All this time, my body was moving towards answers even when I didn’t have the words. As I drove out of Pittsburgh for the last time, I realized this move felt big because it embodied the answers to the questions about what I believed to be important. The direction I turned at this fork in the road would determine both who I was and what I was trying to be in the world. This surety in my choice to come home that stunned me, this choice to listen (for once) to that holy tugging in my gut asking me to embrace my life. Not my friends’ lives, not lives of people I envy, not a noisy or particularly instagrammable, objectively impressive life, but the one that was unfolding in front of me. The life I was living. The life I am living. It was as if, all of a sudden, I understood that Mary Oliver line I began this post with: “the past is the past and the present is what your life is.” And above the cacophony of my own questions, Mary’s question to me cut through like a descant:

“will you live your life?”