Context Then, Context Now

I drafted Monday's piece on Tuesday, August 5, 2014. I was just two days off my bottom, the day (quite different from the Greatest Day) when the necessity of making substantial changes in my life became immediate and unavoidable.

I have no idea what possessed me that day to write that introduction to the pieces I had written about Nolus in the days following his death. I had no immediate plans to publish them. Perhaps I found the draft printout of the pieces I had written thus far and, in that space of need for immediate changes in my life, started working on it again, as something unfinished that needed finishing? I really don't know.

I wrote that day, "I sit at the cusp of vast changes in my life," a sentence I left untouched in the piece I published Monday. As I look back over the last ten months, I look to where I was when I wrote that and I'm pleased and take some pride in just how far I've come. It seems like a different life. Was a different life. "Sitting on the cusp" doesn't quite describe where I am right now. I'm embedded now in the process, embedded in bringing those changes to fruition.

And yet there remains a certain core uncertainty. The process continues, and where it will ultimately come to something like rest remains far beyond my ability to see. At the time, the uncertainty was born of the insistent desperation that overwhelms stasis and becomes a drive to action and thus, paradoxically, a form of hope. The uncertainty I feel today is that elevated-heart feeling of when fear ceases to be a negative and gives way to thrill, as of a driving motion not wholly within your control. It feels awake, it feels in-the-moment. It feels alive.