Remember how you used to spin yourself dizzy, just to watch the lamps and couch and pictures on the wall keep swimming past when you stood still?

The adult equivalent – which (judging from my disorientation) I have inadvertently discovered – is significantly less fun.  Now that the room has stopped spinning, I find – dervish-like – that the world is different because I have changed.  I wrote more, slept less and concentrated under pressure to a degree I didn’t know I could.  I make no apologies for how I have whimpered and licked my wounds in the process. The hardest obstacles to navigate remain inside myself.

The intensity of these past few months has been, in a way, the greatest medicine of all. It made my options clear,  at least in the moment – sit down and write, get up and start packing, you stink – take a shower.  If my purpose was no grander than not to fail, that was good enough. Simply making it to the end is a victory.

But, starting next week, I’m gonna get back on that ride, and go again.  My purpose is ever-so slightly clearer, and I know something I didn’t know before:  there is no turning back.  Everything, good or bad, is in front of me.  Truckers, you are not down yet.