What it means to be inspirational
This profile did so much to me internally. It's a profile of family doctor Dr. Greg Gulbransen who practices in Oyster Bay, Long Island. It is probably one of the best things I've read all year. Dr. Gulbransen shows what it means to live outwardly, to channel energy towards doing good. This is true even if it comes from a personal place. From New Yorker.
Good people are often puzzles to those of us who wish we were better. We try to understand what they do, and how, and why. Many base their goodness in principle, or faith, or some vision of how the world ought to be, and we sometimes suspect that, if we could only adopt one of their systems, we might do good, too. But Gulbransen’s goodness wasn’t part of any system; it was personal, even arbitrary. There were, I learned, many Reds and Maliks—many people with whom he’d forged one-to-one relationships of care. Some were in the Bronx, others farther from or closer to home. He’d begun making these connections after Cameron’s death, and, over time, they had become a way of life. In the Old Testament, when Job laments his fate, a friend tells him that “man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward.” We all suffer, as inevitably as a fire throws off pieces of itself. But Gulbransen had built something from his sparks.