Once again love...
But, now a kind of brotherly love. No longer romantic or idealized. A form of love that is contagious, that allows the best in every human being to emerge.
Today, I would like to share with you some of the teachings given by a personality that I greatly admire and that I had the opportunity to participate in his lectures. His name is Hunter Doherty, better known as “Patch Adams”, the clown doctor, who defends the idea of ​​humane treatment in hospitals. A man who understands friendship as the best medicine.
Hunter had a troubled adolescence, like so many of us, he was an easy target for bullying, as he was outside the standard of perfect appearance defined at the time. He was too tall for his age, thin, clumsy, bespectacled, and not handsome for dates. But he had an important point in his favor: he didn't need to study, as he was very comfortable with the subjects. Today, he would easily be labeled a “nerd”. At that moment, he realized that by making those who annoyed him laugh, he was accepted and bullying was no longer fun.
Hunter was a young man who saw a lot of inconsistency between what he heard in the church he attended and the real world. Because he could not live with this inconsistency, he attempted suicide 3 times. He admitted himself to a psychiatric clinic voluntarily after this third attempt. That's when he said to himself: “You're not going to kill yourself, you ass. You can make a revolution!” There, Hunter made his first choice upon discovering that he could serve Humanity and would do so by becoming a doctor.
Patch Adams says that in 45 years of medicine he has never used the profession to make money, he has always practiced the profession voluntarily and with a lot of love, bringing joy to patients. The question usually asked by him is: "Would you rather end your life with joy and humor or continue the disgrace that is to die in sadness?".
This is certainly a very different look at death. Patch Adams teaches us to look at both life and death in a less painful way. This is a way to break patterns, to look beyond what material eyes can see, to see the essence of the human being.
During his college years, Patch did countless experiments to figure out how to get close to other people, to find out what makes people pay attention to one another. In one of his experiments, he would take the phone book and call numbers he didn't know. His point was the opposite of saying “Sorry, it was a mistake and hanging up”. He just wanted to continue the conversation with this stranger and thus make a new friend.
Patch Adams made a second choice while still in the mental hospital and chose not to have any more unhappy days. He made the decision to live a happy life. According to Patch “Happiness is the platform on which a person launches himself into life”. He has lived very well with that choice for 53 years. Patch founded the Gesundheit Institute, located in Virginia - United States and in the first 12 years of work, he assisted more than 15 thousand patients. This shows us that love is possible and can be contagious, as long as we have our hearts open to others and the desire to serve, to be useful, without judgments or demands. This is how we work for love and with love.
I close this article with an exercise suggested by Dr. Patch Adams. The proposal is to live a week in a bad mood, complaining about everything and everyone, keeping the beak in the mouth. We will make room for unhappiness and sadness. The following week, we will live in a good mood, we will greet people, we will not complain about things, even when they displease us, because we will look for the reasons why they happened and we will understand the person or the situation, we will laugh and allow ourselves to be happy.
Patch says that only after these two weeks will we make a choice about how to live our lives. Every day, when we open our eyes, we have to make the first choice: get up or not, work or not, study or not, fight or not. Therefore, this will also be the moment to choose: “Today I will be happy”! And try, just for today, one more day, to be happy”.
