Understanding others

I have just finished reading The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (which won the Man Booker prize in 2011). It's a bit tenuous to link my leisure reading into a professional blog but I thought I would give it a try anyway! It is a short book - a novella that took me a few hours to read - but (uncommonly for me) I went straight back to page 1 on completing it. I found it impacted on me in a way that doesn't often happen by compellingly taking me into one person's story. For those who haven't read the book, it is a story told by a man looking back over his life, acknowledging the tricks that memory can play, but emphasising the impact that one's experiences can have (whether correctly remembered or not) on choices that are then played out over a lifetime. For me, the feeling that the book has left me with is a renewed appreciation of the complexities of seemingly straightforward lives, the hidden depths of people's experiences that may not be obvious to the casual bystander (or the health professional), and the assumptions that we can make about people's motivations and choices in life. We obviously can't do in-depth interviews with our patients to uncover their life experiences, but for me the book highlighted that we need to take time to understand people as best as we can so that we can at least attempt to put ourselves in the shoes of others when caring for them - an impossible task I know. I don't often get to my leisure reading these days, but I must do so more often as good books help me to appreciate and understand people and ideas better.