The Beginning

My life is about to change in a big way. Let’s recap. I’ve basically spent the last 23 years living in one spot. I grew up in Rhode Island and spent four years at school in Massachusetts. I had the good fortune to spend a couple of months in Virginia and a couple more in Australia, but those were both short-lived ventures and they were always designed to be temporary. After college, I came back to Rhode Island, where I have been living for the last year. Now I have decided to pick up and move myself 2000 miles across the country to Colorado, possibly for good.

Now, I’ve bounced around enough in the last couple of years that it wouldn’t seem like this would be a terribly big deal to me. But this is not school. This is the big, bad real world. I’m leaving a very comfortable, broken-in home in favor of one where I know less people than you can count on one hand and where I have no immediate means of sustaining myself. Interesting choice I’ve made here. It almost makes me want to cancel all my grandiose plans and crawl into bed, where it’s cozy and familiar, and not come out, well, ever.

Almost.

What I realized in the course of making this decision is that I had two choices: I could stay comfortable, or I could challenge myself. And at this point in my life, I’m just not ready to settle yet. Don’t get me wrong, I wish I were. Most of me can’t wait for the day when I can wake up every morning to a stable, routine life. But that day isn’t today. It isn’t even close to today. There’s a big world out there, one that I want to know and one that should know me. Right now, I have the opportunity to experience new people, new places, the excitement of the unknown and the adventure of being free. Who am I to be scared?