Ethical Responsibility

I'm sure many of you have attended an institute of learning, an institution which demanded your mandatory presence at least five days a week. We humans have convinced ourselves that our species' survival depends on cocooning our offspring for about 12-16 years of their lives in order to prepare them for participation in species preservation.

I cannot with certainty say that our offspring should be sequestered in order to develop ever more complex social structures. Of course, I have benefited my whole life from human complexity, and learned to desire products of our complex diversity (or is it diverse complexity? Semantics!).

At lunch today, I ran into a former professor of mine who taught me many years ago to appreciate the beauty of accounting, Dr. B. Dr. B retired this past year so I don't know who, if anyone, will be able to instill an understanding of the Truth found in accounting that goes beyond ethics and morality. Dr. B had a way of pulling aside the veil of numbers to show his students the universe of Symmetry. Ahh...I can still remember the moment when I saw his Vision. Up until that point in time, I wondered why anyone would get a PhD in accounting. Then the yin and yang of two jigsawed columns spoke to me and opened my eyes. The path to full Enlightenment only partially wanders through the poppy fields of Liberal Arts.

Life is not a theory. Life is practical. But you know we could not send humans and probes to other parts of the universe and expect them to return successfully without first understanding the principles which give us life. Mythical chariots do not carry the sun across the sky. We are not saved by the deus ex machina in Act 3 of our lives.

How much theory does one need to survive? We experiment with gravity when we're infants, conquering that invisible foe when we hold our heads up. "Gravity pulls me down while exercising my neck muscles for some period of time allows me to pull back against gravity," we might think. We see the theory of gravity in practice but very few of us can quote the mathematical theory of gravity.

Which takes us back to the doctor's examining room. Theory does not place my hand lightly over the NP's. Instead, theory puts a mental picture in my head like this one:

http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v8/n10/fig_tab/7401072_f1.html.


[from: http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v8/n10/full/7401072.html, accessed 7th April 2009]

While attending an institute of higher learning, I spent the break between winter and spring quarter at the home of an older, divorced woman with two boys living at home with her. Some of you know the story about Frances so I won't repeat it. However, I will say that in the week I lived with her, I learned about the behavioural responses from children of single, divorced women (at least one of them).

The older boy told me he wasn't going to call me "uncle." I told him that's okay because I was going to just call him by his first name and wanted to be treated the same way - two men sharing an interest in the same woman, but for two totally different reasons. The younger boy was happy to get attention from an adult male and didn't care about my status as temporary resident of their household.

Frances and I learned a lot from each other in that short week. Any two lovers will, if they care to pay attention to one another. At the end of the week, Frances realized that beneath my mask of openness and "free love," a layer of conservatism and close-mindedness blocked access to my inner thoughts. She had broken through similar layers of other guys by using sexual honesty, exposing their raw emotional states during acts of love. Because I took her to new levels of orgasmic understanding, she saw too late that my requirements for true interconnectedness went deeper than physical enlightenment. She was used to guys who saw making love as two to five minutes of body-to-body motion and had long ago set her mindset accordingly. My introduction to her of letting the woman have all the time she wanted/needed prevented her from seeing that sexual intercourse is one thing and giving yourself up to someone else is something else entirely.

So, there I was, sitting with the NP, weighing the ethics of uncertainty in my mind, mentally holding discrete data about spending a short period of time with a young single mother who had grown used to being a sex toy. I had also dated a married woman who had treated me as a sex toy, which added more data points to my practical understanding. I had only to decide whether risk or danger was the issue at hand.

Risk or danger. Is that really what I faced? No, it wasn't. What I faced was a woman to whom I trusted my medical history. My chart showed her that I was disease-free, liked to flirt, and had a relatively healthy body. As a medical professional, she recognized that I also listened to what she said, responding not only to her words but to the underlying emotions in her voice and body gestures. Her answer to my open, unguarded looks was an invitation to show how she would thank me for seeing her as a person, if I wanted.

I am sitting here now because of her invitation. I know who I am. I step out of the shower and see the nearly 47-year old body that my eyes perceive in the mirror's reflection before me. I am a man with a hairy chest, slightly muscular arms, a small spare tire around my midsection, and a wonderful smile. It is the same image that the medical professionals have seen and diagnosed. It is the same image that the older female server flirted with at lunch today in front of my wife.

Sadly, it is not me. And that's why I've given up the pretense to be someone I'm not.

I grew up with the hope that I would be the good-looking older guy holding a pipe in the ads of my father's Playboy magazines. I fancied myself as a sensitive lover who knew what women wanted - love not sex, appreciation not idolization. I wanted to be the guy women looked at and men talked about. These very words are the same black-on-white text I read in my youth about suave men who always had the right thing to say, being just as funny and insightful talking about sports as about women's fashion.

That's what I've become. I am the good-looking guy, unpretentious and approachable. I don't stand on other people's shoulders to get what I want. I don't think my shit smells sweeter than everybody else's. I know I am not better than the next person (although a bit of my intellectual snobbishness still shows, sometimes).

But that's not who I am. My thoughts are not permeated with the same thoughts people have of what my thoughts should be. I can be a good listening lover, showing a small subset of heterosexual women what they aren't getting from their husbands or boyfriends. But I'm not. So why pretend to be?

It goes back to my retraining/re-understanding of the flirting process after the auto accident when I was 16 (and back to the first training/understanding of the flirting process after my girlfriend died in fifth grade). What is the point? Are we just peacocks, strutting our stuff in front of men and women alike, getting more complex in our poses, no longer satisfied with showing off erect or swollen genitalia but now must also show our sympathies for the others' thought processes?

A friend of mine, Jim, used to talk about the simple fact of paying attention to one's spouse/mate as the cure for infidelity. It takes 10% of the effort to satisfy the needs of your compatible mate as it does to lure and satisfy a new lover while you're still with your mate because you don't have to worry about covering up and lying to your mate about the time spent with your lover [I'm referring to my culture with its left-over Puritanical tendencies, not ones in which bigamy or extramarital lovers are the norm].

I work out with a weight set every morning. I eat a healthy breakfast. Occasionally, I take a hike/walk or jog to raise my metabolism and keep excess weight from accumulating on my body. Now I wonder why I bother. I'm not the man I planned to be. I am not a Casanova or Don Juan. Physically, I am capable of being a loving, comforting man for a free woman who desires someone like me. I have been that man in my younger days. Nothing prevents me from being that man again except my promise to stay married to the one woman I call my wife and call her my only lover for the rest of my life.

These are not ethical or moral decisions I'm making here. It's a practical one, one that I concluded when I was 10 years old while watching filmstrips and 8mm films about sexually transmitted diseases. If I wanted to avoid life-threatening STDs my whole life, then I needed to find one woman to call my wife and not have sex with anyone else. Turns out I met her the following summer. I had a few lovers along the way before I married, letting my testosterone and curiosity overcome my desire to avoid the risk/danger issue of keeping my body disease-free.

That's why I've been sad lately. I only recently became fully aware of the fact that the path people think I've been joyously walking is completely out of step with the decision I made 37 years ago. I have been meeting people's expectations, listening to their advice to keep myself physically fit (especially from the NP and another nurse), thinking they had the best intentions for me when in fact it was them they were thinking about all along.

I should have known better. The evolved human has created a sense of self that typically puts self-interest first (abnormality aside). I am just such a human. Guess I lost sight of the forest for all the trees.

In my search for enlightenment, I will encounter contradictory thoughts. I will see a woman who wants to make love to me in the only way she knows how, and I think I can give her more than she ever imagined because I believe I have done so. In the same moment, I will know that I will never give her anything but disappointment because ultimately I will reject her requests, no matter how overt or subtle they may be. I will be human and not human in my thoughts.

There is nothing except what is before me. Ethics, morals, physics -- words, only words! My being is not just thoughts and not just the black-on-white electronic ink stains on this screen. I am not the universe and the universe is not me. I have all of my body functions, give or take some age-related bone loss, tissue degeneration, hair color change and muscle mass reduction. Thus, there is nothing that prevents me from being human.

I have a positive influence on most everyone I meet, especially when I throw off the messy layers of culture I wear with discomfort or out of habit, because I know we all suffer the same human conditions and there's nothing or no one else we can be.

My exterior does not match my interior so why do I perpetuate my current image to others? Because it's my "EZPass through life" (I'm paraphrasing someone I can't remember). But the perpetuation is killing me, trapping me into hormonal responses that raise my blood pressure and prepare my body for actions I will not take.

How do I prepare myself for the next level of enlightenment, shedding my cultural trappings for one that is neutral, neither appealing nor distracting to others? Remember, enlightenment is only a word and not a place or a destination. It's a crutch as much as anything. A shield. A barrier, like my marriage is to free love.

I know who I am. I know who I am not. I don't know who I'll be or who I was.

I pretended not to hear what the NP was saying and told her to wish her husband good luck on his overseas trip. The NP slipped back into her NP role and hasn't spoken to me again. I gave her nothing to worry about because she never really said anything, and as a professional I know she does not worry, assuming I'm a professional, too, who's going to keep his mouth shut, unaware that as a writer, who take words more seriously than they deserve, I'll treat my time with the NP amateurishly and write about it for all the world to see. What kind of ethical responsibility is that? If the people who run into my life only knew!

Writers make a living doing this but I don't want to make a living as a writer. Another contradiction to sort out in the next 15,004 days ... sigh ... it's like having all the money in the world and nothing to spend it on. The clock next to me says 3:35. Upside down, it's SEE. At 3:37, it's LEE. At 3:38, it's BEE. And at 3:39, it's GEE. 15,004 more days of this? What's the point? Oh well, it's time to grade the institute papers of others who are trying to do something different with their lives. Maybe I'll step out of my comfort zone tomorrow. People do it every day. Can't be any more painful or pointless than sitting here, can it?