Spirit of the Ninja

Introduction: The following was written November 2009 and posted February 2010. Better late than never. Read on and beware.
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My world is gray. Lots of crisscrossing gray threads that make the canvas stretched across the gray plastic frame of my cubicle.

My cube. That box with no cover that I sit in for 6-9 hours a day 5 days a week. (Only 6 hours on Friday.)

40+ hours a week
80+ hours a pay period (Might as well just leave it at 80 since that's all I get paid for. The bittersweet reality of the salaried employee.)
1 phone
1 computer that some dude from IS named BANKRUPT (I kid you not, it's labeled and everything.)
1 printer

and me...all together in one gray box.

Sounds a little lonely, huh?

Well, I already wrote a blog about loneliness, and I think I'll let that stand for the the time being.

This is about gray. Smoke. Rubber. Well-used blackboards. Old movies.

Sometimes conversation can even be gray. Like that single cloud that followed Eeyore wherever he went on an otherwise sunny day.

He talks. You talk. She talks. They talk. We talk. The sun is shining outside, I've seen it through the glass door with the heavy tint that makes the outside world look a lot like Kansas in Wizard of Oz before Dorothy lands after the cyclone and opens the front door.

It's good that there are doors out of those gray places. Sometimes they're hard to find. Then you learn to use them regularly, like at lunchtime.

The office where I work is divided into two main areas separated by real walls and a dark, fireproof door. Employee Relations and Benefits (my domain) are on one side of the door, while Recruitment and Placement are on the other side. I'm preparing to cross over. (By the time I post this, it will probably already have happened.) Now, I hesitate to call one side of the door more "gray" than the other, because that gives you the impression that one side is worse than the other. It's easy for gray to feel pretty negative.
But no matter how much I want to avoid it, I have to admit that I have felt so gray on one side of that door, that I'm really hoping the other side will be a little sunnier. I hope I'm sunnier.

That's just it. A sunnier me.

I remember a family friend, the pastor of the church where I grew up, who used to say, "Where you are doesn't really matter much, because wherever you go, there you are."

Wherever we go, along tags the baggage.

And it's all in the gray matter. In the cranium, el cerebro, where the freaking marbles get lost and found.

I was recently talking with my mom about my job, some decisions I've already made and others I'm looking forward to. At a pause in the conversation, a question popped into my head, "Mom, what are you amazed by?"

"You," she said to me. "I'm amazed that I've known you for so long and never realized just how analytical, just how thoughtful you are. I don't know how, but I never realized how relentless your reasoning can be."

Sarah the Thinker. That's me. The blessed curse.

"I think, therefore I am."

Thank you, Descartes. For what? Not really sure.
Some of those philosophers had some interesting things to say, I suppose. And interesting can be a drug, and like any other drug, it can replace substance with emptiness and a lot of gray.

To sum things up thus far, I've spent a fair portion of the last four months of my life in a state of significant discomfort and dissatisfaction with my job, my work, and my effort (not to mention other various factors). I try to blame it on the gray cubicle or my BANKRUPT computer, but it all comes back to me. It really is just a matter of attitude, right? Suck it up. Figure it out. No, don't figure it out. Just do it.

I try to tell myself that it's all a choice. True?
Why is it that certain shades of gray are so much easier to choose?

[If you're still hanging on to the disintegrating thread holding the ideas in this blog together, congratulations! I don't know about you, but I'm pretty much over it.]

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I'm crossing over through that door, that fireproof one I mentioned about 150 words ago, from Benefits to Recruitment. And I'm excited about it.
More than being excited about Recruitment, I'm excited for change. A different shade of gray.

This brings me to an almost entirely unrelated question: What does the spirit of the ninja mean to you?

Dominic and Ben, two of the recruiters I work with, think Andrew, another guy in our office, is "like a ninja." He's quiet and Asian and moves through the office in ways often imperceptible to the human eye until it's too late...and he's standing right next to you with paperwork in his hand and a question on the tip of his tongue.

This behavior has led to ninja references, ninja jokes, ninja impressions, and ultimately ninja forwards.

Allow me to share:

Ninja Forward #1:



Ninja Forward #2:



Final Destination: Ninja News.

On November 18th, Ben e-mailed us the following link.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,575463,00.html?test=latestnews

The headline reads: Man Who Said He Was a Ninja Impaled on Fence in Failed Jump.

All Ben had to say was: "I don't make this crap up!"

So, on to Recruitment. New colleagues. And ninjas.
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Oh, the moral of the blog, you ask?

1) When things look gray, check your own baggage.

2) Watch out for ninjas. They're everywhere...if you want them to be?
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Oh, the moral of the blog, again, you ask?

I answer you with some questions: As we live this journey, where does the gray end and the morals begin? When do we stop seeing the shadows of who we desire to be, shed the chains of Plato's cave, and walk in the light of God? What kind of extraordinary faith does it take to be faithful in ordinary ways?

In short, most of our lives are blogs that never get revised.