I was sitting on the top floor of my office building, staring out the giant windows across the San Francisco bay during my supposed lunch break - at 2PM. About 15 feet away sat two women, one Caucasian, another Russian. Their training course was taking a 15 minute break, and most people had stepped out of the room to stare out into the abyss.
I paid little attention, or tried not to anyway, with a lukewarm, medium cup of coffee with a mix of soy milk. I was only 20 minutes into my break, but already I was starting to feel like I was sitting back at my own cubicle. The people chatted as though everyone up there was dying to talk, while I, on the other hand, had gone up to escape all the noise.
At first the two women didn't seem to be talking about anything in particular, anything worthy of being overheard. As they trailed into the conversation, one of the two, the Russian, exclaims, thoroughly proud, because you really could hear it in her voice, "I'm use to doing 10 things at once, now I just sit in my cubicle all day - bored." She trails off a bit, and the next thing I hear is, "People in my office complain when they have one problem, I'm use to juggling 10 problems at once, and I think 'man, that's nothing'." The woman seemed only to think that she's the one able to juggle ten things at once, and I presume, and I'd presume almost correctly, that her ten things is really just a mere four or five, but in exaggerating she used ten, because ten sounds good. Maybe she didn't think that there are various sorts of people of all caliber in the work world, some able to juggle a million things, and others barely able to handle one. Yet her tone of voice seemed to suggest that she thought she's the only one able to juggle more than one, because she use to be a real estate agent. As though being a real estate agent meant that she's that much more capable than say anyone else.
If she had been talking to me about being a real estate agent, I would have proposed that being a medical doctor, physician of sorts would require that much more attention to detail, and ability to handle madness. I mean, for all it's worth, our office/cubicle work is much more tamed. The chaos that people imagine, or think they can conjure up are all within scope, yet I truly believe that nothing is more tough than having to work all shifts to save the lives of people - not being able to predict the injuries that people suffer, to come into work not knowing what you'll face. At least office work has some guidelines, or a general pattern to follow, but with medicine - everything goes.
This wasn't the only topic they breached, somehow they had changed subjects and how the "universe gives them [the negative people] what they deserve". The Russian woman again exclaims with extreme pride that she reads a lot, if the other woman couldn't tell. And she repeats a bit of knowledge, and proceeds to explain why she didn't agree with the author's logic that people don't get to choose what is dealt them.
To that I say, the woman's choice of words did her no justice.
In all seriousness, when people have a negative view on life, their views are biased towards that, so instead of, as the Russian woman would say 'the universe gives them what they deserve', the people choose to pick out the negatives in life, instead of seeing the positive. Everything in life is about choices, whether they be how people react to situations, or how they deal with failure.
People can see failure in two ways:
(1) that they've failed and that they were stupid to have tried at all, or
(2) that they can alter the way they handle a situation, so that a better outcome results - something of a second chance
This works with everything in life, as the saying goes, "if life gives you lemons, make lemonade".
The woman might have thought about it and maybe meant to express it the way that I thought she didn't, and I'm not saying she's entirely closed-minded, but her choice of words did not convey that ultimate message.
Words matter.
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