This seems to be a month about endings

and false starts.  I've said goodbye to a lovely friend who died far too young.  The sadness keeps welling up in me.  It's a bitter sweet sadness that reminds me how precious life is and how much I have to be grateful for.  How life is for living and taking our opportunities, for asking for what we want.  For asking in hope without demanding.  Around me I see others trapped in their wanting and I'm not immune. Unable to sleep last night I listened to a This American Life podcast about Break Ups and torch songs, about that aching pain we feel when we are left by someone we love.  In all its painful wallowing unprotected grief.  So familiar.  And so uncomfortable when we know we have given that pain to someone we used to love.

The thing about seizing the moment is that you have to get the timing absolutely right.  It's exciting and there's no way to know when that right moment is.  Timing timing timing.  I've never been patient and I've spent a lot of time living with the consequences of some bad choices so it's hard to let things come to me now.

Other endings...my job will be finished soon.  We're interviewing this week.  It's right to leave and I'm pleased by the prospect of a new project in 2012.  Yet there's always that knowledge of what I'm giving up and so I'm enjoying the last few weeks of the good parts.  The clouds of starlings swooping over the pier in the late afternoon light.  The people I've come to know and like that are part of my day.

I hope December will be about beginnings.  I hope and I intend December to be about rest, then new beginnings.