AROUND THE KITCHEN TABLE

By Lloyd Ratzlaff

The improbable dance of being in the middle

Recently the CBC aired an interview with a doctor whose specialty was in treating certain kinds of cancer. She considered herself an expert, she said, until her own mother took ill and died of the disease. Then, she admitted, “I realized I knew a lot about cancer, but nothing at all about people.”

This interview came on the heels of a weeklong hospitalization for my brother-in-law. The chief doctor saw him briefly near the beginning, and said, “You have either pneumonia, or cancer, or tuberculosis,” and left him in the isolation room with his thoughts, and never spoke to him again. The troubling symptoms, it turned out, were side-effects from a blood-thinner he’d been prescribed earlier for another problem; but it was one of the nurses who finally explained this just before his discharge.

Professionalism, like so many other words with the “ism” suffix, has become a bad word. This three-letter appendage often implies a tendency gone wild, a vigorous, blind energy confined in a narrow space, like a tumour that imagines itself a paragon of thriving life, but which the body as a whole finds a murderous intrusion.

The dreary list of isms — materialism, rationalism, consumerism, fundamentalism, institutionalism and professionalism too — of these disorders Carl Jung once wrote, “Isms are the viruses of the day, and responsible for greater disaster than any medieval plague or pest has ever been.”

On the other hand, Thomas Aquinas said, “Virtue is in the middle.” To be professional, then — physician, teacher, artist, academic or what have you — is to be neither power-monger nor doormat, neither serf nor lord, neither public chattel nor insolent snob. A professional is someone in the middle of all that.

Vernard Eller writes of being in a department store where a vacuum cleaner display had been set up to attract customers. The hose was attached to the rear of the machine and aimed upward, so it blew a stream of air toward the ceiling; and high overhead, a ping-pong ball was doing a little mid-air dance, the jetstream pushing it up and gravity pulling it down. Eller says this is an example of a dialectic — staying in place between opposing forces and doing an improbable dance.

Neither the broad aims of our professions nor their minutiae need make us haughty, cranky or militant. If the point is to be a decent human and good neighbour, or to be (as an Orthodox friend describes the aim of his faith) “an undisturbed and undisturbing presence,” then all competing forces become the context of the dance we do, right here in the middle of where we are.

Whereas professionalism is just one more ism.

Ratzlaff is the author of two books of literary non-fiction, a contributor to a number of literary anthologies, and editor of Seeing it Through, a collection of senior adult writings. Formerly a minister, counsellor and university instructor, he now makes his living as a writer in Saskatoon.