Pack 'em Up, Move 'em Out.

No biting sarcasm today, just a pinch of humbling intospection.

When I was five years old, my parents stuck me and my sister in a 1973 Chevrolet Kingswood stationwagon, that I swear on Great Odin's Raven was a block and a half long if it was 3 feet. They proceeded to take us on a five day drive from Hammonton, New Jersey to Tucson, AZ. Now at the time and as I grew up this struck me as odd. Sell the house, pack our things drive to somewhere where we have no house, no job nothing.
There are some things about this drive that I remember distinctly. I remember swimming in the pool at the Ramada Inn in North Carolina, I remember the cockroaches at the Days Inn in Montgomery, Alabama. I remember Egg McMuffins every morning, and Kenny Rogers "The Gambler" on the radio everytime we got close enough to a town to pick up an FM signal. I remember Odessa Texas and having to drink soda at every meal because all the water tasted of oil. I was not too far into my teens before I began to connect to these memories a deep rooted sense of respect for the courage it probably took my parents to leap into uncertainty, to move from family and familiarity, into possible opportunity and certain uncertainty. I remember the change it produced in all our lives, almost certainly for the better.



It is difficult sometimes to measure the effect of change in a system where it is constantly felt. The one constant in my adult life has been the shedding of a relatively stable childhood, in favor of a life of constant change and renewal, of advancement followed by disarticulation. Difficult to weigh the natural evolution that lifes own changes provide, versus the difficult, loaded, and often self perpetuated changes that we can burden ourselves with through fear and doubt, and their nagging child: procrastination. The reaction to that change has seldom been negative, since many times, particularly with the latter kind, I have created it. The greatest problem with that brand of change is that it has generally been reaction, as opposed to action. It is beckoned by a fear of success or failure that strains at our souls until we bail on the things that are most important in favor of those that are the most comfortable.
As I get older and hopefully mature I hope this one lesson of my mother and father stick with me: That sometimes we need to abandon the comfortable in favor of what is most important.