Home Again

I think we all have heard the expression, "You can't go home again," and we thought we knew what that meant when we heard it, maybe.

I am coming full circle with my life and I feel this expression, I don't just know it. It was seventeen years ago that I attended my first university, Cal State San Bernardino. I was there a total of one year and began my university career. It was my start to what has become a Masters degree and a college teaching assignment.

The school I ran to, HSU. and the man I found when I returned.

I learned so many things about life in that first year at CSUSB. It is easy to be a big fish in a small pond, not the other way around. People break promises and your heart. Don't assume you have something until you do. Paganism and journalism--not my thing. This too shall pass. Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it. Your friends are a reflection of you, choose them wisely.

That year taught me many things about myself that I didn't really want to look at, but nothing could really teach me what going back years later would.  

You really can't go home again.

Maybe I was having a mid-life crisis. I don't know. I just know I had to go back to school and I wanted to forget how much I had made unwise decisions. How I had shut too many people out of my life and how I was feeling about that. I was in the California budget crunch and my job was obsolete. I decided to change careers rather than continue to fight a bad situation.

So much had been added, new buildings and roads. Expansions on different buildings and movement of offices. My favorite teacher, Roland Barnes, had died and the theater building was named after him. I felt like a stranger in a familiar land, only now, what was once familiar, was foreign.  I realized the expression that best described this feeling and I knew why instantly--you can't go home again. It is not the just the land that changed, what had changed was me.

I had changed.

And it made all the difference.