End of an Era

There's something about moving on from one thing to another that is always disquieting. Conflicting. Irritating. Saddening. Exciting....

Imagine that you're moving from one home to another place (that isn't home -- yet -- but might be. Eventually). All of your things have been packed and are gone, and what was once warm and yours seems like a shell. It's empty and it echoes, and even if you put everything back where it was, it just won't feel right again. You know that, and yet you're dragging your feet.

The last straw comes when you're standing in your bathroom, staring at your toothbrush. When that moves, it's really over. There's no taking it back after that. It's all tied up in the toothbrush.

The toothbrush holds things in limbo. You can sit there and pretend you're still where you were before you sealed up the boxes while you're looking at the toothbrush sitting where it always has.

Grabbing that toothbrush and putting it into a ziploc bag for transport is like grabbing for the monkey bar three swings over from where you are. One side of you is swinging free, hoping against hope that you'll manage to wrap your fingers around solid metal. The other is hanging on to what's behind you. There's a momentary limbo -- the scariest part -- where you aren't holding on to anything anymore.

That's sort of where I'm at right now. Standing in the bathroom, contemplating a proverbial toothbrush. Swinging through free space on the monkey bars. Leaving one thing behind and looking forward to something else. I'm not sure if two years qualifies as an "era," but in that special way that time has, it has both felt like forever and gone entirely too fast.

In that time, I've been eating, breathing and sleeping volcanic hazard awareness and mitigation. I've jumped hoops and turned cartwheels for the public and the powers that be to further education and projects. Learning the geology of Mount Rainier has been my life, communicating that to the people who live in the valley towns at its base has been my air. Analyzing policy has been constant; working with changes, different agencies, beurocrats who shit platitudes to your face and do the exact opposite of what they say when you walk out the door. That's been my world for the last two years. Now, it's just supposed to be over. Done. Just because today is August 25th.

The prospect of doing something else is exciting, but there's that familiarity that keeps a person going back even when the prospects for mobility are becoming limited. It hasn't been all sunshine and kittens. But there's a part of me that is invested in this project now, and getting out?

I don't know. How does one do that? Just stop doing one thing and invest themselves in another? When I find out, if I find out, I'll certainly pass it on.