On change.

So I was reading through a new friend's old blog posts last night.  Blogs from a decade ago, a voice from the past etched in the boundless clay of the internet.  It made me think of my own history, my own life in 2003.  Where I stood as the timer reset, putting to bed one terrible year and starting the clock on a new one.

I wasn't in good shape ten years ago.  My mother ended her year-long battle with pancreatic cancer.  I'd just been laid off from my dot com job; I was dating a girl who lived in Toronto while I rotted away in a tiny apartment in New York.  I smoked too much.  Drank too much.  I didn't know what to do or who I was.  I only knew that change was coming.

I didn't know that I'd start working later that month at a bar that would come to define not only my 20s, but those of my closest friends as well.  That the job would connect me with the finest scum and villany lower Manhattan could offer.  I didn't know that a year later I'd be applying to school again, fighting to fulfill one last promise to a dead woman.  That people that would prop me up in my darkest hours even existed, much less find their ways into my life.

So much of what I am was still on the horizon.  My passion for food and cooking, my haphazard mastery of a pool cue.  Loves lost and won and lost again.  Mistakes indelicately made, the gouts of flame that broke me down and forged me ever stronger.

And that isn't to say I haven't had my constants.  I still love fried chicken.  The cigarettes I'm trying to quit are the same ones I smoked out on the fire escape ten years ago.  The boy I grew up with became a man I still stand side by side with, and the friends I made on the fourth floor of a college dorm still gather every year to celebrate our lives and friendship.  But nothing's the same.  Love grows deeper; people grow into and out of things.

That's the trick, isn't it?  Nothing gold can stay.  We always wait for change to come, never knowing that it's happening all the time.  Every day that passes brings something new and puts something old away.  To stand still, hoping for constancy, for stability is a fallacy.  To hold on to anything, to pray it'll stay exactly as it was is foolish.

If you want to keep anything in your life, be prepared to shift with it, to duck and weave as it expands and contracts.  Because change is always coming.  And the choice to make it for better or for worse is yours.