posted on June 13, 2014 03:54
I try to read books about places to which I’m planning to travel; and in advance of a visit to Nova Scotia later this summer, I’ve recently completed a 1999 novel by Alistair MacLeod who was raised in and writes about Cape Breton, Nova Scotia’s most northern portion, in No Great Mischief. The book provides two short but powerful lines and a memorable metaphor that stimulate this and my next two postings.
The first line is this: “He found it because he looked.”
It doesn’t matter in which character and context these six words occurred; they stopped me cold for the multitude of applications to which they might apply.
“He found it because he looked” has been the case for many explorers of the heavens, continents and ocean floors, for both laboratory and field researchers in scientific disciplines, for both historians and innovators in the arts and literature, for mathematicians and musicians. Those who keep looking are more likely to find.
Certainly it is true that some who seek never find exactly what they wanted to find and hoped for; but that result is, nevertheless, a finding. Even the accidental or tangential result of the search is a finding. And perhaps even finding no answer or no solution is a valuable finding.
It is in this spirit that the MHSAA has conducted many inquiries over the years, taking new looks at old issues with different people, using different processes. As often as not, the result was a finding that there is no better approach to a situation, at least at that point in time.
In most cases, we take topics “on the road” without a particular preconceived outcome in mind except that, even if the inquiry results in no change, the process has at least advanced constituents’ understanding of what current policy is and why.
The MHSAA is doing this now with several junior high/middle school matters and the complicated topic of out-of-season coaching. We are hopeful that our looking will find some positive proposals for changes in MHSAA policies and procedures. If this happens, it will be because we searched together.