Scatter my ashes here...

Scatter my ashes here...
scatter my ashes in the desert...

Friday, September 6, 2013

Passion and Serendipity


Passion means, I give a $@&# and I intend to do something about it until I'm satisfied with my efforts.

It means you don't stay silent and sit back allowing things you care about to be destroyed.

Serendipity means, an occurrence of events in a positive, unexpected way.

Yesterday was a weird day. All good, I believe. But the chain of events were unusually numerous, validating, and supportive within a short number of hours. I kept getting emails, messages, and phone calls from people about things I've written lately.

"I read your most recent blogpost and felt like I was reading my own thoughts."-RN

"I have not heard a nurse say that she loved her job in many, many years."-RN

"Would you please turn this into an op-ed piece and submit it to the New York Times or your local newspaper?"-RN

"Your DNF means "Do Not F@*# (With Me)"- massage therapist

"It's been estimated that more than 20% of U.S. women in their 40s and 50s take antidepressants." -Med Page Today, September 6, 2013

"Perhaps 'Health Care' in this country should be more accurately renamed 'Profit-Centered Illness Enablers.'"- Geri Kilgariff, freelance writer, and my friend.

Sometimes you need to put your passion first, because if you don't, you're compromising your own values to the point where you can't live with yourself. I am not made of the same material as most corporate players. I couldn't walk around with a clear conscience doing things without considering the consequences of my power, being enriched by the sweat off the backs of those who work in the trenches.

As much as I'm disgusted and fed up with nursing, I'm passionate about it. I'm even more passionate about people being treated like human beings in the workplace, and leveling out the disparities of wealth in this country.

As for me, right now, I have not run in 12 days due to fear of re-injuring my hamstring, have not been on my bike in 10 days due to fear of my brainfogged state endangering my health and life if I were to crash, have not been able to motivate myself all week to do anything more than walk the girls. Even though I no longer feel my hamstring, I am not motivated to go out and run. Getting my butt going is proving to be difficult. I need to make myself get out, which I will do at some point this weekend. I need to at least test the hamstring with an easy short run.

I did file articles of organization for my newly formed limited liability company on Wednesday morning when I met with our accountant, and filed the other necessary paperwork with the City of Fort Collins. I'm moving toward launching a business sometime next year, and I'm chipping away at the business plan. There are a lot of things still to be decided and put in place.

Tomorrow morning is the signup for Umstead 100, a race I've been wanting to do for quite some time. I will get on the website at 10 am our time and attempt to get an entry. If I do, that will give me a long-term goal I can shoot for, and might help a little to motivate me through this fall and winter. If I don't get in, I'll figure out something, maybe another trip to Iowa to run on the track. One thing's for sure, I will not have the budget to do much traveling to races for a while, but that's okay. I can find more inexpensive trips and races closer to home. Right now it's more important for me to get my overall health back.

Then, late last night, out of the blue, I was contacted on Facebook by a friend from junior high, Carla in Pennsylvania, we have not talked in 35 years, since I moved to Arizona at the beginning of high school. Turns out we have more than a few things in common these days, one of which is a passion for writing and blogging.

We chatted for a while and laughed about the mutual trauma we experienced in our clique-ridden junior high school days. And, turns out she's a cancer survivor, and a gifted photographer. So it's been great to reconnect, it's fascinating to see where people's paths have taken them when you meet up at one point and go your separate ways. I'll look forward to sharing our stories of where this adventure called life has taken us.

photo credit: Nathan Nitzky

4 comments:

MJ said...

Good luck getting into Umstead! Always helps me to have a goal. (right now I'm having some struggles as an injured runner with my goal race in about 3 months...)

Re submitting your post to a wider audience - I think it's a great idea. These people do programs on getting more voices heard, not sure if they provide one-off advice.

http://www.theopedproject.org/

My best to you!

Alene Gone Bad said...

MJ, Thank you OH SO MUCH for the link to the Op Ed project. Much needed and very important!

And good luck to you in recovering from your injuries.

We'll see what happens when I submit it, if they NYT won't take it there are a lot of other major newspapers I can submit to, as well as other media outlets.

Carla said...

Thank you for the shout out! You're right I love to blog, and LOL what you've seen for me is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Believe it or not, I was a sometimes militant activism based blogger for many years. Saveardmorecoalition.org

Life is very weird, and what I have learned in the past couple of years is sometimes it is cool to go back to find the cherished bits of your childhood-

Hugs

Alene Gone Bad said...

Thank you Carla! Looking forward to sharing more from here on...glad we reconnected.