Andy Gray
In the first editorial of this series, I set out to “to spark debate amongst the broader membership as well as to inform”. In that first Shades of Gray, I argued against the conference motion as representing an archaic ritual, an “annual paroxysm of decision-making”. By the time you read this final version, the latest paroxysmal event in the SAAHIP calendar will have decided on my successor as President. It has been one of the signal honours of the position to be called upon to write an editorial for each edition of FORUM. I hope that I have been able to do justice to that task, that I have indeed been able to both spark debate and inform. Our transformation, as a profession and as a Health Care System, is far from complete. As many challenges and controversies face us now as in early 1998. So what final thought could I leave with the broader membership? In searching for an appropriate “hook”, I came across this piece by Laurens van der Post. In the autumn of 1926 he visited the garden of the Temple of the Dragon’s Repose in Kyoto. At first he could not comprehend this “stretch of well-raked gravelly sand” with its fifteen stones, “carved by time into shapes of an indefinable but definite meaning”. Gradually he understood, not as a “rational perception of meaning so much as an emotion of sharing the intent”. In words that only the great Jungian could muster, he wrote: “In its self-denial of all the means of eloquence at a gardener’s disposal, and leaving so much unsaid, it evoked a whole far more poignantly than any complex statement, however inspired, might have done”. As pharmacists we have a clear sense of our calling, and should ensure that law, policy and practice share that intent. Time has carved our profession into a shape of defined meaning, but it is a meaning most clearly seen by those initiated into its practices. We should not allow it to remain unread, it’s meaning as impenetrable as the abstract garden.
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