Ethics

I started thinking about this when I got my R card from the NYC MTA, the card that lets me travel half fare on subways and buses. R for retired, which I'm not.

 Or maybe it was when young women began offering me a seat on the train seven years earlier. 

We talk about mentoring but mostly through the lens of the person mentored. Get trained. Find someone to guide you.

 At some point in our careers, however, do we not have a duty to mentor? I realize the duty may begin earlier, or if not a duty exactly, than at least a presumption. It's the late afternoon of careers (I refuse to say "twilight") that concerns me here.

In other words, after fashioning our own careers for decades, there comes a time to put our energy into guiding others: To replace us, not to put to fine a point on it. 

This is a hard pivot because it depends on a level of selflessness that may be greater than we were theretofore accustomed. It has rewards, of course, in seeing growth in those we support. It requires generosity and altruism.

I don't mean to imply a metaphor of parenting, which starts earlier (it should start before birth) and calls upon greater devotion. But the analogy is not entirely inapposite.