Trust the professionals

“For the first time, I'm thinkin' past tomorrow, and I am not throwin' away my shot.” - Lin Manuel Miranda (Library of Congress Photo)

I know what it feels like to be an expert.

For years, I studied music—from the outside in, through learning classical charts, and from the inside out, figuring out songs by ear and writing my own.

However, I thought that the details would always elude me and I would have to build every song from the ground up, note by note, forever.

And then one day I played Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” on the guitar, even though I had never played it before. It was just there, under my fingers. And another time, after listening to Tori Amos’ contemplative, textured version of “Rattlesnakes” for solo piano and vocal, I sat down at the piano and my fingers just found the notes and played it perfectly. It seemed so complicated, but it was as though my fingers could just hear it. They were operating without my conscious thought…but of course, my movements were the result of many, many, hours of prior effort. It felt like magic, but it was magic that I could trust.

Ironically, this expertise has given me a healthy understanding of my own ignorance. The human body may seem to me to be an infinite array of tubes and wires and mysterious fleshy objects, but I understand that, to a surgeon, these pieces and parts are defined and knowable — there is no mystery at all. The workings of an automobile are similarly opaque to me, but an experienced mechanic can quickly diagnose and fix a problem based on knowledge and experience I don’t possess. My job is to trust the professionals.

Likewise, as a monolingual English speaker, I accept that my mother tongue represents only a sliver of the world of communication. Russian or Polish or Arabic might sound like nonsense to me, but I understand that these languages are spoken by millions of people, and their proficiency is not limited by my own. I do not have to understand what they are saying to believe that they are saying something. I can also acknowledge that they don’t have to put words together piece by piece like I do in French. It’s not hard for them. They are fluent, the way I am on the piano. They see something I don’t see and have something I don’t have, and they owe me no justification or explanation.

I know I can’t get up to speed with the knowledge of a medical or legal professional in a few hours or days. I can’t learn a foreign language that quickly, and I can’t figure out the engineering of an engine in that time, either. Just as I took years to develop an intuitive understanding of music, it would take years to gain expert status in any of these other realms.

So I am not doing independent research prior to receiving the coronavirus vaccine, which I am eligible for next month. I do not have the knowledge or resources to administer a large-scale study in this field, nor would I know how to assess the results of one. I have only a layperson’s knowledge of how vaccines work. I’m not a doctor, a scientist, or a public health professional. It is incumbent on me to trust the doctors, scientists, and public health professionals. I must trust their motivations, their research, their findings, their knowledge, skill, and expertise. I must trust the process.

If I should ever need heart surgery, I have no way to assess the knowledge and skill of the team that will perform the surgery. However, it would be foolish to refuse the surgery on those grounds. My only hope is to trust. I must believe that these doctors and nurses have earned their position. I’ll never know what they know, but there is a system in place to make sure they know what they are supposed to know in order to protect people like me.

Many of us are mistrustful of our governments and health care systems, and not without reason. It is understandable that many are hesitant about receiving the vaccine. It’s understandable that someone might have a “you go first” mentality about anything new. But it’s important to recognize that the important work has already been done. The vaccine is tested, effective, and safe, even if you or I did not personally verify its safety or efficacy. Other people have already set up systems to take care of this, and the work has been done. The language they speak may be as foreign to us as Urdu or Pashto are to me and my family, but that’s a limitation of our perception, not of the language itself.

There are those who go through the world believing that if they haven’t double-checked something, it hasn’t been double-checked. Years ago, as director of a music school, I was arranging a piano recital. I sent out the directions to the venue and so on, and got an email back from a parent. “I presume there will be a piano there?” What an exhausting way to live. Yes, ma’am. You have my word that there will be a piano at your daughter’s piano recital. Hard as it may be to accept, I got this.

We can’t control everything. We can’t know everything. We have to believe that others are doing the work that we can’t. It is not irresponsible for me to get the vaccine without studying its provenance. It’s someone else’s job to do that investigation, and that job is complete. My responsibility—to myself, my family, and my community—is to line up and get immunized when it’s my turn.

I’m an expert in music and maybe a few other things. I know enough to know what I don’t know, and it sets me free. One thing I do know that the endgame of this pandemic is for you and me to get our shots, no matter how uncomfortable and uncertain it may feel. The professionals have done their part — this is ours. Spread the word!