If I can stop one Heart from breaking

Feb 10

What does it mean to live a life that matters? Does it mean having a successful career? Raising happy, well-adjusted children? Loving and being loved? Achieving fame and fortune? Or simply enjoying the beauty and wonder of the world?

Surely there is no single answer to this question. One of the miracles of being human is that each of us gets to compose our own response over time, shaped by losses, successes, resignations, and hope. In recent years, my work in healthcare has quietly but insistently shifted my own answer toward Emily Dickinson’s.

Dickinson offers in this little poem a vision of a meaningful life that is disarmingly modest. There is no talk of achievement or recognition, no grand legacy to be secured. Instead, the measure of a life well lived rests on small acts of care: easing pain, offering comfort, tending to suffering—sometimes in ways so ordinary they might never be noticed at all.