Unfinished Business

When I was interviewing for my current job, the manager called one of the other guys in to talk to me. I took one look at him and knew that I had worked with him nearly twenty years before when I was recently hired from temp to assistant. He was already in a full-fledged career and fifteen years my senior. Essentially he was the age I am now.

He didn’t remember me as we only had passing dealings and he left a month later to work for the company he still works with, my new one.

At a separate company, the one I just left, when I told the manager who I worked with he began laughing and told me that was the company he had managed before coming to this company. He managed the very division, ten people, that I just left. We never met. But the people at my old job were hired by him.

Time and space are overlapping at this new job. I don’t know if it’s my age, but I am finding myself surrounded by these sorts of coincidences on a daily basis. Granted I’ve worked for some large corporations and the business I’m in is very, very specific. But isn’t it something that a man I knew briefly at the very start of my career, would be my partner twenty years later?

That a man who hired all of my old co-workers, switched firms and then hired me away from them?

Now is where it gets truly strange. Everyone I’m surrounded with is at the top of their game (pardon the cliché). But they aren’t cocky (which is the norm in this business), they aren’t mean, and don’t cut others down for sport (once again, occupational hazard). They are all really friendly, and generous, people who say “Good morning” when you come in for the day, and ask if you want to go in for lunch, a really great group of people.

Here’s the strange part (keeping in mind the other coincidences), there are two personality types that I have difficulty with, and they aren’t the norm, just two types that undo me. I am in direct contact with something that most people wouldn’t be phased by, but normally would have me unnerved. Every single day.

But it doesn’t this time. I watch them, and look for lessons as to what I’m supposed to learn that I haven’t quite gotten yet. I can’t help but think that is it, that I am put in this very strange situation because I can’t move forward until I get this, and I’m not going to get it until I can move past it once and for all.

Weird, no? I mean, these are NOT common traits. I have met very few people who behave in these certain ways other than the originals, if you will. And now every day, there I am. There we are.

It reminds me of writing. You can run from the scenes that scare you, the scenes that you just don’t have the chops for yet, but you’re going to keep coming up against them one way or another. You can’t keep running because it only weakens your book. The only way to grow stronger is to keep at it until you get it.

As I just read in a book, the bone is strongest where the break has healed.

 

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