One of the “lessons” I learned fairly early in my 900+ days blogging about gratitude is that some days you don’t feel like writing about what you’re grateful for. In the early days of this blog it was often because I’d had a tired or demoralizing day job seeking with little or no success. I battled serious and understandable depression back in those days, having lost my father, my job, my partner, my home all in a six-month stretch. And so some days I just didn’t feel like writing. I was smart enough to realize, however, that focusing on and writing about something I was grateful for was exactly what I needed to do on the days I felt leas like it. And so I did.
And so I find myself this evening, still exhausted from too little sleep earlier in the week and weary from a stressful day at work (at the job I was grateful to have found after nearly 18 months of un- and underemployment) tired but determined to focus on and acknowledge things for which I am grateful. I can remember during the first weeks of writing Lessons saying that, although life was difficult for me at that time, I couldn’t throw a rock anywhere in my room without hitting something I was grateful for; I was literally surrounded by blessings. It was true then, it’s true now.
I am grateful this evening for my coworkers–all of them. A team of eight hardworking, creative and talented individuals, with whom I work most closely day to day. They are also human, each of us bringing our personalities, backgrounds, idiosyncrasies, and foibles. “We are who we are all day, every day,” has become my mantra, not just for our team but for nearly everyone I know. We show up fully as who we are in all our splendid imperfections. In the midst of some current challenges our institution is facing, a subset of our team met late this afternoon to begin to hash out how to deal with some serious budget issues in an exceedingly short period of time. We have to turn our recommendations in by mid-afternoon tomorrow, having just received our full instructions this morning. Like any democratic, consensus-building leader, I had invited as many of our team members together as possible to discuss our approach. There are definitely times when it would be easier to be autocratic and dictatorial. This was one of them. After over an hour of discussing, debating and at one point near shouting, we made some progress and determined to return to it the next morning, only a few hours before the deadline.
After the meeting, the colleague with whom I’d exchanged verbal blows (at one point I pointed my finger emphatically at him, raising my voice in irritation) remained behind explaining the points he had been trying to make. It’s like that between me and this person–we’re wired quite a bit differently and at times we each have to work really hard to understand where the other is coming from to reach common ground. In spite of that, I hold this colleague in as high regard as I do those with whom my personality is more similar. The butting of heads is simply part of the way I relate to this colleague, with another it might be quite different. There’s a proverb that says, “As iron sharpens iron, so a person sharpens his/her friend.” And in a lot of ways that’s what we do for one another in our workplace, we sharpen one another, sometimes through sparks and friction and other times through gentler more measured interaction. In either case, I learn and grow from my interactions with the people around me, those who are like me and those who are very different from me.
This has been a challenging but good day. I am tired, exhausted really, but grateful not simply that I have a job, but that I am able to do good work with good people who make me better and because of our work make the world better. At the end of the day, you can’t ask for much more than that.
