If a man is called a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Greetings to everyone. Hope you had a great summer. I had a very restful, reflective time away from writing. In pursuit of my annual new skill (useful or otherwise) I began studying website design and writing and am eager to get back to publishing the monthly newsletter. As those skills improve, we can all look forward to a better looking publication.
Work. Love It. Hate It. Tolerate It. Be inspired by it?
Of the four pillars of holistic health maintenance (diet/nutrition/exercise, spiritual life, and quality of relationships), work tends to get short shrift. Work is often viewed as a necessary evil to be approached with any combination of wariness, resignation, numbness, and even dread. Dr. King’s quote above might be seem a bit overblown, but does provide a way to think about how we approach what we do for a living, wherever we fit on the org chart. A job well done can create an interesting feedback loop. You do an outstanding job on a seemingly trivial task for someone else, they gratefully thank you, you feel good, repeat. A bit of Googling on “how to love your job” results in a much advice on how to love the job you have while you look for/create the job you love, much of which might not seem applicable to your own situation. However, many of those articles have suggestions that could be useful to you and your situation.
If you’re lucky enough to genuinely love your job, doing something you love, many congratulations. Maybe you have an intellectually interesting job that pays you well but is still unsatisfying. Perhaps you are working in a job for which you feel over qualified, under appreciated, or stifled in some way. Or maybe your convinced your co-workers and management woke up today with the specific goal of making your life miserable. While bits and pieces of all of the above might be true on any given day, the one thing you do have control of is your response to all of the above.
In addition to the good feelings we get from a job well done, as indicated in Dr. King’s quote, here are a few suggestions on how to change the relationship you have with your job.
- One of the pillars of health maintenance is high quality, supportive relationships. Rather than focus on the silliness inherent in most jobs, perhaps we can focus on improving the quality of your relationships with some of your co-workers, clients, and management, especially the ones that didn’t wake up to make your life miserable. Seek out those co-workers who share and complement your professional and personal interests. Sharing the trials and triumphs with friends can make a less than perfect job tolerable while creating great friends.
- In Buddhism and some types of yoga, there is a greeting, Namaste, defined by Mahatma Gandi as “I honor the place within you where the entire Universe resides, I honor the place within you of love, of light, of truth, of peace; I honor the place within you, where, when you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us.” This greeting applies equally to your best work buddy as well as the cranky boss. Might this notion also be applied to your job or company? Your company and boss might very well be trying to do good in society, but happen to be grumbly when demanding you do a menial task. While this notion is not to let the grumbly one off the hook, it gently thickens your skin a bit to not take the grumbles personally and perhaps even, by example, improve the grumbly behavior of others. It will also keep you in a better frame of mind to change your situation, if that is indeed what needs to happen.
- Are you working a stress inducing because the money is too good to pass up? We can all agree that a certain level of income is necessary for the basic necessities of food, shelter, and clothing and that higher levels of income provide more opportunity for leisure and fulfillment. In addition to your tax returns, there are other measures of wealth available to any of us at any income level. As already mentioned the quality of your relationships provides a large measure of wealth. Do you have adequate time and headspace for outside interests (i.e. fun skills, useful or otherwise)? Time for your family? Sure, you might be able to make more money doing something else, but time developing aspects of your life measured by something other than income can create a greater sense of wealth. If you’re lucky enough to have a high paying job, make sure to develop interests and relationships with those that have no interest in your productivity and only interested if you are happy and how they can help.
Food Focus: Grain salads
Grain salads are one of my favorite ways to eat. It’s easy and quick to make a lot for a crowd in for dinner or a week’s worth of eating for yourself. There are also infinite variations of grain, veggies, protein, and a bit of dressing. They can be served cold or room temperature over a bed of hot or cold greens, tossed in soup stock for a quick meal, tossed in a sauté pan with an egg, or made into croquettes with the addition of an egg and a little flour.
Almost any grain will work. Cook as necessary, rinse and dress while still warm. It’s important to think about the textures of the veggies. It’s also time to practice chopping as everything wants to be sort of the same size. Here are one of my favorites, inspired by a salad bar find somewhere in Connecticut.
Wheatberry, Dried Cranberry, and Walnut Salad
Ingredients
1/4 c. apple cider vinegar
3/4 c. olive oil
handful of chopped parsley
touch of mustard to taste
1 cup cooked, wheatberries (1 part dried wheatberries to 3 parts boiling water for an hour. Berries can be soaked overnight to reduce cooking time a bit)
1/2 c. dried cranberries
1/2 bunch of cooked, chopped kale
1/2 c. toasted chopped walnuts
1/2 c. minced Bermuda onions
1/2 c. minced celery
1/2 c. shredded carrot
Directions
- Combine the first 4 ingredients in a bowl to stir or in a jar to shake up. If the wheatberries are hot, dress them first with a quarter of the dressing so they soak up the dressing, while your chopping the rest of the ingredients. If not add them with everything else in step 2.
- Combine the rest of the ingredients as well as anything else you find interesting, perhaps a hearty chopped protein, smoked tofu, cooked chicken, or pork. Combine everything, add dressing, and toss. If time allows, let the salad sit out for awhile for flavors to come together.
Send This On!
I hope you have found this newsletter to be as informative and inspiring to read as it has been for me to share it with you. Please feel free to forward it to those friends, family and colleagues in your life that you think might also be interested and inspired by it.
