Thoughts from a “shadow”

Today for my internship I got to shadow a high-up Policy person at the Capital, and it was great! For starters, the woman I was shadowing is simply amazing – she’s in constant motion convening meetings, asking questions, giving orders, and cracking jokes. She moved so fast that a few times she lost her “shadow” :) But it was really a neat experience to watch this brilliant woman at work. She’s a small woman in the tall men’s world of politics, but whenever she is in a room she holds people’s attention and respect. And while considering all of these weighty issues, she’s still able to have fun. Very impressive.

Today happened to be a day when she was absolutely booked, and so I went to back-to-back meetings with her all day. The breadth and depth of material covered in these meetings surprised me, and gave me a new understanding of how interconnected everything really is. She is a Policy person, so in some meetings we hammered out details of how best to administer the nuts and bolts of a certain policy. But in other meetings we strategized how to get legislation passed, and still other meetings were about the PR campaign for getting the public on-board. Sometimes all of these elements were discussed in the same meeting! So it was just really interesting for me to see how all of these pieces are inseparable, and that to be effective at this level you have to be able to integrate multiple approaches to a given issue and constantly switch back and forth.

Another thing that stuck out to me as I sat through these meetings was how much emphasis there was on money and how to use it. It makes sense that governance at this level deals a lot with apportioning and administering funds, because money is the lifeblood of all programming, especially in our age of economic crisis. There are so many different “pots” of money to manage but never enough to go around, so these people must make the hard decisions about who gets what when, and then fight tooth and nail to make sure it’s not taken away. That’s really what it comes down to. And the devil really is in the details, so much time and painstaking effort must be spent to make sure funding formulas and allocation schemes are exactly right with no unintended consequences.

Apart from the actual content of the meetings, I was interested to just observe how people interacted. There was always lively debate, and I learned some key things about how to be effective in meetings. You have to be assertive and speak up – if you don’t interrupt people your voice won’t get heard. You have to ask lots of questions to get all of the information, and you have to ask clarifying questions to make sure you understand the decision that has been made and what is expected of you. You also can’t be afraid to say “I don’t know” or “I’ll get back to you on that”. These are all really important things for me to take away, since lack of assertiveness is definitely a weakness of mine. I feel like I would be better at it in a setting where I was more comfortable and had a defined role, rather than this nebulous “intern” who’s kind of on the fringe. But I do definitely need to be practicing in this area…

One of the best parts of the day was when I unexpectedly got to meet the Governor as part of my shadowing! Sitting with him and the person I was shadowing as they talked made me realize that these are real people too – people who get tired after a long day and forget things sometimes. But I think that in recognizing them as real people, my respect and admiration for them only grows. Their jobs are not always as glamorous as they seem – these are “public servants” in every sense of the term who work their butts off under nearly impossible circumstances to accomplish things that they really believe in. I could feel the Governor’s passion and pent-up frustration as he addressed the press about the need for gun control, an issue close to my heart. I saw the many roadblocks that people tried their best to circumnavigate during meetings throughout the day. It’s hard work, it consumes your every waking hour, and these people do not get enough recognition for it. The public are so easily persuaded to lambaste government for everything under the sun, but few realize or appreciate how much good work is done. And whenever something is accomplished, there will always be people to condemn them for it.

So it was an exciting, interesting, and enlightening day – only further confirmation that this is what I want to do :)

Trains: A metaphor for my vocational musings

So when I’m with DJ, age almost-6, I learn so much about trains – which are the fastest, where they go, when he saw one or rode on one last, etc  This weekend, however, as I rode a train from Harrisburg to Philly and back for Easter, I was thinking about a train as a metaphor for my life. Don’t laugh – it’s true.

These past few weeks as I’ve been intensely thinking through my vocation and struggling with questions of what I should do and where I should be, I’ve been impressed upon by the idea of sacrifice – some wise words by a recent Messiah grad. In life, especially post-grad, the decisions I make will ultimately involve sacrificing something – I can’t have it all. All of the people that I love will never be in one place – in fact, they’re getting more and more spread-out. So it’s this tension that I’ve been feeling – I cannot embrace one place joyfully without feeling some sense of sadness at saying goodbye to another place. And this brings it back to the train metaphor – I must always say “good-bye” before I can say “hello”, and to some degree I will always feel pulled back and forth between my different homes.

But this week I have finally felt a level of certainty about where I will be after graduation. For about the past year, I have been wanting to stay in Harrisburg, but lately have been struggling with ideas that I should go back to Philly or I should head off to DC instead. But experience has taught me that making major life decisions based on what I think I should do is not a good idea.

And really what my vocational decision comes down to is, where can I find community? That’s what is most important to me right now, and that is what I have in Harrisburg – amazing communities and amazing friends who love me and support me. I think before I was trying to resist the idea of staying in Harrisburg because I was afraid I was doing it out of fear (ironic, huh?). I didn’t want to do it just because I was afraid of leaving my communities to go somewhere else. But that’s not it at all – Harrisburg is where I belong right now. In addition to the sense of community here, I have fallen in love with this city, and I’m so excited to really invest more of my time and energy into making it better.

I don’t have a job lined up yet, but I’m not too worried (most of the time). I have lots of connections at the Capital, so if anything opens up there I will know about it. I am looking more into advocacy groups and excited about exploring the communications end of politics. And if all else fails, I think I will be pretty happy working in a coffee shop, volunteering, and just learning how to live life as a real person, not just a student. Even though things are uncertain, I just have so much peace about this, which is a really wonderful feeling.

I’ve been reading a book by Parker Palmer called “Let Your Life Speak”, and it’s all about vocation, told through his vocational journey. This is my favorite quote from him: “Vocation at its deepest level is: ‘This is something that I can’t not do, for reasons I’m unable to explain to anyone else and don’t fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling.’ ” That is exactly how I feel about staying in Harrisburg – I’ve tried to explain it to people and they don’t always understand, but it’s something that I’ve just got to do. This is where I am meant to be right now. Maybe not forever, maybe for a season, but for right now – YES!