I’m not exactly thrilled with my job right now, as you know. And I hate travelling for work. But sometimes I need to. In fact, as you read this, if all goes according to plan and the good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, I’ll be in Houston. Not my idea of a fun time. But the tradeoff of doing two 90 minute training sessions is that I’m out-of-pocket and away from those maddening conference calls for three days.
Now that part ain’t so bad.
My friend Fran referenced this quote on Facebook:
What screws us up most in life is the picture in our head of how it is supposed to be.
I immediately saw in this how I relate to my job. I have certain expectations about how things should be at work. Those expectations are not met. I am, therefore, unhappy.
I validated this with my spiritual director. She added that it is a lot of work to keep holding up an image of how things “should” be and comparing that to how things are. Certainly keeping this in mind does not remove all stress from work, but it helps.
Of course there are times when we should have a picture in our head of how it is supposed to be. Like when there is social injustice and inequality that needs to be fixed. But in the case of my job not having expectations means not being unhappy because expectations are not met.
One thing I have in common with my dad is that today in my fifties I feel about my job the way he felt when he was in his fifties. That is to say frustrated and aggravated by corporate silliness and stupidity. The difference is that my dad was able to comfortably take early retirement at age 55. I’m on the other side of that milestone and see another nine years of work before retirement is a realistic option.
I keep repeating, mantra-like, that I am grateful to be employed in this economy, and I am. I keep telling myself that I can make the conscious choice to simply choose to like what I am doing. That sort of works, some of the time. And I do remember a lot of the time to look at the Buddha when needed.
The quotidian reality is that I look forward to my evening time with Terry: newspaper, iPad, and scotch. And the week becomes a race to Friday.
Still, it is not as bleak as it sounds, and the truth is that my identity is not defined by my job. I remember Studs Terkel’s elegy to labor, Working, being a big seller in my early B. Dalton days, and I remember a book coming out to counter that: Work: I do it for the Money. I fall into the latter camp. But the reality is that I have a marvelous life with my wife and our four-footed child Tasha, and it is supported by the work I do.
One of the things about my company is that the teams are global and distributed. There are a lot of telephone meetings and many of the people I work with I have never met.
I did, however, have the opportunity to meet my counterpart in the other organization this past week. The one who I once mentioned, you may recall, bites the heads off of nails for breakfast. I will say that she did not look anything like what I imagined. She is tall, slender, fit (as in zero body fat fit), with long black hair. But regardless of appearance, it was good to meet her in person.
Having met, I’m sure our relationship will remain pretty much the same, and I’m still convinced that she bites the heads off of nails for breakfast. Yet I have to say that having had the chance to sit down and talk with her in person will make it just a little easier and a little more comfortable to interact with her on a day-to-day basis.
That’s a good thing.
I wrote last week about buying a Buddha for my desk to help me deal with the aggravations of work. I mentioned in passing that I found one at Ross, but there’s more to the story than that.
When I was talking to my spiritual director about this, she said, “They have them at Ross.” That immediately triggered the snob in me, and I said, “I was thinking of Cost Plus.” Actually I was thinking of Pier One, because that’s what we have in Gilroy.
On Saturday we went to Pier one, and the only Buddhas they had were the big outdoor garden size. In spite of the fact that I hate even walking in the door at Ross, we went in there, and lo and behold, there were a number of choices. I spent some time going back and forth among the various choices, but finally settled on one, which I had kept coming back to. It wasn’t quite what I wanted, but I thought it would do temporarily. I thought that I could check Amazon for something permanent. When I got it home, though, and situated it on my desk, I knew that it was perfect and exactly what I needed. So much for snobbery.
And how is it working? When I get frustrated or angry while on a call or reading an email I look over at the Buddha and I calm down and come back to center.
How about that?
I have not been doing a very good job of letting things be at work. I have let the politics and the conflicting agendas and all the catch-22’s I’m faced with get to me. I think about how I can make the deliberate choice to enjoy what I am doing or simply remain frustrated and aggravated. But I don’t follow through.
I was talking to my spiritual director about this, and recalling Jerry Jampolsky’s well-known quote from the Course in Miracles, “Would you rather be right or happy?” Problem is that I only seem to remember this when I am meeting with my spiritual director.
Thinking about Jampolsky, I used Google to look up the Web site he shares with his long-time partner Diane Cirincione. Right at the top of the page it states plainly what I know perfectly well but fail to practice:
“Your Attitude is Everything and it determines how you experience every aspect of your life. You cannot always control what happens to you in the world, but you do determine how you react to it many times a day by your attitude.”
My spiritual director asked me what I could do to keep myself reminded of all this during my work day. I told her I should get get a Buddha statuette to put on my desk. After all the Buddha is all about non-attachment and letting it be.
So I got one. At Ross, of all places, but I got one and it’s now sitting on my desk.
Now I need to look and remember.
You know I'm not exactly delighted with my job these days, grateful as I am to be employed.
I was talking to my manager about getting a project manager certification called PMP, just as a sort of insurance. I told her that would be great to have on my resume in case this job ever sent me over the edge. Her response, "Let me tell you about over the edge…" and she then proceeded to tell me about an experience with respect to what she was doing.
Last week, in the middle of a day of particularly aggravating conference calls, I told Terry, "I want a different job." Terry's response: "I want a job that pays more."
No sympathy.
I was talking to my spiritual director about the level of stress and aggravation at work. After our session she emailed me her sermon from a couple of Sundays earlier. Right in the middle of the sermon was exactly what it was I needed.
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How do we remember that God is with us when things get rough? How do we hold onto courage to keep
seeking the treasure when we can only see the rocks in the field? The answer is simple. We practice.
In the small changes of life, we practice looking for God’s presence. |
Thank you, Linda!
I had been composing in my mind a blog entry on work ennui, but hadn't yet put fingers to keyboard.
Then last Wednesday I had a call with my manager and her manager. They told me that there was a big reorganization happening and I was being given a new job. The work will be very different from what I've been doing the past almost ten years and will involve program management, which I enjoy. Then, on Friday my manager told our team that those of us affected would actually be part of an entirely new organization. Wow!
I found out on Monday that my old manager, whom I lost in January, will be my new manager, at least for now. That is good news.
The thought crossed my mind last week that those of us moving to the new organization were being caught up in the rapture while those staying in the old organization were those left behind. But then, it could be exactly the other way around and those in the old organization are the ones caught up in the rapture. Besides, premillennial dispensationalism is bad theology. It only really came into existence in the nineteenth century. There is no real Biblical basis for it, and no basis in the beliefs and practices of the early church. So enough of that.
In any case, this will be something new and different. I'm looking forward to it. So much for work ennui, at least for now.
The last couple of times I've had lunch at La Hacienda I have seen two different pair of women lingering over lunch long after they had finished eating and the check had been delivered.
Makes me think of my days at work when I actually worked with people on the same site and we would have lunch together. Normally we would eat in the cafeteria, but sometimes we would treat ourselves and go offsite.
Yes, we spent most of our time at lunch playing Ain't it Awful. But it was a form of bonding, and an acknowledgement that none of us, individually, was losing it, that (in our minds) the system and management priorities really were messed up.
There's a lot to be said for working from home and avoiding the commute. But the flip side of that is the isolation, and not being able to interact in person.
It's a different world.
