I realize that whenever other people talk about work, it’s not very interesting to the person listening.  Well, this week, a very interesting thing happened at work that I thought was worth sharing.  I’ll be short, I promise 🙂

To put it simply, I was back in my office when my boss came and just sat down on the seat beside me.  Since we have a fairly close office environment, I didn’t think this was strange so I asked him what was up.  “Just checking to see how everything was going”, he said.  To me, that meant that I was supposed to rattle off a list of everything that I’d been working on lately (in an effort to justify to myself and prove to him that I was keeping myself busy).  However, after lots of me talking I realized very soon this was not the case.

See, even though he was asking me “how is everything going”, it was a question he expected in return.  When I finally caught on, he admitted that he wasn’t himself lately, that he felt like he was being short with everybody in the office and that he had been in an overall bad mood.  Since this was 100% correct, we joked that he was on his “man period” and got a good laugh out of it. But at the heart of it, he said something like, “I just don’t want to be known for the man that was cool in his 30s, but not fun at all in his 40s”.

Of course, I really think his “funk” is for the most part temporary, even if he was scared it was permanent.  In my opinion (which I told him), it was likely the affects of piled on stress and the result of him taking work everywhere with him.

But this conversation did get me to thinking that no matter how buttoned up we all think we are, we all want to make a lasting impression in this world.  We want meaning, we want people to look at our lives with admiration, and we want to feel that we left an impact when it is all said and done.

And even though I have trouble communicating this, I feel that this desire “to be known for something” is just one more reason to live for God.