I work retail. Not the most exciting job in the world, I know, but it is leading me to where I want to go in my career. I love my company, my co-workers are fabulous, and the clothing is simply wonderful. There are times, however, when I look at the mall janitorial staff and I envy their job.

How I sometimes wish I had a job where I had explicit orders every day on what to do, where to go, and how to do my job. How I'd love to be left alone with my thoughts as I did the manual tasks of day-to-day work without having to deal with customers, make quick decisions on pressing situations, and not have to stand confined to one store as the day progresses. I'm certainly not knocking the mall staff--they do a great job that gets little appreciation or notice from the patrons of the mall. We do have the shiniest floors this side of the Mississippi (thanks also to the mall manager who has some strange obsession with cleanliness, though who also knows little about marketing), and they are quick to clean up each and every dropped food and drink item when customers think that some unseen force is there to pick up after them when the nearest garbage can is only a few steps away.

But instead, my co-workers and I stand in one place, constantly tidying the store, checking in new merchandise, filling special orders, and of course, waiting on our customers hand an foot. Especially in this, our slow season (save for the upcoming sales), we have a lot of free time to try to come up with new tasks to keep busy when we outnumber our customers. Once the store is sized, vacuumed, glass is cleaned, merchandise is in, etc. we spend a lot of time brainstorming new ideas to draw more customers in and make the store look better than it did five minutes ago. There are even times when our manager is out of ideas of things to do. So we wait.

Wicca can be the same way. Wait, you knew I was going to bring religion into this, right? Right. Once you've studied the basics and even many topics that are related but not necessary to the religion, you may feel like there's nowhere to go and nothing to do. It's easy to want to have a manager, be it Priest, Priestess, teacher, guru, etc. to tell you what to do next. And usually even those who have been in the business for so long can run out of ideas. How we then long for a religion in which someone tells you your orders for the day so you can carry on with our own thoughts and simply do the tasks we've been given. When we run out of tasks, such as topics to study, we want to go back to our leaders and ask for new tasks to accomplish. Oh the frustration when even your leader says, "I can't think of anything else right now other than wait on our customers."

Who are our "customers"? In religion, the customer is yourself and Deity. You want good customer satisfaction, right? It seems so easy to think we are satisfying ourselves when we find a new book to read, a message board to join, or a class to participate in. Once the book is done, we need to find another one. When the topics on the board are dull, we need to come up with new ones to mentally stimulate us. When the class is over, we need to pursue another class. Or better yet, for all of these suggestions, we need to put them into practice. That's how we satisfy Deity!

I admit to being a good armchair Pagan. I can read the books and learn from others on an intellectual level, but putting that knowledge into practice is always the hard part. This is where I can't go to my manager and ask, "What can I do?" but come up with new ways to be active in my practices.

For the store, one way I can better my store is to go into other stores, see what they do to stay busy, and adapt their techniques to my own needs. Same with religion. Taking a small break from studying yet another book on Wicca and instead studying a book on Christianity or another religion is a good way to get a new perspective on my own religion. What does the other religion have that I am not presently practicing that keeps its own members satisfied?

We can always stand around in our own religion, lamenting a lack of new things to do, or we can go out and explore a bit. We may not find anything that is particularly useful at the moment, but at least it keeps us from being bored. Sure, taking some time to sit back and watch the world go by can be satisfying for a short while, but sooner or later we'll feel a sense of stagnation. Brainstorming new tasks and topics of study may not seem like much, but it does give us more options than just standing there complaining how our feet hurt. And certainly you'll have to come back to those tasks that were "completed" at an earlier time...in the case of my store, the racks may need to be re-sized again, and in the case of my religion, I may have come across new information that calls my previous beliefs into question so I have to re-think my opinions. That's okay. But I know the decisions and actions I make are not dependant on what a manager or leader tells me. That's up to me. In a religion where we usually don't depend on a clergy of leaders, we have to become our own leaders. We are responsible for our own advancement. We are responsible for our own spiritual satisfaction.

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