Doing Your Job!

 Sharing this  from Cristal Orrand.  I found it very powerful.  

"From a #painting I did in 1999...

I miss the days when speech was Czech and French and not python and corporate. Today an architect (but not the kind that built the St Charles Bridge) shouted over and over "You're not doing your job!" 

I honestly thought he was quoting someone and couldn't process that he was shouting at me. Not reacting made him angrier, so he pointed his finger in my face and shouted louder "YOU! I mean YOU! You're not doing your job!" (because I had not escalated an incident).

So I thought about it. And I thought about listing the 17 things I do every day at work that are not in fact my job and how impossible the whole situation is, but I thought about it some more and I realized he's right. He's wrong the way he meant it, but on a metaphysical level, it was actually quite profound.

I am not doing my job because my job is not to escalate. My job is not to clean up for idiot men who don't want to play nice in the sandbox. And my job sure as shit is not to battle every day to "prove my value". 

This isn't my job because it isn't my purpose. My purpose in this life is to connect, not shatter trust. My purpose is to create peace, not escalate. My purpose is to love and work and protect and grow relentlessly. My job is to amalgamate and to create possibilities where none existed. 

10 or 15 years ago I would have stewed on this for months. I'm still upset, but within hours I can take shit and turn it into something useful. Sucks, but I'm only going to say thank you for pushing me one more step closer to what I want. Thank you, for turning me away from what I don't need. This was 1999, and this was today. I still don't know where I belong. But I'm getting closer to finding it."