A week... and then another

Written on February 22, 2007
A week and then another... and then another... and so on, until they sum up to 52 (and a day) and make a year. Then another year, and yet another, and another... and so time goes by. But time does not pass by himself, but with our lives also. So this is how our lives pass (or, for the merrier or wiser of us: are spent).

Time went by for me also. Some days went by and I can say that, while some of them have merely passed away, others I have spent in a quite remarkable way. Two weeks ago I had my (well deserved) vacation from school. After surviving my exam session at school, I was relishing the project of home entertainment (meaning I was planning on a long chill-out period back home; long evenings and nights in “Club T” and so on – the usual). As the saying goes, (as I can translate it from Romanian) one’s plans from home do not match with the market reality. So, it was one (passing) day that I read an e-mail that invited me to co-deliver a three-day training for an NGO in ASE (later I found out that it was about ASCIG) and, after that, to deliver a teambuilding for the E-XP team in @Bu.

When I first read the e-mail, I was like: “oh! Shit! Am I going to make home ‘till Easter?”. After realizing that going home so late was not a problem (not at all, actually) I started thinking about the way that my “vacation” week would look like: Monday – preparing the training for ASCIG; Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday – delivering the training; Friday preparing the teambuilding; Saturday – delivering the teambuilding; Sunday – sleeping. Hmmm... Fascinating week... Again I was far of the real world, because my schedule proved a bit different. Not the important issue here.

What made that week interesting were some things like: I was totally (pulled) out of my comfort zone (I was happy that this happened, because I was increasingly feeling the need for some unpredictability in my life); I learned a lot (and developed also); the thing that I’m mostly proud, in fact, is that I have spent some days of my life.

My key learning points (in very, very short) are, regarding training, that I am (definitely) not a born trainer (it seems that that part of the genes went to my sister J), therefore I prefer (in the future) to deliver only trainings that on topics on which I am really good at (for example, the stuff that has to do with self-awareness and personal reflection that I talked about during the teambuilding seemed to me “a good one”). Another thing that I’ve seen is that, (while delivering a training) you give a lot of energy (in order to make it better and better), at the end, you also receive (from the audience) a great deal of energy (in the good case J). On the other hand, while holding a teambuilding, you give a great deal of energy (and I gave it all because I had to meet some very high expectations) and you receive... nothing. Yes, absolutely nothing. And this is as it should be, because your participants need every ounce of energy that they can get 9including yours). So, a word for the young: if you want to deliver such a thing, make sure that you are ready to fell at least four years older the next morning.

I’m happy that I got to spend another few days of my life. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be happy long enough, because the days started passing by once again. But that’s a totally different story...

Food for thought: If you were to sum up the moments that passed by in your life, on one hand, and the moments that you (truly) spent, on the other, which one would be greater? If you knew such a thing, would you change anything?