The Mountain You Don't Have to Climb
I spent a long weekend in the Pacific Northwest enjoying wonderful friends and admiring the mountains. Our conversation drifted to Zen and I shared the koan I keep coming back to these days:
The Zen master Qingyuan Weixin said something about mountains that evaluation keeps circling back to. Before I studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains. After arriving at more intimate knowledge, I came to see that mountains are not mountains. But now that I have got the very substance, I am at rest. Mountains are mountains again.
Simple seeing. Then complexity. Then simple seeing again, but different.
I tend toward concrete things: data, evidence, methods that hold up under scrutiny. But I try to stay open to insight wherever it shows up. So when friends were drawing cards from an oracle deck I drew. And I drew mountain.
The translation said: “You have the capacity to flow around any obstacle. This is the time to adapt.”
I think about this when I am stuck in work. When a problem looks immovable. When stakeholders are dug into positions. When the data says one thing but the politics say another. We see the mountain. We recognize it. Sometimes we even admire it.
But we do not always have to climb over it.
Rivers do not argue with mountains. They find the path of less resistance and flow around. They adapt. They keep moving. They get to the other side without the drama or need for conquest.
Evaluation has a version of this. The perfect design that no one will fund. The ideal sample that the timeline will not permit. The recommendation that would require political will no one actually has. These are mountains. Real ones. Solid and immovable.
And we can spend years trying to summit them, or we can look for the path that water would take.
This is not compromise. It is not giving up. It is recognizing that the goal is to get to the other side, and there is usually more than one way across. The next right action is not always the hardest one.
The key is understanding the nature of mountains and rivers. Mountains stand. Rivers flow.
Mountains are mountains. Rivers are rivers.
~Sadie
Sadie Paschke is Founder and Principal Strategist at Anthralytic, a social impact strategy and evaluation studio combines human expertise, data, and AI to help mission-driven teams clarify and amplify their impact. She brings insights from Zen practice to evaluation work, exploring what clarity looks like when we stop trying so hard to find it.
