cancer

I gave this talk last Saturday at the Leadership Forum at Silver Bay.

It is a bit presumptuous to arrive on Saturday morning to offer reflections on the life of a community that has been intimately engaged with this year’s work for three days already. I am grateful for this privilege and the access that a 25 year history with the Forum affords me. I would like to open with a poem by Mary Oliver.*

Some of you know that I am currently in the middle of a radiation regimen for prostate cancer, sharing the fate of an estimated one third of my fellow males in our lifetime. No great consequence; not something one would willingly choose, but hardly worthy of the frame of fate; but how much of our lives do we live, willingly chosen? Few of us are so brave and free. But few of us would label this life as fated either. For there are choices we made and those we did not make. Letting go of the choices we didn’t make is part of growing up (growing old?). Letting go.

I am particularly impressed with the passion, dedication, and capacity of so many FOR members to invest themselves in research and publication at their own expense. I look forward to reviewing a number of such pieces over the summer.

As someone personally entering treatment for cancer (prostate, early detection, virtually fully curable), I was perhaps more readily drawn to Mott’s metaphor than I would have been otherwise. But our culture and times, between the aging of boomers, the advertising empire of pharmaceutical companies, and the political issues of health care, mean we are all familiar with much medical terminology, so the language works to make Mott’s case.