Living Authentically: Clarissa Ward
I recently finished reading On All Fronts: The Education of a Journalist by Clarissa Ward. Ward is a foreign correspondent and contemporary of mine (being just 1 year older then me). In her book Ward describes beautifully how following a life of purpose and learning to be her authentic self led to great things.
Discovering Your Life of Purpose
Clarissa Ward doesn’t hesitate to talk openly about her unconventional childhood. Her parents (and grandparents) were quite cosmopolitan and lived in various places throughout her childhood including London, New York City, Singapore and Hong Kong. She grew up comfortable around different cultures and learned to speak different languages but often was not comfortable in her own skin. At the age of 10 she went to boarding school saying that she felt like she was being “sent away.”
But all these sometimes painful and confusing experiences were preparing her for her life work and when September 11 happened she was in her senior year of college in New York state.
She describes a conversation she had with a friend after that fateful day.
‘I can’t create,’ I explained. ‘I am not going to write novels or make films or be a great artist. I’m a vessel.’ I gasped for the right words in my altered state. ‘I can understand people and convey their ideas. I’m a communicator,’ I said finally, triumphantly.
In the sober morning light, it was all a bit abstract but it had still felt like an epiphany. And in the weeks after September 11th, the only thing that seemed important or relevant was to communicate.
The rest of the book follows her story, how she got an internship in Russia through CNN and later got her first paying gig with FOX. Then a couple other networks before coming back to CNN. She shines light on the conflicts in Palestine, Syria, China, Afghanistan, Russia and more.
She talks openly about the difficulty of caring for herself and the extreme burden of pain she tried to share with the world.
Finding Your own sense of purpose
I share the story of Clarissa Ward with you because I feel that so easily we get our ideas of what constitute a life well lived. While I love the idea of working sharing ideas and stories of other cultures I am not cut out for a foreign correspondent. But this is the path that Ward was drawn to and while there were hiccups overall she feels her life was well lived.
When I was growing up I knew I was called to be a mother. In the 1980’s if you were asked what you wanted to be and you said, “a mother” you would get some pretty strange looks. But I knew who that was I meant to be. The other difficulty is that you don’t get paid to be a mother.
Through my work as a mother and helping my children discover their life purpose I see the beauty of being open to all possibilities and really pursuing YOUR path with your whole heart. Along the way you may find some things that are surprising or difficult to deal with but all the better.
When you are able to accept all of you even the parts that are something difficult to love you are able to be more compassionate with yourself and others and see the world through the lives of others. This is the highest benefit of living a life in pursuit of our authentic self–compassion and through compassion seeing the world through another’s eyes.
Ward says–
I understood that in a sense I had failed in my quest to act as a translator between worlds. There were too many people who didn’t want to hear the stories of others, who felt that listening was tantamount to weakness, who believed that humanizing ‘the other’ was dangerous. Opening yourself to other perspectives certainly shattered illusions one had about simple narratives of good guys and bad guys, of black and white. And living in the gray was not easy.
While she might have felt like a failure it is my deepest hope that by seeing the lives of other who are striving to live authentically we can be inspired to pursue our own true life purpose. Through pursuing this purpose we can embrace compassion and help others and continue to move towards a more compassionate world.
