Acceptance and the time/priorities continuum

When I moved from bustling Boston to the California wine country in 2001, there was a period of adjustment. It took 5 months of teeth gnashing and hair-tearing before I accepted the fact that print jobs would take longer (a lot longer), nobody had the latest technology (PDFs? Never heard of ’em!), and there was no sense of urgency when it came to advertising matters.

And then, after working on the acceptance, I greeted this new life with gratitude. My new mantra: “A marketing emergency is nothing related to a brain surgery emergency.” I still wanted everything on schedule, I still showed up for meetings on time, but I realized it wasn’t that they were all wrong (d’oh!), it was just different priorities.

These days I’m dealing with a new version of that: I’ve got a client in Africa. And let me tell you, compared to Africa, Healdsburg is the bustling center of technology and marketing communications. The other night I was clucking around my office, trying to make a deadline, acting as my old self. I’d forgotten the brain surgery comparison.

Then I remembered. Time, priorities are different in Africa. Getting anything done is much harder there. I realized my clients were doing their best to get me what I needed to help them, but they were also trying to pull their village out of poverty, give the people hope and resources, and they were doing it while many of the people in the organization were suffering from malaria.

So the invitations to the fund-raiser are going out later than I’d planned. There are a lot worse emergencies than that.