This year seems to mark a few milestones. With that in mind, it seems a good time to reflect, to look back, to assess where I've been so I can perhaps get a clearer picture of where I'm going. Maybe it's a sign of old age that I'm waxing philosophical? More ramblings in the extended...
So what are some of these milestones? This year marks the 20th year since my graduation from high school. And last Friday marked the beginning of my 10th year with my company.
It's so strange to think of how much has changed within those two markers. I think if I could talk to the kid I was as a high school graduate, or even as the adult who started as a tech support engineer in my company, they wouldn't believe the things I'd have to tell them. I could tell them about friendships that I thought were rock solid that would fall by the wayside. I could tell them about friendships found in odd circumstances that proved to be much better bedrock upon which to build on my adulthood.
I could tell those former me's about lessons learned from various romantic relationships. Both painful lessons, and lessons about love, joy, sharing, compassion, and what it means to be a grown up. I'd tell those former me's that not taking shit from people is not the same as being a bitch on wheels. I'd tell them that if you wait long enough, you outlast the assholes at work. I'd tell them that politics is important at work - not to manipulate situations, but to understand the real places that people are working from so that you can be prepared and work through things (i.e. most people are driven by fear - you have to know what they are really afraid of).
I'd tell them that there are equally important lessons to be learned from friends: that you don't have to be dragged down by a friend in a spiral, that being a good friend sometimes means knowing when you can't do anything more, that true friends are always there for you, believing in you, pulling for you, and helping pull you along when you've lost your way, but still making you do the work because that's what's important. Good friends help you sort things through, work things out for yourself, and don't mind (much) when you keep banging your head into the same lessons over and over, so long as you are making some sort of forward progress with each new lesson.
I'd tell them that the most enduring lessons, those hardest learned are ones that they would have to learn themselves - that nothing I could say would sway them from those difficult paths, and that the journey to become who I am now would not have been complete without those hard won lessons.
Posted by cshell at August 1, 2006 10:39 PM