dreaming

When I read the Dr. Seuss book Oh the Places You'll Go! I celebrated that it was full of encouragement for young people as they dreamt the places they would go. I never dreamt of course of the roller coaster ride called “Looking-for-work”. It is a challenge to plump one’s ego sufficiently before leaving the house for an interview, if you’re lucky enough to get one. Only to nurse that ego along with creative reasoning as you wait to hear if you can move on to the next step in screening boot camp, jump the next hurtle that could move you closer to being hired. All the while trying to dream up plan M or T if this position doesn’t work out.

It’s an atmosphere where dependable allegiances are rare because the people I know and would call to make connection for possible employment worry about losing their jobs too. It’s hard not to take it personally and feel like I’m poison. When in actuality the atmosphere is poisoned. There seems to me to be a fear in the workplace—all workplaces that is more pervasive than the expansive dreams that Dr. Seuss encouraged us to dream. In my experience pastoring local churches, when finances and future are threatened people do not turn to expansiveness and creativity. They, instead, try to invent the wheel again and again. They turn to what used to work; what used to make sense when they were doing and growing and all was right with the world. Fitting the corporate culture and following the rules institutions have targeted as keys to their survival are keys to getting the job. Thinking outside of the box may be completely passé unless; of course that is the true corporate culture and not just lip service.

To dream of a place to go and work, I find myself needing to practice increasing clarity about who I am as a human being and where my true value lies It’s a much different me than the woman who first picked up and read Oh the Places You'll Go!. I also need to be savvy or at least knowledgeable about .not only the institutions/corporation where I dream of working, I also need awareness of our current cultural climate which creates an un/underemployed class to survive. The dreams of surviving that sustain the un/underemployed are the same dreams that sustain big corporations in their practices. It’s going to take people who can dream creatively to break up this road block. .