Reply To: Exercise 1: Initiative Personal Essay

by Beth
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Beth
Participant

Exercise 1: Personal Essay

When Josh sent the email with the video about this course, I opened it without really expecting to sign up but I was curious and wanted to know more. Once I watched the video, I knew I wanted to take the course (I should add that my certainty was at least partially driven by having heard that it was a 10 week course. I missed the statement in the description about the 10 + 20 weeks. A lesson in paying closer attention.) So, what did the video do that rearranged my interest? Let me explain.

I am retired.

My prior life that included work was full and fulfilling and characterized by an unusual trajectory. In my college days I was extremely interested in chemistry, an interest that had been cultivated and nurtured by a very passionate and gifted high school chemistry teacher. That led to a bachelor’s degree in chemistry followed by doctoral work in biochemistry. I was extremely interested in the nature and chemistry of thought which led me to change to a new doctoral program in neurochemistry/neurosciences at the University of California, San Francisco. That was a world of passionate, motivated and intelligent people that both inspired and challenged me. I was in my early 20’s and still figuring out how I wanted to spend this one glorious life. Understanding myself as a human animal and understanding “where thought comes from” was a driving force. While I had the gift of working with some of the most devoted and capable (and fun!) scientists in the field, I came to recognize that the physical sciences were not going to answer my most passionate questions. My curiosity moved me toward the human animal as a thinker and creator of experience.

I went on to become licensed as a Marriage and Family therapist which is where I spent much of my professional career. During those 25 years I worked in the County Mental Health Department and in the local K-12 school district where I developed programs, directed programs, supervised contracted programs, and provided direct service to clients. During the time I worked for these institutions, I had a private practice in which I provided counseling services to children, families, and adult individuals. My private practice included consultation with law-enforcement agencies and I assisted in hostage negotiation events, officer debriefing after shootings, and at times working with the victims of crime such as bank personnel after a robbery.

I retired from my private practice at the age of 52 and shortly thereafter received the news that my job in the school system was being discontinued. I went from having two jobs to having no job and I wasn’t a spring chicken. I had never considered a nursing career, but a family member who was a nurse suggested that my background would make nursing school an option. That suggestion and an experience with a hospice nurse at the death of a family member pushed me in that direction. Thus started my third incarnation in this lifetime. Because of my unusual background and experience, I worked as a full-time critical care nurse for 3 years before becoming a full time nursing instructor, and then tenured professor of nursing at the school I had attended. I continued working part time in critical care while teaching full time. It was from this work that I retired at the age of 64.

I use the above to demonstrate that my life has been full of meaningful work that has most certainly required initiative and leadership but in a different way than I feel called to now. I was a part of larger systems and institutions that had infrastructure and goals and resources that were foundational to what I did and how I did it.

I recognize that the above focuses on my professional rather than my personal life, largely because my experiences of initiative and leadership have most often occurred there. My personal life has always been permeated with my interest in how we use our thoughts to narrate meaning. Is the disappointment I just experienced taken in as a confirmation of my incapacity or as a step in the path of learning something new? How do I take responsibility for how to live together, to find a way through the storms, to solve problems, to love each other, to have fun, to grow. I am a human being that has been learning, falling in love, falling out of love, raising children, skiing, camping, having friends, all the while pondering how our chemistry and our experience are interwoven.

So, now I am retired. I have no external structure on which to act on my own passions, the calling of my deepest heart. This is what brings me here now. This is what spoke to me in Josh’s video. I see in this class an avenue of actualizing my love and ideas in concrete ways that will increase joy in my world and in the larger world. I am in love with my family, my friends and I am in love with this beautiful, amazing planet on which we live. I want all of our grandchildren and great grandchildren to have a planet that nourishes them and brings them joy, awe, and wonder. I am committed to do what I can to help that happen.

How can I do that with this class? I want to be an agent of love and healing. Life is relational. Everything we do is in relationship to something, our bodies, the people in our lives, the natural world. Our disconnection has wounded us. We are disconnected from ourselves, from each other and from the mother or our nature, the planet herself. Disconnection grows from and is perpetuated by our addictions; to ease, to screens, to dopamine hits, to substances, to consumption and so much more. I am passionate about being an agent of reconnection. ? I want to be a conduit of healing connection.

I have been thinking about a project in clean up Merida since I participated in a beach clean up last year. I believe it would be a healing experience in that it would help connect us to each other and to the environment in which we live in ways that will make us better.

Three people close to this “field” of interest:
1. Kimmy Suki, director of Yucatan Giving Outreach who has organized a number of clean up activities in Merida.
2. I Love Modesto (there are no names on the website so I emailed them asking for a name and contact information in order to talk to someone specifically
3. Greg Casini – President of Merida English Library Board and entrepreneur with a lot of experience

Three people with high status or value in this field:
1. Ney Villamil – Regional Director Earth Day Mexico
2. I don’t know how to determine this. I have searched the web for people involved in a larger scale doing community clean up projects but haven’t found names of people.

Three role models:
1. Jimmy Carter
2. John Lewis
3. Jim Nielsen

I think taking this course, specifically as an experiential vs. didactic course, is valuable for several reasons. One doesn’t learn how to DO a thing by reading about a thing. One learns how to do a thing by doing the thing. I have had lots of experience with moving from the theoretical to the practical in my work world buy not in my more personal world and I think this course will help my in a step-by-step process realize my ideas. I think the group support and accountability is key. Having a weekly task helps me focus and maintain action in a time frame that keeps me moving. I am looking forward to all that I anticipate learning how to do!

REFLECTIONS:
This was a more difficult task than I first thought it would be. I realize it would be better to start earlier in the week with my first iteration of a task as it would give me more time to process and digest what it is I’m doing and pondering. I started on Thursday morning, which did allow some reflection time but I feel the time of letting my thoughts “percolate” is important. It took some time to move from where I have been to where I want to go, but in the end, I feel like it connected inside of me in a way that leaves me feeling more prepared now to move forward than I felt before I did the assignment.

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