|
A spiritual outlook allows this worker to feel harmony in her workplace.
Hey, everybody! I GOT A JOB!!
I’m now working in a music store. I didn’t want a desk job. I love music. I’m in heaven!
My days are spent helping people find just the right sheet music and instruction books, and renting musical instruments. And for the most part the customers are relaxed and happy. Working here feels more like play than work.
Well… almost heaven. There’s a catch. The store seems stuck in the past. And I’m beginning to wonder if this is the theme of this store and its employees. I’m surrounded by individuals who are displaying various aspects of being stuck. One employee in my department is very set in his ways of displaying merchandise and telling his co-workers how to do their jobs, though he is not our supervisor. Another co-worker is mentally “stuck” in the memory of a bad personal experience she had years ago, and can’t quite move past it. And from the owner on down, no one here likes the thought of computerizing or updating the technology around here.
Consequently, I find that I'm stuck. If I’m not willing to learn their non-technological ways, I’ll be of no use here.
Ironically, I also got stuck (while using my computer) this morning, when after spending until 2:00 am last night writing this article, and then somehow losing it and basically having to start over from scratch this morning.
But now that I think about it, this comes on the heels of yet another personal technological “stuckness” I have had over the past two weeks. I had a digital audio recording to do and needed to send it to a friend. The recording went fine, but the sending it to my friend didn’t work at all no matter how many ways I tried. Again I was just stuck. This is the pits! Something’s got to change.
I was surprised to hear a large number of people praying in unison in the private back room of the music store one evening recently:
"God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change,
courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference."
It was unexpected, but pleasing to find this aspect of the store. No one told me that they hold AA meetings there. This is a great service to the community. Their prayer was very relevant to everyone, including me.
What can I change about this store, the attitudes of its employees or its owners? Maybe nothing. I can’t make people adopt my point of view if they’re not receptive. I can’t expect a 30-year old store to change its methods overnight just because a newcomer says so.
I’ve totally lost the first draft of this article and am wasting time continuing to look for it. And I can’t make my old laptop in combination with snail-mail paced dial-up do what it just can’t do. Give it up! Get something new.
So what CAN I change? My thinking -- about this store, its employees, my department, technology and my recording project. That’s basically everything.
So let’s begin.
Mentally, I’ve been criticizing my new co-workers and stereotyping them. I’ve been feeling a bit superior about my love for computers and the Internet, and feeling that those who don’t also have a love of them are inferior. Also I’ve been irritated by some of their idiosyncrasies and insistence on doing things in certain ways. But isn’t this exactly what I’ve been doing? (This is a classic instance of the pot calling the kettle black!)
But now that I see what I’ve been doing, I can stop. While we may not agree on many things, we DO have something fundamental in common. We are all ideas created by the divine Mind that thought up the whole universe, including us. That is our common ground. We have that Mind in common. It's our source and we are connected by and through it. That means we are family. And that implies brotherly love and unbreakable spiritual connection.
Since having this change of my thought and beginning to see my co-workers as spiritual family, my last conversation with one co-worker I disagreed with before, was much more cordial. We both tried harder to see the other’s point of view. I may never convince these people that computers are the best way to do business in this store, but we can at least get along and do business together without strife. Even lovingly.
Also I had been insistent that my old laptop is the only way I could get this recording project done. But since I began to rethink this, I see that there is newer technology out there that I could be using and I really need to give it a try. It might take a little time, but I can learn what I need in order to get the job done.
Even a pesky problem with a few days of physical constipation (which I didn’t mention) has cleared up completely.
And as you can see, I got on with rewriting my article.
I gained some serenity by realizing the difference between the things I can’t change and the things I can. I can get a lot more done by changing my thinking. Read more from this blogger and how she has searched for the right employment at SEWjourner.
|
