it’s not my job
I have had many jobs in my life. In junior high, I delivered newspapers after school and babysat. Over the summers during high school, I cleaned cabins on a ranch in Oregon, I coached tennis, strung racquets, and worked with inner city kids. In college, I waitressed for our food service, catering events on campus. I have sold knives, house sat, taught school, ran a nonprofit, bartended, created a drug and alcohol prevention program, cleaned fraternity houses, wrote a children’s book, and explained health to 7th grade girls.
It’s an assorted career. Early on, I was given the advice, “never say ‘it’s not my job’”, and because I listened, I have often found myself taking out the garbage, moving irrigation pipes, sightseeing with doctors in Russia, preparing garnishes for a lunch shift, and connecting with teens on weekends (all tasks that weren’t actually in my job description).
That advice taught me to roll up my sleeves, and I watched in every workplace as employees I admired did the same.
Still today, I believe it is good advice…most of the time.
Lately, life feels heavy. I wake in the middle of the night with a list that weighs on me: unfinished work that needs finishing and concerns about the people I love. Some of these things are rudimentary - repair the printer, order dog food, pay bills, etc. - while others are more complicated. And it’s the more complicated ones that keep me up.
When the people I care about are going through hard times, I want to fix it, to fix them, to make the hard times turn good again. And it becomes part of my job to find a solution.
But maybe that’s not my job.
It is my job:
to love, support, and even nag;
to let others find answers and feel empowered;
to put away my hero’s cape;
to remember that I am not God.
Sometimes it is my job to do nothing; to let our children fail. And then feel proud to get it right.
It’s not my job to handle it all.
So tonight at 3 am, when the stars are bright, I’ll have one job, and that is to sleep, and that’s a job worth keeping.