 By Stuart J. Whitley | Bio
Ethics concerns the attempt by disciplined
discernment to identify moral options available in a given case, around
which there is some general agreement. Professional societies and other
groups, through statements of ethical standards or codes of conduct,
attempt to assert rules about rightness of conduct that rise above the
minimum standards of the law. This is most often referred to as
‘applied ethics’. [ Read More]
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By Stuart J. Whitley | Bio
About
three years ago, I assisted an aboriginal woman elder with a
presentation she was doing for the media. She was trying to explain the
role of justice as conceived by the first peoples of this continent.
Paraphrasing her: first, she said, there is the sky over all of us,
then there is the water below. What takes our breath away when we look
to the rivers and the forests is the same thing that possesses us when
we think about the wonder inside our own bodies. As the moon compels
the oceans with forces we can feel (if not fully understand), so is
every atom of water linked one to the other in performing the essential
tasks that the living earth needs. A rainstorm in the mountains stirs
our blood. What we do to the pond in the slough where the horses graze,
we do to the world. As goes the fate of the smallest creek, goes the
fate of us all. All things are connected. [ Read More]
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By Stu Whitley | Bio
So what is to be done about depression? Much the same, I think, as
rediscovering the rational self in a time when emotions hold sway. Not
an easy task, but it’s done all the time. One disciplines oneself to
think. The brain is exercised through reading, or better yet, writing.
Journaling is a powerful tool to self-discovery, and one doesn’t need
to be a Joseph Conrad to diarize one’s thoughts. What better way to
explore the inner self—the ossuary of our life’s experiences, events,
images, biases and tribal assumptions—than to set them down on paper as
influences for our present course?[ Read More]
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By Stu Whitley | Bio
Another balm to the damaged soul lies outdoors. The natural world, with
its fixed cycles of life, degeneration and recuperation, is a soothing
reminder that all passes eventually. There’s a harsher truth as well: the world is indifferent. It is
neither fair nor unfair; it simply is. Outdoors, if one is careless,
disaster can easily happen. Rushing streams and precipitous inclines
may be beautiful to contemplate, but they are neutral on the issue of
your vanity or self-indulgence. Yet taking ourselves closer to our
natural beginnings is a healing first step toward self-rediscovery.[ Read More]
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By Stu Whitley | Bio This is the second post in a series. Read the first post.
I had my own struggle with depression, brought about by a confluence of
events that seemed overwhelming. In spite of my rational training and
experience as a lawyer, I was completely disabled by my loss of
perspective. I could not see beyond the shadows of perceived (and real)
threats. A feeling of being trapped is the best way to describe the
sense of hopelessness and abandonment I was experiencing.
Fear inspires the ‘fight or flight’ response, as we all know. But the
very preoccupation with survival paradoxically can immobilize us, in
the way that an eland, seized at the nose by a lioness, yields to a
dominant force. Depression is truly a form of pseudo-death—an
ambulatory sort of coma. In my experience, ameliorative drugs such as
Paxil and Prozac don’t do much more than maintain the most minimal of
functioning, at a cost of any exuberance, sexuality or joy.
[ Read More]
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By Stu Whitley | Bio
No voice divine the storm allay'd,
No light propitious shone;
When snatch'd from all effectual aid,
We perish'd, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm'd in deeper gulphs than he
—William Cowper, The Castaway
There are probably more things at work in the human mind than we
will ever know. Too often the turmoil we confront in our daily lives
gets the better of
us, and we succumb to a depressed state for a day, a month, or perhaps
longer*. The above stanza brilliantly captures the sense of isolation,
despair and torment in the mind of someone who is incapable of seeing
the world with a balanced perspective. Cowper, who was not capable of
being diagnosed as such in the 18th century, probably suffered from
recurrent depression.[ Read More]
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By Stu Whitley | Bio This is the third in a three-part series.
I
read somewhere that good decision-making—indeed, good relations—
depends upon a virtuous cycle of respect, trust and candour (which
takes some time to establish, but which can easily be interrupted).
Attitude, after all, is everything. Perhaps that last statement needs a
bit of refinement: the ethical
attitude is everything. By that I mean the determination of the answer
to the age-old question: who is right? Was Harold right to express his
annoyance with conduct he perceived as racist and excessive, in coarse
language? Was the police officer right to arrest Harold in his
perceived perception that Harold was instigating a threat to the public
peace? Was the security guard right to expel the children from his shop
and continue to press for their departure from the vicinity? We don’t
have enough facts, a lawyer might argue. In a courtroom, various
perspectives and motives would be put in play, with neither party being
satisfied by the result. Forensic justice cannot answer competing
claims for rightness in a manner satisfying for everyone. But here, I
stand with Harold.[ Read More]
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By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is the second in a three-part series.
Einstein is supposed to have said that the most important decision we
ever make is whether the world is a good place or a bad place. I don’t
believe that we consciously make that decision – we are taught to
believe it, one way or the other, and the most difficult lesson of all
to unlearn is that we live in a hostile universe. There are just too
many confirmatory events that tend to erode our courage to think
differently.[ Read More]
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By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is the first post in a three-part series.
O body swayed to music,
O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
—W.B. Yeats (Among School Children)
I had lunch with an old friend, a Tlingit
elder, Harold, today. I’ve known Harold for nearly a dozen years. And I
know him to be a serious, thoughtful man; he’s someone who has taught
me many things, not the least of which was the powerful consequence of
even the smallest positive intervention in someone’s life. I have seen
it in action: Harold is the embodiment of Emerson’s dictum that it is
one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can
sincerely try to help another without helping himself…”serve and thou
shall be served”. Harold helped me, a lawyer, see love in a loveless
system.
[ Read More]
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By Stu Whitley
Bio
This post is the fourth in a four-part series.
It
may be that memory is the Well of Wisdom: this idea is central to
Celtic mythology. In Celtic lore, the well is situated at the centre of
the Otherworld, the spiritual source, the land of the dead. Where it
gushes up, pilgrims drink from it using a skull as a vessel, thereby
creating a direct link with the dead. At the well of Llandeilo in
Dyfed, Wales, this practice continued into the twentieth century. The
skull was said to be that of St. Teilo, the ruins of whose church
loomed over the well itself.[ Read More]
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By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is the third post in a four-part series.
What may be demonstrated as a biological truth is intuitively
understood as we grow older. We become less egocentric, more aware that
the world has many centres of the universe besides our own, and that in
some mysterious way, these centres are all linked. In the mature adult,
we recognize as poets have before us, that we are round people on a
round earth, cognizant of being interwoven in a circular web of
connection with all human beings, which is among other things to
understand interdependency, forgiveness and the nature of healing. Hugo
wrote: “We are never done with conscience. Choose your course by it…it
is bottomless, being God.” And what is conscience if not memory?
Memory, that is, linked to consequences. No one can divine the future
with any exactitude. Yet we are capable of discerning the truths that
help guide us to it; I believe that those truths are at least in part
found in our collective memory.[ Read More]
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By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is the second post in a four-part series.
Poetry is sometimes the casualty of an age where rational clarity is
considered supreme. If the message of the poet is not apparent at the
first go, chuck the damn thing. This, of course, ignores the obvious
reality that to try and capture all that reposes within our innermost
thoughts on a particular matter may not be easily condensed and
dispensed as received wisdom. I think our ability to speak clearly on
important things is seriously exaggerated. Kant observed that there’s
no great art in being generally comprehensible if one renounces
insight. He thought that the result was a bunch of patched up
observations and half-reasoned principles, which he considered to be
the enjoyment of “shallowpates” in “everyday chitchat”. Jacques
Maritain wrote in Creative Intuition in Art & Poetry:
The law of intelligible clarity imposed by the classical tradition has…been an occasion for innumerable mediocre poems… [ Read More]
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By Stu Whitley
Bio
I’ve been thinking lately about the poetry I write; the poetry I write for you
while joyful, is more than chirrup (I hope), with only a touch of elegy
more, it tries to plumb the mystery of apperception, and
the discernment of the uncommon qualities in the common things
that mark our quotidian ways: an arm-linked walk
a mug of hot tea at day’s end—these are the liturgies that shore
what always needs reinforcing; love cannot survive unilaterally
[ Read More]
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By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is the third post in a three-part series.
In
the 18th century, Sir William Herschel became the first man to discover
a planet, Uranus, and six years later, he found two moons to that
frozen, unimaginable world. His sister was an eminent astronomer as
well, discovering three nebulae and eight comets. His son John, born
into a family steeped in brilliance, wrote Treatise on Astronomy in
1833, in which he, like all visionaries, looked to the heavens to
illustrate the central point in his work: he warned against
misinterpretation and what he called ‘vulgar errors’ arising from
imperfect or habitual apprehension. His instruction to men of reason
was to try and listen, to see, and to understand the gigantic truths behind the reduced forms of mundane existence, in the same way as a sailor knows but cannot immediately measure the frozen immensity under the iceberg’s cap.[ Read More]
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By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is the second postin a three-part series.
In our relationships, as with our work, listening is absolutely
fundamental to leadership and the discipline of effective
communication. This includes the need to be alert for situations where
cocking one’s ear to the rhythms of speech, as well as its content,
will ensure better understanding. To do this in the context of
conversation means to project positive non-verbal behaviour, to avoid
being captured by words that we know can provoke negative emotions, by
not interrupting, and by silently analyzing as dialogue
proceeds.[ Read More]
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