The Need To Do Good

A moment of clarity in the midst of training.

Monday night, after the last formal class had ended and we had all had dinner and I was getting in the car to drive home, I had a brief thought about work (still two days away) and everything that undoubtedly had to be done.  I sighed a little bit inside, and thought "I wish I was doing more good."

And then it hit me:  I lost the feeling of doing good.

Ask anyone in my line of work that has been in it for a while, and at some point in the conversation they will tell you they are in the field because they believe that they are doing good.  It is not only my industry, of course:  lots of people in lots of industries want to feel that they are doing good, that they are making a contribution to the betterment of something, be it society or the environment or the lives of rabbits.

But my job is really not that at all anymore.

My job is making sure that projects meet time lines.  That things get built and moved and published and hooked up on schedule.  That things moves forward.  But no sense of doing good any more.

A bit of a pipe dream, perhaps?  After all, many people do not do not jobs that result in "good".  Lots of folks simply do things that enable things to occur, like selling or delivery or cooking.  This is correct, of course - but it is certainly not true for me.

When doing good (for me, anyway) is eclipsed by making sure things are moving forward, the long hours and days begin to take a toll - after all, there will always be something else that needs to be done or a time line that needs to be hit.  It becomes a never end pursuit of destination that one will never quite reach.

I am not sure what to do with this epiphany.  All I do know is that one of two things needs to happen.  Either I need to rediscover how I am doing good where I am - or I need to be doing it or something else somewhere else.