I witness others’ beginnings every day.

Especially newborns’ — our patients arrive naked, empty-handed, needy. And also learners’ —our students/trainees travel laden with lists and notes and references and manuals, the trappings of learning accumulating over time.

An attending physician, however, is armored in the long white coat of authority. A coat with empty pockets, because the attending knows all and needs nothing.

How can an attending be a beginner?

To suggest such a thing might be like suggesting that the emperor has no clothes.

But to admit it is, in fact, freedom.

Freedom from the mask of invulnerable, self-sufficient omniscience — and freedom to attend: to listen, to observe, to be present.

I resolve to begin: to attend, and to share the journey.