It Never Fails...

... that whenever I make a plan for how to live my life, something or someone comes along to remind me that nothing ever turns out the way I plan it. So when I decided that I knew what I didn't want to do, I should have known that I'd end up doing exactly that. And sooner rather than later.

Knowing, as GI Joe told us when we were kids, is half the battle. And it's also the best weapon for going forward into potentially disastrous situations. What you don't know can hurt you a hell of a lot more than anything you've prepared to face. I guess I'm sticking to at least part of my plan: keeping my eyes open and accepting things for what they are and what they may turn out to be.

Time to Tell the Story

If 2011 is the Year of the Bucket List, then November has definitely been the Month of Surprises. Unfortunately, not all of them have been enjoyable. For better or for worse, though, they've been thought-provoking. By far the best surprise was finding out that a friend of mine is participating in National Novel Writing Month. Halfway through the month, she was halfway to her 50,000 word goal and incredibly excited about her progress and the process. Hearing her talk made me realize how much I've missed writing, and how much I really depend on it to make sense of things in my life. I'm just not any good at sorting things out in my head. I wind up, as a friend pointed out last weekend, "thinking too much." Putting words, ideas, and emotions on the screen means taking them out of my head and forcing them to be what they are. Acknowledging them, re-reading them, maybe fixing a few typos here and there, but, for the most part, committing them to their place in the past. Telling the story means saying what happened, and separating that from what I could have done differently, or wish had been, or didn't understand at the time. The words on the page are the truth (or my version of it) that can't be changed. The story of the future is unwritten and is mine to shape with the choices that I make. The last couple of weeks have brought both hurt and hope, and the realization that I'm going to have to risk the first -- and maybe a lot of it -- if I want to have the second. I've been pretty good at convincing myself that I could avoid getting hurt by setting my expectations really low and then not being very surprised when people lived down to them, so to speak, instead of rising above them. I've been afraid to hope for better for myself, from myself, and from other people, and I can't do that any more. What I might have lost is gone, and I need to let it go. What I might gain will be so much better if I have the courage to let it be.

The Year of the Bucket List

I can't really say that I set out to make this the year that everything happens, but somehow it all did. Which I'm going to use as a very convenient excuse for having not posted anything.

So, the things that I crossed off my to-do list this year:

• Went to the Super Bowl (of course, my team stayed home as usual).
• Finally got an A in an Economics class.
  
• Saw my first NCAA basketball playoff game. Almost saw my team pull off what would have been the upset of the century.
• Saw my first (and second) baseball spring training games. Also saw my (very) local college team land a foul ball through my window.
• Drove a Mustang convertible. Added "buying a convertible" to my bucket list.
  
• Witnessed the aftermath of an epic battle between man and nature and the branches of a tree poking through my ceiling. I would gladly have left this one on the to-don't list.
• Shouted myself hoarse at three NBA playoff games, including a triple-overtime monster.
• Finally went to Disney World with some of the best friends in the world.
• Got to be both a little bit country (CMAFest) and a little bit rock-n-roll (Bon Jovi).
  
• Spent an entire uninterrupted week at the beach without getting sunburned.
• Admitted to my mother that I got a tattoo.
  
• Made a well-reasoned career change that didn't scare the hell of me.
• Got my picture taken with Elvis. Actually, with five Elvises. (Elvii?)
  
• Toured the World of Coca-Cola.
  
• Crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and experienced my first two earthquakes all within my first 12 hours in California.
  

Somewhere in between all of that going and doing were a lot of small things that were, in some ways, just as big as the things that made my list. And that's what this year was supposed to be about: being happier with who I am and where I am. Fixing the things that made me feel broken. I did that, too, but along the way I think I got too protective. Kind of like the difference between driving a beat-up Corolla and a brand-new Mustang. I was afraid of going back to bad habits, but I might have let go of some good ones, too. If you really want to enjoy the drive, sometimes you have to loosen your grip on the wheel. So now I'm looking for a little more balance, and hoping that I'm heading down the right road to find it.

Turning the Page

I can't say for sure that it's the end of the book, but I know that I've started a new chapter in the past couple of weeks. I'm still struggling to make sense of the plot twists, and maybe I'm reading too much between the lines trying to find things that weren't ever there.

I've always been the kind of person who does best when I take time to think before I speak, which doesn't always happen. I've certainly had my fair share of times when I've hurt people -- and been hurt -- by speaking too quickly or saying too much. I've learned that sometimes you shouldn't ask the question unless you're prepared for an answer that you don't want to hear. But I've also realized that you don't get any answers to the questions that you don't ask. No amount of chasing them around inside your head is ever going to resolve them with the certainty that you need to finally put a period at the end of the sentence.

Even if everything in life really does happen for a reason, in the long run, the reasons aren't what matters. Once you've made your peace with where you are, you stop thinking about how you got there and wondering what you could have done to get to somewhere different. It's a great feeling when you have it, but once you get it, you can't let yourself look back. The moment you do, you're trying to connect the dots and make sense of the past again. You get so caught up in the "why?" that you forget to concentrate on the only question that you can really answer: "what am I going to do about it?" It's not about what you should have done; even if you did make a mistake, you're still too close to learn from it. Picking it apart just prolongs the healing process. Until you can put it down and walk away, it's just baggage that you're carrying.

Nothing in the world scares me so much as a blank page. Given that I write for a living, that's probably a bad thing. I always need something to start from, even if nothing that's there at the beginning ends up in the final product. There's always a conflict between wanting to look back and needing to move forward, especially when you're not quite sure which is which. I know that eventually I'll get to a place where the difference becomes clear. I'm just not sure if it will be another new chapter, or the end of the story once and for all.