we are nowhere and our time is now

and then one day, my life was changed for forever.

i still do not completely know the extent of the change. i continue to find it difficult to wrap my head around that sunday afternoon on the beach when two coasts met and fell. hard.

i realized recently that now, a lot more than before, i put a lot of stock into what creates change change. into moments. ideas. people. semantics, songs. wrong turns...all can cause massive shifts in one's reality. lately i focus on those details intensely. i wonder if i just said that or thought that, met her first, took the chance on that...didn't bring a map...where would i be. overanalyzing it may very well be, but i didn't grow up to be a lawyer for nothing. for me, in this moment, the cause of change is in the details of the choices...

a veritable choose your own adventure book i guess.

i had a few of those funny little books when i was small. i remember seeing a boy in my class reading one, he let me browse through it a bit and i was perplexed. these books you didn't read from begining to end, you jumped around based on choices you made...
"if you choose to enter the woods go to page 45,"

or

"if you choose to take the long road around the woods go to page 74."

faciniating.

or they were until i got my hands on one... perhaps because i cheated. i would read the options of my choices and choose based on the result that best suited me (that is of course i would read all the options AND their results before in my 7 year-old mind i really committed to a choice) and in the end i read every possible version of the adventure anyway because my feverish young mind couldn't fathom that there was really only one option...ever...

(insert thanks here for hippie parents who gave me lots of choices and opportunites long before i knew what that meant)

things are different now...the mind of a 7 year-old may not understand that sometimes you make a choice and you can't turn back the pages to chose a different path that might suit you better. the mind of this 28 year-old has a hard time with that too. trying to move forward with a life of no regrets seems so difficult when a choice in a moment can change everything.

i have made so many choices over the last year that have completely altered my life...
to show up that day in venice. to take that first flight. to love hard. to let go. to subvert the hostilities that lay on the 33rd floor of a downtown la office building. to find myself on the therapists couch. to begin a transition. to accept who my family really is. to return home. to be honest despite the consequences. to fight hard. to turn around to give my brother one more hug. to value the friends i have chosen as my family more intensely than i ever have before.

i sit here. now.

missing something and having everything. wishing i could flip back through those pages i read through too quickly to contemplate the result and still somehow settled where i am because i know there are more pages to turn through. reflecting on a year of complete change i see the way weaving in and out of the maze of pages of choices has put me here. a place where i am okay.

i used to want to map out everything. plan precicely...then one day (i think at some point between panama and costa rica, a subject for another blog)...i just threw the map over the bridge. i let go of the planning...let my choices, my opportunites, that wonderful nexus of heart and mind be my guide.

things could have been done differently...that is always true. but i made the choices i did and this heart beats and this blood pumps through it. i am aware...finally completely cognizant of those small choices that put me here...i think that is why i have intensely examined them lately. it truely is facinating that such small choices can create change of such a large magnitude.

i may choose my next adventure with cation. i may dive in head first.

although i may not have that ability of my seven year-old self to chose those adventures with full disclosure i think now...yes, i know now, that i finally understand the importance, the gravity, of a moment. a word. the action of turning around. of taking a chance. all of those things everyday...every choice, it all moves me through this adventure that i have chosen. this lesson is something i could never have learned if i was always allowed and able to read ahead to the end of the adventure.

so a year later though everything on that day remains the same in my core, everything is different and while there may be places i hope this path weaves though, warm spots i hope it returns to, cold dark places i hope to avoid and places i will fight to remain, i cannot look ahead to the moment of that fork in the road that will cause me to end up here or there...the choices on the way will be my next adventure.

and i am glad i threw the map away.