Inspiration
Articles to inspire authentic living on the topics of resilience, spirituality, and self-growth with touches of storytelling, depth, and humor.
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The sensibility of numbers
Being born an artist is quite a gift. Curiosity is your biggest talent and it is easy to delight in the simplest things because wherever you see there is beauty. There is a certain rawness that comes with it as in order to create artists need to experience, to live, to feel. Yes, I love being an artist with its presents and its challenges. We tend to be boxed into a category of dreamers as if we were disconnected with reality. As in any other profession or lifestyle, that is a generalization and I got proof of it years ago.
When I was about to finish High School, we were asked to take a career aptitude test. My results were somewhat unexpected. There was a tie on two - very different - careers recommended for me: Art and Math. Art was very obvious; Math not as surprising as you would think. The fact was that I love numbers. Math was one class that I always excelled at. I enjoyed solving questions, equations, finding patterns, the fact that there were formulas to solve simple or not so simple problems. Because I had played instruments from a young age, I knew math was interlaced in every musical rhythms and pattern. So, yes, I have always being an artist with a love for numbers, and history has proven that I am not the only one.
Lately, numbers have come to chase me with the force of an axe and I has been forced to deal with the way I relate to them. No, I am not talking about home schooling through the pandemic.
Bleeding to life
A warm blanket over my shoulders could not dissipate the angst for waiting for a doctor that was taking forever to show up. A thousand things in my to-do list, my mind going in circles planning how was I going to make the best out of the little time I had left to address my responsibilities of the day. A nurse with apologetic eyes kept coming in and out of the cold room. Finally, the doctor came in. I needed to get a contrast injected into my knee. The catheter was much larger than I expected but I was as collaborative as possible so that I could leave out of there as soon as possible.
The doctor was tall and thin, the kind of person that makes jokes without any inflection of his face muscles in a effort to keep you wondering if he was throwing a joke or filing a complaint. After the third “joke” I was laughing. We discussed politics, kids’ age differences, country of origin, why the doctor had sent me there among a variety of topics. After he removed the catheter he pressed the site and looked at me with a very serious face, or with his regular face, I should say.
“You have very thin blood,” he stated.
I thought for a second. “Is that good or bad?” I asked.
“It all depends,” he mentioned. “If you go to war and get stabbed, that is not good.”
I consider my options for a second. I have no plans of going to war.
“But if you worry about things like blood clots,” he continued, “Then it is really good. It can go either way.”
What do you want to be when you grow up?
What do you want to be when you grow up? I have to admit I always enjoyed that question. The thing is that I was a weird kid. I just knew from a very young age what I wanted to be. Since I was 4, I would always have an adult ask me “so, what do you want to be when you grow up?” and I would say in my serious 4 going-on-forty’s voice “I want to be a painter and a writer” And they would say “You are cute. Do you mean like a teacher, or a mom, an astronaut. “No, I want to be a painter and a writer.”
I knew it in my heart, the same way I also knew that there are things I really, really wanted but they were not in my destiny. Like ballet, for example.
Today I was driving when a memory hit me like lighting. I was probably a sophomore or junior in college and as every Sunday we stayed for hours at the dining table talking about our weeks, our lives, our dreams. At that moment I was expressing my life plan: what I was going to study, where, timing to reach my goals, how I was going to make a living, what I was going to do in order to sustain my creative endeavors, etc. I had such a determined plan and I was proud of myself, I felt I was on a roll.