Blog-series: No Step Wasted, Gratitude for the Journey #3 | The Invisible Curriculum: What Home Care Nursing Taught Me About Humanity
Before I ever founded a company, wrote a book, or mapped out a methodology, I returned home every summer to the same place: the cobbled streets and quiet homes of Fredrikstad, Norway, where I worked in home care nursing for the municipality. This job, which I began in the summer of 2004 - my first break from art school in Vancouver, became a seasonal rhythm in my life. Four months each year, I traded textbooks and paintbrushes for wound dressings, medication trays, and long walks beside elders who would teach me more about time, presence, and wisdom than any lecture hall could.
During my time of eight years combined working in home care nursing, I was entrusted with everything from medication administration and wound care to nutritional guidance and everyday support. But it wasn’t just the clinical tasks that stayed with me, it was the invisible yet undeniable value of the ordinary. A walk to the mailbox. Reading aloud from the local newspaper. Eating breakfast at a table with someone who would otherwise eat alone. Listening, truly listening, as a patient with dementia or Alzheimer repeated a childhood memory, those still clear in mind told stories of their time working for the resistance movements during World War II, how they met the love of their life, or voiced their fear of becoming a burden. These were not just social gestures; they were cognitive, emotional, and spiritual medicine. Small acts with profound ripple effects on a person’s dignity and well-being.
One of the most defining experiences came when I served in palliative care, sitting bedside with patients as they prepared to leave this world. These sacred moments of transition taught me more about life than any theory or textbook could. Palliative nurses focus on comfort, pain management, and emotional support for patients with terminal illnesses and their families. In those moments, holding someone’s hand, witnessing their final breath, sometimes being the last face they saw, I felt the veils between worlds thin. It was a space of deep humility and presence. These moments left permanent imprints on my soul.
My parents, seeing my dedication and emotional capacity, begged me to move home and switch majors to become a certified nurse. They saw a clear, honorable path. But even then, without yet knowing why, I knew this role, as sacred and meaningful as it was, was not mine to make permanent. I loved the work, but I knew my soul was gathering something else through these years. I sensed I was in the middle of something formative, an embodied apprenticeship not to become a nurse, but to become a deeply attuned systems-thinker and community builder. These experiences were my early career capital, quietly shaping the vision that would later become Sumati Group and The Wondervention Effect.
What I witnessed during those years was the quiet interplay of science and soul. Movement, companionship, and shared story weren’t just comforts, they were cognitive interventions. They were medicine. The mind and body responded to these rituals. Elders thrived when they were seen, heard, and invited into conversation. What we now know through neuroscience and longevity research, I first learned through peeling apples, sharing silence, and listening to songs hummed in trembling voices.
Intergenerational work taught me that community health is not a department, it’s a culture. That storytelling is a form of knowledge transfer. That the arc of healing is often circular, not linear. We care for those who once cared for us. And in doing so, we grow wiser ourselves.
These summers, these homes, these lives - they gave me something far beyond experience. They gifted me the foundation for my life’s work.
No step was wasted. Not one summer. Not one story. Not one goodbye.
And for that, I am deeply grateful.
No Step Wasted, Gratitude for the Journey is a blog series of reflections from my interdisciplinary life. Each post is a love letter to the generalist’s path, to trusting that every chapter, even the ones we don’t yet understand, may one day reveal their place in our deepest calling.
