Making a reputation here for my own personal flavor of American practical know-how. Have built out a bit of the network here, handled Hoover repairs and replacement, and helped with a handful of other minor gizmo repairs and improvements.
It feels good to be useful, even as I notice most everyday — as I’m loading the dishwasher with tea mugs, refilling the tea station, hoovering the lobby and cleaning the bathrooms, greeting students, making repairs, and yes, posting blogs and emails and other e-things in spare moments — that I’m not really doing anything “important.”
It’s just really impossible to make an “importance” story out of what I’m doing… and yet I’m thoroughly enjoying the place and the processes and the people here. Enjoying the little connections I make with fellow staff and with visitors. Small kindnesses I’m able to perform. Indeed, my job is pretty much to generate small kindnesses, visible and invisible, all day long. It’s good work.
After about a week and a half here I’m starting to get the feel of the waves, of tasks and needs and people, that wash through here. Getting the hang of this surf. Was nice, too, that today was mostly preparations for retreat that starts tomorrow. It got a lot quieter here today, which allowed a bit of that familiar Thanksgiving quieting to happen in sync with the feasting back home.
Getting the hang of things here, then, just in time for the whole thing to be changed because December is full of special retreats, rather than the usual classes and meetings. Impermanence never ends! Nothing that is made clean will stay that way, of course. But sometimes that speed and the extent to which it gets fouled again just blows my mind. Practice, practice, practice… [grin].
are you in ghana, ted? either way, hope thanksgiving was happy where you were. just back from dinner here with bliss, where i got a bit of pumpkin pie. not exactly mom’s cooking, but it will do the trick for this week. we did thanksgivig in september in my family.
Found your site on the web because you mentioned “Hoovering.” My Hoover just went out. I know it is a faulty connection, because it went out repeatedly in my hands when I wiggled the wire to the switch. So, all I need to do is open it up and resecure the wire, right?
Well, the Hoover is plastic, so it snaps together, and I’ll be danged if I can’t get it open to at least look and see if I can see a loose connection. But noooooo. . . . .
The manual on the web shows how to snap it together, but does not show how to “unsnap” it. I bet I can lug this thing to a shop, and if they are not too busy, will charge me $50 for a simple screw tightening, but will have to wait two weeks (if they don’t forget about me) to justify the 50 buck charge!
So . . . . . . I had this brilliant idea after I realized that your blog site was not a Hoover repair site!
What if, . . . .
Someone turned their blog site into a repair chat room!!!
Somebody probably had the same problem and found a way around it. They would probably be willing to share it with others, just so that lazy repair man can’t rip off other unsuspecting blokes for 50 bucks or so.
Think of all the traffic it could generate. Think of the advertising royalties. Think of all the satisfied people.
The site would not have to be up-dated. New visitors would write of other ways to solve the problems. The old solutions could be archived “for ever” in case the new way wasn’t quite as good, or models changed, etc. The site would take care of itself. It is just a self generating chat room!
What do you think?
hey, michael and christy! what a great place to meet up…and i hope you each have heaps and heaps to be thankful for this weekend!
hmmm…generating kindnesses…thanks for sharing that michael. we could all put more of those in our job descriptions!
and when we meet again, maybe in vancouver next time, i hope it will be for a longer visit christy – wonderful to meet you too.
love from here, penny
just saying hi to this fine crew here… great to feel you all.
love,
Nice to have a glimpse of what your days are like there! And while making those little connections and generating those small kindnesses are not, I guess, glamourous or dramatically important–like a lot of caregiving work–they sure are some of the important threads that the underlying matrix of humanness grows out of, don’t you think?
Hey, I got to meet Penny here in Seattle last week during the Interra presentations–too brief, but fun!
love,
sounds like you have a happy, happy heart! good to hear all is well and even better than that.
Welcome to the impermanence practice field for parents. Nothing stays clean for long when you have two little lamas running around the house on a rainy day.
yes, was thinking that this is just a thimble-full of the parenthood learning curve!
You in London, Jill in Rotterdam and others all over the world (like Ghana, for example) not at home for Thanksgiving. Good to hear things are going well there. hugs, ted
Yup, I’m still in Ghana. 🙂