Follow Your Inner Drives

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For the sake of personal bias

Published: April 14, 2011, 3:33 am ET

By Katie Toussaint
Opinion Editor

I will be the first to admit I’m an amateur. I have risked nothing as a journalist but my own insecurity when it comes to the awkwardness of phrasing emails, conducting phone interviews and fidgeting through face-to-face interactions. And frankly, I have absolutely no desire to risk anything more.

But there are journalists worldwide who are risking every shred of their physical and emotional security when it comes to doing the job that they are called to do. Why? From where does that calling come?

In his memoir, “Dispatches from the Edge,” Anderson Cooper writes: “By the time I was 25, it had all changed. I had a job, a salary. I was being paid to go to wars. … The more I saw, however, the more I needed to see.

“I tried to settle down back home in Los Angeles, but I missed that feeling, that rush. I went to see a doctor about it. He told me I should slow down for a while, take a break. I just nodded and left, booked a flight out that day. It didn’t seem possible to stop.”

Until reading Cooper’s words, I was convinced by previous classes and my own assumptions that journalists push past the risks of their line of work for the sake of truth-seeking. For the sake of fulfilling their occupational duty to inform the people, unbiased, of every occurrence, agenda and opinion that is a part of this world.

And perhaps many journalists are driven exclusively by this duty. But it also seems that the actions taken by those like Cooper do in fact stem from the personal bias without being skewed by it.

Cooper’s words intersect that ambiguous plane within each of us that aligns our inner drives. So often there is no knowing why we feel compelled to take certain actions. The only certainties are the exterior influences, such as our parents or our peers, and the following logic they assert, whether or not we give into and follow what we feel driven to do.

We can attempt to reconfigure our drives, link them to a new source and end them with a different purpose, as Cooper tried with the direction of a doctor. We can open our minds to the possibilities of other such influences, and we can actively seek them out. We can push and be pushed toward a perhaps more commonly lived path.

But Cooper’s bias does not prevent him from carrying out his journalistic duties to his public constituency. He writes: “For years I tried to compartmentalize my life, distance myself from the world I was reporting on. This year, however, I realized that that is not possible.”

So he prompts the question of why we bother holding ourselves back from what could make us complete. Just as a journalist can expose the truth of a matter for the minds of the world by responding to an interior point of inspiration, we can do what is positive for those around us by doing what is best for ourselves.

Cooper stresses that the self’s inner drives do not arise merely to provoke future action, but to maintain present existence. He writes: “Hurtling across oceans, from one conflict to the next, one disaster to another, I sometimes believe it’s motion that keeps me alive as well. I hit the ground running: truck gassed up, camera rolling…

“There’s nothing like that feeling. You run toward what everyone else is running from, believing your camera will somehow protect you, not really caring if it doesn’t. All you want to do is get it, feel it, be in it. “

He avoids the steps that are natural to everyone else in a circumstance and takes a risk because that is what his impulse nudges him to do. His journalistic success conveys that often doing what is easy is the same as doing what is natural, and there is no need to hold back from this.

The other day a close friend told me that she knows when she is being exactly the person she is meant to be because she has the feeling that she is radiating. She feels this way in both simple and complex situations. She feels this way when she is praying to and at peace with her God, when she shows kindness to others or when she goes for a run and just enjoys it.

Cooper reveals a similar notion in his memoir: “Working overseas, traversing front lines, I felt the air hum. … Coming home meant coming down. It was easier to stay up.”

When choosing any action, all we can ask from others and even from ourselves are perspectives. And regardless of what it is we choose to do, it’s necessary to remember that our time is our own. That we are allowed pursuits whose purposes we do not owe to anyone but ourselves.