Good afternoon from an overcast Vancouver. Friends and relations are digging out after storms in other parts  of the continent. 

I'm thinking about the expression 'digging out', and am reminded of a Buddhist Parable...

4 monks are walking to a town some distance away. As they approach a river they need to ford, they see that not only is the river raging, but their are people drowning. Lots of people. True to their vows they dive into the torrent and start hauling people out one by one. ! hour, 2 hours, 3, 4, then 8 hours have gone by and the four monks work tirelessly hauling the drowning people out, one by one. As they approached 9  hour of this, one of their number pulled out another person, but instead of diving back into the torrent, he began to trudge up river. 

His companions called out after him, "Hey, where are you going? We still have work here! We have many more people to pull from the river!" 

The monk turned back towards them and said, "I'm going to go and see who is throwing them into the river in the first place."

As we think about digging out after storms, we might ask ourselves where are we digging out in our workplaces and might there be some work we need to do 'up stream'? Remember too that up stream work may be more difficult because it might ask us to change our own behaviour and assumptions. As good as we may feel about pulling people out of the torrent, we might find that up stream it is another part of our own organization throwing them in.

May this week be one of trudging up stream a bit.