Gratitude of Former Paid Employment

Today was the last day of the “day job” and it still doesn’t seem real. Maybe because it has been yet another week of sleep deprivation, making me feel like a zombie (a lamentable condition of unreality). It feels like I have been going to the day job, day after day after day, since forever. Hard to believe that when Monday morning comes along I will not have to get up before the crack of dawn, jump on a bus, hike many a block of Minneapolis skyway to fill a chair in a cube farm, and stare, glassy-eyed, at a computer monitor for 9 hours straight. Now I have the leisure to stay at home and stare at my own monitor for as many hours, days, and weeks on end as I can tolerate (hopefully NOT – I am getting tired being chained to computers! Especially with the tantalizing edge of summer emblazoning the sky with warmth and electrifying the grass in hues of vivid green!).

I am so grateful to have met my coworkers. Lots of really excellent people, and the best supervisor anyone could possibly ever imagine. I feel a twinge of regret that even after spending about a year and a half with these people that there always remained a few fascinating characters that I never really got to know at all; and even the ones I thought I knew, still left me wondering how much more was hidden in their hearts that I would never know. Our lives intersected these many months and now I am moving on to other things; and, in turn, each one of them will be moving on and inhabiting their own realities as well, going about living their individual lives, intersecting with other people in an infinite web of connections. It is so true that you don’t realize what you have until you’ve lost it. Now that I contemplate this latest turning point in my life, I feel immense gratitude that my life intersected with all of these beautiful, genuine people. I hope I can keep in touch with them in the future, or at least keep them in my thoughts and prayers from time to time, wondering where they are, what they are doing. Bless them all!

If only life were long enough and deep enough that we could know other human beings in more authentic ways, in their souls. How many times do we pass by our co-workers, people with whom we spend an enormous portion of our waking life, making idle chat that only touches the surface of lived experience, when each person holds within himself or herself an unfathomable world of consciousness, memories, perceptions, and potential greatness? It is impossible for any of us to know what it is like to be another person, to be inside their eyes and minds and perceive the outer and inner worlds from their unique viewpoint, as well as vice versa. When I think about this, I am awestruck by the immensity of life! Each human being a self-contained universe, known only unto itself! Such a wonder!