Whoever came up with the default iPhone alarm sound, we’ve gotta talk.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, we can talk about what we’re really here to talk about. Much like any other week, work started on Tuesday for me. Said alarm noise sounds off and I’m up. Into the shower, get dressed, bowl of cereal and I’m out the door to start my day. I roll into the center at 9:45 (if you’re on time you’re late). Walk in, say my hellos to all my co-workers as I pass their offices heading to mine. Set my stuff down, and get ready to unlock the front doors and take the flag out.

The meat of my week has been spent working on various forms for the center. First, I was tasked with creating a survey to send out to employees asking about meeting effectiveness. Things like level of preparation, materials provided, adequate time, effective use of time. That was interesting to put together because I found myself thinking “Hmm what would I want to be asked if I was the one filling the survey out, how could I make sure my voice was heard?” The next thing i was tasked with doing was creating a survey to send out to all of the attendees at our latest event, our Kickoff to Summer Celebration. Much like the other survey I wanted to make sure that the questions in the survey were engaging and allowed for the feedback and reviews we received to be useful and honest.

Wednesday rolls around next and thus my favorite part of the week: The OSU Aphasia group comes in for their hour and a half of volunteering. I roll into the center at 9:45 and head straight to the events room to get the round tables and chairs set up for everyone. This week I gave them tasks that included cutting out “wings” made of traced hands and coloring popsicle sticks so that any kids that come into the center can make their own butterflies. Man, let me tell you. You put a task in front of these people and they just grind. Within a few minutes we already had over 30 popsicle sticks colored and were onto getting wings cut out. Considering not all of them have full function in their hands, they were doing an absolutely awesome job at tracing their hands and then grabbing scissors and cutting them out.

Thursday I only worked a half day because I had to attend a funeral service so it was a quick day for me. I handled all of our data for the days between June 16th and 30th, put them all into sperate excel sheets (color coordinated because OCD told me I had to). That took up most of my day and then I was out of there.

My theme for this week is resilience. I had to attend a funeral service for the mother of one of the kids that I coach at Olentangy High School. She lost her battle to cancer last week. I am choosing the theme of resilience this week because this week reminded me in many ways that life is tough. But it’s never about how hard life hits you, it’s all about how you choose to let those hits effect you. I went to the funeral service expecting to see a 16 year old kid at his worst, but instead he was standing up tall, smiling, thanking everyone for coming. You could see a shine in his eyes, i think because he was proud of how many people’s lives his mother had touched. She was an elementary school teacher at a Columbus city school and it was very apparent that she was loved by a lot of people. The same can be said about the strength that the people in the Aphasia group show, not letting life’s punches knock them down and staying down. No matter how many times life may swing at these people, they always get back up. I think that is very admirable considering the world we live in right now and all the effects the pandemic has had on us. I can speak to that certainly, as someone who deals with anxiety being in isolation for all those months weighed on me. I also suffered the loss of two people due to suicides during the year of 2021. Life hits hard when you least expect it, but you gotta just take a breath, brush yourself off, and keep going.

If you see this and you happened to be on the receiving end of one of life’s punches’ recently, take a second, catch your breath, and then pick yourself up and keep going. It’s worth it.