Mayo Clinic Brothers Quotes

In 1937, Gunda Lawrence, a teacher and homemaker from South Dakota, lay close to death from abdominal cancer. Doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota had given her three months to live. Luckily, Mrs. Lawrence had two exceptional and devoted sons—John, a gifted physician, and Ernest, one of the most brilliant physicists of the twentieth century. Ernest was head of the new Radiation Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley and had just invented the cyclotron, a particle accelerator that generated massive amounts of radioactivity as a side effect of energizing protons. They had in effect the most powerful X-ray machine in the country at their disposal, capable of generating a million volts of energy. Without any certainty what the consequences would be—no one had ever tried anything remotely like this on humans before—the brothers aimed a deuteron beam directly into their mother’s belly. It was an agonizing experience, so painful and distressing to poor Mrs. Lawrence that she begged her sons to let her die. “At times I felt very cruel in not giving in,” John recorded later. Happily, after a few treatments, Mrs. Lawrence’s cancer went into remission and she lived another twenty-two years. More important, a new field of cancer treatment had been born.

A 4-year-old loves her toy puppy’s golden brown fur. Her teenage brother is annoyed by its loud bark. Her mom sees it as a tool to keep the 4-year-old busy. Her baby sister finds the puppy’s big teeth scary. Her dad considers it an overpriced piece of plastic. The same toy evokes different feelings depending on how one looks at it. We see what we seek. When you don’t attend to attention — when you’re inattentive — life may pass you by. The tulips come and go, the seasons change, and the baby climbs out of the crib, off the bunk bed and on to the college dorm. We forget that joy is in the details. As a Jewish prayer says, “Days pass, and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.” Intentional trained attention is directed by your will. This trained attention pulls you away from distractions to savor a more wholesome morsel of life. Trained attention doesn’t deny or repress reality. It gives you temporary freedom from negativity. You stop carrying the entire load of the past and the future in your head. Trained attention is focused, relaxed, compassionate, nonjudgmental, sustained, deep and intentional. This meditative attention is essential to experiencing flow. Its optimal practice helps you forget yourself, immerses you in the world’s novelty, and frees your mind for creativity and joy.