Its New years Eve and another year is winding down, the last few grains of sand trickling to the bottom half of the year-glass. The television and the internet are both flooded with retrospectives, exploring what was good and what was bad about the year gone past, and like many people I am in an introspective mood myself. And I’m struck by the contrast between this New Year’s Eve and many of them that have so swiftly gone by - for most of them, I simply went to bed. I didn’t watch the ball drop in Times Square, I didn’t go party, I didn’t sing Auld Lang Syne. But this year is different, because this time it is ushering in profound changes in my life. This year it has a lot of meaning. After a little over eighteen years at Adams State, I have resigned and today is my last official day. Tomorrow morning I will wake up un- (or self) employed, and I have never been so excited, so full of anticipation, or so ready for another day in my entire life! Don’t get me wrong; I have loved my job at the college - I have met some incredible people, built some amazing relationships and made some wonderful friends. I have accomplished some good, I think, and while my contribution was somewhat indirect, participated in and helped along the process of educating many young minds over the years... I helped the educators educate, I suppose, and I’m very proud of that. I love the college itself and feel a strong connection to it that I know I will never lose - my grandfather was a friend of Billy Adams, my dad was an alumnus as am I, and perhaps another of his brood will one day walk through that line and get a diploma bound in green. I have no regrets and much to be thankful for. I am ready for something completely new, though. I want to go in new directions and chase new dreams. I want to do things I have never done before and see things I have never seen. And most of all, I want to wake up every day knowing that what I will do that day will be what I chose to do, and some time down the road I want to look back on another new year, a successful one, and know that what I accomplished was purely the result of those choices and my own skill and cleverness and talent and hard work. The thing I am looking forward to immediately is the freedom. Never again waking up burning with an idea for something that I want to work on or research or build or write or photograph… and having to shelve that passion for a day while I go to work at a regular job and hope there’s still a flicker of that passion left at 5:00. For the first time in my life I want to be able to apply *all* of me to something (or a bunch of somethings) and see what comes tumbling out and hope that I can somehow make a living while I do it. The most common question I’ve gotten when I’ve told people my plans is “but what are you going to do?” Meaning, of course, “how are you going to make a living?” And the answer is that I will simply decide that anew every day, and in all honesty I think that I will either be wildly successful or fail spectacularly, but either way, I will still have the experience of having tried and that is more valuable to me than all of the money and stability in the world. I don’t want to look back when I’m on my death bed and try to justify having not taken that chance. So what will I really do? As I said, I’m going to defer that decision until the beginning of each day but my biggest goal right now is to simply spend as many days as possible doing things that I know I wouldn’t have otherwise done had I not had the courage (or total lapse of common sense, depending upon your point of view) to turn my back on the sensible path and just close my eyes and jump. A few possibilities, though, are beginning to take shape and become pretty likely: I am going to pursue my photography. I plan on buying some kind of camper and spend quite a bit of time traveling and photographing what I see. I want to as often as possible *not* have a destination in mind, heading only to where it is that I am going, just looking for interesting people and places and things to photograph, and most importantly, be free of having a certain time that I have to be back. I want to do more landscapes, but for at least right now I seem to be getting more and more passionate about photographing people, so I’ll pursue that too. And anything else that comes to mind. I am going to build a prototype of a proprietary design I have developed for a knife sharpening machine, which I can immodestly say that if it works the way I anticipate it will, will outperform any professional knife sharpening machine currently on the market. In the world. In which case one could conclude that there might be potential for some income there. I want to write again. This more than anything. Years ago, when I was a student at Adams State I began writing seriously for the first time in my life, taking Creative Writing multiple times from Cole Foster. For the first time I really felt the rush of creating a story and putting it down in words, and the absolutely pure high and euphoria of finishing a story and knowing it was good, reading it back when I was done and realizing that yes, here is something I have a talent for and that I could develop that talent and make it even better. That was a better high than any drug I ever have ever taken or any booze I ever drank in my life and I want to feel that again. Standing in the way, though, has been the fact that I have a rather obsessive personality and when I am involved in something I completely immerse myself. All the years I worked at the college writing software and developing systems I worked my ass off. I lived it and breathed it and worked nights and weekends and when I wasn’t working I was thinking about it. I put everything in to it, but unfortunately that didn’t leave enough of me, enough of my time or energy or creativity to be able to write well. Again, I have no regrets - working at ASU for all the years that I did was the right thing to do - I feel that strongly. I feel just as strongly, though, that it’s time to start directing that passion (obsession) in the direction of more personal goals. Lots of little things that I’ve never done before! In addition to writing stories, as I get older I have become much more interested in politics and philosophy and social issues, and especially the effects of coming technology on those issues and I would like to write about that, too. I want to try my hand at sculpture - something I was always interested in but never seemed to have the time to pursue. Maybe do more metal work with copper and silver. Oh, and I want to learn French for absolutely no practical reason at all. I just want to be able to enthusiastically say, on as many days as possible for the rest of my life, that I am not just existing, but living. So, the morning will bring not only a new year but begin a new chapter, and like any major change it’s not without some sadness that I turn the page on the old one. I’ll miss friends from the college, I’ll miss doing what I did, I’ll miss the comfortable routine and the sense of familiarity and the work, but the pull forward is a force that is exponentially stronger than the one behind. So, onward into the New Year and a new future... and to all of my friends, both old and new, bonne année et bonne santé!
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 03:22:15 +0000