TINY HUMANS, BIG LESSONS

Ludwig reflects on the lessons she’s learned while working with premature babies in this memoir.

This motivational book is drawn from an unlikely source: the many premature babies the author has helped while working in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit). In her experience helping these most vulnerable of patients, Ludwig was compelled to focus on the tiny gestures and almost imperceptible changes that are often the most important elements in the world of the premature baby. This focus forms the basis of the self-help sentiments she dispenses throughout the book, most of which are aimed at noticing and appreciating what Ludwig calls the “little moments that pull back the curtain,” moments that “give us a peek at the wonder, and have the power to elevate our lives” if we let them. People grow into new versions of themselves by learning and meeting the demands of their surroundings, she notes, and many of the lessons she’s learned in the NICU can form strategies for this growth. One of these is the “Rule of Tens”: How could she help a little baby in the next 10 minutes? The next 10 hours? The next 10 months? Through the numerous stories she relates about babies (and other clients and friends), added to her own reflections, the author very effectively pulls together a larger compassionate narrative in which “awareness has a funny way of bleeding past the edges of our original intentions.” In clear, ringing prose, she observes that no one walking around a neonatal intensive care unit would criticize the babies for being vulnerable and requiring development. “If only we saw ourselves as generously,” she laments, and even readers who’ve never met a tiny baby will doubtless benefit from her gentle and bracing moral clarity.

A heartwarming series of lessons the smallest babies can teach the rest of us.