Do you remember the first time you left home to live elsewhere? That event is etched into my memory. I was 18 when I left California beaches for Flagstaff Arizona snow in January, to go away to Northern Arizona University. My parents forbade me to go and, when I told them I was leaving, they did not talk to me for almost two weeks, during which I packed and prepared. My mother held on to her anger for years, saying that I ran away from my family and home. Deciding to change was easy, but the act of leaving was much more complicated.
This Thanksgiving, on my way to the beach, I stopped at Flagstaff and spent a long morning walking around campus and remembering. Back then I incurred my family’s anger driving off into the unknown, but my time at college was filled with a sense of wild potential and possibilities. These feelings reemerged as I walked around the campus which was both familiar and different, in a similar way that I am the same yet changed.
As I walked through campus I wondered if it is ever too late to make dreams come true. And then I realized that it was only too late when we stop dreaming. I wanted to be a forest ranger and I still can be, by volunteering. I have already signed up. I wanted to run on the beach, which I did just one day later. I wanted to write, to dance, to feel free in the wilderness, and all of these have been part of my life. I wanted to live unfettered and free, a life on the loose, even if my choices pushed me outside of the normal boundaries. And that life I have lived.
And I am not done. While I do not know how many days I have left, I do know that I choose to live them embracing my dreams, old and new. That young girl who “ran away from home” is alive and well, loving deeply, dreaming fully, and ready for her next adventure.
This is wonderful. Keep dancing.