Balance

It's no easy thing...walking that line between obligation and desire, between work and play, between what one must do to make a living and how one wants to live. It's tough to find a balance.

I love my job. I don't love having a job but I derive great satisfaction in what my job allows me to accomplish. I get to put into practice many of my values around serving people. I do good. I make a difference. Still, in order to be permitted to work on my job, I have to devote an extraordinary amount of time and effort on things that have nothing to do with actually doing what I perceive as my job. So much, in fact, that it threatens to overwhelm my life outside of the allotted forty hours out of each and every week.

This is probably the way of the world now days, with the increasing demand that workers do more for less, though it doesn't make it right or necessarily a good way of operating any business. What happens when you squeeze workers, whether in an manufacturing industry or social service agency, is that the product is compromised. In industry, product quality is sacrificed and goods become shoddy. In social service, people are sacrificed and lives likewise become less and less.

And at the core...the workers...who tread water every day, fearful of losing everything at the whim of management which threatens extinction of careers for those who do not provide their ever increasing demands of carrots; the value of their lives becomes irrelevant.

Something is wrong.