There's that...

A friend of mine told me she was having a crappy few weeks.  She was questioning her effectiveness as a teacher, her impact, her role.  She was half-heartedly considering other employment options.  "I'll be okay," she said, "But I just have to work on being cheerful right now."  

That’s how a lot of us are feeling this time of year.  It takes effort to stay positive and grateful.  

Not far from my house is a well-traveled road alongside which is a super-long stretch of corporate buildings.  It’s a suburbanized industrial park; you can take a right turn at any point and get lost in overlapping loopy roads with office buildings.  Big ones.

There’s this one, though. 

It is gigantic.  It looks like a person, with these enormous window-eyes.  It sits, all formidable and massive, on ginormous lot.   It looks like it was built there by a giant kid playing with life-sized Legos.  It is brown, and the land upon which it sits is brown, and I swear to heaven, the air around it is brown.  And every day, a whole bunch of people park their cars and walk inside, moving silently, like robots, and they stay inside and don’t come out until the end of the day, when they all come out again and get into their cars and drive away. There’s a giant water tower in the background, and I imagine it is there to give the corner office people something—anything—to look at. 

I have no idea what they do inside all day every day; I don’t know what they “make” or what work they are producing.  I have no idea what happens in the cubicles and offices within.   Sometimes I imagine that the people all go in and sit and stare at the wall, just waiting.  For something. 

Or maybe they do something fabulous for the world.  I don't know.  

Regardless, whenever I drive by the building, I think to myself, “I am so effing grateful I don’t have to walk into those doors every day of my life. “

Because every day, I get to walk into a building where there are children.  And children give us hope, and energy, and laughter. 

So there’s that.

Stay positive, friends.  We’ve got this.