For a long time, Will and I have had a sort of a mantra. I've probably mentioned it before, and maybe mantra is to grand a word for it, maybe it's just a thing we tell ourselves when life seems too changeable.
You cannot plan, you can only prepare.
Because plans change, go awry, turn upside down. So it's better to prepare. Prepare to stay, prepare to go, prepare to have a spanner thrown into the works, prepare to pack furiously over a holiday weekend so that we can move to a teeny tiny town in Vermont in three days.
Vermont.
VERMONT!
If someone had told me two years ago that we would find ourselves in New York, I would probably have laughed. If they'd told me that I would be, this week, finishing up a year of homeschooling my wonderful, energetic, occasionally maddening son, I would have laughed even more. And yet here we are.
Likewise I would never have guessed, on the weekend we moved here, one year ago exactly, that we would be heading next to Vermont. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'd never really thought much about Vermont at that point. On that weekend, I was just hoping we'd make it though the year and then go home, either to Charlottesville, or back to Portland. And yet, as before, here we are.
Living in this city for a year has taught me many things, and I'm sure that, in time, I'll reflect back on all of them. But the main thing that I've learned is that, while New York is beautiful and exciting and thrilling, it's not for us. Or perhaps, we are not for it. We can exist here. We made friends and saw wonderful things and had a great deal of fun, but in the end, we are not living the life that we want. And existing isn't enough. It's time to live.
I have so many things that I hope for the year, years, ahead of us. As much fun as I've had this year, I feel a little bit lost in myself. I think all of us feel that way. So it's time to get back. To start over. To live the inverse of this year. And believe me, where we are going is about as different from Manhattan as it could possibly get. We couldn't be more thrilled. Honestly, I keep dancing in the kitchen. I think the neighbors across the way think I'm a little nuts, but that's ok, they only have to see my mad midnight dancing for a few more days.
You'll have to excuse me from this space for a bit, however. The move that was supposed to take a month has now been compressed into a few days. And ready or not, we pick up the keys to the moving truck Thursday morning and turn in our keys to the apartment at the end of the day. So we'd better be ready.
