Looking at this past year………. 11-22-2016
November in black and white with a touch of orange.
Dear Wonderful Family and Friends,
As many of you know this past year has been quite a struggle for both of us. It started early in January, at work with a situation that just snowballed. That’s all I can think to call it. I worked as a paramedic for an ambulance service. I gave my all to this company and I felt I had an excellent work ethic and a desire to make the service exemplary. And I believed we were working in that direction. Then something happened in January and February.
In February we went away for a much needed vacation. We had an awesome time visiting family in Florida and spending beautiful sunny days on the beach. Somewhere in the middle of the vacation we got a message from one of our trusted people on the service that he needed to talk to us. What he had to say was the board had replaced us with a different model and different people without really telling us why. And to this day no one has ever really told us what happened. Everything felt different when we returned to work. It didn’t take me long to realize I was not able to continue working at the service. And to be honest I started to lose confidence working in this field. It is very stressful, and relentless. Day and night, the pager going off, people having emergencies, needing care, driving in the snow, dealing with crazies. It just became too much and I needed to search for me because somewhere along the lines I got lost. And then…
So you know when you listen to financial advisors.
And they give you advice about how to save money and how to protect yourself. One of the recommendations as to always have 2 to 3 months worth of money in the bank as an emergency fund to cover expenses that may come up in the event you’re not able to work. Well, that was something that we faced. I’m lucky I did have savings, not a lot, and I have been working towards putting money away for retirement. Life has gotten less complicated now that the kids are grown and out of college. They are on their own and I’m not faced with the financial issues that I was earlier in my life. So things felt OK we were doing all right. I am so grateful for this unique opportunity that I was actually given to explore deep inside of me. To explore where I want my life to go and how I want my life to develop from a day-to-day point of view. I do believe if it spun out of control.
So back to the summer.
I was getting my act together and working on a business plan and working on my next step when I got that phone call from John in the ambulance telling me to come pick him up at the emergency room. Well, that isn’t exactly what was going to happen. He’d had a motorcycle accident and ended up in surgery before I got a chance to even get to the hospital. I called his kids told him what was had happened and his daughter and son-in-law were able to get to the hospital.
It was a very long night. Surgery went well he had not heard himself terribly and I’m very grateful for that. But do you have hurt him self pretty good and his recovery was going to be a little bit more than what he expected and you know what he’s kind of a given an opportunity to check out his lights check out what he’s doing and figure out whether not he’s happy with that but I think he is. He’s ready to go back to work he’s he’s healing and getting stronger every day and will say that he’s been fortunate to he had that savings that he needed to get through the last four months of no real income so the upshot of everything is that we got the curtain pulled open we got a chance to really check out our lives and inspect what was going on and I think would come to the conclusion that it’s pretty good and we will not take things for granted the way we may have in the past and I know that I won’t let things for into me and frustrate me and overwhelmed me like the work situation had been. So the next chapter in my story is a desire to develop a business work from home explore my creativity work with my passions and what I’ve discovered is I really enjoyed doing the bakery I really enjoyed my time cooking and sprucing recipes and experimenting with meals and. The one thing I will say I am very focused on and have been for a while it’s good whole Foods meals we are very lucky to be able to grow food here at our house along with being able to source good quality meats pasture raised pork and beef and chicken’s that come from John’s daughters farm. So my next chapter my next phase is to develop that is to expand on that and nurture it and grow a an online business that starts with a blog and then become something more not really sure. I do think about how crazy our lives have been and how important it is to reach out to family and friends and nurture that part of our lives while the kids were young and work was stressful and needy that’s the kind of stuff we got dropped and I’ve not been a very good friend to the few people that I can call my friends and I have definitely not been a very good sister and aunt and cousin to many many people that are my family out there and before it’s too late I’d like to put a little bit of emphasis on that truck like a lot of emphasis on that and make that my next phase in life and I can’t emphasize the positive more.
I want to make sure I include the importance of the positive and positive side of this that without having had this experience I don’t think I would’ve ended up here I think I would’ve just kept working and slogging through and I am lucky to be able to look at The things I value and treasure in my life and I am able to highlight those more now that I am not being pulled in a lot of different directions. I also want to stress a decision that I’ve made to actively simplify my life to actively clean out and sort through the things that are important. The things that are necessary to live a splendid life and a life with meaning and purpose. And this is part of my journey. I have spent the last three or four months truly learning and researching and learning more and discovering things that are wonderful things that aren’t wonderful and I am truly grateful every day.
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