The leaping heart is the starting point.

 

ABOVE ^ July 2018, me in my second month as BOOK's Lady, and Big Boss

I. "There are no 'difficult people.' People are difficult."

I'm reflecting, as I prepare to interview for a new job, by looking back at blog posts on l'astronave from 2018, my first year at the thrift store:
gugeo.blogspot.com/2018

My God! The WORK--energy, thought, love, effort––I put into it!

When I'd started volunteering there six years ago (February 2018), I was meeting with a job coach.
I'd written:

"Lots going on lately, by my standards. 
Besides toy photography () and seeing the job coach, who tells me interesting stories from her life and recommends novels (I'm halfway through Moonglow, by Michael Chabon--good call on her part), I've been working (unpaid) practically half-time at the thrift store.

"Going to the job coach made me realize I'd like to work at the store (as paid staff)––the place is chaotic, it'd be a big pain of a job, and getting it would be a long shot anyway, because they have no budget
––but I fit the place and believe in its mission (feed the hungry, clothe the naked, etc.), so I went ahead anyway and told the manager I'd like to work there.

I'm worried about my ability to deal with difficult people but take heart at the job coach's reminder:
"There are no 'difficult people.' People are difficult."

As for making changes, reentering a workplace, she said:
"You need commitment and perseverance.
And you will feel very uncomfortable."
_________________________

II. Socially Isolated

The SAME as I feel NOW, I'd also been thinking and writing about feeling socially isolated---and about resilience!
I'd been writing on contract for the publisher since my mother's death fifteen years earlier--and I hadn't fully reattached to people, socially. At least, not face to face:
For my final book, which I'd recently finished, I'd been totally immersed in online FANDOM for a year.

BELOW: In April 2018, I went to a library convention in Dallas to present on a panel:

I'd written:
"I see how socially isolated I've become. For a bunch of reasons, I undermined my natural tendencies to socialize.
But it's not something I can build back up in a moment, with a dramatic act of will. It's more like remembering to drink water.

"You don't build resilience by forcing yourself to look on the bright side. It's more about gaining a set of skills--boring and sometimes hard to practice--like. . .  honestly, little things like drinking water throughout the day, or eating some peanuts when your blood sugar drops. Or turning down invitation to go to a movie with friends if you don't want to go. Or getting up the gumption to ask someone to a movie.

"I'm really pleased that I took a small but huge step of volunteering at SVDP. I go to my first shift this morning, and then tomorrow I interview the facilitator of the Refugee Welcoming Committee for the  article I'm writing for the store's newsletter.

"It's amazing what that little stuff can do for mood. It's not little in importance, any more than bricks in a wall are."

III. The leaping heart
I'd looked up the etymology of reslience--with a surprising reference:

1. resilience (n.): "act of rebounding," from Latin re- "back" + salire "To jump, leap"
 
2. salient
Used in Middle English as an adjective meaning "leaping, skipping."
The meaning "prominent, striking", 1840, from salient point (1670s)--Latin punctum saliens, going back to Aristotle's writings--refers to the heart of an embryo, which seems to leap, hence, the "starting point" of anything.

3."The heart of an embryo"?!

"The heart is the first organ to function within an embryo–– starting when the growing embryo's nutritional and oxygen requirements can no longer be met by the placenta."
[about 4 weeks in humans ]

This picture of a the heart here, of a  mouse embryo, was created by Dr Laura Pastorelli at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR).  

The heart here is at the "looping stage". The organ starts as a single tube before looping round itself. At a later stage in development, the heart tube fuses, forming the four chambers of the heart.
___________________________
IV. BOOK's Lady Begins

ABOVE: in the parking lot of the thrift store--I've just put on the Library Thing T-shirt that store regular BJ had given me.
A few years later, I'd help BJ in her last months living with lung cancer.

At the end of May 2018, I wrote:

"Yesterday the manager [Big Boss] asked me if I'd like to replace the paid, part-time worker who processes book donations.

"I enthusiastically said yes.
We'll meet next week to talk about pay and hours and stuff.
I expect it's minimum wage-- $10/hour, like GoodWill-- but I don't care. I can supplement it with my father's house money.

"You may remember that when I started working at GW last summer, I thought I might stay there until I retired (at 75?). The management was so awful, I didn't make it through the summer.

"This store is screwy in its own way, for sure! but I've already been there 3+ months and I CAUTIOUSLY could imagine staying there a long time.
Especially if I actively pursue my plan for get better at tolerating uncomfortable/unpleasant emotions that arise from close contact with my species."

In July I wrote to a friend:
"I am sometimes deliriously happy in this job, sometimes I just feel overwhelmed.
While I LOVE that it's the opposite of corporate thrift stores, where I worked last summer, with their stranglehold of rules, the lack of much in the way of organization means you're constantly fighting the Avalanche of Entropy . . . with a spoon. But it's a vintage silver spoon!"

I was pouring out real love, and feeling real joy, but already it was a bit out of balance. In my first summer I wrote: "In theory I don't mind working almost full-time for half-time pay, but in reality, I sense resentment starting to flicker around the edges... "

Within a few more months, I was also writing about how exploitative the store was of vulnerable, impoverished, and old workers:

"Worst of all in my eyes, most everyone who works there is working-part-time,  minimum-wage, no-benefits, and is a middle-aged and older person living below the poverty line.
A coworker told me he doesn't eat at Subway because they're too expensive."

This never changed.

BELOW: Filthy, greasy toaster oven, one of the "daffy donations" I photographed in my first months at the thrift store, 2018


BELOW: A favorite of mine, August 2018--part of a books-into-movies display.
People laughed at my annotations, but no one wanted to pay 49¢ for this "atrociously written" book.

V. "Where we have found ourselves alive together"

I started at the store when I was 56, about to turn 57. Now I'm 62, about to turn 63--next month.
Around my 57th birthday, I'd posted this quote Auntie Vi photographed and emailed me, an invitation to "accept this mission of living fully" (I don't know where she found it):

"Regardless of how often we forget or what we wish were true, this life does fly by in an instant. And in the stretch of that instant, we are given the opportunity to celebrate––to love fully, to live fully, to express fully the joys and the sorrows of the heart.

"If we accept this mission of living fully, it is incumbent upon us to dance on beaches and prairies and mountaintops, to sing in forests and backyards and city streets, and to make art in the nooks and crannies of this planet earth where we have found ourselves alive together.

"We have also been given the task by the great powers that be to let go, over and over again, to surrender to God's will, to the Tao, to the Way Life Is. And as we surrender and behold this universe of infinite and fleeting creation, we will resound with a great hallelujah. And then we will say, 'Amen.'"

Now, I'd say that for all the . . .  discomfort I've felt at the store, I DID reattach to people there, with all our difficulties (so very extra on display in the 2020s!).
And as I look to move on to a new adventure, I am the better for having looped my heart around the mission of living fully in my work.

This post from summer 2018 is one of my earliest good encounters--
gugeo.blogspot.com/2018/07/winter-is-coming.html
I'd found for Mr Furniture a copy of a book he'd been wanting since the Powers That Be took it from him in prison in 1970: