Picking it up again...

Three and a half years ago, I left Portland and returned to San Francisco with a vague notion that I wanted to do something new with my life. It goes without saying that I've long since recognized the value of having a plan over a notion.

I'd returned to Portland once in 2006 and then again in June before going back for these past eleven days. I'm moving back there now with a plan but also with more than a little good fortune to have quite a few threads from my prior life there that are available for me to weave back into my life as it is now. In many ways I can pick up where I left off, but not by going back in time. Instead, who and what surrounded me when I lived in Portland seem to have advanced in the same direction that I've advanced. We've walked somewhat parallel paths... re-connecting them is not so hard.

And, I suspect, it's not so coincidental that as I sit here on my flight back to Vegas from Portland, I've been able to open Love in the Time of Cholera to a page midway through the book and start reading it again, picking up where I left off but enjoying it far more than when I laid it down a year ago.

Life does go on... and as Gabriel García Márquez wrote in describing an uncle's willingness to offer a second chance, "He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."