I’m 103 years old. My name is Irena. For most of my life, I was a doctor. At first, I worked in a small clinic, and later, for many years, I treated children.
I saw people the doctors gave up on recover anyway. And I saw others swallow the best medicines only to burn out from the inside. After all these years, I know one thing for certain: a doctor can diagnose an illness, prescribe a drug, even perform surgery, but a doctor cannot live a patient’s life for them. I’m not telling you to stop taking your medicine or cure yourself with positive thinking.
I’m talking about that part of a person that still wants to get out of bed and take the next step. For years, I kept a small notebook and wrote down short sentences in it. Five of them stayed with me. Life.
Love. Laughter. Work. Listening.
They aren’t a recipe for reaching a hundred. They’re five questions that helped me not lose myself. And the last one, I only truly understood because of a single glance I’ve carried with me since 1933. The first two are inseparable.
Life and love. Think of a seed locked away for years in a dry drawer. It lies still and looks like nothing will ever grow from it again. Then it’s planted in the earth, given water, light, and warmth.
Its hard shell softens, and the first shoot appears. That’s what love is for life. It doesn’t always come in grand words. More often, it’s a cooked soup, a blanket pulled up over someone, an evening phone call, or patience with a person telling the same story for the hundredth time.
I saw children who were clean, well-fed, and nicely dressed, and yet were terribly lonely. They had everything except the feeling that anyone truly saw them. That’s why I told young doctors: don’t just look at the test results. Look at the person holding them.
The third thing is laughter. People say laughter is good for your health. But not every laugh is kind. A single sentence said as a joke can stay stuck inside someone for years.
Laughter joined with kindness brings relief. It’s the kind of laughter where no one has to defend themselves, because we’re laughing with them, not at them. In hard times, that sort of laughter helped us survive. We didn’t have much, but we could still forget what was missing, at least for a moment.
The fourth thing is work. Work without meaning becomes a burden. You get up because you must, you do your duties, and you wait all day for the moment you can go home. But work where you see the other person works differently.
More than once, I came home from my shift so exhausted that I fell asleep at the table. In the morning, I got up and went back. Not because I was a heroine. I never was.
I simply knew that behind the door, someone was waiting who needed help. When a person sees the meaning in what they do, they can achieve more than they ever thought possible. The fifth thing is listening. And I think that’s what I learned last.
You can hear every single word and not listen at all. A patient talks, and the doctor glances at his watch. A child tells a story, and the parent is already preparing an answer. Someone admits they’re afraid, and we immediately tell them there’s nothing to be afraid of.
Everyone hears. No one tries to understand. Listening doesn’t mean we have to agree with everything. It means that for a moment, we stop putting ourselves first and let the other person finish.
It’s a small thing. But after all these years of practice, I know that some people only tell the truth when no one interrupts them. Life, love, laughter, work, listening. From time to time, I ask myself: does what I’m doing serve life?
Am I really listening, or just waiting for my turn to speak? For many years, I carried another picture in my mind. I imagine myself walking a dark road at night with a small flashlight. I can’t see the end.
I can only see a few steps ahead. When I was young, I wanted to know my entire future, whether I had chosen the right profession, whether there would be enough money, whether something bad would happen tomorrow. Life never showed me the whole road. It only gave me light for the next step.
And today, I think that’s enough. Sometimes, you can see a faint glow on the side of the road. When you turn your flashlight toward it, the light grows stronger. It’s the same with people.
Someone next to you may be lonely or frightened. They don’t always need great advice. Sometimes, they just need someone to look at them like a human being. I remember one such look from my childhood.
I was ten. It was 1933. My mother took me to Warsaw. For a child from a small town, the capital was huge and loud.
On Krochmalna Street, we saw a group of children. A short, thin man with glasses was standing there, talking to them calmly, as if nothing in that moment mattered more. I recognized Dr. Janusz Korczak.
I knew he ran a home for children. But only then did I see the way he looked at them. A little girl was holding a crumpled paper flower. She walked up and offered it to him shyly.
Korczak didn’t take it from above. He squat down so he was at the level of her face. He accepted the flower seriously, as if he had just been given the most precious gift. Then he raised his head and, for a moment, looked straight at me.
He didn’t say a word. Neither did I. But I understood something. You can look at a child as someone small and unimportant.
Or you can see a whole person in them. My mother pulled me along, and I kept looking back. Many years later, I learned that Korczak didn’t leave the children behind, even though he could have saved himself. I don’t want to turn that into a beautiful legend.
There was nothing beautiful about it. There was war, fear, and death. But the question stayed with me throughout my whole practice: does the person standing in front of me feel that I truly see them? When I examined a frightened child, I tried to sit a little lower first.
I asked their name and what they were afraid of. I didn’t always have the time. I wasn’t always patient. I made many mistakes.
But I always returned in my thoughts to that paper flower. People are waiting for someone to notice them. It’s not about praise or admiration. It’s about the simple certainty that we truly exist for another person.
We might meet someone only once, on a train, in a clinic, in a shop, or on a bench. We might never learn their name. And still, the way we look at them can stay with them for years. If I were to leave one thought behind, it would be this: the most important thing is love.
Not as a pretty word, but as the way we treat a person when no one is watching. In laughter that doesn’t hurt. In work that serves someone. In listening without interrupting.
In simply noticing the person standing next to us. Love has to pass from one person to another. If we keep it locked up only for ourselves, it starts to die. And when you get to the very center of the question of life, healing, and meaning, you always come back to the same place.
To love and to life.