they were reluctant, resistant, (no, that's not the right word),,, they were pissed to change. The bottle is hard, plastic, chewy rubber nipple and there's me anchored to all of it. Not very tempting save for the desperation that hunger induces. It took two days of gentle persuasion to convince them to abandon the old fleshy-furry-momma they once knew and adored. Problem was that momma was feral. She was ferrying her babies form one shelter to the next to avoid incarceration from the good intentioned onlookers providing her free room and board. We captured these three as she attempted to once again avoid intrusion. These three boys were lost from the home they knew and the mom who has thus far been everything they needed. Who wouldn't be disgruntled about this turn of events?

We have a very well-qualified technician we are interested in hiring. Her credentials and work history are impressive and it would be so nice to have someone just slip into our work schedule who didn't need a year of training who then discovers they want to be a cosmetologist, or nurse, or tattoo artist. She interviewed, gave us a high dollar start figure ultimatum and then requested a shadow work day to see us in action. She left that shadowing day feeling as if we were incapable of the changes she felt we needed to make to fit her work style and standards. In a polite decline she made us feel like we were below her standard of care. While I appreciate knowing who you are and maintaining a bar you are not interested in negotiating I found it poetic that the staff felt much the same about her. Her obvious insinuations that there was room for improvement put them on the defensive. They felt she wouldn't fit in because she had little interest in trying. I explained to them, all strong, very talented, experienced technicians that I was pretty sure they would do the same if they were transplanted into a different clinic. What remains at the core of each of us is, needs to be, the same nidus of inspiration. We all have to be here with a common goal. Perhaps we need to be reminded, or inquired as to what that is, and then ask ourselves if we are capable of gentle persuasion to work together for this instead of competing for who gets there more efficiently? Also, maybe the carrot, and the warm bottle are not our preferred substitute but we can learn to tolerate it, maybe even embrace the change that is inevitable.

Maybe the whole world, every interaction, every moment needs to be centered on gentle persuasion when the life around us reminds us there is a wrath of consequences awaiting.

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