Yesterday we barely made it out of a late afternoon Florida thunderstorm, parking the boat as the heavy drops began falling. For hours while still out on the water, I stared at the dark clouds on the horizon, letting thoughts float up from within. Somehow, during this week spent traveling with my dad to visit his siblings on the east coast, I have been struck by the power of ethics in my life. Not ethics as enforced or designed by anyone else -- but ethics stemmed from the core of one's own being, from the mind-boggling internal, intuitive guidance system we have all been given.
This afternoon Uncle Lou (left, with my dad) asked me to read an article he wrote a year ago. In it he expressed, with vulnerability, the sense of abandonment experienced by physicians who don't get the kind of emotional or moral support given to, say, police officers, when someone dies. Doctors lose a patient and are paged on the hospital intercom to perform two more surgeries. Policemen, on the other hand, are substantially consoled and given paid time off to cope with the loss.
Where is the justice in this equation? What might Uncle Lou voice, in journals of medicine, to help bring about a place, an organization, that provides the kind of support doctors need when a patient dies under their watch?
The power of values flashes through my mind. Sesame Street values like kindness, respect, generosity, care, and appreciation for cultural differences.
I think of my primary college mentor, Bruce Grelle, who inspired his students to reflect on the values and ethics promoted by major religions like Christianity and Buddhism. Are their spoken values genuinely held by their representative religious institutions?
So tonight in southern Florida at Uncle Lou & Aunt Martha's house, after some California Cabernet and fried Puerto Rican 'tostones' (tohs-tohn-ess), I feel a joyous sense of comaraderie with my uncle, a man of great humor, integrity, class and sensitivity. And I can't help but notice a shared strain of ethics at play in our path -- a strain shared with great passion, as well, by my father, Lou's older brother.
One thing is for sure. I am not promoting "one right way" -- that there is one dictatorial "rightness" in any human voice, in any one religion or in all of them combined, or in any book ever written.
When it comes down to it, what I'm saying is personal. My own life is about spotlighting that no matter your age, Sesame Street had a point. And if all we do is focus on being kind, celebrating this astoundingly precious gift called life, being human enough to mess up madly and forgive ourselves, having the courage to ask questions and speak up when something just doesn't resonate with our own internal moral compass... that, I pose, is the primary substance of a life well lived.
Hats off to the Uncle Lou's of the world.
