Water cooler break anyone?

The last half of May has been a busy month for just about all the staff and volunteers here at the Downtown Campus of St. Vincent de Paul. For whatever reason there were more people then average coming in for services. When this happens it makes for a very fast paced work environment which can be both good and bad. I might have mentioned this before in another one of my blogs, but sometimes the lobby in our community center feels like an emergency room. There are people walking through the doors with all kinds of problems, like not being able to find a place to stay for the night or needing someone to call an ambulance for them because they are having trouble breathing. It’s just a whirl wind of activity sometimes. It’s easy to get so caught up that the day is just gone in a flash and your left wondering what you did that day.

So at some point last week in the middle of all this organized chaos I got a phone call from Carla, the secretary at the front desk. She was asking me to come down and meet with a client. I think at the time I was organizing all of my homeless court cases so I could fax them out the next day. To make a long story short I was pretty busy at the time, but I like to make myself available to the people who come through the door who need to talk to me. So I decided I would meet him.

The person who was asking for me was a guy by the name of Mike. I had met him a couple of times before but I hadn’t seen in a while. We started talking for a little and in my mind I’m waiting for him to ask me for something that he needs. Like a homeless court application, some kind of referral, a phone number, or whatever. But he didn’t need any of that. He really just wanted to chat. He was talking about the weather, and about his kid, and about how it was neat that our names were the same, and how he wanted to show me how to play a card game, and so one and so on. So it didn’t take long before I started thinking to myself “Man I really don’t have the time for this, what do you need?” This went on for about 20 minutes, and I really wanted to just get out of there. I did not want to sit and chat at all.

Then it kind of occurred to me that maybe this is good a thing. Maybe I’m supposed to just relax in this situation and go with the flow. So I started talking with him about who knows what and just kind of letting the chaos of the community center and the heavy load of work I had to do just fade into the background for five minutes. You know what? I really lightened up, and we only talked for about another five minutes then he had to leave. But it really reminded me that it’s worth while to take time to soak in life and be with the people that walk through the doors of St. Vincent’s, because life is short and relationships matter. It also showed me that I’m not just some resource for a person, which fills some need. I am also a friend to the clients of St. Vincent’s. Who knew a simple “nonsense” conversation could wake me up. It was a lesson in disguise. So cheers to chatting about nothing.

~Mike