It's Time to Piss on the Fire

Today is a new beginning.  I am closing chapters in my life and it feels very, odd.  Change of address, shipping boxes to a new home, tying up loose ends,  shipping out all of the last items that I sold, downgrading my seller store on eBay.  I am no longer doing any of that anymore.  The semi bohemian-gypsy life that I have been living for the last year is coming to an end and the florescent lights of the corporate world beckon me like a 7-11 on a long, dark stretch of lonely highway.  As Jackie Gleason once said, “It’s time to piss on the fire”. 

It has been an interesting year. I created an amazing collection of bags that were loved, and are now all over the world from Alaska to Japan.  I have seen so much of the rest of America.  From the flat farmland in the Midwest to Amish country , the historic city of Philadelphia to the green rolling landscape of Virginia.

And just when I thought it was time to settle in, I get a call. Well, an email. And it’s too good to pass up.

After 6 months of a long, cold winter that gave way to a beautiful, enchanting spring, it’s on to another city for a whole new adventure.  Well, kind of.  The city is familiar, but the lifestyle will be exceptionally different than when I lived there before.  Yep, Dallas.  That old, comfortable shoe that my feet always seem to return to.  It seems as though my life for the last three years has been somewhat of a game of Monopoly, and here I am about to pass Go and collect my $200. We start from point A, only to find ourselves arriving right back where we began.  The best part of it all is when you leave and experience the rest of the country, or the world, you discover that your own backyard wasn’t so bad after all.  That maybe it wasn’t the city or the area that needed changing; perhaps it was you that needed to see it differently.  Perception is everything. And our creative force is with us anywhere we go, we just have to realize that and be confident enough to create a space wherever we are, even if it seems there is no “space” to create it. 

 I think about the journey.   I think about everything I have experienced.  The hard times, the great times.  The things that were beautiful, the things that were painful, but also beautiful -even if they didn’t seem so beautiful at the time.  I think of everyone who  I have met along the way.  The story that their life and my life wrote when they collided. I think of all the moments I missed out on while I was away from family, and then all of the moments going forward that I won’t be missing.  It makes me smile. 
This has been hard but it feels like the end of a hard road.  There was a moment three years ago when moving just felt like I was force feeding myself a healthy bowl of sticky, tasteless oatmeal.  This time, moving feels good.    

No more sticky oatmeal.