I've waited for a long time, as a fantasy since 2009, and as a real goal since September 2014, for tomorrow. Following my daughter's practice, I'm laying out my outfit, planning my lunch, and carefully packing my backpack with books and supplies. The damn thing weighs more than the Alexandria Library. I spent today printing out syllabuses, carefully three-hole punching them and putting them into a three-ring binder. Not exactly a trapper keeper, but close enough. I will invite Sofie to decorate it with emojis, her current sticker of choice.
I've been reading syllabuses, book chapters we'll cover this week, getting my first pair of scrubs hemmed to the length of my stubby Gimli-length legs, and watching videos about such matters as critical thinking and time management. I am trying very hard to set my preconceptions to zero. Does critical thinking mean something different in nursing than it did in literary theory, software documentation, or arguing who deserves election into the Baseball Hall of Fame? In theory, probably not. But in reality, I expect it takes directions I've never seen before. I'll let you know. 😀 As for time management, I once learned that if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. It will take the least amount of time necessary. Ask someone with an empty schedule, and you won't see it checked off the task list until after Elvis returns.
I suspect that in particular, my new teachers will specifically target social media, perhaps the greatest snare of wasted time that's ever been invented. I am vulnerable to its wiles and I shall resist. I'd like to write one paragraph a day for this blog while I'm in school, but I doubt I will. Of course, once I post, I neurotically check back to see who liked and commented. This must end. The other social media risk for health care workers, of course, is strict protections of privacy. We must learn to practice omerta, adopt a code of silence that would make a taciturn mafiosa seem like a talk show host.
I had hoped to write a post before I started about how my education prepared me for this moment. I'll provide a condensed version here. I'm a pretty introspective fellow, both a blessing and a curse. As I've mentioned, I left working in tech under a cloud. My thoughts have gone from the bleak to the delusional before I found a balance and figured out my path. On bad days, I thought that I'd wasted the expensive education my parents sweated to provide by going into nursing, which doesn't require nearly as broad an education as I've pursued. I've finally come to understand that in part that education--more the process than the product--trained me to be adaptive, imaginative, self-reflective, and observant. In terms more current today, I have a gained a rubric for a personal SWOT analysis. My father used to tell me that I could do anything I wanted to do if I worked hard enough. I don't think toil worthy of Sisyphus could possibly have made me an astronaut or a major league first baseman. On the other hand, it does now look like it's true that any schmuck can grow up to be the president of the US, but that's not the subject for this blog. Nursing is within my scope; reading the syllabuses and seeing the amount of writing involved in the training, I've spotted my edge, that little bit of well-developed skill that'll save me a ton of time compared to many of my classmates. I hope I can help them too, as we're no longer competing, but cooperating. Or so we were told in our first meeting back in November.
Ten years, twenty years, thirty years ago I could not have imagined what I'm about to do. Self-doubt alone would have closed the door before I'd even peeked through it. I went in the door at Microsoft and Amazon; that door closed, a window did open, and I got my ass kicked through it. I landed on the sidewalk, took a deep breath of salty Seattle air, and after grieving the end of my career, set off on a new adventure that offers more possibilities for the rest of my life than I ever anticipated.
I'll close tonight by quoting my two favorite philosophers: Calvin and Hobbes.
It's a magical world, Hobbes ol' buddy. Let's go exploring.
Any schmuck can be elected president, all right. Or make money, or sell real estate, or grab pussies. (Or often to thrive in the corporate tech environment.) No compassion or conscience required -- or even desirable. Intelligence, maybe of a certain kind, the kind a hockey player needs to maneuver strategically on ice: that might be helpful. But more important is the capacity to inflict pain and to absorb it without outwardly showing how much it hurts. But to be a nurse you need not only to be "adaptive, imaginative, self-reflective, and observant" while intentionally using serial commas, but to have both conscience and compassion as well as a deep, broad intuitive intelligence.
ReplyDeleteWhen bell hooks was asked how she'd define herself, she said, "I wouldn’t start with race; I wouldn’t start with blackness; I wouldn’t start with gender; I wouldn’t start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, which is that I’m a seeker on the path." You're clearly a seeker, and now it seems you may have found the path. It's good to see you heading off to explore.
-- Jim Molnar