A lot can happen in just a few short months. You could move to another country, travel the world, share all new experiences, and realize that there is so much more you still have not done. A part of my life is ending and at first I could not understand how it is that we move on from one stage in life to the next. How do we take the step that makes the present something of the past? How do we approach the end? We all ponder that dark ominous cloud. Leaving home for the airport to go to Spain I asked myself, will I be lost forever? A young daughter about to walk down the aisle turns to her father anxiously with tears stewing and asks, will I always be your daughter? When newlyweds are preparing the final days before their first-born comes, each wonders, will we still love each other? And an old widowed man on the cusp of death looks at an old picture of his wife on his farm porch and asks her, will I see you again?
I was lucky enough to travel to Paris, Rome with the Irish Queen (Karen O'Chief), London, Vienna, and even squeezed in a spontaneous trip to Bratislava, Slovakia. How did that happen? In summation, I have travelled a lot during my abroad experience, I have witnessed a lot, I have done and eaten a lot (both good and regrettable), and I have changed a little. Change, you gotta love it, even though when first encountering it the majority of us are intimidated by it. Change is the perfect theme to encompass this entire experience. I have changed the way I look at life, people, and even slightly myself. I felt that change along the way and I learned to take it in stride. Day by day and little by little, inevitable new ways of thinking overcame me and new people came into my life. I like to think I learned how to nibble on change instead of swallowing the force of it whole. That is how we learn to live in the present, to enjoy the little moments as they come, and to reflect without letting those little moments of change pass us by without even feeling them.
It is the constant dilemma we all face, at all ages, at different stages of our lives. We cannot help but struggle to figure out a way to live in the present. It becomes so bad sometimes that we end up missing whatever it is we did have. Our life can simply become a fragment of the past. Our feet never really touch the ground. We are either so obsessed with how things could have gone differently in the past or we are so obsessed with predicting how are lives will change in the future. Eventually everything becomes something of the past and we were too clouded to enwrap ourselves in those moments while they were happening. Rather, we were too numb to even feel the change while it was happening. Case and point. Our feet never touch the ground. We should strive not to be those unfortunate few who near their final bows before death look back and regret how little they actually lived. That would be the ultimate failure of life itself.
I know I am not the only one who wonders what will happen when something ends. I understand the scared kid I was when I walked up the airport, I empathize with the young bride grabbing her father's arm, I feel that fear those soon-to-be-parents feel as they look at each other, and I ask the same question the old man does every time I lose someone I love. Each one of them--each one of us unquestionably looks at what is to come after the next thing--after the change. What is to come when one chapter ends? Well I think the problem is in one word itself: end. We look at everything that nears its' expiration date as a finite end, a concrete termination stamp, or even the point of no return. That is where we are wrong and it is that word that causes us the most destruction.

-M