Value

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

 In the months prior to my leaving my bus driving job, the person who is the department head (I hate having a boss, but that's a discussion for another time) and I have had more than one conversation in which she she told me just how much she appreciated all that I brought to our program.

Invariably my response was that I did understand how appreciated I was , however, appreciation was not reflected in my paycheck. My paycheck speaks to value and I needed to be valued as much as I was appreciated.

More often that not, these conversations became supercharged and over heated.

Being appreciated is nice.

Bottom line, for me anyway, was in the words made famous in the film Jerry Maguire, show me the money!

Show me the money and show me the love are all too often the intertwined,

particularly in work situations.

Understandably, she had a budget to work with.

No matter how much she appreciated me, her hands were tied by budgetary constraints.

I may, and more likely was, deserving of better compensation.

Unfortunately, her charge was to hire a bus driver, more specifically a part time one.

It wasn't to employ someone with all of the strengths, experience, abilities and sechel*

that I brought to the table .

(* sechel- a Yiddish expression meaning ,knowledge, smarts or even wisdom )

This was made clearer to me while filling out paperwork to try and collect unemployment (don't even ask about this bureaucratic nightmare).

Once again. no matter how much good I brought to the program and department or for that matter the entire community, she needed a bus driver, and a part time one at that.

We're talking many thousands of dollars.

And while those many thousands of dollars were a mere rounding error in the grand scheme of the overall budget, cutting where possible means cutting wherever possible, including sacrificing appreciation as well as over all value.

In the end, the strain between the two, my value and how appreciated I was, became an unmanageable divide.

It certainly made living with the man I faced in the mirror each morning unbearable.

My humility has always led me to turn a blind eye to my self worth, including my value.

In this instance, humility be damned, the man in the mirror won out.