Missions and Mantras

I started my new job last week!!  

And there was much rejoicing!

 Not only did this give me a reason to put on mascara and actually speak aloud before 3 pm (ah, the joys of living alone in a new city), but it's going to be a really really cool job.  Filled with inspiring colleagues, daunting challenges, and some serious street-cred.  In our busy week of orientations, meetings, and team-building activities, they managed to carve out some time for us to think about our Personal Mission Statements.  This fellowship is definitely one where they Capitalize Meaningful Things because we are the Future of Classical Music and we are going to Carry the Torch, etc, etc.  I've crafted mission statements, vision statements, even weird abstract metaphor statements before.  My best being, "I am the hiking trail that celebrates the journey."  Yah.

Surprised you didn't recognize me.  Geez.

So I was right there ready to go with my big ol' vision statement to Save the Human Race by helping people learn to pay attention to beautiful things (like classical music!) for long stretches of time.  And I believe in this vision, truly I do, it's why I practice my horn, it's why I perform and interact with people, it's why I get up in the morning.  It "resonates" with me, as pretentious arts consultants like to say.

But I must say, my mind was awakened this week by a fellow colleague's mission statement.  When asked to share in our small groups, this colleague admitted their big dream was not to be uber-successful, uber-effective, or even uber-artistic (random aside: Does anyone else feel Uber without umlaut would be a good name for a cow?), but their personal mission was in fact to be "happy, relaxed, and productive."  Those last two words really struck me.  Relaxed?  Yep, I like that.  Productive?  Totally what I aim for every minute of every day, it seems like.  But the combination of the two?  Whoa.

I seriously have never considered relaxed and productive to be anything but mutually exclusive.  And this whole week, I've been thinking about how little relaxation I bring into my productivity.  My whole day is divided into times for cutting loose (like now, when I'm drinking a beer and listening to my Broncos get beat) or working hard (like my 6 mile run this afternoon).  And of course, relaxation occasionally creeps into productivity, but I don't conciously aim to unite these two states.  But why in the hell not?  I totally should.  And not because it'll make me more productive (which I'm pretty sure is true), but because Quality of Life counts for something.  And at a certain point, you gotta ignore the sands slipping through the hourglass and just...enjoy.

And bust a move.  Did I mention that?

So thanks, wiser-colleague-than-I.  I'm off on my two-year mission to save humanity.  And chill.