Anniversary

One year, three residences and a non-stop mixture of business and pleasure throughout Santa Barbara, Chicago, San Francisco, The Pacific Coast Highway, Ventura Beach and Nashville. The first chapter of an exciting new story quietly trails off, satisfying the need for wonderment in any good story, turning the page once again to Chicago — where the next year is born. 

Barreling through an entire year, stopping for nothing, satisfying a reckless gusto in an ever-changing setting where the calendar pages mirror the cluttered sheets of any entertainment magazine. A vivid parade of 365 consecutive days with only short-term, chaotic adventures throughout gives measure to the motivational jargon we read all the time — those gleeful pins that prompt us to live each and every day of our lives in absolute wingding.

Emphasis on a literal calendar year was crucial to the survival of the time. Moving every day together, sliding the days into the next with absolute purpose constructed a boxcar adventure that was crucial to the plot, and the significance of marking a calendar year served as the perfect framing device for such a story. When measured, and performed with tailored style, the significance of 365 days between two marks of time is powerful enough to lead your life into a completely foreign and unexpected world. A world worthy of starting a whole new chapter for.

That particular year introduced me to a growing counter-culture of thirty-somethings starting brand-new lives for themselves in brand-new worlds. Over the course of that year and across the country, it became commonplace to meet young, thirty-something guys and gals fresh in the beginning stages of their new-era lives. Sometimes, you meet the people who made major decisions at early stages in their lives; and other times, you meet people like me, people who had not made any decisions at all. Regardless of direction in the fork, any direction leading to this particular time period is drawing people of my age range to explore reinvention. It seems, in some degrees, the theory of "Thirty Is Twenty" is practiced in the reasoning that life can begin again in your thirties. If you are by far from being old, you are still pretty young, assuming. Excitability and passion are still hot enough to warm desire for anything new and imagined. Staying a course through the shaky unknown with courageous anxiety is the only way to give fate and new opportunities a fighting chance at all. For an entire year, I anxiously sifted socially, professionally, creatively, and unassumingly in my own participation of the wayward thirty. I was taking a chance at starting over again and I watched many others my age do the same. The movement did not seem to discriminate. I shared this social happening with single people, relationship people and parent people. This genre exists in our culture today and the common thread is merely an age demographic. Terrified participants take something monumental from it all. I learned that it is okay to want everything different. Initially, when I started this blog and set my sails to sea, the only thing I knew for certain was that by the time October came around again everything was going to be different. Nothing was going to be the way it was ever again and that was the only thing I was asking for. Excitable terror has permeated my life and now it is quietly slowing down, entering another October, ending that momentous first chapter of recalibration on the soggy banks of a gentle duck pond in the crisp autumn of the midwest. The next chapter calls for more settled stability, however, the stories for the coming seasons are the challenges that must keep the reader guessing and holding tight with fascination.

The new setting reveals a particular stillness. A stillness from the ponds and wildlife that reflects a permanence in the coming pages, where the characters and story plots grow on a scanty stage. The suspense and the uncertainty never staggers when re-sketching the bundle of blank pages that came with everything you asked for. The crisp air returns to where it was a year ago, this time autumn casts a grander spell, illuminating the shanty stage with the appropriate edge to delight just as well as any Second City scaffold. October will always mean something when it whispers with the leaves every year. The wingding carries on in the settled furnishings. The satirical euphemisms about it all are helpful in the processing of new beginnings. Believing that what you are doing is apart of some delirious adventure entices those dreamers and their dreams to live for the world to see. After all, the quaintest of settings tell surprising stories.

The sun is setting. The waters calm and the unruffled fowl nest before their reticent night swim. I join the mallards in nesting, actualizing the steadiness in the new, quiet ambience. Heavy rain and thunderstorms are predicted to oversee the twilight and follow midnight into the one-year anniversary. I sit in a recliner by the open french doors of the balcony. My mind is dizzy with relief and memories. I closed my eyes to remember more clearly. Nothing moved at all. I slept through the night.