I opened a magazine today right to Gerry Hadden’s piece about journalism and meditation. He muses about the way he didn’t walk – choosing a journalist’s career over deep retreat some years ago, two paths that seem very, very different on the surface, but turn out to be different approaches to big ideas of Truth.
Interesting, isn’t it, how many approaches you can take to the big stuff? Here’s the quote that struck me:
Both reporters and meditators are on quests. As the years pass, both will likely realize, if they’re doing their work well – bravely, wholeheartedly, applying themselves with diligence – that their quests are in vain. Reporters will realize they can never seem to find a story with a simple, discernable truth behind it, a clear right and wrong. The story is always nuanced, multifaceted, changing. And yet with each new assignment they set off after an ideal they know they’ll never find, never nail down, and in that there is a great thing to be learned.
Gerry Hadden for Shambhala Sun
I see this in the clients I help to adopt change. It’s never simple, and there is never an obviously right or wrong answer. You only see the nuanced, multifaceted and changing nature of change, of collaboration, of team-making if you’re doing it well (“bravely, wholeheartedly, applying yourself with diligence”).
What about you?
Do you feel yourself “questing in vain”? Is your work shifting, squishier than you imagined when you got on your [metaphorical, I assume] white horse? Maybe there’s something great to be learned there.