The year of feeding the grey wolf

There is a version of an old Cherokee story about a grandfather telling his grandson that inside all of us there reside two wolves who are constantly fighting one another for supremacy.    

One is black and is made of anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.  

The other is grey, made of joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth and compassion. 

The little boy asks which one wins the fight and the grandfather replies, ‘The one you feed’.    

I love this story for so many reasons.  Firstly, I love the fact that it acknowledges that inside all of us as human beings there are parts of us of which we are not proud. That there are times when our egos, our anger, our self-pity and our pride get in the way of us being the best version of ourselves.  And that’s normal. 

And I also love this notion that the wolf that wins is the one we feed.  That if we focus on what we can do, if we act with love and kindness and compassion as often as we can then the black wolf will lie quietly in the background and not get in our way. 

I confess that my black wolf had a lot of ascendancy in me last year.  There were real moments of self-pity, times when my ego really got in my own way, and definitely supreme moments of arrogance when I proclaimed what was wrong with our nation and how it should be fixed, and so on.  And I spent a lot of the year in pointless anger about stuff over which I had no control.

Sometimes the black wolf can overtake our sector too.  When we knock another charity because we think ours is better; when we make pronouncements about the scandals affecting other organisations without reflecting on our own; when we take potshots at the Government for not doing what we want them to do without caring that what they have done might help others even if it doesn’t help us – all those things are feeding the black wolf. 

But if we feed the grey wolf – if we focus on what we can do; if we look for what is good and what works; if we actively seek to praise our ‘competitor’ charities rather than knocking them down; if we seek to support those who have made mistakes and need our compassion; if we don’t join in the haranguing of those who do things we don’t like; and if we actively seek out people to work alongside to achieve our goals just imagine what might be possible! 

So let 2025 be a year of feeding the grey wolf.