"We live our days as we live our lives" -Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard's words have been getting to me. If, as she says, life is a collection of days, some more memorable than others, I wonder what this past year would say about my life. It's brought into my life new love, new people (the refugees I work with, the little girls I babysit for, the ragtag team of travelers/writers/artists that was the Census crew), new music, and new books. I look the same as I did when I graduated, and many of the things thoughts that ran through my head then still do now, like a record on a two-year repeat.

But since last year, I've been yearning for more. It was a year to this day that I applied for the Peace Corps, 13 months since I got home from Israel and was not satiated, but filled again, with the desire to travel. Peace Corps has been a pipe dream of mine since high school, when my godmother told me stories of being a PCV in Senegal with a Belgian boyfriend.

Now, it's two months away. Two and a half, to be precise. I haven't thought about packing. If I think too much about it, I almost explode of excitement. And then there is a thought that gnaws at me. What if it is not great? What if I'm not enough?

I have to believe that I am, and that it will be hard, lonely, and frustrating, but amazing. Hannah and Kristen, returned PCVs I work with, both tell me to keep my mind open. "Don't go in with expectations," they say. Which is hard- hard because the human mind wants to plan, to research, to figure out exactly what to bring and what we'll be eating, and who we'll get to know, and all of that jazz. But, like we saw from the earthquake in Japan, or the chaos in Libya, you never know. Embracing the chaotic world is hard. But the pleasant, relative stagnation of this past year, at home in my Dad's house in Silver Spring, is not something I can continue doing if I want to live a realized life.

Will start making a packing list in April. Next week, I go to Maine to say "bye" to my oldest, and first to be married, friend. The only time I've ever studied abroad, she was there too, one country away, talking about this strange intellectual guitar player from Tennessee who she couldn't figure out. Now, he's her husband. Strange world.