Desperation is the Mother of Reinvention

I've been talking with a friend of mine, someone I knew a long time ago, someone who wouldn't know me at all right now if not for MySpace. Because I'm not the person I was fourteen years ago. And if you think about it, not many of us are, are we?

Fourteen years ago I didn't understand a lot about what makes life really hum along with positive energy. Basically I was putting a lot of effort into my eyeliner and the height of my bangs. I was careful not to show too much when climbing up on top of the bar to dance at one in the morning and I was very selective in the men that I dated. I ranked them by their preferred instrument and the length of their hair. Not really, but it kind of looks that way in retrospect.

When that life of dreams was rudely awakened by a newborn baby, I had to reinvent myself. So I became a travel agent, dressed in suits every day, and drove downtown to work in a corporate daytime environment. After a couple years of that, I reinvented into a married woman then later became a homemaker and now, most recently, a writer who tries to keep up with her kid's activities and wants like hell to support her husband to pay him back for the ecstasy of not having to work outside the home anymore.

Gone are the rooster bangs and the black minis. Gone is my wonderful convertible from my early-Mom days. Gone is the daily gossip over the coffeemaker in the break room. But on the other hand, I'm not missing the pantyhose from the corporate world and I'll never again have to tug to keep my knee-high boots in place while dancing on a bar. I don't miss the late nights or the too-early mornings and I'll never miss the sound of a sound of a zillion phones ringing when the airlines started a fare war.

Every reinvention has brought me happiness and for that I'm lucky, I know. Not everyone gets to reinvent in an upwardly mobile manner. Some people reinvented into post-career-college-bound thirty-somethings or into cancer survivors () or discovered that our last incarnation into teaching wasn't the best and reinvented into cosmetic saleswomen.

Isn't that the best benefit of life, though? Everyone's road may be different but no matter where you are on it right now, you're further along than you used to be. And even if the only thing you're gaining is wisdom, I'm betting your life feels a lot more valuable the further down the road you make it.

Life is all about the journey, not the destination. After all, the destination is death. Why get in a hurry?