Last week a friend told me about a conversation she had had with a coworker. (We shall call these people A and B) A is new to their profession and B is acting as a mentor to her. A is having a tough time adjusting to this new job and she told B, "I've never been bad at my job before. This is what I thought I wanted to do, but I'm not sure I'll ever been any good at it." Now B knows that it is perfectly normal for A to need time to adjust and B sees that A has plenty of potential and should find her groove soon. "But I wish I could convince her that she is not her job. She doesn't have to get her self worth from this job," my friend told me.
Is who we are defined by what we do?
I've spent the last few weeks (finally) listening to Season 1 of the Serial Podcast. In case you aren't familiar, the podcast is done by a reporter who examines the murder of a high school girl 15 years earlier. The girl's ex-boyfriend was charged with the crime and is in jail, yet he still maintains his innocence. He tells the reporter one time that it makes him mad when people say they think he is innocent because he's a good person. He would rather they think he's innocent because of the evidence. Meanwhile, a middle school girl was just murdered by two college kids. People were initially shocked that they had been charged as they are "good people."
Can people really be divided in to good and bad?
Every day I go to the mall with the baby to walk (#tenthousandsteps). At 9:30 each morning, there is a mom group that meets there. They wear workout clothes and have their strollers and take up huge sections of the mall to do a particular part of the workout. They sing to their babies (Old MacDonald, Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes, etc.) during different parts of the workout. It makes me uncomfortable, but only because I have NO desire to be part of it. It doesn't mean there is anything wrong with what they are doing.
Should we be defined by what we don't do?
I recently went to the funeral/life-celebration of a well-loved resident at the retirement home I worked at in high school and college. She was the mother of my GS troop leader and grandmother to my friend from the troop. She lived an amazing life, yet I knew about very little of it.
Does our past matter to the new people we meet?
Over the weekend I went to an event and a speaker there told a story about a little girl. The girl's parents had told her who he was and so she went up to him and said, "I know who you are! Do you know my name?" The man sitting next to us at the table was touched by this story and talked about it to us later on in the event, except he recalled it differently, remembering the question as, "Do you know who I am?" A slight change, obviously, but in a way, it drastically changes the effect of the story. "In a way, isn't that what we are all always asking?" the man at our table said.
To be honest, I feel as though we do not really know who people are, even in our own family. Why? Because there may be some aspects of ourselves that we hide from each other, whether it is to keep peace or that we know some aspect of ourselves will offend others. Then again, I believe that we all are guilty of keeping others at bay who we may not understand or maybe it is just because we are following the masses and their beliefs of a person or group of people, instead of making up one's own mind.
ReplyDeleteI like this quote: "You're always the person you were when you were born. You just keep finding new ways to express it."
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