Pick a rock

A friend from our cubicle days is sitting in my living room talking about the last speech she gave. Her story goes like this:

As I was doing my research for the speech, everything shifted for me. I suddenly saw that, in gathering my material, I was stepping into a river of information. If I came to this river tomorrow, the information would be different. It changed the way I looked at everything. And I realized it made no sense to prepare a linear speech about information that was not the same from one day to the next. So I gathered some river rocks, wrote a different topic on about 20 of them, placed the rocks in a basket, and went off to give my speech. I asked people to "pick a rock" and then I'd talk about whatever was written on it. We picked rocks until the time ran out. If different rocks had been picked, it would have been a different speech.

My friend has been the dean of a communications school for 15 years. When she speaks, I listen.