At the same time, my soul is filled with excitement at what is about to happen next.
Concurrently, my mind knows that the only way to move forward is to leave the past behind and grab hold of the next goal.
All of these things are swirling through my being and it occurs to me that when I was 25 years old, I would never have imagined having the same sensations twenty-five (cough) years later. At that time, I was leaving everything I thought I had planned for my life, about to leap into running a business with my mother and sister. I had quit my job as a Christian Education and Music Director and was moving out of my wonderful little apartment and planning to live at home with my family until there was enough money in the business to pay me a real salary. I was terrified, excited and ready to go.
I have a tendency to make huge changes in my life ... all of a sudden. Some of them are thrust on me, some are because I radically react to a situation I am in and others happen because I can see great potential in that change.
When I was in high school, I was an avid letter writer. I had many long distance friends all over the place and would write four or five letters a week. I remember writing some of those letters though - when all I could say to my friends was that nothing much had changed in my life. There were so many times when I believed that nothing ever would; that I would be doing the same things in the same manner for the rest of my life.
Scores of years later, I recognize that though it often seems as if not much changes, in actuality, life is filled with transformations. These changes are both large and small and even though it seems much safer to avoid them, it's not near as much fun. I like to have fun, even when it is tossing my life up in the air and seeing what shakes out as it returns to reality.
For the last seven or eight months, I have been looking forward to this date, attempting to do my best to prepare for the moment when I was no longer responsible to a professor or fellow students, when I had no more papers to write, textbooks to read or grades with which I needed to be concerned.
Today it has arrived ... well, officially I am finished at midnight tonight, but I have submitted my final paper and unless my professor comes up with more questions, I have written my last response on a classroom wall. It will take a couple of months for the university to process all of the paperwork and deliver the piece of paper that tells the world I have an advanced degree, but right now, I own this moment.
And in the next moment, I am already preparing for what will follow. I have a rather large list of things that need to happen as I forge ahead. Some are piddly little items which will be checked off as quickly as I can get to them, others will require as much concentration and learning as I've put into several of my classes these last three years; but all will continue to propel me into a different life.
Now, I'm kind of looking forward to a couple of days of not thinking about much of anything, but more than that, I'm looking forward to not fracturing my concentration into many different areas. I have stories to tell and it's going to be fun focusing on one thing at a time.
It's nice to have an adorable companion on the journey.
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