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Toward the end of October, I will have been here for six months. How appropriate then, that around that same time I will have had my name on six issues of Milford Magazine: two as editorial assistant, two as associate editor, and two as managing editor.

I’m happy. For the first time in a long time, I’m really happy. Not that manic kind of wave happy that hits you all at once like a sugar high before you dive back down into the depths of cynicism, but a genuine lasting sense of progress and good direction. Wherever it is I’ll be in three years or five years or ten years, this is really the jumping off point. This is really the start of whatever I decide I’m going to do with the rest of my life.

Some people could argue that what you do in one moment has nothing to do with what you’re going to be doing in the next. I don’t know how they could make that argument, but they’ll make it. In any case, I disagree. I can remember my trip to Spain in 1998 and how it affected the last two years of my life in high school. I can remember a tranisition in those last two years that took me through a frightening yet necessary 3 year void. I can remember being at the lowest point in my emotional life and moving to Missouri for a couple of months to revive myself. I can remember coming back to Canandaigua with a purpose and a reason to change the person I was.

It’s been a slow process full of growing pains, but it was all necessary. The alterations, the drops, the climbs: everything led me to here. Even what I do now–even the words I write in this post will alter some kind of direction I take for the rest of my life. My path.

People always talk about how they stray from the path, but no one really does. You’re always on your path, because everything you’ve done has in some aspect had an effect on what you will do.

This is how free will and determinism get along just fine. You have choices to make, and you make those choices–but ultimately every choice you make will lead to something you need to experience for one reason or another.

I walk around Milford in the evening, and I can feel the pull of winter taking us into the fall. I always smell the peak of summer when it hits–it was about two weeks ago.

I remember what Jim said when I was working at the Winery. After working a 15-hour shift (shift+overtime 3rd) we were both walking out into the cold December morning,
talking about what we were going to do. I wanted to reapply to school (though I still wasn’t sure why) and Jim had said something about wanting to move. We both agreed, though–we’d be at the winery for one more year.

I always wonder how many people take “one more year” to mean it. I certainly didn’t. There were times when I thought I was going to be at the winery for five years. Ten. I had no idea what was going to happen, just as I have no idea now. I can only make plans, point myself in directions, and hope for the best.

So far, my calm, quiet, and forever wise goddess known as fate has led me in the right direction, even when I don’t see the path clearly and curse her for forcing me to learn the more painful lessons in life.

Sometimes, on nights like these when I take a walk and wander back to the office to write a blog post, pulling in the beauty of the area and the sting of fall as I pass through the night with a hooded sweatshirt and a cigarette, I just look up at the sky and whisper “thank you.”

I said it before: even if there is no great Gaia that I’m thanking, even if I’m directing my thoughts to an absolute nothingness that I personify as a femininity I call fate, there’s no harm in gratitude– especially when it’s directed at my own perceived personification of the force that guides all things.