Waiting to Exhale

What have I been up to, you wonder?

I've been responsible for the coordination and planning of two of the major annual events for work, and they just happened to fall on the previous two weekends, one right after the other. Being prone to anxiety about insignificant things let alone significant ones and it becoming increasingly difficult for me to focus on one thing at a time let alone several, you can imagine it's been a trying month for me.

I'll spare you the details, mostly because I'm tired of hearing myself whine about them. But it's over now, and today at work as I erased all the notes from the last several months off my whiteboard, I smiled and heaved a big sigh of relief.

Because when I'm growing I don't often feel it, but today I felt it, and it made it worth the trouble.

Here are a few of my favorite moments from the last couple of weeks:

- Listening to a group of ten Tongan men talk amongst themselves and then suddenly erupt in laughter to the point of tears... making me wish I could understand Tongan.

- Watching strong grown men take a physical task I was struggling with away from me, only to watch them struggle to do it themselves. It was gratifying.

- Hearing one of my favorite volunteers apologize over and over for not recruiting more people, even when his people were the only ones who showed to begin with. If we weren't both sweaty and exhausted, I would have hugged him.

- Reaching a point of exhaustion where my shoulder muscles just completely stopped working and I had to improvise using other muscles to lift donations into the truck. I've never been that exhausted. It felt good.

- Finding out that my failings with the first event were being discussed behind my back, and finding out that several of my coworkers defended my efforts without hesitation during the course of the conversation.

- Watching my coworker as he stood at one of the inflatable slides at the kids carnival. I gave him the task of making sure the kids took turns and went down the slide only a couple at a time, and instead he just stood there grinning in amusement as fifteen of them would barrel down the slide together. His wife must be the disciplinarian in their home.

- Even as the cold rain had been pouring for about fifteen minutes, looking across the way to see my volunteers in their red shirts still out running the carnival games without any kind of shelter. As long as kids were still brave enough to face the rain, they were determined to keep their end of the carnival going.

- Overhearing a kid whose mouth was lined in blue sugar from the cotton candy he had just inhaled as he exclaimed to his friend, "This is the greatest day of my life!"

...I tragically didn't get any pictures of either event. But if I can steal some from a coworker, I'll try and post visual aids later.