Life like river moves, swerving past rocks and branches until it stops, sometimes at a wall — you know, when it has to stop what it's been doing because something gets in the way, something unchangeable. Other times it just sort of ends in a bigger pool that takes the energy and distributes it. In some ways this can be just as shocking as hitting a wall. Nothing told it to change what it was doing yet suddenly the tasks of the day were entirely different. One day a river became ocean; it is still water. And even before the river, or maybe after, depending on when you pop into this cycle, there are clouds and raindrops. Imagine being a tiny raindrop and falling into a mass of a ten billion raindrops and becoming a big raindrop blob called a river. Water expanding and contracting, shifting shape and state, always and forever moving.

I've been considering my latest predicament, trying to sort out this feeling I've had of "transition." It occurred to me this week that for several years now I've felt in transition, between one thing and another, and usually between many things at once, or at the least overlapping. I am not a serial transitionist, but I'm not necessarily polytransitional either --many changes happen in succession and some also overlap. That must make me a polyserialtransitionalist. Wow, look at that word! I've arrived.

A friend mentioned how incredible it is that every few years I have a new identity. In ways I agree. I've had many careers in a relatively short time, including the non-traditional ones like renegade artist and deejay and world wanderer. I've had many hair cuts, and colors and corrective lens frames. I've learned to speak slang and think in PowerPoint. But something about this idea of transition and this statement of identity makes me think: Perhaps I do not have new identities every few years, I just let a different cat out of my personality bag from time to time. And perhaps I am not *in* transition these last few years or these last four months, more specifically, but I *am* transition. It's funny; I've changed so much and so often that noticing it is nearly impossible. I find myself waiting for the realization and it never comes. I convince myself I don't feel the realization because nothing is happening. I convince myself that nothing is happening because I am lazy, or stuck, or lost. But everything is happening, and it happens so quickly and so consistently that it's like nothing at all, if that makes sense. What an odd feeling!

In another light something has happened. I've transitioned from awaiting change to allowing change, in all its forms. I've become aware of the micro-elements that build transition -- moments. Less and less I strive to string these moments together to create an artifact of history or a progression of time. If all goes well I will not create any paths of goal-soaked moments to define progress, I will in fact progress in many directions at once, allowing open, free moments to swirl in an out of rivers and oceans and clouds and rain.

So. That's where I am at, or not at, or you get the point.





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