It's not about speed

At my work at L'Arche, one of my responsibilities is shredding confidential documents for our community leader. It's a somewhat tedious task, unless I ask for help. Then I'm never quite sure what will happen.

The first time I asked one of our core members for assistance, "Thomas" was more than willing. The Community Leader and I invited him into her office, where I was supposed to be doing some filing while she went elsewhere to take a conference call. Not too surprisingly, I didn't get any filing done. Instead I spent the afternoon affirming what excellent work Thomas was doing, occasionally unjamming the shredder, and answering the same questions many times over. In the end, Thomas left the office quite pleased with himself, and I enjoyed my time with him even though I accomplished next to nothing. His happiness was worth it. When I commented to my boss that I hadn't finished the filing, she laughed and said, "Welcome to L'Arche, Maria."

When I arrived at work last Friday afternoon solely to get in an hour of shredding, I learned that "Sandy" had spent part of the morning helping the Office Administrator with hers. I asked Sandy if she wanted to help me during the afternoon. "Yes," was her immediate response, and she took my hand and led me upstairs to the offices, not letting go for a minute. I told her she could sit in the "community leader's chair," since my boss was away at the time, and I moved the shredder into her office, where my pile of shredding was waiting.

What I didn't realize was that Sandy would gather and bring everyone else's shredding with her, but no matter. The two of us got to it. At first it was very slow going, as she fed one or two papers at a time into the machine. Aware that I only had an hour and a half to finish the job, I decided to see if I could speed up the process by handing over a dozen or so pages at a time. It worked; my friend shredded them without comment, then reached for the next bundle.

We went on like that for about a half hour, making great progress... until the shredder quit, the little status window shouting, OVERHEATED. PLEASE WAIT. We hadn't even touched my fairly significant pile of shredding yet.

Sandy looked at me for a moment, then said, "Paper, please." I handed her some of the paper we were intending to shred, and using the blank sides, she began to write her name and the names of her family in large print, one name per page, and put it into her "outbox." She was taking her position as "community leader" very seriously, doing very important work, making the most of her time while we waited for the shredder to say READY.

I, on the other hand, had nothing else planned since I'd already done the week's filing, so I waited, watching my friend, her unhurried work making me wonder. Sandy, who does everything at pretty much the same pace, wasn't fazed by the overheated shredder, but I was feeling impatient and somewhat frustrated because I realized there was no way the job was going to be done before it was time for me to move on. Until I got involved, Sandy would have been content to shred two pieces of paper at a time, but I pushed paper more quickly, and probably pushed the shredder to its limit much sooner than Sandy would have. Besides that, I couldn't help but have the sense that, had we raced through the rest of the shredding at my pace, she would have been disappointed to finish early. For her, life is not about speed.

But for so many of us, it is. We complete one job and race to the next without taking any pleasure in a job well done, or in anything, for that matter.

As someone who wants to live simply, more appreciatively, and with less stress, I could take a few pages from Sandy. And not just literally.