Living Our Values in Challenging Times

What a swirling, high-energy, and change-intensive time we are navigating! It reminds me of a regrettable moment of childhood when I couldn’t stop spinning around the wooden porch pillar of our humble family home, just blocks down the street from K-State’s campus in pleasant Manhattan, KS. Letting go was a thrill, but taking a step forward, not to mention staying upright, was a major challenge. An eyebrow scar reminds me just how hard it proved to be.

In my role at the Center, I am uncovering a granite resolve to stay upright by standing firmly in our core values – dignity, advocacy, justice, and action. These are reinforced through community and increasing lived experience. In any time of uncertainty, principles help to define bright lines of behaviors and responses, and they help to temper overreaction or rash shifts.

Empathy and Listening

I’m observing, more than ever, that empathy and compassion are missing from many of our leaders. I guess it’s hard to know the vulnerable among us unless you’ve rolled up your sleeves and served them, but shouldn’t listening be a basic skill?

I admire the work of our team. A first step in most of our activity, from consultations on difficult ethics questions at the bedside, to how AI can be responsibly used in healthcare, is to carefully listen to all involved parties. Only then can solutions be envisioned and discussion about recommended action take place. We’re not perfect, but we are acknowledging the centrality of this simple skill.

Listening well requires focused, low-volume opportunities, and the physical act of coming close to the speaker (or an intense visual focus in the case of nonverbal communication). It’s deliberate, and highly counter to our daily, techno-fueled sensory bombardment.

Dignity and Advocacy

 Another deliberate act is choosing to have our work be driven by who we serve. We find this to be the counterbalance to rash decisions and mistakes that perpetuate imbalance and harm. It is a priority informed and bolstered by two of our core values, dignity (upholding human worth) and advocacy (amplifying unheard voices). Doing this well requires setting ourselves aside and elevating our mission and the unified work it takes to achieve it.

Through studying aging, I believe we will all gain humility through time – will your gain be through understanding that comes through relationship with real people, reacting in a way that builds improvement and progress so that the human experience is bettered? I perceive that many who demonstrate false strength through hostility and arrogance will meet their humility in shame. May I possess the courage to sacrifice what is necessary to avoid it.

Community Voice

There is great danger in this moment to become complicit in harm, embittered, or apathetic. To reduce this risk, we are heavily orienting our services, programs, and long-term strategies to be informed by community voice and designed to address community concerns. Nothing less is plausible for an independent bioethics center.

As we have been for more than 40 years, the Center for Practical Bioethics is here, rooted in our core values, to stand beside you as the future unfolds, whether spinning or calm.

By James Stowe