Katie Krueger's Snippets of Gratitude

These days, I drive to Wausau once a week for work.  Its a long drive, but I have plenty of things to make it bearable:  coffee and NPR in the morning, audio books and sunglasses on the way home.   This week, I had no need for the latter.  It was pouring rain so hard that I couldn’t see the lines on the road.  It was a  post-tornado storm rolling through.  When they are not terrifying, they are beautiful.

When the rain abated, my car was filled with a golden light.  To my left was a full rainbow, seeminly close enough to touch.   I could see where its two ends touched down:  one on a farmer’s field and the other ahead of me, in a grove of tall northern wisconsin pines.  I was so mesmerized by it that it was probably unsafe to drive, so I pulled over to gawk at it.  Eventually,  clouds from the south rolled in, erasing it and returning the sky to a gray blackboard.   It was  at that moment, it occurred to me to take a picture.

I then get back on the highway and arrive safely at home. For that, I am grateful.

You can’t tell by looking at them, but my websites have never been in better shape. Three of my favorite creations: Find Funding Magazine , Project Japale Goune, and this blog recently got a major upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. I made the decision to hire someone who is much more knowledgeable than I and could do the work in 500% fewer hours than I. (Business school thinking, right there!) And just like that, the dashboards of my sites are easier, more intuitive, and more functional than ever before.

And yet, you, for whom the websites are built, can’t tell a damn thing. It’s behind the scenes progress.

As with the rest of my life these days, I am hoping that I am making similar progress, perhaps so well hidden that not even I am aware of it.  Otherwise, I might lose hope.  I have pieced together a hodgepodge of internships this summer that look, on paper, nothing like the linear path I anticipated I would take.  Instead of experiencing the  steep learning curve and anxiety of starting a single new job, I’ve taken on three.  I am also on the D.L. from racquetball with a bruised (or cracked) rib, which has me feeling either in tremendous pain or lethargic from narcotic painkillers.  Not to mention a bit doughy from the lack of exercise.

Yet, I try to believe that  I’ll look back on this time as I have on so many other difficult times: with the gift of hindsight.   I will understand that the seemingly scattered dots do eventually connect, that the times I felt I was treading water were actually propelling me forward, that some progress isn’t always observable.   I am grateful for the reminder of how important it is to believe this (and the prescription painkillers.)

Steve Jobs gets at that same idea in this short video -- you can’t map your journey until you have arrived.

I have been listening to the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin on audio lately.  Driving in the car, lifting weights at the SERF, sitting in front of my computer doing some task online.  This man was amazing.  He made a list of virtues that he wanted to live by, and then kept a detailed log of all of the times he strayed from his goal each day.   Can you imagine?  Every time you “drink to elevation or eat to dullness”   (a breach in the virtue of Temperance), you’d have to mark it in a book!  Boy, that might stop me from “just one more beer” or the second scoop of ice cream.   My little book would get used up so quickly!

But he’s rubbing off on my, that Benjamin Franklin.  Now, when I go through my daily life, I often ask myself what BF would do.  WWBFD?  (I like saying it because BFD has already been assigned meaning in my txt vocab…and it contains the f-bomb. It feels like I’m getting away with something.)

At the grocery store, my clerk gave me an extra dollar in my change.  My bill came to $6.34 and she gave me $4.66 in change.   I had paid with an Alexander Hamilton.  I hesitated, plucked a single dollar bill from the fan of them, then handed it to her.  I explained I thought there had been a mistake.  This is a sea change.  YES – I ADMIT IT!  There may have been a time in life when I would have just considered it my good dumb luck and walked away a dollar richer.

But, I didn’t.   Because it would have been unvirtuous.

I am grateful for  Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography.  It’s making me more virtuous.

Being in school for the past 9 months required so much of my brain’s bandwidth that some of my regular functions got suppressed, or shut down completely.  First, it was excercise and daily gratitude.  Not a power combination in terms of making my life bearable.  Second, it was my optimism. I sat in classes with people who said that, given the opportunity to make “stupid easy money” betting against the economy of Greece, they would do it without second thoughts, regardless of the fact that doing so could cripple an entire nation’s people and economy.  Its not easy to listen to that and avoid becoming a cynic.

Another core function that went into hibernation was my creativity, almost unbeknownst to me.  I didn’t take pictures, I didn’t do any creative writing, and there was an absolute dearth of fun, creative projects. Now that I have time (and brain space free of accounting, finance, operations, economics, and the like) I am back it.  Creating things that bring me satisfaction and make me happy.

The first project:  what to do with all those old CDs that are busted, unusable, but seem wrong to put in the landfill?  Make coasters!  All it took was paper and adhesive.  Now every time I have  a sweaty drink, I’ll put one of these underneath it and feel so happy that I made them.  I am grateful that my creativity is back.

Room 112 is not actually a room.  It’s a clearing in the middle of periodical stacks on the first floor, north wing of UW’s Memorial Union.  Walking to it, I weave through the maze of 8′ tall, army green, metal bookshelves and arrive at a half dozen tables arranged between the shelves.  The walls of this room are made not of drywall or concrete, but bound books of periodicals organized alphabetically and chronologically.  The titles are common and obscure; I sit in the “T” section, between Tibetan Bulletin and Time Magazine.

I came in search of a cover story featuring Sears, published in Time in the late 70s/early 80s.  It’s been so long since I had to navigate through electronic library databases,  I figured it’d be easiest to ask the rosy-cheeked librarian downstairs where the old issues are kept. When I arrive in section AP .T58246, my heart sinks looking at the number of volumes I’ll have to page through to find my elusive article. Five full shelf rows. Quickly, I give in and decide to reteach myself how to use electronic databases on my laptop. I can hear myself think because the silence in the room is stark. The only noise is the humming of the fluorescent light tubes overhead and my fingers typing on the keyboard.

Aha!  Less than five minutes into my search, I have an electronic copy of the article. Still, I am in no hurry to leave.  This room holds me, time suspended, in a way I can’t articulate particularly well.  All these books.  All the writers who sat to put pen to paper or fingers to keys to preserve their thoughts and understanding of the world.  It’s overwhelming and wonderful.

I am grateful for electronic databases, libraries, and the fact that there is an old school pencil sharpener mounted to one of the walls here in Room 112.  I can’t remember the last time I saw one of those.

I am grateful for all entrepreneurs.  Especially the talented ones who are humble, unassuming, and still the hardest working of anyone in town.  They are the ones I like to give my business.

Blessed with abundant growth in the garden but lack time to manage the weeds?  Visualizing a beautiful garden, but not sure of which plants would thrive?  I got just the guy for you.  www.JosephNdour.com