Coming Back to the Beginning All Over Again

I have this feature on my blog that displays “On This Day” posts from previous years. Mostly I ignore these because I think I know what I said. But today’s post from 2004, about not having a summer vacation, intrigued me.

Now I’m really uplifted, even a bit teary, which really has to stop as I need to talk to utility companies and crying is a bad idea. That post, written at the end of my first semester in the MFA program, outlined seven goals:

1. I will improve my writing.
2. I will have a marvelous educational experience.
3. I will enjoy the collective experience of being part of a class of students sharing the same education.
4. I will benefit and learn from being at the receiving end of education.
5. I will grow from the many great readings I will carefully work through, those assigned by my instructors as well as shared by my peers.
6. I will produce a book-length work that has nothing to do with libraries.
7. I will allow this program to help shape my values and my priorities.

I made every single goal–all that and more. My writing is better. I loved being in school, among my analog writing buddies, perched on that beautiful hill in San Francisco. I appreciated my peers and made great friends. I developed the discipline of careful and selective reading–and re-reading. I managed to write a thesis that almost never mentions libraries and except for a few instant messages quoted in a couple of pieces, barely acknowledges technology.

And my values changed, stretched, and deepened. I find myself saying “no” to opportunities that I know would conflict with what I want to do with the un-MPOW part of my world, a basket of writing activities which can be summed up as write, read, revise, read, submit, read, repeat. I still take on plenty of those “opportunities,” but I’m aware as I was not two years ago that life is short and like nearly all writers I will only get time to write (and revise, and submit, and read, and do all of it over and over again) by carving it out of the tree of life.

I’m going to miss my friends, my teachers, and the old Lone Mountain classrooms with their stunning (and distracting) views of San Francisco. But they are with me always.