So if you think I haven't been motivated lately, and thus no recent blogs, you are wrong; just busy, is all. Motivation is all around us; like beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder. if you aren't feeling motivated by something, you probably aren't looking.

Motivation is what differentiates us sentient beings from ameobas, but even then, some painful stimuli from time to time will get even the lowest form of life to do something relatively modest and therefore, if we are just feeling plain-ass unmotivated, we probably just need to look a little harder.

For example, I took some time off to spend with my wife, the girls, my sister-in-law and her grandhchild in Orlando this past week. We drove the five hours from Hilton Head Island, kids watching Diego DVDs ad nauseum in the rear of the car, and got to the hotel, only to hit the pool and an hour later, throw out my back while reaching for a floatie ring. That night as I lied there in an amazing amount of pain, my biggest concern wasn't the pain, it was that my oldest daughter, Emma, whose birthday was that week, was scheduled (as a surprise to her) to have a dolphin encounter at Discovery Cove. Knowing how much this would mean to her and how much I would kill myself for ruining the experience, was making me more and more miserable. Eventually, as the sun rose, I broke down and asked my wife to take me to Orlando Regional Healthcare's ER; in better times, the facility was literally a short jog from my hotel and I thought about that as I required all of my wife's care to get me over there, hell, I could have crawled this far.

At the ER, where a Nurse Barb swore she'd be my best friend (thanks, Barb), I got some IV dilaudid x2, the ol' lower back pain work-up, and I was discharged easily enough by brunch with the usual RX pain meds. Of course, my wife was able to get the girls to Sea World for a day with the help of her sister and as far as I was concerned, the edge was off of the pain enough that getting some rays at the poolside sounded like a good way to rest my poor back. Several hours of unconsciousness and a nicely sunburned anterior later (I was lying supine), I actually didn't feel bad, although I looked like hell.

The long and short of it is that the next day, I was feeling well enough to watch Emma and my wife swim with the dolphins. It was amazing. I watched the smiles on their faces and knew this was something many people never live to see, much less do themselves. I thought about how much motivation I get out of just being glad to go to work, or looking forward to a vacation, or to completing an assignment and realized, it's when you lose that joy in moving forward, that's when you begin to die. That could be figuratively or literally, but you know, what's the difference, really?

If we can't take the time and look for the happiness in accomplishment, or set goals that give us something to strive for, our lives are relatively meaningless. Don't you realize that if you aren't moving forward, you're either stopped or moving backwards, and is that really where you want to be in your life?

When I said I was busy, it was that I have been motivated by our beloved Webchief to develop an online network for the State Urban Search and Rescue Alliance (the SUSAR Alliance Network, of all things) in order to better focus the energy of over five hundred US&R professionals from around North America and to spread our grass-roots effort to share and improve the response to disaster. The success I saw in the FirefighterNation was the genesis for this creation and although our beginnings are quite humble (and cheap), we now have a little place to call home that we can expand our horizons into. It's what I have been calling my "little experiment" to our members and I'm hoping that not only can I get these people talking together more and more about positive change in the rescue industry, but I can show them where I got the idea and expand our network here as well.

Like seeing the end to a painful experience as the beginning to a new and happy one, we need to get over our past pain and learn from our mistakes and be motivated by what is good in our lives. Just as spending time with my family was for me, we must find things that give us joy and think about things in a way that give you reasons to reach and expand and to grow. The motivation to simply wake up each morning may be all you have, which is a shame, because there are so many around us that give us inspiration to do and be better people. If anything, maybe just motivating yourself to be a better person today might be the shot you need to keep moving forward.

Take a look around you and notice what there is to be done and do it. It will make you a better person and add years to your life.