Once upon a time, when I started a new job, the position came with a lot of question marks and missing information about operational procedures that I really needed to know to actually do the job. Sometimes it felt like I was muddling through a quagmire, bound and blindfolded.
The fragments of facts were found on yellowed index cards, random note pads and a rainbow of past Post-It notes scattered throughout the office like flotsam and jetsam after a storm.
I should also say that the job itself was one I was very happy to land and for an organization with which I was proud to be associated. But before I could really get down to work it was obvious that connecting a lot of dots would have to be the first order of business.
Every time I thought about getting organized, a cloud of confusion hovered over me and put me at a standstill. It was like opening a big box of last year’s Christmas lights that hadn’t been put away properly and knowing that I wouldn’t be able to get on with this year’s celebration until I untangled the paraphernalia from the previous year.
And that’s when another “power word” came to me. Untangle. This single word became a another Word Worth remembering in those times when I’m feeling twisted, tethered and impeded.
in a roundabout way, this word came to me as a spinoff from another word connected to an image with the same theme. I saw a photo of a painting called Mary, Untier of Knots by a German artist, Johann (Gayer)Georg Schmidtner, circa the 1700s. The story behind that painting has to do with a miraculous intervention in healing a marriage, but the idea of taking whatever tangled mess I found myself in and turning it over to such a skillful untangler has been very effective for me.
I even have a little framed version of the painting at my desk now, where a lot of untangling has taken place in the past several months.
And now that my lights are UNTANGLED it’s time to decorate!
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