Tonight, feeling quite heroic about all the things I had accomplished today, I headed to our building garage to retrieve our car for the last big endeavor--picking up a child whom I had dropped at rehearsal and taking her to a party a borough away.
As the friendly but weary-looking garage attendant handed me my car key, I asked him whether this was the beginning of his day or the end. He chuckled a little, and replied that while he was halfway through his shift there, he would be going to his other job--an eight hour shift somewhere else--right after. He wouldn't be sleeping much this weekend--particularly if his daughter wanted to play when he came home from the second job.
Suddenly, my heroic list of errands and pick-ups and accomplishments seemed pretty mundane. By the time he started Job 2, I would be snug in my bed, done for the day. And while all the things I'd done--grocery shopping, and laundry, and child transportation--seemed heroic, they were choices, useful things to have done, but things that could have waited, or been spread out over two days, or done more simply. The garage man would be working 16 straight hours--there was no getting around that.
It's amazing what a little perspective will do for you. How many times do we bemoan having to trudge to work in the snow, then walk by the people who have been shoveling that snow since dawn? How often do we complain about what's available to us--job-wise or salary-wise or location-wise--only to realize that we are lucky even to have these things to consider?
Tonight, the man in the garage reminded me that while the accomplishments of day to day life might feel heroic, they are simply what we do to make it work. And that no matter how hard we think we are working, there are likely people around us who have it a little bit tougher.
A little perspective can be a very good thing.
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