Folding the Page Differently
A Tiny Epiphany About Novelty and Interconnectedness
I’ve gone to Methodist Germantown Hospital’s Women’s Pavilion thousands of times. I typically park in the same area of the garage, come in the same door, climb the same two flights of stairs, greet the same nurses as I pass them, and sit at the same computer before seeing my newborn patients. I review their charts in the same order, and print my rounding list on a piece of paper that I carry with me during my rounds and back to the office. And every day, I fold this piece of paper the same way – first crosswise, then in half, and finally in half again before tucking it in my back pocket.
This has always been my routine. Until today.
I obviously like order and predictability, especially in my workday. All the details I described to you about my morning rounds work well, except for the fold. When I fold my rounding list as I described, I can only see the first half of the page without unfolding it. I guess I was thinking about this inefficiency as I walked from the printer to my first patient’s room. Suddenly, an idea hit me! What if I fold the page differently? What if my first fold is longwise? Then, I only have to undo one fold to see all of the information about my patients. I paused at the nurse’s station, refolded my rounding list, and eureka, I was right! This tiny change, this tiny epiphany, rocked my rounding world.
Such a Tiny Change?
Ok, I’ll admit it, “rocked my rounding world” may be an overstatement. Changing the way that I fold my rounding list isn’t that big of a deal. Or is it?
After I refolded the list, I walked to the nurses’ station closest to my first patient’s room. I washed my hands and found myself smiling as I thought about the simple change that made my work easier. I told the nurses working there about my epiphany, and they smiled, at least sharing my joy, even if they didn’t completely get it. I saw my patients and left the hospital through my usual staircase. Halfway down, I passed a woman walking up. In my possibly inappropriate euphoria over my newfound folding technique, I smiled and said, “Have a good day!” We passed, and she continued upward until she had almost reached the next landing. She paused, looked back, and said, “Thank you. I really needed that smile because I had something heavy on my mind, and now I’m smiling.”
I wished her well, finished my climb down the stairs, and walked to my car, thinking about how my novel idea had developed, bringing me joy, which in turn lightened someone else’s load, at least briefly.
The philosopher and theologian Alfred North Whitehead sometimes imagined thought as an airplane’s flight. The aircraft starts on the ground with an observation of your own experience. It takes flight, and you can imagine how your grounded experience applies to more general situations. Finally, the plane lands, allowing you to apply those broader ideas to your real life.
As I drove away from the hospital, my grounded experience led me to “take flight” and think about two big ideas: novelty and interconnectedness.
Novelty
If you think about it carefully, we (and everything) are constantly changing. Each moment is unique and unfolds from past events and patterns, as well as from potential possibilities. Before today, I have printed rounding lists hundreds, if not thousands, of times. And every time, I folded them the same way. It was simply my habit. On all those occasions, past events and patterns influenced how I folded my page more than anything else. Today, a new possibility occurred to me. Following that lead, I folded the page differently and discovered a novel way to do something I had practiced the same way for many years.
The novelty isn’t that no one has ever folded a page like this before. It’s that I had never folded my rounding list that way. This tiny idea is not patentable. I won’t write a book or appear on the Today show to teach people how to fold a page differently. It’s simply a new way of doing something that is just a bit better than how I’ve done it before.
Thinking about it a bit more, I realized that this little example gives us insight into other moments. Maybe every moment develops not only from past events and patterns, but also from new possibilities. That thought raises the question of where these possibilities come from.
Whitehead proposed that God sees all available possibilities in each moment and guides us toward those that best lead to truth, goodness, and beauty. This divine guidance isn’t a prewritten script that is coercive or insistent, but rather empowering and responsive.
If reality includes a force that guides us into a novel future aimed at overall well-being, I align with Whitehead and like to think of that guiding force coming from a God who is love.
So, this novelty of folding the page differently doesn’t come from God as a predetermined coercive move. It also isn’t because I’m so smart that I created the best, most efficient method for handling rounding lists. No, my decision to fold the page differently was an example of what everyone faces every moment: the possibility of co-creation. That’s how I see each moment in our lives unfolding. We make decisions about what we will do from a range of possibilities while God leads us toward the options that promote flourishing most, sometimes revealing new options we haven’t seen before.
Interconnectedness
As it turns out, co-creation isn’t only between God and us. As we live and observe reality, we see more clearly that we are all connected. God relates to everyone and everything else, as do each of us. We’re all connected.
My interaction with the woman in the stairwell reminded me of this universal interconnection. I must admit that when I greeted her, I wasn’t thinking about how I could potentially make her day better. I was mindlessly quoting one of the phrases we southerners say when we pass people. Somehow, my preoccupation with my newfound way of folding my page led me to smile. And in my smile, she saw hope and connection that revealed new possibilities.
Bringing it Back to the Ground
So, my tiny epiphany about folding the page differently gave me deeper insight into God’s empowering guidance and the complex interconnections of reality. Now, we can bring these big ideas back to the ground and apply them to other situations.
As someone who helps people navigate the complex path of parenting, I find it natural to consider how we mirror divine empowerment and guidance to our children. Kids regularly need their parents to help them see new possibilities.
Sometimes that comes in the form of scaffolding a new skill by offering them significant help and guidance at first, then stepping back over time as they develop confidence and mastery. This approach is helpful throughout our kids’ development, from learning to get dressed, tie their shoes, make a sandwich, drive, and wash clothes. It still helps as we help our “grown kids” learn about this thing they call “adulting.”
As we reflect God’s guidance to our children, we value persuasion over coercion. Sometimes, that seems easy, but at other times reality hits, our children seem stubborn, and we find ourselves insisting on our own way. It’s then that we must remember the lesson of interconnectedness. Parenting isn’t a one-way street. It involves response in addition to guidance. Over time, we can create and curate a framework of responsiveness and trust, offering choices and guidance while listening to their preferences and desires.
A Tiny Epiphany
If you are part of a faith tradition that follows the Christian liturgical calendar, you recognize that I’m writing about an almost insignificant epiphany in the season of Epiphany. During this season, many Christians reflect on God’s revelation of the divine in Jesus. We recognize that creation reveals God, and that we can see the divine in seemingly trivial things like folding a piece of paper.
My tiny epiphany led to a flight into big philosophical and theological ideas and back to the ground to find ways these ideas may help in the reality of everyday life. The challenge is to find ways we can each fold pages differently.
It might be in how you respond to your child’s frustration, how you engage a familiar conflict, or how you move through a routine we’ve repeated a thousand times. You don’t need a dramatic breakthrough. You only need openness to a new possibility, to a more responsive posture, to the gentle guidance that invites flourishing rather than demands compliance.
In a deeply interconnected world, even a tiny epiphany can become a gift that is received, shared, and passed along.
I want to invite you all to ORTLine 26, an online conference focused on new books in open and relational theology. My book, Open and Relational Parenting: Loving Parents Reflecting a Loving God, will be featured and discussed on February 14th at 12:00 p.m. Central Time.
You can register on Eventbrite.
image: ChatGPT 5.2
Beautifully written! And meaningful.
Excellent article and a wonderful example of moment-by-moment contemplative action. Thank you.