Taking a moment for reflection as a librarian

 My journey to librarianship has been indirect and not been very atypical of many other pathways to librarianship that I have encountered. Libraries were not my first stop in my journey of professional work. I have worked in   banking, insurance, healthcare and of course education.  I have worked with all age groups from interacting with toddlers and their families during story times in a preschool setting and I have worked with the elderly populations within a nursing home setting as a respiratory therapist. Within each of these workplace environments that lead to my role as a librarian, I have learned that people and my interactions with each of them have been the most important part of each my workspaces. It is this lesson that I have brought with me to the role of librarian . The people that I have met, interacted with and learned from in each of these workspaces, have in fact, helped me to develop into the librarian I am today. I have learned from my interactions with each of them that communication coupled with avid listening and clear language is helpful in any situation from answering questions at the reference desk to working with outside vendors and community partners . I have also learned that a little flexibility can go a long way. These learned lessons have proven themselves to be the most fruitful during these past few years of COVID . Most notably , I have seen the staff members of my library  grow exponentially ( myself included ) as each of us learned that  sometimes exceptions become the normal . Especially for our team in the case of quickly pivoting to learning how to create and conduct virtual instruction library sessions, digital tutorials and how to host weekly Zoom staff meetings to try and recreate the sense of togetherness we all missed from our forced distance. Over my time as a librarian , I have also learned that empathy reminds us all of our humanity and how important and mutually beneficial it is to stop , breath and lend a listening ear to learn about what might be happening in the moment with ourselves and with our fellow coworkers.

Thanks for reading and for taking this pause for reflection…

Marlowe B.