Welcome to this week’s Five Minute Friday. Our instructions, via creator Kate Motaung: “Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation.” Today’s prompt: WORK.
Work. SO weird that it ended up being the word of the week since I brought up my new part-time gig in the lead-up Twitter party.
I love working (usually) AND I also believe work is something much more broad than what we do for which we are paid.
Work was the effort, love and energy I put into raising my family.
Work was the three years I spent being caregiver for my father-in-law.
I do struggle with one concept (among others). I have always embraced the book title, “Do what you love and the money will follow.” However, there’s a popular self-help author who argues that “passion” and working to “fulfill your passion” is crazy. No wonder I disagree with him on other things too.
I struggle (look for the word “struggle” more than once in this five minutes!) with my work life. I loved Healthy Kids (where I worked almost 20 years) but never quite found the sweet spot of my skills and the organization’s goals.
My point: sometimes it isn’t enough to love a place if you aren’t a good fit.
I can beat myself up with the best of them and demand perfection of myself, but it’s such a balancing act to figure out how to best funnel your skills (and the new things you make a point to learn along the way) into a work situation where they are needed (and where you can keep growing simultaneously).
I made an error today at Part Time Job #1 and didn’t realize I had made it until the final came out (I am one in a series of writers who touch the material). I can either beat myself up for it or remind myself that tomorrow is a new day.
Seems like work again tomorrow, and a new opportunity to pursue that fit.
This post is part of the weekly Five Minute Friday linkup.
Wife of one, Mom of two, Friend of many. My pronouns are she/her/hers.
may your work tomorrow go better. 🙂 your FMF neighbour
Thanks, Annette. Five minutes is such a brief time to try to describe a day — it really wasn’t “bad” — I was just disappointed in retrospect to have not met my own standards. Time for some self-forgiveness! 🙂
It’s not worth it beating yourself up! Own it and move on (of course, it took me 50 years to learn this…). May your tomorrow be better and may you find your sweet spot!
Thanks! I’m in my 50s too and keep waiting for that wisdom and self-grace to kick in! I guess it’s a process. Thanks for the kind thoughts.
Tomorrow is indeed a new day, Paula. That is one thing I have learned, that I am so grateful to see the sunrise that I forget the mistakes I’ve made before.
Yes, for sure. Thank you for stopping by. Sending love and prayers to you and Barb.
Tomorrow is indeed a new day! Congrats on the new job. I’m in the 33 spot this week.
Thanks, Tara! Today was indeed better. Hooray!
New days with new possibilities are blessings from God. Just make sure you’re not being stalked by yesterday. Thanks for this! I’m at #37.
What a great visual — allowing myself to be stalked. Better to say a clean goodbye, right? Thanks for stopping by.