Turning a page

I haven’t blogged in a while, unfortunately. Even though on paper, my life is a lot less complicated because I have fewer commitments and significantly less school, I have been surprised to learn how complex my life has actually become. When I take so few classes, I become less single-minded, and it’s more difficult for me to keep some sort of end goal (like a midterm would have been) in mind to work towards. I end up scheduling myself to do all sorts of things – things that I would never have had the opportunity to work on last year – but it’s important for me to improve upon keeping in mind the direction in which I want to progress.

These last few days are a good example of how intriguing my life has become. As much as one would expect from a post on one’s birthday, I don’t think I have any birthday resolutions or marvellously brilliant insights into my life today. Rather, I just wanted to write about some things that have happened, and hopefully pull them together into one or two simple thoughts to muse about.

On Friday, Herb and Julianna surprised me at the end of Pharmacy Management class with a slab cake from Safeway to celebrate my birthday. It was incredibly nice of them to go to all that effort for my birthday, which I don’t necessarily consider to be all that big of a deal. Herb said, at least twice, something to the effect of “well, you’ve done so much for us,” meaning our class or our population of pharmacy students in general. As I told Joey after, I felt a bit uneasy from the honour that I was getting – perhaps similar to how Eric didn’t want a party to celebrate his time at UBC before leaving for SF. I think it comes down to me not being sure that I have expressed to Herb, Julianna, and others how important they are to me, as opposed to the other way around. What I’m trying to say is that they are big pieces of my life and more so than the converse, and part of why I work hard on things that I don’t have to do is because of that reason. So it feels good.

Today, I started off my birthday with a Brown Bag event in the Downtown Eastside, and it was probably the best one I’ve been to yet. All of the clients knew what we were there for, that we were there to listen, serve coffee and socialize, and they came in smiling, appreciative and willing to share. I just felt so happy that it seems that the hard work Alison and others have put in the Social Sundays initiative seems to be paying off. We can’t take the relationships that we’ve built for granted – we’ve had to work hard to engage our clients, learn their names and make them feel comfortable talking to students.

In terms of addressing some of the turmoil in my life – things have not actually been too bad recently. I have been living the last two weeks with relatively little stress and have been quite sociable. However, I haven’t accomplished a heck of a lot, and I know I need to pick up the pace when it comes to my mandatory work that I need to complete. In addition, I haven’t made much progress when it comes to my strategic plan or my additional pharmacy-related learning that I had wanted to pursue. I think something I need over the next little while is the energy to do work. I need to be able to get back into the groove of accomplishing work, feeling good about it, while maintaining a healthy work-life balance and ensuring that I reward myself for hard work done; rather than allowing myself to be undisciplined day after day.