Alderperson Brad Firkus delivered the invocation at the 09/15/2021 Appleton Common Council meeting.
Mayor Woodford: “Tonight’s invocation will be delivered by Alderperson Firkus.”
Firkus: “Thank you. For a time in my early 20s I worked as a cook. I had worked in a kitchen since I was 16, mostly as a dishwasher, but my boss at the time asked me to go cook for a summer at a small kitchen attached to a pro shop of the club I worked at back–excuse me–back then.
“I didn’t know much about cooking. I had helped with prep work a little bit here and there. At home I couldn’t make anything more elaborate than a frozen pizza or mac and cheese from the box. But my boss’s chef gave me a crash course on being in the line. He gave me two pieces of advice that I’ve been able to apply over and over, both in my career and in life.
“The first lesson was [undecipherable] highlighting the importance of prep work. The other was to keep paddling, no matter how difficult or overwhelming it gets. Both are important. Especially if you’re facing down a dinner rush where there’s–where the orders are coming in fast and you’re running out of room to put the tickets. You’re hoping you can keep the order straight and get everything out in a timely fashion. It’s chaotic and stressful and when it gets extra special chaotic and the kitchen gets completely overwhelmed, you lean heavily on that second piece of advice to keep paddling. It’s advice I’ve gone back to time and time again at various jobs in the seventeen years since I’ve worked there. It doesn’t matter if it’s a service job, manual labor, or office work. It’s also good advice for outside of work too, trying to get in shape, learn new hobby, mend a broken relationship. Keep paddling. Keep taking the tiny steps towards that finish line.
“The pandemic is no different. We’ve been dealing with this for a long time. We’ve seen setbacks in our progress. We’ve seen selfish and irresponsible behavior. We’ve seen hospitals fill up multiple times now, events cancelled, even this late into it all. Some businesses haven’t made it. Others’ jobs were eliminated. And most importantly, there’s the toll from the loss of life and those living with long-term effects of the infection. It’s been tough. It continues to be tough. It feels inadequate to call it ‘just tough’. But we keep paddling, doing what we can to move ourselves and our community closer to the end of the pandemic. Even if everyone’s not paddling in the same direction, and some of those people are fighting to make reaching the finish line harder than it has to be, we keep paddling, because on the other end of this is where we want to be standing and standing still doesn’t get us there.
“On those days it gets hard and you feel this pandemic is never ending, when it feels like the politics has spread–the politics it has spread are almost as awful as the disease we’re trying to defeat. When it feels like we are a broken society and our communities are irreparably damaged. Keep paddling. Keep doing the things you can to keep yourself and your community moving forward. If you keep paddling you will get there. You will get to that finish line. ‘Cause one thing we’ve seen through all this is when we have the will to solve problems, we can move mountains. I hope we can eventually emerge from what is hopefully our last significant wave of Covid-19, that we can put that spirit to work solving the other challenges we face, in our country, our state, and right here in our community. But first, to get there, we need to keep paddling.”
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