By Anu Dev
“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do” – Leonardo da Vinci
Just before returning to Trinidad a little over a week ago, I caught a bug. It felt like the flu: you know – fever, cough, headache, aching muscles and tiredness. So I downed the usual over-the-counter medications and hunkered down to see it through. Lots of liquid and all that.
Most of the students hadn’t arrived from the other islands so I had the dorms practically to myself. I’d planned to move around a bit…spread my wings so to speak. The bug took care of that plan!
But for the next couple of days the symptoms just got worse and I became increasingly weaker and lethargic. The cough became hacking. Now you have to have an idea of the layout of the dorms of the Mount Hope Medical School to know where I’m going with this. It’s not on the main campus among the other faculties at St Augustine, but as part of the Mount Hope Medical complex (it’s actually the Eric Williams Medical Sciences complex but everyone refers to it as “Mount Hope”.) It’s one of the three tertiary hospitals in Trinidad.
So it’s like I’m living right smack in the middle of a hospital. And I knew I ought to get some kind of medical attention since I wasn’t feeling any better.
But I just couldn’t bring myself to walk over to the clinic or the emergency wings to get help. One of the senior lecturers of the medical school is a friend of my dad’s and he’d done my medicals when I entered the school. I knew the family well.
He’s part of a nearby private hospital…but I didn’t call him.
Eventually (well within a day) my mom flew over and dragged me around to the doctors and they did their tests and all the other diagnostics (in an amazingly fast time, I must say).
My blood count was very low…hence my tiredness and listlessness. They also thought I might have dengue. Well two days later, the latter was nixed and they decided I just had a rather nasty viral infection…much worse than the seasonal flu.
I’m still not fully recovered but the question I pose to myself is, why didn’t I do what I knew had to be done to take care of the crisis I was going through? And the answer is that it’s most likely a form of procrastination, which I’d written about before. This is a very common habit with too many people…including myself. We know what is to be done in a situation and we still don’t do it – even when it’s as serious as an illness.
It’s so widespread that it has its own name…the “knowing-doing gap”. My mom was flying back to Guyana as I was writing this. And I’ve resolved to close this gap. My dad has always taught us that in Hindu epistemology (theory of knowledge) that “knowledge” is not just a cognitive (thinking) act…but become so only when it ends in action. “If you know by doing, there is no gap between what you know and what you do”.
So if you’re like me (and there’s a lot of us out there…in fact we’re the majority) let’s do what we know has to be done before it becomes a crisis.
So if you check up on me during the week, you’ll find me eating better to get my blood count up. And checking in with the doctors to see how I’m doing.