A great question for leaders and for the practice of mindful leadership is: Why must it be this way?
One of the earliest examples of this question dates back to 6th century China. A student, coming upon a crow eating a dead frog, asked Dongshan, a renowned Zen teacher of the time,
“Why must it be this way?”
To which Dongshan responds: “It’s for your benefit, and you caused it.”
Now, that’s not the answer we might expect. But can we learn from and work with that response?
The image of the crow eating the frog may dominate our thoughts and perhaps even conjure up the pain and frustration that we are experiencing in our own lives. We may ask ourselves why our relationships, whether at work or outside of work, are so challenging; why so many of us are so divided on key issues; why we aren’t caring for our planet; how we can hope to thrive with so much uncertainty.
Personally, the question leads me to think about how things might be different; how I might benefit from everything around me, from being alive, from the wonderful things that happen in life, as well as the challenging and painful things.
Dongshan’s words, “It’s for your benefit,” seem almost like a cruel joke but I believe he was referring to the importance of perspective. Stepping back, while our world is filled with pain and challenges, it’s also filled with amazing beauty, loving hearts, and pure goodness, all mixed together in an amazing and mysterious way. The frustrating and the painful is blended with all that is beautiful and moving…and it’s all for our benefit.
If this is the case – if all the good and bad around you really is for your benefit – consider for a moment how that might change the way you think about yourself, your work, your relationships, and your world. It’s easy to feel that the world is somehow operating against us but if we play with the idea that everything that we experience is provided for our benefit, that can help us open to possibility and a felt sense of our own power and agency.
The second part of Dongshan’s response, “and you caused it,” suggests that we are radically responsible for what happens to our world, and for how we interpret events and conduct our relationships. Sure, we’re all responsible for our actions, and to some degree for the insanity of our politics and the demise of the health of our planet. However, saying “you caused it” doesn’t have to mean that it’s your personal fault. It means we must all take responsibility for living the best life that we can, and to help others in any and every way we can.
With this in mind, let’s close with a poem from Sheenagh Pugh, a British poet and novelist:
Sometimes
Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.