In medicine, in research, and in life, it is much easier to rule things out than it is to come to a conclusion.

Each day I go into the hospital and pore over lists of potential eligible patients for studies.. I dive into their medical histories, accessing every single medical note ever written about them. The purpose of this task is to find the key elements that will render these patients ineligible to participate. It’s all about ruling out. As I look through medical charts and initial consult notes, I read the same things over and over again: “Patient denies any chest pain, dizziness, nausea..”, etc. etc.  It is a process focused on what the patient doesn’t have rather than what they do.

I’m finding recently that this practice reaches far beyond the white walls and bright lights of the hospital ward.

We, as humans, live our lives in desire. Desire for more, desire for happiness, desire for improvement. We focus on all of the things in our lives that we don’t have, rather than focusing on the things that we do have. We know exactly what we don’t want in life, exactly what we despise and hate.

What fools us is the idea that we ever know what we want. We think we know what we want, but we don’t know how to get there. We spend our entire childhood trying to become something, trying to live up to the expectations of ourselves, our peers, and our family members. Our teachers ask us what we want to be when we grow up, and we tell them that we want to be an astronaut, a firefighter, the president.

So we get to college and declare our majors before we’ve even stepped foot on campus. We know exactly what we think we want to do and believe that this is our only option, our only road. The kids who stick around and don’t declare their major for a couple of semesters feel inadequate, confused, lost. (me)

But then something happens. We start to realize what we don’t want. What doesn’t fit, and what’s not right. And that’s when we start ruling things out. We take a political science course and realize we hate politics. We take a sociology class and learn the rewarding yet depressing nature of social work. And we begin to decide what we don’t want to do. What we don’t want to be.

And one day, things start to fall into place. We don’t know the specific path, the exact way to get there, but we know we are headed in the right direction. We pick the right major, take the right job, or do the right thing. We have that valuable, incredible feeling inside that you are going the right way. For some, it takes months. For others, it takes years. But it comes.

So is ruling out a good method of living your life? It’s certainly not the only way to do things. Without it, would we really have a sense of what we want in life? Would our desires become even less clear and our dreams even murkier? On the opposite end, are we so quick to rule things out that we don’t even give things enough of a chance? Are we so quick to point out the flaws in people, jobs, life, and situations that we are missing “the big picture?” I’m not saying that ruling out doesn’t work. Of course it does. Medicine would not work without this process; we would never have an accurate diagnosis. But I think that life needs to be about more than ruling out. We’re all so quick to make judgements and dismiss everything as too hard, too complicated, and too much of a pain in the ass.

Maybe we all need to slow down, take a few breaths and take things as they come. Instead of expecting to rule something out, maybe we need to go into a situation with blind optimism. Maybe we need to see that glass half full and instead of ruling something out, rule something in.

But what do I know. Life is a beautiful thing.