[APPLAUSE]
Good morning.
President Ryan, Ms. Directors, members
of the Board of Visitors, vice presidents, my fellow deans,
and faculty and family, guests, and especially the graduates
of the class of 2019, I am--
yay!
I'm thrilled to be invited to speak with you
and share in your celebration today.
As the rector mentioned, this year,
the UCLA School of Nursing received a truly momentous
award, the very first Healthy Work Environment
Award for a school of nursing--
and there's 850 schools in nursing--
given by Sigma, the International Nursing
Honor Society.
Everyone wants to be in a healthy work environment
where respect for all is what really matters
and the focus is on human flourishing.
I've spoken about healthy work environments in hospital
and academic settings for decades
and worked on creating one here at UVA.
So it was quite a moment of recognition.
What I find amusing is that while I'm
introduced as the Sadie Heath Cabaniss Professor, which
is a strong, very traditional Virginia name,
often the one who introduces refers to me as the Sadie Heath
Cannabis Professor.
Easy to do.
And my new line is, well, that's why
we are a healthy and happy work environment.
All right.
Maybe not really.
I don't want to start rumors about my school.
So I am a critical care ICU nurse
and have been for over four decades.
My favorite quote about my profession of nursing
is from Donna Diers, the former dean of Yale.
And this is what she said.
Nursing puts us in touch with being human.
Nurses are invited into the inner spaces of other people's
existence without even asking.
For where there is suffering, loneliness, the tolerable
pain of cure, or the solitary pain of permanent change,
there is a need for the kind of human service we call nursing.
So a signature of our school and being fully human
is our Compassionate Care Initiative,
now in its 10th year.
The hallmark of this is a focus on being, not doing.
Doing or learning skills is, of course,
important in preparing a nurse or a physician to practice.
But increasingly, the kind of person you hope to be,
courageous in the small moments, seems
to be most critical today.
Being fully present in the moment
is not just for future health care providers.
Businesswomen and men, engineers, architects, lawyers,
teachers, policymakers, data scientists
all need this focus as well.
So as we reflect today on leaving,
our exit, and arriving, how we hope to be in the world
should be center stage.
This is our moral commitment to each other and the world
and all its citizens with both empathy and compassion.
So I wish to speak to you briefly today
about exits, mine and yours.
President Ryan mentioned to me in March that exits are hard
and lent me a book by Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot titled Exit:
The Endings That Set You Free.
Professor Lawrence Lightfoot is a MacArthur-prize-winning
sociologist and endowed professor
at Harvard University.
She's the first African-American woman
in Harvard's history to have an endowed professorship named
in her honor.
Her wisdom and storytelling about exits tells us this.
She researched the many faces of leaving
and found symmetry and wonder in the many narratives.
We all leave.
We all arrive.
Her contention is that we spend much time celebrating
new beginnings and perhaps do not appreciate
the wisdom found in the exit.
Her book characterizes the many ways we exit--
small exits and larger ones, like changing jobs
or the end of life.
So I'm going to tell two brief stories.
What can we celebrate in the exits
that can create some wisdom?
The first story is titled "On Stage
with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama"
So the Dalai Lama came to Charlottesville in 2012.
I'm still talking about it.
I know.
A panel was arranged called "Compassion as a Global
Remedy for Medicine."
Three physician colleagues, dear friends--
Pediatric Department Chair Jim Nataro, cardiologist George
Beller, palliative care physician and my friend Leslie
Blackhall and I were all invited to share
some reflections on compassion and listen to his wisdom.
I was invited to be on the panel by a friend, a nursing
alum of the Tibetan community.
And they needed a nurse.
And we've done a lot of work on compassion.
Over 1,000 people were there at the Paramount Theater
from all across Virginia.
We had some lively conversation about how
we can better care for patients and families with compassion.
We were all on stage in these lovely armchairs,
and His Holiness the Dalai Lama and his interpreter
were sitting in the middle.
He gets up at the end of the hour,
and we each stand as he prepares to give us
a white scarf called a khata.
We could see he had them in his hand,
and we were excited to be so close to him.
He arises, and then and he looks to the edge of the big stage
and notices the sign language interpreters
at either end of the platform--
you know, just as we have here.
And he takes our khatas, and he goes over and gives them
to each one--
first on the one side, and then he walked all across the stage
and then to the woman on the other side.
These women had tears in their eyes.
Why did they have these tears?
Because they thought they were invisible to him, the leader
of the Tibetan community.
Of course, we worried for a moment
that he gave away our khatas.
And we're standing there.
Will there be enough for us?
But no, there were plenty for us.
He has these big, giant eyes when he stands in front of you,
and he's always smiling despite the monks setting themselves
on fire to protest.
I learned that he practices what he says--
paying attention.
I learned in a new way what it means to truly notice
and of being kind.
In fact, he says his religion is kindness.
So the lesson for me and for you, our graduates--
what are we failing to notice?
Who may need our attention?
Who are we taking for granted?
With our newfound skills and education and wisdom
from this university, surely there are things to notice,
large and small, in new ways--
injustice, someone left out, a family member in distress,
an environmental crisis, an unethical, unprofessional
action.
Noticing is the first step.
This is helped along by a focused awareness of yourself
and your surroundings.
This is what we teach in the School of Nursing,
School of Medicine, and increasingly in other schools
along with my colleagues in our great Contemplative Sciences
Center called "Mindfulness and Training the Brain to Notice."
Recently I discovered that a few years ago, a faculty member
was tutoring a housekeeper in my school in chemistry
on her own time.
She was trying to pass a course at the community college
to gain entrance into nursing.
Somebody noticed.
A year ago, a nursing PhD student, Tori Tucker,
along with our Nursing History Center director
and our associate dean for diversity
noticed that in the mid-1950s and for nine more
years, African-American women who wished to become
nurses were excluded from attending
the University of Virginia.
They instead were taught at the Jackson P Burley High School
in a licensed practical nurse program.
The head of our school partnered with the Burley High School
to establish the program at the time in the 1950s.
Tori and colleagues planned the Hidden Nurses Project
and found 34 of these nurses, many now in their 80s and 90s.
With a grant from the Jefferson Trust,
last month, 25 came back to the School of Nursing auditorium
for a celebration and to march across the stage
and receive a certificate of recognition
and an apology for their exclusion.
President Ryan--
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
President Ryan says we should be great and good.
He enabled us to induct all these nurses into the Alumni
Association in front of hundreds of their tearful and joyful
families.
Someone noticed, and we stood up to this injustice.
So my second brief story is called "The Pause."
Several years ago, a fellow nurse
in the Emergency Department at the University of Virginia
Medical Center, Jonathan Bartels, a dear friend,
was struck by the suffering of his colleagues, other nurses
and physicians after traumatic or unexpected deaths.
It happens often in our nation's over 6,000 hospitals.
I know because I am a trauma nurse.
When health care providers do everything
they can to save a life and they can not,
it evokes feelings of anger, sadness, and sometimes
depression.
Jonathan saw this firsthand as a longtime emergency department
nurse here in Charlottesville.
As part of our Compassionate Care Initiative,
he vowed to do something.
Consider a seven-year-old girl hit
by a car brought in by the rescue squad
to a busy emergency department.
The trauma team does everything they can to save the girl
and cannot.
The team rips off their gloves at the end of the resuscitation
attempt, walks away from the room and into the hallway.
And what's in the hallway in the nation's hospitals?
Well, more patients to see who need our help.
So there's no time, no time to-- you just need to shake it off.
So Jonathan developed the pause, a compassionate intervention
for his colleagues.
45 seconds-- the team, physicians, nurses, respiratory
therapists, maybe the chaplain are
invited to stand in silence around the stretcher
or the bedside for only 45 seconds
and honor the life of this patient who no one knew but was
someone's daughter, sister, loved one,
and honor the good work of this team and each other.
It's not religious.
But if you wish to say a silent Hail Mary,
you know, knock yourself out.
We've even had family members be there.
Imagine how meaningful this is to them.
So it's catching on not just at UVA,
but it's around the nation and the world.
It's in over 100 hospitals and four continents.
It provides a sense of healing and closure
for this end of life exit, the final exit.
So why is this important?
This brief ritual values the life
of our patients, their families, and affirms the good work
that each team member tried to do.
Jonathan's work has gone viral.
So notice and pause.
I'm distilling my whole 47-year career into two words.
Notice and pause.
Pausing is important today because we are all
rushing all the time.
We think we can multitask, but the neuroscience researchers
say no, as it really hurts the brain.
Pico Iyer notes in his Art of Stillness
that we now have the urgency of slowing down.
Pausing can lead to wise and thoughtful action,
even new ways of being.
Example-- what might it mean to pause before you say something
unkind, before you proceed instinctively
and forget to notice and listen to a new voice,
maybe a counter to your preconceived ideas?
All right.
So I'm going to give one more bonus story.
I learned that from President Ryan.
This is a quick bonus story, a last exit story.
In 2002, I was teaching at Georgetown University
and was recruited to the University of California San
Francisco.
At the time, it was the number one school
of nursing in the country.
I'm very competitive, so I moved.
I had an 11-year-old son, and my new dean said to me,
perfect time to move.
What she meant was that move them
before they start high school, because that's a lot tougher.
So Sumner, my son, entered seventh grade in San Francisco.
And every day, my husband Barry and I heard, I had a good life.
Why did you move me?
It was kind of painful.
By eighth grade, he'd found Haight Ashbury.
He bought an electric guitar.
He joined a little rock band, and life was good.
By senior year in high school at St. Ignatius, he truly loved--
he told people he was from San Francisco.
In March of his senior year, his favorite teacher, Mr. Castro,
told the class one day, all right.
Here the three C's for going to college.
First-- go to class.
Second-- don't do cocaine.
And third-- use a condom.
Well, the students loved this and told their parents
what Mr. Castro said.
And the parents were just a little bit wigged out,
but not the moms who were nurses, because we thought
this was pretty good advice.
But again, it's a Catholic school,
so there are lots of attention.
Recently, I contacted Mr. Castro in an email.
And he told me recently he did get in trouble.
And he's now an administrator, so there.
So I've turned his three C's into my own.
I've done this for 11 years.
I've turned his three C's into my own as I end here.
I offer these three C's for a possible wise exit
strategy from our beloved UVA.
First, consider a grateful stance, thanking others.
Notice who may need our appreciation or who could be
overlooked and needs our thanks.
Every night, consider these three things
that you are grateful for, even simple ones
like a great conversation with your roommate,
someone told you that you did a good job.
Write them down.
I tell our nurses to do this on the way home
from clinical in their heads because
after that 12-hour shift.
It's so easy to recount all that you did not do.
Second-- cultivate compassion and kindness toward others.
George Saunders, in a convocation speech
at Syracuse years ago, spoke of regrets in his life.
Number one was failure of kindness.
He mentions the story of his third grade
where a little girl was bullied every day,
and he stood by and did nothing until she left the school.
He still remembered that.
He talks of high kindness and low kindness periods,
so increase the highs.
Remember the stories of the Dalai Lama and the pause
and know that compassionate action
starts with noticing and then pausing for wise action.
In fact, there is no compassion without action.
Third-- celebrate the wonder in exiting with style and grace.
Be courageous despite your fears and anxieties.
Because I know you have them.
Actually, I have them too.
But you've survived well and likely thrived.
So in conclusion, nursing puts us in touch with being human.
I was lucky enough to have chosen
a profession four decades ago that put me in touch with being
fully human.
Whatever your degree today, I wish the same for you.
This approach in considering being, not just the doing,
will help create real meaning in your life.
All your faculty and administrators and staff at UVA
who love you, as well as your families, all
wish this for you.
So as I reflect on my own exit, I
am reminding myself to notice, to pause, to act with wisdom
and grace as best I can.
I join you in this exit today as a fellow traveler.
We are all fellow travelers wishing
you a memorable and graceful exit, and, of course,
a wonderful arrival.
Thank you so very much.
[APPLAUSE]