Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug…I’m not saying just yet which I was today. I am grateful to be at the end of what has been, as a friend of mine calls it, a rich and full day. Even as I write this, I am sitting on my bed surrounded by reports, notes, outlines, and worksheets. My virtual desktop is likewise littered with open documents, PowerPoints, emails and PDFs. I was working on some of these at the office, but that got somewhat derailed by a variety of impromptu occurrences, all of which were important. That is the nature of being in the people business, things come up that draw our attention away from whatever other important things we were working on at the time. By the time I was able to get back to them, it was time to climb into my car for the commute home. A quick dinner and back at it. Now it is blogging time.
I have to smile that I find myself in a people business. People who’ve known me for a long time know that one of my heart’s desires is to be a farmer. People are okay; animals are great. I can remember when I was in junior high school and was being pressed by my mother to begin to zero in on my career path. I had said I wanted to be a writer, and had the skills and aptitude to pursue that vocation, but Mom convinced me that I should consider writing more of a hobby and look to finding a more marketable, employable career. I knew I didn’t want to be a doctor like my father–I didn’t want to deal with people constantly complaining about what ailed them. Eventually I decided that because I liked animals I should be a veterinarian, and I studied animal sciences through my bachelors and masters degrees. There was a reason for that choice of study: I was essentially a rather shy person and figured I was much more comfortable with dogs and cats and farm animals than I was with people.
But God has a funny sense of humor and I eventually found myself increasingly in roles in which I was helping, guiding, teaching, and in myriad ways interacting with human beings. And in spite of my initial shyness and genuine enjoyment of nonhuman animals, I discovered I was actually pretty good at it. Now having spent nearly 30 years working directly with and on behalf of different groupings of people, I am much more relaxed with it all. There are days, though, when I am peopled out and I need to reconnect with nature and with my own inner resources.
A number of years ago I made a deal with God that I would keep doing the work that I’m doing for ten more years. I’m in the last couple of years of that contract. While I’m here, I’m will continue to throw myself wholeheartedly into this particular iteration of the people business until such time as I can retire to the farm. It is a privilege of sorts to be called to work directly in service to or on behalf of people. It is particularly gratifying working in higher education and being able to see the impact your work has not only on the students you serve but on the greater world as those students go on to have significant impacts on the world around them, on the people they serve.
It has been a long day interacting with people and the occasionally messy, sometimes complicated situations that emerge where human relations are involved. My general approach is to offer a silent prayer, take a deep breath to calm my heart, and do the very best I can. Tomorrow I will step back into the space and meet whatever is there. I am grateful to have the opportunity to offer my mind, my heart, my energy, myself in service to the people I work with and the people we work for. From that perspective, it’s all good.
