It’s been a long time since I stuck anything up here. I guess it’s been one of those years.

I’ve been doing high-volume psychiatry. Which probably has me talking to north of a thousand patients a year. It’s an interesting counterpoint to the small private practice I used to have.

Humans are fractals. That’s the thought for the day. 

One property of fractals is pattern with indifference to scale:  small forms echo larger forms. 

If one listens closely to the data—the words, the feelings, the context—in human interaction, you will begin to see the smaller pattern, and then the larger one.

Sometimes it’s a word choice in someone else’s report, the opening salvo as doctor and patient meet, a misunderstanding about appointment times…the data is present in everything, and the future is encoded therein. Like a symphony that builds from a theme, those themes are just as frequent in our own interpersonal fumblings as in music.

Hopeful or hopeless? 

When I notice this, patterns playing over timescapes large and small, the corollary is that change is illusory.

Included in that recursion is me. Ebbing and flowing, waxing and waning my way through productivity and paralysis. Blessedly I’ve gotten a lot done this year, despite bloggy silence.

With any luck, an upslope of verbosity to follow…