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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Alfonsina Betancourt Blog

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The sensibility of numbers
resilience resilience

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.

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Bleeding to life

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.”

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What do you want to be when you grow up?

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.

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