It's the Little Things

Note: I will get back to the wedding posts. Things started getting quite chaotic immediately after I announced I'd finally get to that, and I've hardly had time to check email much less write a blog. And today I have something way more personal and important to write about so you'll just have to wait a little while longer on the wedding posts.


Do you ever look back at moments in your life, things that seemed insignificant at the time, and realize they really had a huge impact?


I've been doing a lot of that lately.


For instance, I never thought that a summer job at a park would lead to the adorable cat I've spoiled for 10 years this summer. Or that moving into one particular dorm in college (one primarily chosen for having A/C) would lead me to my husband, who came to the U.S. and to that dorm 10 years ago this summer. (Yeah it was a big summer.)

I also never thought that one person I met in high school 15 years ago would have perhaps the biggest influence on the path my life has taken.


She was one of my best friends in high school. The kind you just can't let out of your life after graduation.


She'd always been a traveler, growing up in Hawaii, moving to NC in middle school, traveling to Europe and moving to California after graduation. I'd never traveled farther away than Disney World, and had never been on an airplane.


After she'd lived in California for a year and I'd completed my first year of college, she decided to move back to NC and wanted to bring her car. Since driving any long distance is zero fun by yourself, we concocted a plan for me to fly to California and drive back across the country with her, sightseeing along the way. That trip would prove to be a pivotal point in my life (10 years ago strangely enough...I told you it was a big summer).


I was bit by the travel bug. I realized there was SO MUCH beyond the borders of my life. And I wanted to discover it all. 


I moved into that dorm where my husband lived, a dorm filled with students studying abroad at my university. 

I made fast and lifelong friends in that dorm. Friends so close they traveled across the world to be at my wedding two years ago. One friend so close she comes to visit me in the U.S. every few years (I'm now poor and haven't been able to convince my moneymaking husband to take a trip to England...yet.) A friend so close I traveled around England and Scotland with her six months after she left the U.S. 

My first international flight. A flight that was so craptastic it was delayed by 12 hours and I spent the night on an airport lobby floor. And yet it didn't stop me from taking a ton more international flights, including to England to visit that friend another six months later en route to my summer studying abroad in Madrid.


I went on to travel to (and consider a life in) New York, San Francisco, Boston, Austin, Aruba, Hawaii, India (three times, once for two months), Turkey and Sri Lanka. 


I moved away to Washington DC, a city I now love with all of my heart and that feels like home.


Without that friend I met 15 years ago, I probably never would have done any of these things. She introduced me to the world outside. She inspired and encouraged me. Heck, without her I probably still wouldn't be eating vegetables! She broadened my life in so many ways.


This weekend, she's picking up and moving back to Hawaii. In just a few weeks she has sorted through all the things from her life and decided what is important enough to keep and what is just extraneous. She is leaving behind the life she's built for herself and starting over.


She continues to inspire me.


If I ever find the strength to do something like that (which is in my plans...for "someday"), it will be because of her influence in my life.


She has helped make me who I am. And for that I am forever grateful.