My job, My plans for future

As the busy season at work is dwindling down my afternoons are becoming longer with less to do, so I find myself thinking of things to write about. I am a buyer for a small manufacturing company, our business is Ag related so our busy season starts around September and ends in June, my primary purpose the afternoons is to answer questions or contact people for the answer to those questions, once in a while there is odd emergency order that needs to be place but for the most part not a lot happens. I don’t hate my job or the company I work for, they have been good to me over the years, they were big enablers in the later days of my active alcoholism and have defiantly support my recovery, they have let me take time off when I had stuff going on with my daughter, they provide a comfortable living and are easy to get a long with.

I have been reading some different blog’s lately and notice a common thread and that is not being truly happy in their jobs. This is something I can relate to and for the same reason, people and their attitudes and actions. For me what has happen is the long I stay sober and the more my spirituality grows the less I can justify working with people who’s words and actions go against my spiritual principles. Every morning I have to have a little time for pray and mediation because as soon as I walk into my office I am surrounded by negative energy. My boss has bent over backwards for me over the 10 years that we have work in the same office together but he is a very negative and pessimistic person. I will not and can not repeat his words of profanity and vulgarity, the demeaning way he talks about salesmen, engineers and others who don’t see things his way, yes he is selfish and centered to the max, he is also a sexist and racist. A couple of people in production are the type who are never wrong, everything they do is bigger and better, everything wrong that happens is someone else’s fault, anyone who makes a mistake that effects then is a idiot (that is a mild term) one of these guys works outside my door so I hear him quite a bit and the other comes into my office at break or for no other reason than just to BS with the boss. The rest of the employees are decent with the garden variety personalities. I have been in the manufacturing profession for 16 years with only one previous employer. The headaches of sales order ship dates not matching component lead times, the greedy emphasis on monthly ship goals, inventory errors, vendor errors, the fighting and back stabbing between departments has taken me to a point where I am ready to make a career change and one into a totally different direction. I am grateful for the spiritual opportunities I have received because of my mental conflicts at work. Because of my boss, I have learned to mediate at my desk or step outside and mediate, I have learned to hear and see nature on my trips outside, he has helped me to control my own foul month and work on Right Speech more strongly, to more closely evaluate my morals and ethics and work hard on correcting the errors in them, he has taught me to sit silently and not get caught up in the game, he has given me more opportunities to practice living the 12 steps of recovery and Buddhism than he will ever know. The 2 co-workers have taught me to think more about interdependence and radical acceptance so that I don’t start to mentally slaughter them with the double edged sword in my mind. I have learned to accept where I work and I am in no huge hurry to leave, I am not a huge risk taker and think things completely through before I make a huge life change, today’s economy isn’t safe enough to not think ahead.

One of the paths on the Eightfold Path is Right Livelihood. The worst thing that can be said bout my company when it comes to the effect it has on the environment, society and the world as a whole is that the product we makes assist in the application of harmful chemicals that are applied on crop fields. You will find negative and spiritually unhealthy people in most jobs, unless you work totally alone and then sometimes you are stuck with a negative and sick person too, so the personalities are not a big deal in Right Livelihood. I have stayed in this part of rural Nebraska for my daughter and parents. This is a great area for raising a child on your own even if that child gets into trouble it would have been worse in a larger city. My parents are elderly and my dad transcended last November, I have done what I could to assist them over the years. Now that dad is gone my mother is doing alright because she doesn’t have the extra burden of having to care for dad. Also my oldest sister said she would start assisting mom more. My daughter graduates from high school on the 17th of May and by the end of summer she will be out on her own completely, her plans are to move to Denver and attend massage therapy college, as much as I hate to see her and my grandbaby move that far away it is time she starts her own path in life with all the ups and downs. If she does go to Denver she will have to learn to take care of her own problems because dad won’t be handy to bail her out or fix something which will be good for me also. I have no interest or reason to move to Denver. At one time in my life I liked big cities but over the last few years I have become more and more Countrified, I like the slower pace, I like my open fields. My intensions are to move to Lincoln; Lincoln is bigger than where I live now, with ethnic restaurants, specialty shops, a bohemian community, a Zen temple, lots of AA meetings and a strong recovery community in general. I have quite a few friends down there so the transition won’t be too hard, plus I am fairly familiar with Lincoln. Job wise I want to use my talents for speech, insightfulness, positive attitude, experience as a recovered alky, to a practicing alky whose actions cause his daughter to become a ward of the state and more, to a recovered alky again whose life outstanding and whose daughter life is extremely better also. Lincoln has a lot of halfway house and group homes; there are also a few treatment centers there also. I do not want to be a counselor, I have seen too many recovered alcoholics and addicts go into counseling and suffer from burnout because they spent too much time working on others and stopped taking care of themselves. I just want to be around to assist where I can and give something back whether it be with new people in recovery or troubled kids, to me this is the proper use of the Dharma and 12 steps.

So that is my spiel about my job and what I hope to achieve in the future. First off I need to make some minor repairs to my house so can put it on the market for sale, once that is done I can use the money live on while I find a job in Lincoln and a place to live.