Yeah that stuff.

When you arrive at the place in your life when things are never like you'd thought they'd be, ever imagined... your living.

Your living and your taking everything step by step, day by day.

My most recent decision to go back to school was one that I've been contemplating for awhile. I had no clear path in mind or even a program selected but that all changed one evening in January when I discovered CCA and the DMBA program. The pictures and thoughts of what it would be like journeyed through my head over the next several months and when I was accepted in the summer my head started to swirl a little more vividly.

Your idea of things never seem to be just that. I'm happy with the decisions I've made and know this is the right path for me but it's hard. Harder than I expected. Between the heavy workload, commuting back and forth from North Carolina to San Francisco, managing my time with group project, individual projects, homework, tweeting, reading, Google hangouts, packing, trying to find a job, trying to figure out where I'm going to live and trying to figure out what the heck I just did to myself.

The notion of putting school work before going out with friends or hanging out with my family, or taking my dog for a walk or even not sleeping for a few days because my list of "to-dos" is endless, wasn't in my idea.

And to top it all off, I am having a yard sale in a few short hours selling most all of the things that surrounded me in the past 10 plus years. And let me tell you, going through a lifetime of collections, memories and stuff is hard too. It's emotional, trivial and it just plain stinks. It's amazing the hold items can take in your life though, even if most of them don't matter. After emptying my storage unit and packing up the truck I rode back to the place I call home right now and couldn't help but question myself.

Why can't I keep it all? Why am I doing this? Why do I have to get rid of that? Why is this so hard? How come it's terrifying to think about your life without all this stuff?

While I don't have all the answers I know that the stuff I'm getting rid of won't be mad at me, it will find a new home and a new person to start leaching on to. It will become their thing, not mine. And will give me less to think about and less to clean.

 I'm considering this a re-birth. A beginning, not and end. Here's to the traveler.