Budding

I have the sense that I am in the process of undergoing something. The most similar experience I can relate is that of what I was feeling last year about this time, a sense of pushing against barriers inside myself that I could not really see. The barriers do not feel as if they're there this time; it is more of a sense of standing on something as a base and stretching out.

Like so much else that seems to happen inside me, it is hard to explain in concrete terms. Perhaps the sense of a flower bud opening is the closest. In one sense, it probably is natural: I'm starting over ahead of my family in a place I've never been with people I've never known. In a real sense, there is no safety net (or at least, not like I have had in the past with friends near and family no more than two hours away).

In the other sense it is naturally unnatural (there's a puzzler for you): there is a sense that in some ways, I am taking responsibility for parts of my life for the first time. This was a semi-conscious decision (semi-conscious in the fact that if I was going to look for work outside of California, this potential always existed) that I at least thought of when I started down this road.

What do I mean? Simply that there are parts of my life that I still, even at 42, fail to act in an decisive and independent way. I agree that moving doesn't magically "make" it happen - but putting one's self in the position of having to deal more directly with them does.

It's odd - but good in the sense that instead of feeling like I am pushing against boundaries, I feel I am growing up from them.