Welcome To The Rest of Your Life

I have this black file cabinet that has been stuffed with every scrap of paper imaginable from the last 17 or so years of my life.  Recently I’ve started revising the way I organize (or in some cases never organized) my files as part of a process I’m undergoing to get a better handle on my life.  More on that some other time.  On Saturday morning, I started going through every single piece of paper in that file cabinet so I could put it into this new system.  I just finished.

From a short story I wrote when I was 12 to a high school report card to a phone bill from 1996 to my marriage license to the settlement papers on our first house, these fragments of data and memories don’t really represent my complete experience over that time period.  Rather they are like small snippets of radio one would hear turning up and down the dial on my life.  All the way from the oldies on 198.7, Middle School FM to traffic and weather together on the 8s at 200.4, The Present, I got little glimpses into how I’ve grown from the person I was then into the person I am now.

Of the thousands of bills, letters, forms, cards, notes, and pictures I pored through these past few days, there is one that sticks out above the rest.  I found it probably mid-way through my work this weekend and I became unexpectedly emotional when I read it.  It is my acceptance letter to UNC, dated December 4th, 1992.

I think I was choked up because I realized that no single document before or since has altered the course of my life like this one did almost 12 years ago.  Leaving Ohio and coming to Carolina has given me almost everything that I have today.  I have a wonderful family, very close friends and some great memories in Ohio, and they will all always be a very important part of who I am.  But the rest of my life is here now.  My wife, my UNC friends, my friends from when we lived in Raleigh, my career, my business.  I have all of these great things now and they are all because of that one piece of paper.  I try to think about what my life would’ve been like had I not ever come here and I can’t even imagine it.

I realize that this isn’t exactly earth-shattering and that lots of people move away from home and have life-changing experiences as a result.  I think just seeing that acceptance letter in the context of a lot of the other things I’ve done over the years makes it stand out a bit clearer in my mind.  Coming to North Carolina represented a huge turning point in my life, and I feel like going through all of these old things these past few days has made me pause and take stock of all that has happened since for the very first time.

It’s fitting that I went through this exercise so close to Thanksgiving.  Looking back on all that I’ve gained since that momentus day, I have a lot to be thankful for.