On new year's eve, my best friend and I sat in her car overlooking the city from the top of my neighbourhood. Fiddling with the heater, she turned to me and said: 'You brought more of Cambridge with you last year. This year you brought more of Trudy; and I think I like it better'.
There are moments that epitomize certain periods of your life. What my friend said, on the eve - the cusp - of a new year, resonates deeply with me. I nodded in agreement then and have ruminated it since Thursday, when I touched English soil and dragged a load of 50 lbs suitcases up four flights of stairs.
It's funny how going away for a time can give you perspective on things. Such realizations are not epiphanic in any epic sort of way, but they mark significant turning points in each of our lives: they mark moments of appreciation.
This Christmas, I learned that you can come home again, that you do not fall off the face of the (community) earth when you venture to the other side of the pasture. From catching up with my best over forty pieces of sushi at Mikados to celebrating my parent's 25th anniversary over two glasses of bubbly to breakfast at 'our' diner before church to perusing wedding florals with my best friend the night before I left - these moments mark a time that I will not forget. They represent the most important things in my life.
It's not - I don't think - that I didn't bring Cambridge back with me this year; rather, I think that it is now just a part of me. I feel settled, knowing the love and warmth and comfort of close friends and family. And this place - all that it represents - is now a place of opportunity to grow and learn; it is not a place that should define me. It is only a part, not all, of who I am because much of who I am is reflected in the faces that grew up with me.
And I think that's what I would like to take with me this year, going into 2007. I would like to shed off the burden of comparison and just give these next two and a half years my all; I want to give God my best, be it in writing, thinking, or living.
A big year this year. And a wedding that marks the close of a school year and the beginning of a new phase in all our lives. I can't wait.
1 comment:
AUTHOR: Andrea
DATE: 01/11/2007 02:05:01 AM
It was a good holiday, wasn't it? When people ask me how my Christmas went, I can honestly beam at them and say "great" because it really was that amazing. One for the books. It was amazing to have more than 24 hours with my girls, to actually start feeling like a real 5-person family, to eat sushi boats and go shopping and role-play in fun dinner parties and sit, overlooking a bluff, with my best friend. :)
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