About a month after we landed in Seattle I turned 25. As Jules and I celebrated that milestone it struck me just how much had happened to me since I graduated high school and first contemplating leaving Haddonfield. I had covered a lot of territory — both literally and figuratively — in 7 short years. While I was happy to be getting older and wiser I also was aware that my childhood was ending. I had come to a place where I had separated myself from my home, gone on the journey that I'd dreamed of, and now I was ready to choose where I wanted to live and what I wanted to actually do with my life.

The End of 'The Life That Was My Own'

memory

remembering
life on the road

I remember being very aware at that time in my life that following the path I was on would most likely lead me to a full-time job, a house on some residential street, children, and a mortgage. Wasn't that the goal that my parents had been pursuing a quarter century before when they moved our young family to Haddonfield? Was I doing basically the same thing a generation later? I could not help wondering if I was just following the role that had been laid out for me.

The more I thought about it the more I realized that there was one key difference between the home of my birth and my new home in Seattle: the first was what I was born into, and the second was of my own choosing. This realization made all the difference. The home itself was only a box without taking into account the journey it had taken to get there, and that journey was what made my life my own. My parents had found thier lives and now I had found mine.

All that motion had been exciting, but The Road is not the same as The Destination.