Important Things

I posted briefly the other day about the pronunciation of the word diocese. Amongst the replies came this:

'The Anglican communion is falling apart, pews are emptying, gays get married in Church, lead is being stolen from Church roofs, General Suynod (sic) is about to debate some of the most far reaching and potentially damaging matters . . . and you worry about how to pronounce dioceses? Oh dear!'

Notwithstanding my disagreement with much of the content (both implied and direct) it made me wonder; why do we ever talk about unimportant things? Is there ever, or has there ever been, an appropriate time to discuss the pronunciation of a word when people are hungry in our world, or there are wars?

Fact is, my anonymous reader, that trivia, minor matters and the unimportant all have the possibility of being solved quickly and easily. They are interesting and give us positive feelings. Wins, if you like.

I once worked in an office where the files of about 40-50 insurance claims with new correspondence were placed on my desk at the beginning of each day. After sorting them out I ended up with about four piles:

Desperately Urgent
Need time to think and study
Routine
Read and file

There was no-one to delegate to. I was bottom of that food chain.

The desperately urgent stuff usually needed a phone call to sort and that required offices to be open for business at 9.00 a.m. I arrived at work about 8.00 a.m.

So I spent the early part of my day with a coffee, a cigarette (it was a while ago) and I did the 'read and file stuff.' Usually I got 10 of my case files back in the filing cabinet where they could be found easily before 9.00 a.m. I felt I had achieved something.

Then I did the desperate and then I did the thinking stuff in the best bit of my day from about 10.00 a.m. - noon.

After lunch I was rubbish (always have been, always will be) so that was the time for the routine stuff.

The world is a mixture of the urgent and non-urgent, important and unimportant, but only the non-urgent unimportant can be ignored.

How do you pronounce diocese? It's not urgent, but it is important. If one of the central structures of our church is a word that the employees cannot agree about pronouncing then how silly do we look?

Trivial stuff is worth doing or it becomes urgent.

Government's legislative programmes are not all about matters of national importance. There are usually some minor things that need fixing too.

We all need a bit of easy work, quick fixes and unglamourous activity. This blog has such a mixture of posts.

I argued that quite badly but I think the point is in there somewhere. It's my first day back from hols. Nice, thanks for caring.