The Thick of Thin Things

I am overcome this morning with the sense that I have spent my week majoring in things that don't really matter. It the sense of waking up to another Friday morning, looking at what you still have to accomplish for the rest of the week, and realizing "I've spent my time on things that have little meaning".

"The Thick of Thin Things" as Stephen Covey refers to it, the things that crowd together in our lives which are about a mile wide in the amount of time and energy they consume but are about an inch deep in the significance that they have. This is a concept which I have long known and occasionally recognized, but nothing as compared to this week.

When I leave today, I will have seen two audits to completion and spent a majority of the remaining time either preparing for one or the other, preparing a senior management review, or fighting fires. The resulting feelings washing over me are not ones of accomplishment, but ones of indifference. In reality, the things that have been done and accomplished this week will have little if any impact on my life and will be forgotten by all who would benefit by them in a short amount of time.

This emptiness of career accomplishment is beginning to weigh on me heavily.

There is a sense - I cannot fully describe it - that the ground is shifting under my feet, that "good enough" and "taking one for the team" are no longer enough, that doing something for the sake of doing it is not enough create satisfaction. Something happened in the space of a week - something that I am not able to describe not out of unwillingness but out of not understanding what it is - that is sharpening me, tempering me.

All I know is that The Thick of Thin Things is no way to live a life. Life is too precious - and too short - to have it consumed in the morass of the trivial and short-term.