In my Wisdom Wednesday series, I’ll eventually do a post about the difference I see between what I call “black & white” thinkers and “grey area” thinkers. (Myers-Briggs has 16 classifications. True Colors has 4. Hamology basically only has 2!)
One big aspect of this difference is that are those who think there are hard boundaries between a person’s work and personal life and those who realise that is impossible.
Well, maybe not impossible if the “box” of your life is narrow and you rarely go out, don’t volunteer, don’t read the news and don’t engage with the world, I guess that may be true.
But after spending a weekend at the Sask NDP Convention as a CUPE delegate, it only reinforced how intertwined various aspects of our lives are – personal and professional, political and voluntary, friends and foes. (And how, at the end of the day, all six of those things are political – whether you think so or not.)
In the course of a weekend, I heard about the Sask Party’s attacks on the education and healthcare systems. I heard about their abuse of the Notwithstanding Clause and how it would affect some of the most marginalized children in the province (including one of my son’s best friends who would’ve been impacted directly if these rules were in place when that friend announced they were transgender three years ago when they graduated from grade eight and were preparing to move to high school.
During the weekend, I talked to MLAs and City Councillors and they talked to me about what’s happening at the library and in my life.
She never attended an NDP convention in her life but I talked to numerous people who knew my mother because of her long nursing career spent in Indian Head and being actively involved with SUN.
I bumped into people who I knew through CUPE’s role representing the library’s workers.
I got texts from coworkers asking how the convention was going.
I bumped into someone who works at Queensbury Center who I had helped multiple times at the library.
Someone else asked if I was still working at the last branch they saw me at (I am not.)
I spent much of Sunday responding to trolls that are probably 90% bots after one of my tweets went mini-viral (yeah, I know – don’t feed the trolls!) 😉
I skipped some NDP social events to go for drinks with another group of incredibly progressive people I enjoy spending time with and learning from.
And I heard and saw things – about homelessness and minimum wage, reading scores and poverty, addictions and immigration – that are part of my work every single day at the library.
