I was going to tell you about Louisville. This came out instead.

“Just because my life is different than I expected doesn't mean it's bad. Different is not necessarily bad; different is just different.”

It took me awhile...like a few years...to come to fully embrace that viewpoint. Now, closing in on a decade of “different” I can honestly say that in my case, different is definitely good.

To the outside world, my different life...my life of very early retirement and my husband who decided to join me and our relocation to the boonies and our very flexible schedule...looks like a dream. And honestly, it is. It was our dream when we married as young pups nearly 20 years ago. “Save for a house then for retirement.” That was our plan. Four years in, we had the house. We then launched into turbo mode, working incredibly hard so we could stop working. Our stated goal was to mutually retire by the time I was 40. We admitted 45 might be more realistic. I'll be 43 in a few months.

By the grace of a cough, we got our dream about 10 years early. It came with a few strings, like pain meds and bad days and worn-out heating pads and disability status. In the early years, the dream seemed much more a nightmare. But these days, I am grateful for my new normal...which isn't so new anymore. And I don't bother so much with dreams anymore. Life is too much of an adventure to try to plan it all out so carefully. I still have plans, things I would like to do, vague images of what I hope my future might look like. But for the most part I am trying to just experience life as it comes, to learn to be open to things that happen that I would have never planned on my own, to leave open the possibility that “different” might actually be “better.”