Dear friends,

We talk a lot at On Being about the word “healing,” the meaning of healing, and how it is distinct from, and interwoven with, words that are used with greater fluency in our world: fixing, curing, closure. 

I love that the Surgeon General of the United States has had a deep, intentional orientation to healing from his earliest life with his father, also a physician, and his mother, who helped run their medical practice. He defines it this way: “Healing is about making whole. To be a healer, you have to be able to listen, to learn, and to love. And I saw those three forces at work in my parents, and how they cared for their patients.” 

In fact — though we don’t touch on this in our conversation, the final episode of this season — Vivek Murthy brought The Healer’s Art course of Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen to Yale Medical School when he was a student there. And she was the first person, early in this adventure, to bring home to me this connection between healing and wholeness. She gave voice to counterintuitive truths I’ve seen embodied in wise and graceful lives ever since. Healing — becoming whole — is not about eradicating our wounds and weaknesses. It emerges in and through them. “The way we deal with loss,” she’s written, “shapes our capacity to be present to life more than anything else.”

The other side of this is that when we don’t deal with our losses — when we suppress them, wish them away, power through — they “distance us from life” and continue to define us. I see this so powerfully, heartbreakingly, in our world right now. And as intensely as anyone I know, Dr. Murthy has been out there in civic spaces and workplaces tending it. He has put his incisive, caring finger on the pulse of all that is implied when we speak about the “mental health crisis” and worry in particular about our young. I spoke with him in a room of raucous podcasters, many of them young, and he helped them hold a greater fullness of what we’re living through and bring a tenderness to themselves. I trust that listening to this will offer that to you, too. 

The point of such naming and grappling, of course, is not to wallow, as the culture of my childhood might have critically observed. It is to reach for the vitality we need as human beings, and that we need to draw on as we face the great callings these years have placed before us. There are callings for each of us to be healers in our places, in our ways. Healing, as comes through so refreshingly in this conversation, is never something we do alone. And it comes, among other things, with a restoration of our capacity for joy.

I am constantly grateful for the profound sense I have at all times that everyone who gathers around On Being — guests and listeners alike — is walking alongside me and each other. 

As we move into a time between podcast seasons, we’ll be tending to making that more vivid and more real.