Boxing up the Decade

I feel like I can draw a box around this past decade. 2000-2009. Everything that happened in that box is somehow no longer relevant. It's funny how it fits so perfectly into one specific decade.

College graduation
Life in Boston
Graduate school graduation
Life in Maine
Two fine puppies
Marriage
Writing a novel
Africa
Divorce


All those things, laden with joy, pain, confusion, contentedness, they're all over now. So it feels that with the close of 2009, I am ready to seal up that box, in every way, and store it in the closet of my memory.

This coming New Year more than any other time in my life feels like a true transition. Though I have been living in Hawaii for the past year, it is only now that I find myself actually being present here. It was as if for the past year, I was trying to fit the Becky from before into a world where she clearly didn't belong. That Becky was meant for 2000-2009. And I realize that now. I was living off of who I was then, rather than who I am now. And I am someone different now.

It's as if for the past decade I was ice-climbing up the side of a mountain. Then, in the past year, I fell off that mountain, rapidly, suddenly and painfully. And being the person that I was, I had been trying to find my way back to the icy slope, so I could attack it once again, so I could prove that I could make it to the top. What I didn't realize is that in all my searching for an entrance to that mountain, I'd actually been traveling along a nice meandering path. A path that winds around the mountain, and around the mountain next to that, and the next and the next. And as I stop now to consider this new terrain, I realize that it's about time I remove my ice-climbing boots. I may not know where this new journey is leading, but I do know this: I'm not going to need the spikes to struggle my way through it.

So off come the boots. They can go in the box with the rest of this closing decade. It's just me and the soft dirt beneath my feet as we make our way to begin this new journey.