Don't Miss It

The other night, maybe a couple weeks ago, I had just gotten home from the beach and was catching up on a few things, very focused on ticking things off the growing 'to do' list. All of a sudden I looked up and saw the sky outside and suddenly heard the lines in my head from the beginning of Joan Didion's Democracy: "The sky was this pink no painter could approximate, one of the detonation theorists used to try, a pretty fair Sunday painter, he never got it. Just never captured it, never came close..."

I ran to the roof to snap a picture - just catching it - as a few moments later the sun sank past the horizon, and the moment had passed.

For the past month I've been busy in the adventure of starting a new job, where everything is completely new. I absolutely love it...and everything is completely new.

Between the cultural shift in moving from fast moving start-ups and project based agencies to a large, global organization, and simply learning an entire new language and depth of understanding around 'what we do', my days have been pretty action packed just mainly learning the ropes (and dealing with all the HR and admin processes). I was very focused on wrapping my head around everything the first couple of weeks, agency style -- what's the problem, what's the solution, what's the action plan -- when others would laugh and say "You're not going to get this in a week! It takes months, years. This is complicated stuff..."

I had a meeting scheduled with the New York director and he came into my office a bit earlier than expected, where I was somewhat wild eyed from sorting out staff issues, navigating 'the system' and just figuring out which end was up. I showed him the flow chart we created to plot the work we were doing and he dismissed it a bit saying "I know you're getting everything figured out. It takes time."

What he wanted to talk to me about instead was the fact he was happy I scheduled a trip to Shelter Island to visit one of our preserves, to meet some scientists and see shellfish restoration first hand (vs. just reading about it). "Connecting to this, connecting to nature, that's what will sustain and refresh you," he said. He spoke of his experience in different countries over 15 years, dealing with various matters and trustees and essentially wanted to make sure I didn't miss the point of what we're doing --- didn't miss what we're actually in this for.

"We must go see for ourselves."

Don't miss it.