From the July 2012 magazine: “But First the News…”

Gerry Hadden was making plans for a three-year retreat when NPR hired him as a foreign correspondent. Busy with work and travel, he found that he rarely had time to meditate, and felt he had lost his way. But looking back, Hadden realizes that a reporter is a lot like a meditator. Both are on a quest for truth. And neither ultimately finds it. As he writes in "But First the News…" in the July 2012 Shambhala Sun magazine:

"For the next four years with NPR I would look back on that untaken retreat like a man gazing across at himself in some parallel, unreachable life. I'd been so sure that that was my path, had felt so passionate about it, and now I was losing my ability to practice even basic sitting meditation. I fretted over this—in the Lacandona Jungle, the Galapagos Islands, Port-au- Prince, San Salvador, and Guatemala City—even lying in my own bed in Mexico City, just feet from the mat. I loved my job, and had no regrets about having accepted it, but it was also true that I'd paid a price: I'd lost my spiritual way. I'd left it behind in my untested little house in the northwest.

"What a radical rupture, I used to think, going from would-be meditator to foreign correspondent. Now, more than twelve years after making that choice, I've reconsidered. I see that the lure and life of the microphone were, in fact, very similar to those of the meditation mat."

"But First the News…" is now online in its entirety; click here to read it. And browse the entire July 2012 Shambhala Sun magazine online here.

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