There are sometimes in life when you think you know what you want, and then after a while, you realize it would have been all wrong, and what you did want you now don't really want at all. And you're happy that what you thought you wanted to happen didn't actually happen because what you thought you wanted was based on a belief you had that was actually rooted in falsity, and though your belief was pure, it was also wrong.
Every once in a while I think to myself, maybe if I wasn't serving, I would miss it. Maybe I just want to spend time focusing on something negative to distract me from whatever I am not wanting to focus on. This is not the case. The example above is not what's going on here at all.
Nope. I really and truly don't want to be serving. Food. To people. At night.
My coworkers have different agendas. My friend from the Czech republic has a mortgage to pay. Another has a daughter, another a new apartment to move into, and my El Salvadorian buddy a house payment in Maryland. I have, er, none of those things.
My mom teases me that I am tight...I will see a dress I like, stew over it, try it on, like it, carry it around the store, and then return it to its place on the rack. "Just buy it, Meredith," she will tell me. But I don't just do things. I think about the decision, a lot, first. And I think it's this same hesitancy to just buy things that has kept me out of adopting for myself responsibilities that will keep me places I don't want to be.
What I have realized through my serving, waitressing, {whatever label you want to give them experiences} is this: most people are doing it for the money. They are enduring because, at the end of the night, you walk away with cash in your pocket, and it's more per hour than the wage most college graduates sitting in an office will see on the paycheck they get bi-weekly.
That's not the case for me. It's the way I purchase dresses and organize unattachables that led me into a restaurant. Simply put, freedom. No one says I can't have a day off. I am not chained to a desk, and if it's slow, it's the custom for someone to leave early, not a fireable offense. It's the flexible culture of the service industry that landed me there, not the promise of pay.
So when I am at work, and not wanting to be, it's like an itch underneath the most sensitive part of my skin. I look around, and want to escape the walls with the force of a lioness about to attack, after starving in the midst of a famine. I look at my co-workers, who are looking up and down and all around the walls, and I think, how are they still here? And then I think about their mortgages, their children, their car payments, rent, and the like. In their moments of escape, their mind must wander back to responsibility, which grounds a person, and brings them back to reality. They will walk away with the needed cash in their pocket at the night's end.
I walk away, headed for the bus, with my head and feet still in the clouds not visible at night, thankful for change and challenge, new experiences, and life's never ending possibilities.
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