“If you board the wrong train, it is of no use to run along the corridor in the other direction.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Once I committed to learning a new route, I was ok being a slower mail lady doing the best she can. I came in late, but I am confident that most of the mail was delivered correctly.
Today I will do the route again, and this time, I will not go as far down the wrong road, or so I hope.
I recall the nervousness I had doing the mail the first time, and the mess inside of me, let alone looking around for the correct roads and mailboxes. This time, I remained calm inside and didn’t have expectations that were way ahead of where I should have been.
It is the expectations that get the body all worked up, not the actual job.
Somehow we expect to do the job perfectly or as swiftly as a person with 15 years of experience.
I expected to be late, to get lost, to overshoot a road or two and to reverse back to a few boxes, and I did!
I met myself exactly where I was at, and continued to be present as I searched for the correct mailbox scanning yards to see their fire number.
The first mail route I had, I cursed each box that was not identified with name and number, now this time I understood humanity, some are so beautifully marked, and many are a mystery.
The mysterious ones may not have gotten mail yesterday or perhaps someone else’s mail. We will see today which boxes have the flags up, telling me my guess was wrong!
The regular lady had tried her best to mark the unmarked, to tape up the doors of the vacant, to help those who just never got around to labeling their box, to get their mail while I am on the route.
She cares, I am not sure the others do. Part of the agreement with the Postal Service is you mark your box, give us hint, so we can match the mail in our hands to the place on the ground.
What happens is we assist others to be lazy, by learning to identify their mailbox by its uniqueness, we become familiar with no label, we allow them to not do their part.
One new recruit to backing up a route returned all mail with boxes with no numbers, you would not believe the amount that came back! He didn’t care if there was a fire number in the yard. He adhered to the rules, that the boxes must be marked clearly!
Who knew there were rules for mailboxes!
Well I am off today to learn to identify those that are mysterious and soon they will not be mysterious at all, but rather clearly marked in my head as being the correct one.
How often do we let things slide and just consider that ok because to make others stand up and do their job is harder, so we let them slide and then train the next person to let it slide, until we are all sliders!
Surely we can’t blame the sliders, for it takes two to tango!
