Reflections from the Frog Pond

From The Simple-Minded Manager, Cutting Through Your Work-Life Chaos

"I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds."
William James, 1907

AS LONG AS I LIVE I won't forget my first visit to the frog pond! Just a kid of 10 or 12 perhaps, I was seldom indoors. No, my natural habitat was the woods and creek beds that edged our little town in upstate New York, extended by intermittent visits to the nature section of the school library. My niche included the rabbits, blue jays, monarch butterflies, giant tree fungi, fossils and minnows that I stalked each day and read about every evening.

Then I discovered the frog pond. It was nothing of note at first; just an old muddy pool on an abandoned farm, where cows had likely drunk in better times. I was attracted by the growing ends of cat tails emerging from the previous year's drying and shredded leaves at the interface of ground and cloudy water. It was about one foot from this edge that I saw the jelly-like mass that would frame my entire life. There, gently undulating just beneath the pond's surface, warmed by mid-spring sunlight, was a clutch of frog eggs.

I returned to this spot each afternoon on my walk home from school, alone so as not to expose my precious discovery to the clods that I otherwise considered friends. They would not understand. They would stomp, and splash, and destroy, and laugh and leave. Alone, I observed for the first time that incredible segment of every life cycle called embryonic development.

I brought an old magnifying glass that my grandmother, who was nearly blind, used to see the Sunday funny papers. Through that bulging eye, I watched amazed as the randomly assorted eggs, white on one side and black on the other, rotated to position all of their black halves upwards capturing the sun's warmth. Over the next several weeks, I watched them divide and grow into spheres, elongate into rippling crescents, and ultimately hatch into swimming tadpoles.
 

On subsequent trips to the pond I watched the tadpoles metamorphose into frogs, resorbing their tails and growing legs. I also began to understand another set of delicate interrelations, those involving the changing embryo/tadpole/frog and the changing environment in which it lives. My evening reading began to include books on conservation and the environment.

Looking back, my first glimpse of one of society's most vexing problems came from trying to extend my young boy's understanding of the developing frog embryo and its pond environment. I began to perceive mammalian embryos, including human embryos, in their environments. I began to perceive the complex set of interrelations between the emerging individuality of a developing human fetus and the individuality of a pregnant woman. I began to understand a dramatic tension between interdependence and autonomy of fetus and mother. I began to recognize the incredible responsibility that even this glimpse of the human reproduction had placed on me. I am awed by this fundamental tension and the responsibility of any degree of understanding of it to this day.

It wasn't until I was a teenager that I heard about contraception. It wasn't until I was in college that I learned about abortion. It wasn't until graduate school that I became aware of population issues. I have worked most of my professional life in the turbulent vortex of women's reproductive health, population and environmental concerns. Even these controversial issues have always felt like sub-plots to the main mystery of emerging fetal life and maternal life that runs through my mind whenever the noise reduces to a level that I can hear myself think. And when I can hear myself think this is what emerges:

People who have an abiding belief in the sanctity of life, and
 people who share fundamental beliefs in the rights of women, and
 people concerned about population issues, and
 people who care about our planet's environment
 have a great deal in common.

There may be dynamic tensions at the intersections of these difficult issues. But there is also real opportunity for creative communion. I challenge each of you to seize every opportunity to find common ground, for I deeply believe that it will be the most fertile in which to nourish productive discussion about the most important and controversial issues of our time.

I return to that frog pond of my boyhood often in my mind, especially when the din of conflict rings loudest in my ears. And there, with the sun's low glint on muddy water, with iris shafts slowly responding to gentle surface ripples, with the trill of tree frogs, or chirps of leopard frogs, or croaks of bull frogs, I see this common ground with precise clarity.

And it occurs to me that each of us must have such places; deep springs where our fundamental values and universal interconnections flow freely and clearly. It seems to me that in these times when harsh diatribe is screamed from the furthest pole on every issue, it is critically important for each of us to find our own frog ponds hidden somewhere in memory.

And, visit there often.

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