What Gets You to Feel “Connected”?

When you are a busy person, sometimes its hard to connect with your spouse, your kids, your morning workout or even a good book.  We often fly through the day checking things off the list.  I do, especially when I am juggling a lot of things in my life.

Recently I’ve been aware that I haven’t been “connecting” in certain areas of my life.  When starting a business, the juggling happens weekly, daily, moment by moment.  I try to keep balance by rotating between to-do lists – personal, home, operations, marketing, build-out, etc.  At the end of the day I derive a lot of satisfaction from checking things off the lists.  But did I really “enjoy” the process during the day?

This past week, I realized that I needed to spend some extra time in the café and actually do some projects with my two hands.  With a long list of meetings that day, and the usual background buzz of power tools, I questioned whether or not I could get some thinking time while I worked on a project.  Everyone had left for the day, and I chose an old bookshelf that we had ripped out of the beverage area and used for storage and staining baseboards for the past few weeks.

In the newfound quiet, I started cleaning the pieces and noticing the different types of wood that were used in its construction.  It fit so perfectly in the place we removed it from that I suspected it was hand-made, and wondered about the stories it could tell.

Just then, I heard a knock on the kitchen wall and a soft, “helloooo.”  I yelled “I’m back here in the kitchen.”   The man introduced himself as Bruce, the husband of a woman I do yoga with.  He and his wife are cheesemakers, and since he comes to Sylva each month for acupuncture treatments, he stopped by to introduce himself.

I took him out front to show him what we were doing and he asked, “What happened to the shelves that were right here?”  I told him that was what I was working on and he asked to see it.  Turns out that Bruce made those shelves 15 years ago.  He was wondering how they had held up since they built it on a budget.

After Bruce left, I felt even more connected to this piece, knowing the love that it had been created with.  My mind started thinking about all the stories of all the people who had owned businesses there before, worked there, or customers who had enjoyed themselves there.  I finished the shelves, and we installed them on the other side of the dining room the next day – it was beautiful.  That experience helped me connect to the facility part of the café, and made me even more aware of my need to connect and be present in every area of my life.

Noticing Joy through Connecting,

Bernadette

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