“With the Passing of Time”: Poetry by Anna Miller-Tiedeman

jobs are not about everything going well.

work is God’s way of teaching us about ourselves, even though we make money doing it.

not everyone you work with is sweetness and light. There are those who seem to play gotcha just a little too often. And some days going to work is almost more than you can face. Then you begin to accept yourself as you are and life as it is.

With your head up and your eyes open,

With the grace of a human being who’s discovering what it’s like to be more fully human,

You learn that a Nobel Prize winner can say something that makes every day life a little easier.

For instance, Ilya Prigogine’s comment that we can recognize ourselves by the descriptions we give to anything.

So, you look carefully at what you say, knowing that you are describing yourself and not the other person,

whether it’s in a job evaluation or a social conversation.

You build your life learning how to own your own projections, falling down and starting over many times.

Then you start to understand that today is all you have, that life is too uncertain for plans,

that goals have a way of falling into the cracks, and becoming tomorrow’s worry.

So, you start living Life-as-Career, setting intentions,

while cooperating with life and listening to your inner wisdom.

Then you discover you have to plant your own garden, and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for others to heap bouquets of praise upon you.*

Finally, you learn that the human spirit is too precious to waste on worry about what has passed.

That all the atoms in your body were once inside a star; and, in spite of all the frustration and conflict, we’re all related-

We’re all one.

We learn and learn…with every experience we learn.

And that’s the subtle difference.