While I expect a lot of people, (so I’m told) I am not naturally irritated and impatient with
people. But when I am, it is a clue. I’ve been a bit annoyed lately.

I’ve noticed a pattern. Someone is talking about their work and how hard it is and how they’re
just not sure they want to do it and definitely not sure they want more responsibility and
wouldn’t it be better if they had more “work-life balance” and also, they don’t want to be like
_____ (fill in the blank with any obnoxious person they ever had to work for).

I hear all of this and think, “you would have more of what you want if you stepped up and led.”
Instead I see quite a bit of stepping back. Retreating and then entreating others to change
things.

Leaders. Needed.

I think work life balance is a crazy myth. As if work and life existed in two separated buckets.
They don’t. You’re spending a great deal of your life working. Make it count. Make it
meaningful.

Do your accounting over time. The books will balance over the course of your life, not the
course of a day.

You don’t care for certain conditions and standards? You wish your agency, company, program,
institution functioned differently? The way things change is you step up and lead. Means taking
more responsibility so that you become the standard setter.

Work dictates work. I find it hard to comprehend the way some folks approach work. I think of
the stories of my great grandmothers. They sewed, cleaned, raised their kids and the food their
families ate. They cooked and cleaned and ran the home and their farms and households and
I’m pretty sure they had no notions of balance. They did what had to be done when it needed
doing. This the kind of discipline that demands we align ourselves with the call of responsibility.
We do it when it needs doing.

Now, I’m not sure what’s going on, but the commitments to work seem so fragile and tenuous
and conditional. So many boundaries and attempts to make it so small in your life until you’ve
shrunk it to something not even worth your time.

I look at you and think “you’re bigger than the space you’ve allowed yourself.”

We grow from commitment and responsibility. Where there’s a cause and commitment to
something larger than our own comfort and individual interest, there’s also a pull to grow our
experiences, skills, understanding. Our grasp of the world expands as we move toward
challenges.

There is fear beneath all these attempts to shrink our ties to work. Fear of destructive effort
that eats our lives. The worry that we’ll be compulsively consumed by agendas that lack any
meaning.

I get that.

But don’t let that fear keep you from meaningful commitment to work that matters to you.
Don’t let fear strip you from the opportunity to use your talent, skill and abilities. The world
needs you. To lead. Go be good for the world.

And be like my great grandmothers. Plant when it’s time to plant. Harvest when it’s time to
harvest. Let the work and the season pull you along.

As usual I wrote this for me and maybe for you too.

Love, Angela