I've been working in libraries for around sixteen years now. Being in any industry that long it's hard to not become jaded and cynical [citation needed]. I admit that it's hard watching things go round in circles, the same issues being debated, knocked back, debated, shelved, picked up...etc.
You know what though, I'm trying to see it differently. Sure, there will be things that happen that I will dislike. Things that cause me to sigh heavily, clutch my pearls, and drink under my desk. However, there will be good things that happen, things I'll want to be a part of.
Something that has stuck with me for a while was a quote by the lich Xykon, from The Order of the Stick:
"When you drink a good cup of coffee, you try to immerse yourself in that cup. You focus all of your senses on what you're drinking. How it smells, how it tastes, how it feels on your tongue. You savor the experience.
But when you drink a cup of absolutely horrid coffee, you do everything possible to NOT immerse yourself in it. You try to shut out your senses from what you are drinking. Inevitably, you try to stave off the assault on your poor little innocent tongue by mentally comparing it to all of the better coffee you've had in your life--reliving each cup in comparison to the godforsaken crap you're pouring down your gullet now. So when you drink a good cup of coffee, you're only drinking that one cup...
But when you drink a bad cup of coffee, you remember every good cup you ever drank. And at my advanced age, that's a helluva lot of good coffee."
- Rich Burlew. (2007). The Order of the Stick: Start of Darkness.
In the GLAm world, I plan to savour those bad cups of coffee, and think about all the good we're doing. Hope can come in many forms, sometimes it's just remembering that the good outweighs the bad.