Pushing up to meet me, pink, moist, soft, and open; a most pleasant way to way up this morning. A Buddhist monk was hiking in the mountains, when he met a hungry tiger. The tiger started chasing him, intent on eating him. The monk ran to the edge of a cliff and looked over. Jumping meant certain death. Not jumping meant certain death -- getting eaten by the tiger. After a moment's hesitation, he jumped. As he was falling he managed to reach out and grab some roots sticking out of the cliff. This broke his fall, but only for a moment, as he could feel the roots pulling free of the dirt, and there was nothing else to grab hold of. During this brief respite, the monk noticed a flower growing out of a rock nearby.
"What a lovely flower," he thought.
Living in the moment can be so hard to do.
The softest breeze sweeps across the water outside my office window. The sailboat's reflection is perfectly still in the mirror-like water beneath it. Several birds sit motionless in the lagoon. In the distance, cars criss-cross the bridge over calm waters. Large jets vector into their final approach to SFO.
So much of life is routine. Get up, shower, shave, maybe eat a small breakfast. Jump into the car for the commute, listen to NPR, and consider yourself lucky if there are only a few slowdowns this day. Hit the office walking, then up your pace with one, two, three cups of caffeine.
Go to meetings, make decisions, comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable. Read the news. Consider the news climate. Reflect on how to contextualize this content, what to emphasize, how to frame it all.
Ride the iterative software development process, where tasks are broken down into micro-steps in order to pursue macro-goals. Read a feed from a prominent site arguing that newspapers are dead; it's only a matter of time before they go the way of all dinosaurs.
Consider your past training. Your B.A. in journalism, awarded 37 years ago. How much has the world changed in 37 years? In every way but one. Your personal judgment is still your greatest asset. Your voice has always been that of a synthesizer. Sort many inputs into a new synthesis that makes sense, that can "advance" the story.
Such is the life of a journalist early in the 21st century. The institutions we were trained to write for are staggering under competitive forces coming from many directions. Most fundamentally, the news cycle has sped up by orders of magnitude, to the point where it is twenty-four/seven. The news never rests.
No wonder you can't!
Living in the moment is not our problem. It's the relentlessness of the next moment, bearing down on us. We are like the monk, hoping only to break our fall long enough to appreciate the beauty presented us...pink, moist, soft and open...one last time.
-30-
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