Old Dogs New Tricks

Old dogs and new tricks. That's how it feels. I took this new job last January and it looked overwhelming at first. They use tools I'd never heard of before like Slack, Jira and Consensus. But my bottom line is paying the rent. I’m just too old to be living under a bridge so I had to figure it out and it hasn’t been too bad. I’ve learned the stuff, made some friends and had some laughs along the way.

My Project Manager is always saying that I’m doing a great job. Thanks Steve! It helps to hear that you aren’t failing miserably at something.

When it was time to head out to New Orleans after Katrina, I wrestled with those same doubts and fears and there were very real threats to my survival daily. Again, my bottom line was the money. With no investment portfolio, wealthy husband or big savings account, I must always be hustling to pay the bills. In all fairness though, that’s not a bad thing. It has given my life direction.

I really want to be the best at everything I do, but I guess we all look around at our lives from time to time and think: “Damn! You sure screwed this up!”

I think it’s easy to lose your perspective. We get so focused on the elements that make up our lives and then we forget to step back sometimes and take in the whole view.

I’m alone in the world. But on the other hand, I don’t have lots of noise and confusion to deal with. If the kitchen’s messy, I can leave it that way for days and no one complains.

Next week I will celebrate another birthday, but I don’t feel so old that I can’t learn new things. I try to learn new things every day. Sometimes these are common sense lessons and sometimes the knowledge is specialized. Sometimes its personal stuff and sometimes, I learn things that make me a better human.

Once on Star Trek, one of the aliens called humans, “Ugly bags of mostly water”. I think that’s fairly accurate. But we’re so much more complex than that. We can be brilliant and inspiring and we can be dumb as dirt. We can invent amazing machines but we can also invent things like the “Beer Hat”.

The coolest thing about us is that once we all get united and work together on a project, we can crank out some pretty incredible stuff. Unfortunately, we get too easily side-tracked by nonsense like skin color, religion, sexual preference and the like.

In my religion, Christianity, we’re all created equal by one great God and we all have a purpose and a destiny. What so often happens is that we forget this or no one tells us to begin with and then we just drift aimlessly, which leads down dark paths sometimes. When you get several million humans in that predicament, it’s a mess!

So let’s take a step back from where we are today and start over. Let’s agree to love and forgive each other, even the wierdoes. Let’s stop killing each other and find something we can agree on. At the end of the day, we all love our families and we want to get home to them safely each day. That makes sense, doesn’t it?