Unit 5 Blog Response

"Being Everything That I Want: I'll Never Give Up."

Topic: How is school influencing your life up to this point?.

There are many different soundtracks simultaneously underpinning the various parts of my life. At this point, one of my current musical favorites is written by a composer/songwriter called Matthew Pucket, entitled, "Everything I Want". It's the opening theme to ABC's reality drama, "Boston Med". I digress a little....As for how school is influencing my life at this point, I would have to say that it is re-emphasizing and re-affirming to me all of the different explanations as to why I've chosen this particular path, at this unique point in my life. If there is one discipline where I feel like where I belong most, it's in health and medicine. No question. I'm not entirely sure if being a teaching hospital patient for my entire life, has somehow re-wired me a little differently in that regard. As a pediatric patient, I saw and experienced so much, so intuitively within that clinical setting, that it's difficult to imagine the ways in which it didn't influence many of my subsequent life-choices. You look at humanity with a keener, more critical eye. You foster a love for life that appreciates the capriciousness and extreme delicacy of human existence.

School is still a significant part of my life. It always has been and will continue to be so, in one form or another. As a much younger student, I was far from an outstanding scholar. Much earlier on, my teachers predicted that I wouldn't make it through junior high school-which also co-incided with a lot of my hospital stays and surgeries. I had to work at it. Prove myself. Now, with a little more wisdom and experience behind me (and several graduations later), I'm able to sit back and be more pragmatic about my progress. I still strive to be humble about it. Each new day brings something or someone new and inspirational. No-one said it would be easy, and no-one is magically going to hand over the answers and do the work for me. That much I've figured out.

My daughter sees my efforts at school, and understands how putting in effort every day, can have longer-term consequences. So, indirectly, my schooling is influencing her life, too. School is grounding me and keeping me where I need to be. It's re-iterating the skills that I've gained, and is highlighting the skill-sets that I've yet to master. There is invariably something that I can refresh, renew and re-reflect upon.

While to an extent, my schooling may be seen as one means to an end, it is a significant and stabalizing influence in my life right now.