authority

I was thinking about teachers, and people trying to get to become professional teachers, and, this got me to wondering about authority (I love adult ed, because people are there voluntarily - when I was supply teaching in Toronto public schools, I saw what a struggle it is for me to be an authoritarian figure, though I've been directing projects of all sorts for years. At lunch the other day I realized how difficult that part of parenting would be for me).

Empowerment: the joy of witnessing the enactment of one's will.

Authority: the joy of subjugating the will of others.

I feel empowered, even enfranchised. And I have authority over no-one. I'll have to work hard to hang onto that, given that doctoring is partly about playing the role of 'authority on health' though I prefer 'expert on medicine' - health is a state of being, experienced by people in unique ways, and I will never be an expert on that, no more so than I will ever be an expert on the myriad expressions of life and death. A witness? Certainly. With a role to play? It seems so. Maybe one day even a bit of a guide, should I get wise along the way. We had an interesting session on ethics of end-of-life care yesterday. Parents of a sick young man were there to tell us about their frustrations when he had been in intensive care. About how much they'd hated the messenger, our teacher, who'd been so convinced that the 'right' thing to do was to "let him go" (for reasons, she now confesses, might have had a lot to do with her own feelings of what would not be doable should she be in the same situtation). It was a good lesson in remembering to check the boundaries of authority - it's innevitable that people practicing medicine begin to feel empowered, start playing the role of authority and get confused about the differences between expert and decision-maker. And it was good to see how the clash of one physician's 'authority' with a family's autonomy played out. We'd all learned something from this. I remain grateful for and consistently surprised by peoples' openness in the name of my education.

I love going to market in the rain. That's where I'm off to now.