A Roller Coaster of Love

225 weekly blog posts.  How do I do it?, a reader recently asked me. The health journey provides me endless material: fascination, intrigue, tragedy, empathy, frustration, wonder, curiosity, fear, and inspiration. As a nurse I’m blessed to participate in some of people’s most intimate moments as a guide, helper, ear, hand holder, and translator. As a team member and leader I study the puzzle of how people think, emote, decide, and relate trying to get anything done safely and ethically in the most consuming, illogical, nonsensical, complex system imaginable. My palette includes the desire and dilemma of habit change, the tangled web of cultures, the enticing potential and hype of technology, the flood and inaccessibility of data, the vital impossibility of policy change, and the insane contradiction of money surrounding,  driving, tempting, confounding health. Can I tease out the simple and illusive filaments of the magic levers of best health? What works, how do we know? How do we find, share, and use evidence? How is uncertainty communicated, how does information about groups of people relate to me, a single person?  I love sharing my broad and thin knowledge of health as a coach and a writer. As a person on my own health journey, writing this blog stokes my fire – feeding and renewing my pathological optimism. Actually, I start with a nut of an idea, sit down with that idea on Sunday and write. Takes about an hour. I used to read the drafts to my mom, now my wife. It never turns out the way I think it will. The post writes itself. I’m an old hippie – at the end of the day the health journey is a roller coaster of love. Thanks for the ride.  See you next week.

This week my son, Mike Funk, would have been 40. Lord, I miss you, Mike. You still inspire me. You’d be proud of your seasoning family.