When I was in the car, it wasn't worth it. I was thinking about what I could have gotten done at the office. I was thinking about how tired I was going to be when I finally got home. I was thinking about the fact that I'm going to be back on the road tomorrow.
But when I was presenting, I was on point. My audience was great. They participated in the activities (which is always a good feeling when you're facilitating); they engaged in the presentation at all the right places; they asked questions at the end. We had a great time and I didn't care that I had to get up an hour earlier than usual or that I had been in the car for 4 hours for such short session. I didn't care what I was missing back home or at the office. I was in the present and I remembered how much I like presenting.
I got a bit of a break before the meeting to mentally prepare myself. The purpose of the meeting was to convince the Dean of Students at a private school that our weekend leadership trainings were a good thing that he should let his students attend. I had been forewarned that he wasn't in favor of letting his students out of class for what would be defined as "secular training". My goal: walk the thin line of being a state employee while convincing him that, as Christians, we should strive to prepare ourselves for whatever encounters we might have with the world. The training we would provide encourages them to look critically at a problem and address it proactively based on fact rather than find ourself in a reactive position. The leadership skills these students would receive would be useful both in the school environment and in their daily lives outside of school. The information they would learn in our presentations would be beneficial, even though they don't "have a tobacco problem in this environment". At the end of our meeting, he looked at me and asked "Do you enjoy what you do?" I had to pause because the question caught me off guard. We had been talking about the logistics of the event, the program and agenda, how far the location was, etc.
There have been several days (some that last an entire week) since we came back in January that I found myself wanting to bang my head against my desk. There have been meetings that I've fought to stay awake and there have been meetings that I've fought to keep my job. There have been meetings that I had to be gently persuasive to get someone to see the benefit of why we do things a certain way and there have been meetings that I had to be borderline disrespectfully blunt to get my point across. And a lot of those happened in the same day.
Those were the things that flashed through my mind when he asked "Do you enjoy what you do?" After I paused, I thought about why I was there. I do enjoy what I do. I get to use my talents as an organizer and a planner to benefit others. I get to use my knowledge and training as a substance abuse prevention specialist to design programs and materials to educate young people across the state. I get to spend massive amounts of time with some of my closest friends. I get to travel and meet people that I would otherwise have nothing to do with. I enjoy getting to see the excitement spread through a group of students as they plan a community improvement project. I enjoy getting to see the light bulb go off when a student finally "gets it" and finds a new passion to throw themselves behind. I enjoy the energy boost that I get from spending time with these people. I enjoy the sense of hope I feel when I see those one or two students who really stand out of the crowd and let me know that there is still a reason to fight.
So instead of thinking about checklists for the next six weeks, the cancelations and registrations that need to be processed, the mountain of email coming through my phone that I'd have to deal with at the office, the number of miles I'll be driving the big white van across Texas in the next two months, the justifying and rationalizing and meetings that I have to endure every year, and the endless number of stressful hours, I thought about the last 10 years of programs and projects, new contacts, excited students, light bulb moments, inside jokes and great memories and I answered: "I really do. The good far outweighs the bad and I get to work with some of the most amazing students in the state."
His response: I just wanted to make sure you believed in the program before I sent my students. Where do we register?
"I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can." George Bernard Shaw
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