I like to run late in the day. For a long time, I envied those runners with the daily morning practice; run with the sun at five before work, breakfast, chipper all day. But lately, I’ve realized that forcing miles out of my just-woken legs leaves me confused and overloaded for the rest of the day. Without my time with the river at night, I find it difficult to process what went on during the day.

I write this way, too, it seems. Late, and fast. My thoughts brew in my mind throughout the day, pieces of information gathered here and there, lines of the story I want to tell coming to the surface from random moments. My mind lends itself to the slow rhythm of the late evening, the noises of the quieting world outside making harmony with my tapping fingers.

Today, I thought a lot about Nurses Day gifts. I did not, as I have been writing toward, get a Google Doodle. In all honesty, I wasn’t surprised to load Google and see no mention of nursing this morning. What surprised me was how much it disappointed me. And how I was further disappointed to read the entire newspaper and see no mention of nursing, or piece written by a nurse. Another year where our voice seems a small whistle in an otherwise deafening wind.

But I only thought about these things a little. I thought more about the question that I unearthed in my last letter to the Doodlers yesterday: Why do I nurse? It scared me, that I couldn’t find an immediate answer. I thought about the moment that I first decided to become a nurse – a confused and dramatic college sophomore, a sunny table at a coffee shop near my parent’s home, a journal, a random calling via my pen. That moment decided for me that nursing would be my life work. But why?

Today, I know that the key to answering this question for myself lies in my words. And so, I bought myself a Nurses Day present to help me in my quest to dig deep into the meaning of my vocation. After seven years of nursing, seven years of haphazardly writing about things, seven years of shifts — why didn’t I write about each one? — I decided to own the fact that I nurse because I write, and I write because I nurse. Those two things are tied inextricably, and finally, I must use them to fully understand what I do.

So, I bought this blog.

Writing to Google was fun, and maybe I’ll include them in my frequent wonderings, but I started this blog as a new nurse to help me understand my job. Seems that quest must continue.

Here’s to writing, creating, innovating, doodling, understanding, telling, enjoying and living all things nursing. Happiest of Nurses Days and Weeks to everybody out there.