It’s a rainy afternoon.

My boots squeak with every step on the hardwood floor.

The emails pour in one after another.

But it’s everything I could love about emails. Productive teamwork. A steady flow of progress. Onboarding gone right. New business opportunities and excited clients.

On this rainy afternoon, I find myself nearly giddy. I’d been working for 8.5 hours and there is plenty left to do, but there are hard-working collaborators on all sides of me taking the occasional break to chat about cold brew coffee and guilt-free addictions to Girl Scout cookies. The team is troubleshooting wordpress functions and responding to tweets in real time. I step back from the 14 tabs open in my Chrome browser and find myself taking my own advice that I’ve given to a few new hires.

Take a deep breath.

It’s in that deep breath that I find joy. In that same breath, excitement. And last but not least, gratitude. After a few years hiatus, I’m back in the agency setting and serving as the Director of Social Media, a position that many of my college mentors and peers said would never exist at a respectable level. Bob Dylan, you were so right: “For the times, they are a-changing.” My mind is working at the startup pace and I’ve got every organizational tool that I’ve acquired over the years sitting in the toolbelt. We’re moving fast and there are moments where I look down at my coffee mug only to realize I haven’t even stopped to enjoy my daily dose of wonderful. I’ve got a notebook filled with cat-scratch that is only readable to me.  At home, a heap of clothes that still need to be pressed and hung up. I left my dishes sitting in the sink too. That’ll happen eventually. But right now, it’s time to embrace the crazy.