Ten Years…

Ten years can make all the difference in the world, it can be the distance between eras in history or our personal lives.

In this case, it has been ten years since I started writing for the Dolphin Talk and I got to be in the lives of you lovely people for the last decade as you moved forward as well.

Also tempting to call it ironic as well as I personally am in a similar spot as I was then, moving back to Illinois after being gone awhile (of even bigger irony is I’ll most likely be back in Victoria soon enough, making that ten years a round trip -and there wasn’t even an ‘in-flight movie’ jeez), and it does not feel like ten years have passed at all.

Hopefully, in that time I have been more an attribute to your lives than a detriment, more helpful than harmful, and made you think about things more as well, if not in broad strokes then hopefully at least what angle you look at things from time to time.

The world sure has changed quite a lot between now and ten years ago…the world was not full of fear then, not as full of anger at the complexities that bind us in the modern world.

There is a reason you can never really go home again and it is because everything constantly shifts…in this column, I hope I have paused that shift at important and opportune moments for the people who lay eyes on this newsprint, as the goal of writing is, of course, to reach out as well as inform.

And of course, the old standards of everything costing less, the times being more innocent, where an aura of simplicity seems to hang over everything like a warm light.

On the last part, I’m not sure if that is all true or just a symptom of seeing a few decades go by already…And it may that for once, time will not reveal the answer as the effect might get worse as the ten-year counts continue to add upwards.

I looked through the Fish Out of Water ‘archives,’ and felt these couple paragraphs from the columns first year anniversary summed up how I feel still in its tenth year:

“ …I am not sure how many pairs of eyes have actively followed this space over the last three hundred and sixty-five days, but I am glad I was allowed to be here and wanted to take time to thank both Joyce and the Dolphin Talk for the opportunity and thanks to you as well for reading the ramblings that flow from this keyboard and this rattled rat’s maze of a mind.

The experience of writing this column and other items for this publication gave me the confidence to start other writing projects and also gave me a chance to keep producing something with regularity. This to me is one of the key ingredients for any writer’s success, especially when real life can at times try to knock you off the horse of your dreams by making you ride very rough terrain.”

Thank you for ten years of riding that terrain beside me.