it's been

ten years.

Ten years.  More than a third of my life.

Some dogs or random animals are probably dead before then.

There's been an idea in my head for ten years now, with a few brief hiatuses.  It's shaped me just as much as I've shaped it.  I've written of this idea before.

It's been called lots of names; some good, some bad.  My dream, my fall-back plan, my future, my heartbreak . . . my what-if.  Always the what-if.

I've clung to this idea like a favorite pair of jeans - loving the way they make me feel, sliding on so comfortable and smooth and familiar, making the best of me come out in all the right places.  I've put it on and off over the years (in more cynical hours, I might say as a reminder of former glory) and in most it served me well.  I learned how to love.  I learned how to pour out, to trust, to dream, to be loved.

And then I learned how to forgive.

My best friend calls it the "old sweatshirt syndrome," going back to what is comfortable because it is . . . comfortable.

I will declare that it much more complicated and nuanced and spiritual than that.   I have soul-searched this issue enough to last a lifetime, and yes, it is all of that.

But that sense of comfort has been -  yes - a primary emotion.  And now that I'm killing the idea, already long de facto dead through circumstances, yet propped up through hope and fear:

I'm slightly terrified.

Because.

It means I have to live life rawly again.

No fall-backs.  No regrets (though there never were any, and of this I am proud).  No second-guessing.  No soul-searching for months that rattles the core of your trust in yourself.  No pre-canned desires pulled off the shelf.  No more waiting in expectation for something that might - just miiiiiiight - come.  In a few years or so.  No more questioning a God who seemed to have dug a road for my life and backfilled it.  No more.

Because the faster reality runs to catch up and knock on my heart's door -
              the greater the sense of freedom grows.

It's permission to be happy.  again.

"Be not afraid."

Duc in altum, Amen.