Nexus

[nek-suh s]
1) a means of connection; tie; link
2) a connected series or group
3) the core or center, as of a matter or situation
4) Cell Biology . a specialized area of the cell membrane involved in intercellular communication and adhesion.

I give up. I can't resist the temptation to start my own blog any longer. I was toying with the idea during my last "life-interchange" in 2008, but then I got too busy. Who's to say I won't, again, but then again a blog could also help me keep my head in one place. And no-one has to read it if I don't want them to...or if they don't want to.

Anyway, I seem to be at a kind of nexus of the varied experiences in my life: all of the facets of life and academia I've kept compartmentalized are quickly coming together and interacting in new and exciting ways.

Long-term personal growth and development has been a sort of backstage-whispering influence on most of the choices I've made since graduating from college, but this year it takes center stage. I was just accepted to the graduate program I've been teasing around in my mind for almost a decade. I went from teasing to earnest effort in 2008 and especially this spring 2010. The application process was a re-awakener of sleeping pieces of me and pieces I didn't know existed. I'd never bombed anything as miserably as I did the GMAT the first time I took it, never felt that my future was riding on my performance at this one specific task. I was shaking! It turned out to be the best possible thing, a wake-up call that buckled me down in a way I could never have motivated in myself. This will be the largest, riskiest investment I've ever made. The house doesn't count because I can sell it and recoup, at worst, 2/3 what I paid for it; this immaterial 2-year degree will cost about half of my house's purchase price and will only recoup what I can make of it. I've tried in every possible way to NOT get this degree but, like a magic forest, my life's paths have all led to this place. This nexus. So here I go.

The job which has contributed two years of incredible turbulence to all other realms of my life shows signs of smoothing out significantly into a semblance of normalcy. A few weeks of greatly slowed-down pace have renewed my mind and hopefully my ability to focus. A fantastically easy relationship with someone who I find attractive, interesting, entertaining, challenging, inspiring, and comforting (and who apparently has a reciprocal attraction of some nature) has taken the place of a gnawingness that has always been there. Like unexpectedly regaining feeling and function in a paralyzed limb, I haven't been quite sure what to do with it, except perhaps to poke it to feel it feeling me poking it, move it without general purpose to enjoy the movement, and test its limits. It's still tender and new, and I'm still not quite sure what to do with it. Its very existence is reassuring.

It's the sort of peaceful time when, in the past, I had confident expectation that an anvil was going to fall out of the sky and smash the peace into smithereens, but so far the peace has a gravity that's just attracting more peace and no anvils.

So I'm giving in to the urge to document on a blog. From this nexus I'll be learning and growing in entirely new ways during the coming years, and it might be nice to look back on my experiences as I've enjoyed looking back on those of others.

The blog name, by the way, is a line from one of my favorite David Gray songs.