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I’m moving.

This is not a reference to a personal household move replete with boxed up clothing, knick-knacks and photos but rather a work-related relocation. Hmmm. On second thought, I guess there is some of that involved with this work move as well. I’ll need to pack up all of my desk top paraphernalia – trinkets, mugs, calendars, cube-wall hangings, family photos and holiday decorations as well as two cover-ups I keep in my desk to ward off the chilly AC environment many of us women are all too familiar with.

After working for eight years in the same west side facility, my new work digs will be downtown. I’m both excited and apprehensive about this change, due to take place later this week. The commute won’t be as far but we’ll face some certain bottlenecks on our drive into the heart of the metro. Parking shouldn’t be an issue and the skywalk system will provide some nice opportunities for lunch time exercise no matter the weather outside. There will be new people to meet, a different routine and some adjustments to be made. Yin and yang, some good, some bad. I’ll be fine.

To prepare for the move, I’ve started some housekeeping tasks that include, among your basic culling–the-herd chores, getting rid of the Day Timer calendar pages I have inexplicably retained over the years. Scheduled meetings, project notes, to do items, lists of what I had to eat and what I did in the way of physical activity each day are scribbled on most every calendar sheet. Sometimes the pages are blank. And occasionally I used them as form of journaling, vacation planning and daydreaming.

As I read through these entries, laboriously flipping over each and every page, I was reminded of how frustrated I’d been just a few years ago, both with work and with my family – situations that have righted themselves somehow and are no longer as much a source of stress as they once were. Or perhaps I’ve just learned to adjust? Some of my scribblings described my Adventures in Baking: a few failures, several delicious successes. A favorite theme, in my journals throughout the years, is What’s Ahead for the Rest of [insert year here]: an enumeration of weddings, graduations, concerts, parties, family gatherings and vacations complete with dates and locations. It’s somehow gratifying to review these check lists and mentally look forward to similar activities yet to come while looking back, reliving events long past.

Decorating ideas, landscaping and furniture placement diagrams, recipes, quotes, photography and blogging concepts, story lines, financial portfolio tracking as well as mundane (yet necessary) doctor appointment reminders – all this information, about me and my life, woven onto paper with pencil, highlighters and pen. So much to sift through here – I don’t know if I can find the time to get through it all.

It’s both fun and thought-provoking to go back in time, one page at a time, to re-examine the minutiae of my life – both on a personal and on a business level – the tasks, events, ideas, projects and plans that filled my days. I no longer use a DayTimer at work but I still journal, jotting down important (and trivial) thoughts, yearnings and observations as they pop into my head. While I’ve never tossed a journal, the time has come to discard these daily calendar pages much as it pains me to do so. However, it is possible, I suppose, that I might need to look up something that occurred way back on, say, Friday, June 5, 2009. Or I might get to wondering what I was doing on Sunday, February 13, 2011.

It could happen. Maybe I’ll just box them up for later…

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A favorite bike trail crossing of mine on the Great Western Trail is just a few yards off of this gravel road intersection. It’s a good stopping point to tip back our water bottles, compare notes on the ride and turn back to the trailhead where our vehicle awaits us.

Central Iowa gravel roads are a twisting, turning maze of this way and that. I’m never quite sure where the highway is to take me home again but that’s part of the adventure when I’m on a photo expedition. Finding this particular intersection – 33rd Avenue and Fillmore – has eluded me for weeks.

Until now.

I was delighted a few nights ago to stumble onto a not-yet-travelled strip of gravel with gorgeous old barns, windmills and fields of cattle. While I had yet to find anything that caught my photographic eye that evening, I did make a happy discovery: the 33rd Avenue road sign. Could this be it? I drove along for a mile or two and there it was. I’d found it.

I was further thrilled another quarter mile or so to come across an old single-lane bridge. The road was lined by swamp and deep woods on either side. When I exited my car to snap a few photos, I had to make it quick as the mosquitoes – late in the evening as it was – were literally out for blood, aghast (or perhaps thrilled?) at my intrusion.

It was a successful outing. I’d found a bridge to photograph and more importantly, my elusive intersection was elusive no more.

Cee’s Which Way Photo Challenge: 2015 Week #33

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Creativity.

The act of being creative, of fashioning something new, something wondrous, something uniquely different than anything anyone in the entire history of the human existence has ever done before. Whether that something be in the form of an innovative approach to everyday tasks, a beautiful work of art, generating an idea into a mechanism of words or fabric or materials or sound or some other combination of elements or even just a different way of looking at the world around us.

How many brand-new creations, innovations, discoveries or ideas have occurred over the human history of time? My brain is unable to compute the possibilities, to even contemplate what it would take to discern that. Where, how, would you even begin?

Suffice it to say, there probably isn’t too much that’s truly new anymore. It’s highly likely we humans have already tapped all there is to do, to know, to be within the realm of creativity. Or have we?

What else is there? What fantastic new breakthroughs in science or the arts or literature or music or images or architecture or film are lurking in the hearts and minds of the human experience, as of yet undiscovered? But hidden there – just THERE – all the same. Waiting for the spring load of release, that spark of ingenuity to make themselves known, either through systematic research or via an inadvertent occurrence that could not possibly be replicated no matter how hard one tried. Trip stones of discovery patiently awaiting their day in the sun.

The prospects for new advances and discoveries, beauty and fulfillment – it’s impossible to know what lies just beneath the surface of conscious reality – of any of us, really, not yet known but waiting, waiting…

This is one of the joys and lovely satisfactions of human achievement. Might that I one day be a contributing member of the creative class, however miniscule my contribution and even with only myself as an appreciative audience for what I myself might create. I only need then to trust my intuition – something I’ve started becoming more and more keen in taking note of – and to take a deep breath and commit myself to taking chances, throwing myself into my passions and maybe, just maybe, coming out on the other side with something sparkling, something new, something that wasn’t there before: creation. It most likely will appeal to no one but myself – as if that’s some small thing – but then again, it just might be SOMETHING.