Waving or drowning?

Charlotte Sidebotham is a salaried GP from Cornwall

Many years ago, at school, I learnt a poem by Stevie Smith called Not Waving but Drowning.¹ I have forgotten much of what I learnt at school, but this poem has stuck with me.

It articulates the story of a man who is drowning. From the beach, however, he appears to be waving. Those watching him have a perfectly reasonable explanation: he is known for larking about. They have seen this behaviour before. So when he raises his arms in the water, they decipher what they see according to what they already know about him.

But he is not waving.

He is drowning.

Smith captures the dreadful misconstruction in the line:

“I was much too far out all my life”

And, towards the end, comes the phrase that gives the poem its title:

“not waving but drowning.”

The poem has stayed with me for another reason. Thirty years after learning it, I find myself thinking about it while walking along hospital corridors.

I pass a colleague.

“How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

And we keep walking.

But are they?

And how could I know?

“Fine” is such an extraordinary word. It can mean honestly fine. It can mean I don’t have time to tell you. It can mean I’m getting through the day. It can mean please don’t ask me. And sometimes, possibly, it means I wish someone would ask me again.

The trouble is that we become very good at appearing fine. We are professionals. We turn up. We do the work. We smile at the right moments. We discuss patients, results, rotas and meetings. We make jokes. We moan about the IT. We say, “See you tomorrow.”

And maybe tomorrow we will do it all again.

So who do you ask twice?  It is hard to know. But it is the nuances that will guide.  Sometimes there is a tiny departure from the person you know. Someone who normally stops to chat doesn’t. Someone seems unusually quiet. Someone looks exhausted. Someone’s “fine” arrives a little too quickly.  And that is the moment to pause. “Fine as in actually fine, or fine as in corridor fine?”

It gives them a choice.

They can laugh and say, “No, honestly, I’m fine.”

Or they can stop.

And probably that is all we can really do.  We cannot know what is happening inside another person simply by looking at them. We cannot assume that the person who appears to be waving is merely waving.

Because that is the unsettling genius of Stevie Smith’s poem. The observer is not necessarily cruel. He has simply interpreted what he sees through the story he already has about the person in the water.

And perhaps we do the same.

We know the colleague who is always cheerful. The one who never complains. The one who jokes about everything. The one who has been through difficult times before and always seemed to cope.

So when they say, “I’m fine”, we believe them.

Perhaps sometimes we should look twice.  And ask twice.  Listen a little more carefully.

Because we may never know whether the person in front of us is waving.