the times they are a-changin'

I went over to Dean and Robin's for dinner tonight (rigatoni with black olive/spinach/pepper bacon/red bell pepper/parmesan marinara - I know, right?) and along with good food, good wine and good cider, we topped the evening off with the usual good conversation.

There are many things that has cemented our friendship over the last few years, one of the key factors in the relationship between The Camaraderie is that we all know what it's like and what it means to venture. 

Dean, Robin, Shamoo, Jared and I have all made the decision to leave home, leave the places we know, the people we know, the lives we know and go somewhere new. 

With little-to-no reason other than we knew our lives would be somehow better in this new place than to remain where we were. 

Now granted, we all came to Portland for different reasons. But the drive, the reasoning, the insatiable wanderlust is much the same.

The places we were born will always be our "home" and the memories we have there have shaped the people we have become, no question. But tonight as we were talking we decided once and for all that, much as it does somehow pain us to admit it, those places - the places in our memories - really don't exist any longer.

Not as a result of anything tragic or apocalyptic, but because we have grown up. A lot.

The people we were, and the people we share those memories with, have moved on, grown up and transformed into something, and more often than not someone, entirely (and happily) different. 

The saving grace here is that those places, those people and those memories are not dead. They have simply transformed and become something new. Something wonderful at that.

And that... Well that is what this great possibility of life is all about, no?