I go grocery shopping nearly every day. That day I was trying desperately to find a good tomato. I finally grabbed the best one I could find. Backing away from the counter with it in hand. I wasn’t paying attention. “Oh, I’m so sorry!” I said as I nearly fell over a woman in an electric cart. Many stores have started providing electric cars for those who have difficulty getting around. “Oh, that’s okay. I’m used to it. they need to put horns(喇叭)on these things,” she said with a smile. “We are positioned a bit lower and somewhat out of view. They are also so quiet that often people just don’t hear us coming. But I don’t know what I’d do without one. Oh, what a beautiful tomato it is ! I used to grow tomatoes. But this year I just couldn’t do it any more.”

“I’m sorry for your challenges. It must be frustrating.” I said.

“Well, it all requires a change in attitude, I could spend my time thinking about what I can’t do any more, or spend it on what new things I can do. I loved gardening. Besides my vegetable I also planted many flowers. All those years of love and attention kept them strong, so my work paid off,” the old woman replied.

“I love your attitude,” I added. “But tell me, what new things have you discovered? You said you needed to focus on new things you could do.” “Well, I can go to the grocery store and make new friends by running into perfect strangers with my cart,” she said. “What I’ve discovered is that I can’t grow flowers any more, but I can paint flowers. When I hang my flowers paintings on the wall, the fresh scent stays in my soul. Since I can’t get around as much and they are just there, we are a perfect match.”

“Just like meeting you, my friend. You added beauty to my day and will brighten the dark corners of my memory just when I need it most,” I told her.

One part of the oath (誓言) taken by physicians requires us to “remember that there is art to medicine, and that warmth, sympathy and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.” When I, along with my medical school class, recited that oath at my white coat ceremony a year ago, I admit that I was more focused on the biomedical aspects than the “art”.

Actually, medical professionals can get too easily caught up in treating to remember there is still space for healing. As doctors learn to communicate with patients beyond the restricted language of physical indicators, drug protocols and surgical interventions that may go against healing, they are reaching for new tools — poetry.

One clinical trial studied the effect of music or poetry on the pain, depression, and hope scores of 65 adult patients under cancer treatment. They found that both types of art therapy (疗法) produced similar improvements in pain and depression scores. Only poetry, however, increased hope scores. Researchers assumed that poetry can break the so-called law of silence, according to which talking about one’s perception of illness is taboo. After listening to poetry, one participant said, “I feel calmer when I hear those words. They show me that I’m not alone.”

Insights like these are already making their way into the clinic. Sarah Friebert runs a care center where children are visited by a writer who helps them create poems and stories for publication. Eric Elshtain uses poetry on the wards to teach children the power of self-expression. He’s found that many of his patients write haikus about things like sports or their favorite stuffed animal, rather than their experience in a hospital bed. Poetry, as he said, is a way to both accept the hospital encounter and escape from it.

While a poem a day won’t cure, it might help relieve. I’ve decided that I’ll learn how to meet my patients beyond the chart documents; that I’ll encourage them to write their own stories; that I will heal as well as treat. In other words, I’ll honor each and every word in the oath I took last year.

STAY HUNGER

STAY FOOLISH

I’m honored to be with you today for your commencement. I want to tell you three stories from my life.

The first story is about connecting the dots. When I was at Reed College, it offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. I decided to take a calligraphy class. At that time none of what I learned about calligraphy seemed to have even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. Of course it was impossible to connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was twenty. And then at thirty, I got fired. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still love what I did. And so I decided to start over. During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, and I returned to Apple. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. So, if you haven’t found what you love, keep looking. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “ If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for “prepare to die”. Later it turned out to be curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now. This was the closest I’ve been to facing death. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you: Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog. On the back cover of the final issue were the words: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin new, I wish that for you. Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Thank you all very much.