There'd be no distance that could hold us back.

Happy 5th Day of the New Year.... to all FIVE of my readers.

My title today is a lyric from the Death Cab song "The New Year."  The rest of the words are sort of depressing, and I do not intend for this post to be at all depressing, so I'm only posting part of the song.

I wish the world was flat like the old days
Then I could travel just by folding a map
No more airplanes, or speed trains, or freeways
There'd be no distance that could hold us back.

There'd be no distance that could hold us back.
So this is the new year.

SO.  This is the NEW YEAR.  These are my thought on the New Year: 2012.

We have already established how much I love a new year.  I started a new journal last night and I was so irritated I didn't have it with me on our trip to Arkansas, therefore making it impossible to begin the new journal on January 1st, that I dedicated the first whole paragraph to that very complaint.  I like things to start at the beginning (it's the Aristotle in me...).  I like them to have direction (plot), and conflict (climax), and certainly I like a good resolution (conclusion).  Preferably, one that provides hope... but that's just my preference.

I just related my whole year to a play.  You will never suck the drama out of me.  

Joyce, I hope you're reading this.

my new 2012 set of journals from rifle paper co.

 

This appears to be a year of travel.  And so "travel" is this year's plot.  In looking ahead, even if all these trips don't pan out, we are planning on a lot of travel: to familiar places, memorable places, new places, and exciting places!  Best of all are the reasons for such travel: friends getting married, honeymoons (finally) being taken, family moving to new locations.  And then, of course, there is the symbolic travel, the travel we do in our daily lives.  The growth we have, the obstacles we face, the decisions we make, and the journey to which all those things amount.  I just have an extra-special feeling about the personal travel we'll be making this year.  

Travel has often been used as an analogy in relation to life.  We are in constant motion.  We move from one place to another.  We travel from babyhood, to adulthood, to what I like to call "ancienthood."  It is all a beautiful and exciting journey, if you make it so, and some journeys last longer than others or take you much farther distances.  But if we face all things in life with the thought that no distance can hold us back, how far can we really go?

My conflict would be this: I've spent these last five years since graduating college being mostly afraid of the distance to whatever is next for me.  It's easier to have dreams than to follow those dreams.  I don't want to do that anymore.  By the way... FIVE YEARS?  wtf.  Where has that time gone? In my head I've been considering them "the lost years," but I think publicly I'll refer to the as "the gap."  It's just taken me a while to realize that as sentimental as I am and as much as I love  reminiscing, I don't want to reach ancienthood only to realize that looking backward is all that I did.  

So this year I plan to use the this lyric as my mantra.  

I still haven't made up my mind, sorry.  I'm sure all five of you were reading this with bated breath expecting an awe-inspiring announcement about what my next career venture will be (oh, the ongoing saga).  I don't have it, because I don't know.  All I do know is that this is a year of travel for me.  I only hope to go places I have never gone, meet new faces and call them friends, revisit old friendships in new places, and let no distance hold me back.  And as with all plays, one can't know the resolution until one has reached the conclusion.