Perfect Days!
By David Jarrard and Ken Graboys
3-minute read
When you woke this morning, what did you first think of?
Or did you not have time to notice as your phone beckoned to you impatiently from your bedside with its tyrannical demands?
That would be understandable. There are certainly plenty of urgent reasons to see what your phone has to tell you next. This has been a year without respite. A year where the volatility, uncertainty and challenges to what it means to provide healthcare have been head-spinning. Full 360s.
Yet amid this buzzing, tumultuous milieu, as we prepare for Thanksgiving, it’s the most beautiful quiet gem of a film – Perfect Days – that keeps coming to mind.
Reorienting Attention
Perfect Days, Japan’s 2023 entry for Best International Feature Film, doesn’t tell a story as much as it shares the life of its main character Hirayama, a Tokyo public works employee.
Hirayama lives alone in a small apartment where he wakes each day, tends to his plants, goes to work cleaning public toilets throughout the city and eats dinner at the same small diner. As we watch him, we are slowly drawn in as we appreciate the unremarkable ever-present reverence with which he holds all that he does.
The film is as much a lovely meditation on the sacredness that can attend ritual and our daily routine as it is a reflection of the complex emotional tableau that is life itself.
In many ways, Perfect Days manifests the reframe of “I have to” to “I get to.” From “Woe is me!” to “How lucky am I?”
This reorientation of our attention – how we resolve to experience our days – is a choice to be grateful. It is an appreciation that we have the good fortune to be granted the opportunity to do that which is before us.
Leaders “Get To” Be Change Agents
As healthcare leaders, we have been granted such good fortune.
You “get to” be the ones who in this tumultuous time get to guide the future of how this country will deliver care for its communities. While the current challenges may not be the ones you would wish for – you “get to” be the ones who take it on.
To be clear, there is no suggestion that such a reframe is easy or that it alleviates the weight of accountability you feel upon your shoulders. The healthcare challenges you are striving to meet are in many ways existential:
- How do we care for our most vulnerable?
- How do we provide greater access and greater care when resources are ever more constrained?
- How do we support our caregivers and employees at a time when burnout is prevalent?
- How do we continue supporting world-changing basic, translational and clinical research?
- How do we effectively harness the promise of technology to address these challenges?
Your answers and actions will be greatly informed by your attention, whether you live in a conviction of defensive scarcity or generous possibility. What do you choose to see?
Healthcare in America is on the precipice of great change…and you “get” to be the change agent, the one in a position of leadership who is privileged with the opportunity to answer the call.
And that is something to be grateful for. To be able to have impact, drive direction, alleviate suffering, elevate the spirit.
For here’s the thing: Gratitude is not merely a feeling of deep appreciation (though it begins there). To be grateful is to act, to be a worthy steward of that very thing for which you are thankful and have been privileged to behold.
To be grateful is to be in debt to appreciation. To be fortuitously accountable to it.
This reframe is not new. To paraphrase stoic and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius:
“At dawn, when you find yourself challenged to rise, tell yourself: I get to go to work – as a human being… I get to do what I was born for. The things I was brought into this world to do.”
If you’re Hirayama in Perfect Days, you rise at dawn, admire your bonsai tree and, from time to time, you trim it and prepare for the day, appreciating the sacredness of what lies ahead.
And if you are a US healthcare leader, you have the same opportunity when you rise. Before the chaos and tumult of the day take over – there’s the opportunity to take a moment to breathe and be grateful to be in the position to make a difference to so many.
And as we look out across the healthcare delivery landscape, the leaders assembled across its myriad fronts, we are grateful for you. For all you have done and all you will do. Day in and day out. And in their context, perfect days.
Happy Thanksgiving.
*Ken Graboys is the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Chartis. His experience in healthcare consulting spans 30 years, working with academic medical centers, integrated delivery systems, and healthcare service organizations to materially improve the delivery of care.
Ken and David Jarrard, chairman of the Jarrard Executive Committee, are colleagues and healthcare thought leadership partners. To read more of their insights, please see Latest Healthcare Trends and Analysis.
Image credit: Shannon Threadgill
