Quotes of Encouragement

As I was going through my daily tasks at work, an email notice floated across my screen from the manager of my department.  It advised that I was being moved to a new location. 

The room I was moved from was full of folks on the phone, all talking at one time and at times a rather raucous environment.  It was a very large enclosed room that leaks during rainstorms and is filled with folks radiating various germs and various scents, spraying cans of anti-bacterial substances, eating varied foods, and the pervasive mustiness of moldy carpets and water damaged dry wall was always present.   

But I was back in a far corner in a fairly solitary location where I was able to steadily get my work done until it was time to clock out and go home.  I’m not anti-social but I am busy and it seems I’m always behind.  So being off in a corner was as close as you could get to having an office with a closed door.  And yet, from time to time some folk who wanted to be friendly would pop their head over the top of my cubical and give me a cheery hello and we'd share a brief conversation.  It was bright room full of folk and I didn’t mind being there.

My new area is much more open.  I’m next to the marketing department and across from all the managers.  Having been moved into a more prestigious venue, gives people the impression that I’ve been promoted.  (Location, location, location.)  It actually gives me the feeling that I’m in a fish bowl and that I mustn’t scratch or make a mess or any comment under my breath.  And every phone conversation I have is out there for any and all to hear.  I feel entirely exposed.

Directly behind my desk is a large chalkboard.  On my first week of arrival at the new desk, one of the managers told me that it would now be my job to write encouraging words of wisdom on the chalkboard above my head daily.  She smiled and said I know you’ve got plenty of that. 

So, I try to spend a part of my evenings on a fairly regular basis looking up some famous quote that is workplace appropriate, and yet morally uncompromising so that I can sit in front of it without fear of reprisal, offense or guilt.  It is rarely my own words that I write.  On occasion I'll edit a quote to what I feel is a better use of the phrase, but usually, it is words from a famous author or statesman or excerpt from a book.  

My desk is on the edge of a heavy traffic aisle, so quite a few people stop by daily to read the quote and make comments on what it means to them.  Several have told me they make it a point to come by and see what words of wisdom I have put up on the chalkboard.  It has been an interesting undertaking,  especially seeing how many people have begun to count on the daily quotation to give them some hope or a smile for the day. 

The company was recently bought out and so there are many changes and upheavals that are creating concerns and shaking people’s confidence in their current career status.  It is just one more unstable layer of gravel on an already tremoring earth, making it a challenge to find sure footing.  

The whole world is in upheaval.  We try and ignore it.  We try and recreate our environment to seem stable by making time to add to our days useful and pleasurable endeavors to afford a bit of meaning to our lives.  But in the back of our minds, we see that the ground of the world around us is anything but firm and unlike the previous generations, we’re encouraged to believe that life is nothing more than a series of ecological happenstances culminating in the existence of the human population and that eventually, all species are destined toward extinction.  Truths have become subjective and defined by the present accepted social mores. 

There is nothing absolute.  There is nothing eternal.  There is nothing constant.  There is nothing inalienable.  It is a hopeless, hapless, aimless, meaningless, and often despairing society.  Like the lithograph created by Escher, it is a society who believes that somehow, we have created ourselves.  We are our own gods.  We're entirely too educated to believe in unseen aberrations.  

And as Mark Twain said, a person who looks to God “is a person who wants to give up great things in a real life for mediocre things in an imaginary one.”  But eventually, things cave in.  Eventually, one of the spinning plates begins to fall.  Eventually, we get old and sick and die.  We dance to the tunes played by the piper until he backs us against the wall demanding payment.  We only see what is before our eyes and our hearts long for what we can no longer envision.

So, they come to my chalkboard and read what I wrote that morning before they arrived, in hopes of hope.