Rolling into work yesterday following what was arguably a wonderful weekend spent with friends and throwing was a stark contrast in the realities of my life.
I had fair warning from Fear Beag before I got in: he texted me and let me now that something - an issue I had thought we had left in good shape on Friday - was simmering again. Fair enough - I got my attitude together and headed in after a good night's sleep and leisurely breakfast. And found exactly what I had anticipated -low level chaos.
As a course of action got sorted out and various people were negotiated with and all was set back in order, I suddenly realized that this was a great deal of my life - and has been for almost my whole time at my current employer: a series of emergencies that needed to be dealt with or immediate needs that had to be completed because this was "The Next Big Thing" that was going to make the company great.
You will note I use the word "emergencies" and not "challenges". Emergencies are things that need to be solved right now regardless of whether or not that they have any importance or benefit; challenges are things that need to be solved but ultimately result in something better coming in to our lives.
I realized that my life - at least my work life - has become a tempest in a teapot.
A tempest in a teapot. A consuming storm of fearsome wrath that consumes all in its path - in the confines of a pot of tea, which one can put the lid on and pour out. Maelstroms of wrath and import that really have no importance at all.
Which is seemingly what my life has become: emergencies that need to be addressed now over things that mater not one year later, let alone five. Personnel conflicts and struggles for power that all occur not on a national or world stage but rather in the confines of a small group of people. Like lemmings on a small island in the Arctic, we struggle and fight for dominance over a tiny piece of rock, never realizing that the world is out there.
The realization certainly changed my attitude yesterday - I went from cringing and trying to please to a sort of non-nonsense swagger (let us be fair though - this weekend left me feeling fairly awesome). It did not change the emergencies or the things that needed to be done - but it did change my attitude about them.
Perhaps this is the thing that I need to fix about my life: dealing with things of substance and import and lasting value instead of fighting over that which has no great impact and struggling with many whom I will not see two years hence let alone five.
Perhaps it is time to simply pour the tea out of the pot, set it down, and walk out the door into the real world.
That's pretty much explains the entire liberal left victims politics and how out government works as well. Not sure which is the reflection on which but that kind of thinking the upper managers seem to have these days will be the straw that breaks the back so to speak.
ReplyDeleteIt just seems like everything is in crisis mode all the time. Perhaps such things as goals and economy figure into this but this is no way to sustainably run a society. At some point it begins to smack of a general desperation.
Delete"Perhaps it is time to simply pour the tea out of the pot, set it down, and walk out the door into the real world." advice I need to heed TB
ReplyDeleteJohn
Thanks John. I hope you are far more able to do it on a regular basis than I seem to be able to do. It is a learned skill, like anything else- much like learning to not respond to the requests of every single person.
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