impermanence and the news

Flowers decompose, but knowing this does not prevent us from loving flowers. In fact, we are able to love the flowers more because we know to treasure them while they are alive. Thich Nhat Han

I’ve worked at daily newspapers for most of my career. There’s probably no better job for training in Buddhist principles: Every day, we gather people’s perceptions of events – sometimes we call them “facts;” most times we admit that everyone’s perception is a little bit different – we look for the places where they overlap and report those as truth, and where they disagree, we try to balance the presentation. We inquire constantly: How do we know this is true? Who is saying it? What is their view? We assemble perspectives, which combine to form stories, which then fill pages, and the pages make a newspaper. Conditions come together, the pages get printed, put on trucks, into the hands of the middle school kids who still deliver it, and then into the bushes or the box or the front porch. The reader looks at it, notes a few things, maybe mentions something that resonates to someone else, and the newspaper goes into the recycling bin or under the catbox or into a pile. (See Thich Nhat Han for more on how the world is contained in a piece of paper.)