And the File Says...
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
—Lao Tzu (also known as Lao-Tzu, Lao-tzu, Lao-Tze, Lao-tze, Laozi…aka, Old Master.)
I think of this quote when I see nature “accomplish” things: sunset over a river, the movement of the river’s water itself, rocks collected on a sandy bank, a snowstorm that shuts down roads, changing seasons, fruit ripening, trees growing new branches, a wave coming in. All of it. Then I come back to the question: what is an accomplishment.
Am I showing my slacker roots?
There was a time when I was a mortgage underwriter for one of the world’s larger banks. I’m decent at math, cautious with risk and fairly good at assessing these things. I’d started in the office as a temp, making copies, took an interest in the work and was hired to make fast decisions regarding who would be eligible for what size of loan. Each day, my in-box was filled with files; before the day was over, I’d have the stack managed. Then I’d ask around to see who I might help turn over files faster before the next set came in. We all worked on our own stacks and as a team, individually and collectively. “Every file tells a story,” we’d say. Underwriters don’t meet the borrowers, by design. It was our job to tell in an impartial way if each life story that crossed our desk was trending upward, financially, or falling apart.