One Thing

The other day I was chatting with a woman who waits tables in the restaurant next to my store. I only know her as a familiar face and the daily wave of the hand and ‘hiya’ sort of way.

This particular morning she was about to do some planting in the flower boxes and realized she didn’t have a hand trowel so she stopped in to ask if I had one. I did not. I’m not much of a gardener so I don’t have the proper tools. In fact to use my name and gardener in the same sentence would be a sacrilege. Trowel? I used a large spoon to dig holes for my plants. I happily suggested she might try the same. She had a perplexed look on her face but humored me nonetheless. Minutes later she passed by waving a shiny new gardening tool she just purchased from the hardware store.

That afternoon, with the planting behind her, she popped in again this time to offer me the use of the trowel. My first planting has resulted in dry dead foliage in my flower boxes which were an eyesore and desperately needed replacing. I planted way too soon, and the rare May frost destroyed my efforts. She exclaimed “I have dirt all over me” (I did not see any) “But OH how I love to do this. I can work in dirt all day long!”

Of course me, being me, asked “Then why are you working in a restaurant? Why aren’t you working with a landscaper?” Her expression was interesting. It wasn’t the expression of ‘Gee, I never thought of that’ it was more the expression of ‘Is that even an option?”

She had been waiting tables for so many years that the idea that she could actually do something she loved and get paid for it was a foreign concept. It was not within her frame of reference. After all, she had built her entire life on income from a job she didn’t particularly love. It was a job. It paid the bills.

How many of us live that way? Well, the odds are great that I will say most of us.

We have jobs. We build careers and over many years we lose the focus as to why we do what we do. We build lives around what the career affords us and then sit in silent wonder of how it ever got that way. That sense of “there HAS to be more” is an acknowledgment that whatever it is we are doing does not fill that void, which by the way, we can’t put our finger on. But how can 'it' be filled without knowing what “it’ is?

In everyone’s life there is something, perhaps one thing that we do which gives us a sense of contentment. It’s the ultimate expression of who we truly are. If we nourish that part of ourselves it trickles down into everything else we do. It also opens doors we cannot begin to imagine. No jobs have to be quit to find it. Careers and lifestyles don’t need changing (unless one truly wants to do that), but to add another element to one’s life and take the fear out of doing something we truly love would add infinite peace and happiness to every other aspect of our lives.

I don’t believe in giving something up (unless it is harmful) but I do believe in adding something that makes us smile. If we allow ourselves the luxury of doing that one thing that makes us happy, just imagine how satisfying the rest of our world could be.