Over the course of the last 30 errrrr .... ish years, I have worked in Non-Profit Land. 1981 to be exact was my first Assistant Bookkeeper position with a non-profit devoted to Skilled Nursing Facility quality standards. During those years, I have worked a variety of places, but mostly at YNI (Yosemite National Institutes, now called NatureBridges.)(No comment on the new name)(and we are going to call it YNI or Headlands Institute because that is where I worked.)
I LOVED working there, and did so for more than 15 years. The people I worked with were passionate about their work. Not just the instructors, but the administrative staff as well. During the peak years of the institutes, it was by far the best work experience of my life, and may remain so.
But people move on and times change. Fast forward seven years. A group of seven of us met for dinner earlier this week. I can't speak for anyone else, but I had more fun than I have had in quite awhile. We laughed, and told stories of the old days, and Remember When stories. After dinner, we walked up the hill to the Mark Hopkins where David Breashears was speaking. The event was the annual award of the Rowell Award for the Art of Adventure. Galen Rowell as a board member for YNI. When he and his wife died in an airplane crash, an Rowell Award was started. You can read more about it here:
This award is given to someone that has shown extraordinary passion towards their adventure project. And I mean extraordinary. Prior to David Breashears speaking, the 2009 Award Recipient spoke - Craig Childs.
This man is PASSIONATE.
Look at his eyes in this photo, you can see the passion. Isn't that stare intense?? When he spoke about smelling the salt in the arroyos of Utah, deep in the canyons, and hearing what the earth has to say to you, the man positively DRIPS passion.
And as I was driving back home, across the Golden Gate Bridge, catching the lights of nighttime San Francisco out of the corner of my eye as I went north up Highway 101, it occurred to me that somewhere along the line, I have lost my Non-Profit Passion.
Somewhere between leaving YNI/Headlands, the passion has leaked out. It could be the work I did at Centerforce (my fiscal sponsor and the organization with whom I still do accounting contract work). That work was hard - dealing with the incarcerated population, and meeting payroll twice a month, and laying off 29 people during the three years I was there. Centerforce isn't to blame, by any means, for my loss of passion, I think it just sort of slowly ozzeeeddd out of me during that time. Cutting budgets and the drain of managing an extremely tight cash flow will do that to you. It leaves you tired and drained.
And here is my (perhaps long-winded) point. Sitting and listening to my old co-workers/friends, and listening to Craig Childs, I felt that passion. I know it is still in there. I think it has been "resting", waiting for the right time to come back. It wasn't there when I applied to Canal Alliance back in February, I never could have done, in my heart, the job they wanted me to do as Director of Finance and Administration. But it is there now.
And it's growing. Getting this Soccer Gear Drive going feels like the Passion of Old. The closer I get to getting on the plane next Friday, I can feel the Passion grow inside of me. Like this little ball gaining speed, carrying me towards Africa.
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