If I could choose my doctor, I’d like it to be Rachel Naomi Remen. She writes with a rare mix of elegance and tenderness. Her work is a shimmering oasis in the vast desert of content that surrounds us. If you need a warm, life-affirming break from scrolling through overnight oat videos on Instagram, turn to her work.
‘My Grandfather’s Blessings’ is a collection of short stories and reflections. It artfully weaves together lessons Remen learnt from her larger than life grandfather (a rabbi and a student of the Kabbalah) with Remen’s 30 years of experience as a medical doctor.
When she was a child, Remen’s grandfather shared with her beautiful insights that were well beyond the understanding of the average 6-year old. He encouraged her to look for wholeness in all things and people and invited her to celebrate all that life brings. He spoke honestly and reassuringly to her about war, darkness and other things that trouble the minds of young children when grown-ups refuse to address them.
It would take Remen decades to fully unpack the wisdom her grandfather shared and piece it together with her thoughtful observations from her life as a doctor. Imagine being handed a huge treasure trove packed with ancient wisdom as a child and then being given keys to each of its hidden compartments over many years. Remen’s experience was akin to this and allowed her the time and space she needed to fully absorb the gift she had been given.
Throughout the book, Remen advocates for more acceptance of, patience with and openness to our experience as it is, rather than as we would have it be. In her own words:
“I’ve spent many years learning how to fix life, only to discover at the end of the day that life is not broken. There is a hidden seed of greater wholeness in everyone and everything. We serve life best when we water it and befriend it. When we listen before we act.
In befriending life, we do not make things happen according to our own design. We uncover something that is already happening in us and around us and create conditions that enable it.“
This advice stands in stark contrast to the messages we hear in popular culture about designing and controlling our lives so that they look a certain way. There comes a point for each of us when we realise that our plans and aspirations, however hard we may have worked for them, will not always come to fruition. When they don’t, we can choose to fight against the natural way of things or to flow with it.
Most of us find it extremely hard to let things be as they are. It seems only human that we would try to fight against loss, illness, death and the other harsh realities of life. In ‘My Grandfather’s Blessings’, Remen gives many examples of people who slowly learnt how to gratefully accept and even embrace the things we find most difficult.
In one of her stories, Remen’s Russian grandmother taught her young children to make the best of their mistakes. At times, when one of them accidentally opened her huge icebox, which was stuffed to the brim with food, an egg would fall out. Remen’s grandmother would eye the egg with a smile and say, “Aha, today we have sponge cake!”
Another one of Remen’s accounts describes a Japanese man in the final stages of prostate cancer who invited people who had blessed his life to his sessions with Remen. The purpose of this was for him to take the time to express his gratitude to them. He began reflecting on death as a mystery that gave life ‘meaning and even value’ and pondering the ancient question of what might come next.
A memorable story from the book recounts the difficulties that eight women in a cancer group retreat encountered when they first came together to share their experiences. Initially, they felt unsafe and suspicious of each other. Over time, they began to accept and care for each other the way they would have done for their own children. The retreat imbued them with the confidence to talk about surgical scars they had hidden from their husbands for years — this began a process of healing on a deeper level.
Remen does not claim to have any definite answers to the question of how best to lead one’s life. Instead, she offers findings that have helped her, in a spirit of kindness and generosity. The beauty of her musings is that they will help you re-think what you’re convinced you know. In the excerpt below, she explains how our supposed flaws can actually end up being a lifeline for others.
“But when we serve, we don’t serve with our strength; we serve with ourselves. We draw from all of our experiences. Over the years I have discovered that everything I know serves and everything I am serves. I have served people impeccably with parts of myself that embarrass me, parts of which I am ashamed. {…}
Many times my limitations have become the source of my compassion, my wounds have made me gentle with the wounds of other people, and able to trust the mysterious process by which we can heal. My loneliness has made me able to recognise the loneliness in others, to respect that place where everyone is alone and meet others in the dark. Most humbling of all, I have found that sometimes the thing that serves best is not all of my hard-earned medical knowledge but something about life I may have learned from my Russian grandmother or from a child.”
Perhaps the best gift we can obtain from good writing is a way to look at the world anew.
Remen’s words help us to stop seeing stories and experiences from our own life as trivial or irrelevant. They help demonstrate the abundant power, meaning and even joy in seemingly everyday exchanges and events.
