new life, new library

Something's happened between going to bed last night and getting up this morning. Something's changed between the raising of a foot and the setting of it down. A bridge crossed. A door closed. A move forward that suddenly means that the way back is not just shut, it is gone, disappeared, as if it never existed. But maybe it didn't exist, not really, it could never have actually happened. Once I set foot in Cardiff, there really was no going back.
Was it destiny? or choice? or calling? I'll never know, but somehow as I sit here familiar words take on a new and different meaning . . . forgetting what is behind. . . pressing on toward what is ahead. The journey has passed the crossroads. The only way to go is forward, onward, into the future. Glorious, wonderful, terrifying. The past melts away. The way back disappears. Who I was is suddenly and starkly separated from who I am - and who I will be.

This separation was suddenly brought home to me last night, as I spoke to a friend from a previous life. She spoke of the circle in which I used to move, and I remembered the emotions that went with that life - so foreign and unnatural now. I described my future plans, and she remarked on how the were unlike my former approach to life.
It's easy enough to say that I have changed. I've said it many times over the last few months, but it is a different thing to feel how I have changed. To sense the door shutting behind me. To be brought face to face with 'me then' and realize how utterly unlike that vision is to 'me now'. Not in a disconnected way - I can see the continuity, the development, how the versions of me are connected, how the strengths and flaws of the former me carry on into the current me, but I can also see how there are certain things I will never go back to and will never be again, and I am grateful. For so much of my adult life, the Past has been a presence that dogged my steps, holding me back. Now the Future has taken over the primary position of influence, drawing me on, calling me forward, opening vista upon vista, possibility after possibility.
The most amazing thing of all is that Future is Now. It begins today. It carries on tomorrow. Every day is a gift, a blessing. By the graceful undeserved favor of a loving God I am here, now, in a place I love with possibilities and opportunities piling up around me like so many fantastically good books, and I am impatient to read them all.
The challenge now is to take each day as it comes, fully dwelling in the Now because it is a part of the Future, and so reading every page of each book as carefully as possible. No one ever told me life could be like this!