The Middle Earth dorms at UCI, where I first lived when I moved to Irvine.
“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night
There is a momentum to everything that’s going on in my life right now, that seems to be spinning faster and faster everyday. Work, home, family, friends, and self are all in the midst of change–most of it too personal or too complicated to explain here.
Probably looming largest above everything is the realization that in a few days I’m leaving the community where I’ve lived for 25 years, where I’ve raised my children, where I’ve found “home” in so many different places–from my first dorm room in Hobbiton to our current family-sized house in University Hills. In addition to moving from Irvine, I’m taking a summer sabbatical from my work Chapman and will be on the move (i.e. homeless) for a few months. And when I return it will be to an “empty-nest” because both of the kiddos will have moved on to college.
It’s a lot of change in a short span of time, and I don’t think that I’ve ever packed my stuff up for moving without knowing where I would be living when I was unpacking.
I’m not afraid of what will happen when I return in the fall, but I am feeling a bit melancholy about the move because I know how unlikely it is that I will find a home that I enjoy as much as the one where I live now. The Markham quote above rings true to my feelings, that the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. It is quite formidable not to know the where and when of what one’s life will be.
But perhaps Markham is also right by saying that it’s good to make big changes quickly and without too much time available for sorrow or worry. To just leap ahead and know that whatever will come will be new and different and probably even better than whatever I imagined it would be. I also know that I have a great job and wonderful OC friends to come “home” to, no matter where or what that actual home ends up being…which brings a great deal of comfort in the midst of such a whirlwind.
