“Love kindness. Build community. Believe in humanity.”
That quote is the tagline for this Humanity Hiker website. I created this website before our 5,000 mile walk across America. At the time I could not disclose that our main purpose was to reboot Cindy’s life and brain health, yet needed a cover for why we were uprooting our lives. I declared our purpose for the American Discovery Trail (ADT) journey was to observe and report on kindness and community across America, both in presentations to the communities we passed through and on this website. My previous long distance journeys revealed how kind people can be, both to strangers and to others in their community, which prompted the humanitarian creed.
During our ADT hike Cindy improved, but regressed again after we returned. I continued as her full time home caregiver and applied my academic training to researching brain health. My research uncovered one of the most important ingredients for preserving brain health:
“Love kindness. Build community. Believe in humanity.”
Yes, this humanitarian creed also increases your brain health. Guaranteed. How do you think I lasted so long as a full time caregiver for a loved one with dementia? We all have the opportunity to be caregivers in our lives, whether for loved ones, neighbors or strangers in need. We also are all journeyers in some way, whether that journey occurs on a long distance trail or as we navigate the challenges of life. This website represents the perspectives of a care partner journeyer, or a journeying carepartner, with information and inspiration for both pursuits.
The Contents menu provides a chronological reference for this blog, the Features menu provides collection of posts corresponding to special topics. Both will be expanded as new themes emerge over time. Note also the Subscribe form. My former subscriber list is gone with this revamping so I need both followers and newcomers to sign up. I am still working out the kinks with this, but subscribers will receive one of my music compositions. This will become very important for my future plans and I hope you will encourage at least one friend of yours to subscribe as well.
One reason for the revamping was the longevity of my home caregiver role, going on fifteen years now with this post. I needed to change things up a bit with my life and with this blog in order to keep both vibrant. The two other websites I created are part of this change as well. Moving forward I plan to provide more personal vignettes that cater to the caregivers among us, plus one extraordinary feature for the journeyers. More about that when everything is ready.
I now have a companion website designed for humanitarians, called the Unenlightened Wisdom Project. The subtitle for the project is “Journeying from Brain Health to Democracy.” Give it a look sometime and subscribe to that as well.
The third website, as of now still in development, will be for eCommerce. People can purchase/book my writings, music and/or presentations for humanity. Perhaps I will offer merchandise someday as well, with items that display the humanitarian creed:
“Love kindness. Build community. Believe in humanity.”