Have you ever been so excited and so scared about something? Where you are ready for the change, living for it, working towards it, but at the same time your feet don’t want to move? Where your heart flutters in anticipation of taking the next step and thuds with dread at the mere thought of doing so?

I have never been shy about taking chances. I’m a ‘why not’ kind of girl with a ‘what’s the worst that could happen’ motto. When most high school seniors were firmly entrenched in their cliques and clubs, I was moving to a school where I knew absolutely no one. By choice. So I could experience something different.

When my husband and I married, I needed a change of scenery from the east coast so we pulled out a map of the United States, closed our eyes and let our finger find our next address. A couple of months later we packed up our two cars, complete with Mr. Fish in his tank buckled in beside me, and drove cross country to Idaho. Without jobs. Without a place to live. We ended up staying there only 3 weeks and limped across the upper mid-west to family in Minnesota, but we still tell stories about those 3 weeks. And discovered that no matter how poor we were or how bad it seemed, we were in it together.

Many years and several moves later (more calculated than the first) we are getting ready to make a new change and for the first time in my life, I have hesitation. I’ve never paused before in doubt. Looking back, I have some regrets, but when I was making decisions I never had doubt. Now I’ve got a tiny one, flickering inside me. I think it’s because I’m older, expected to ‘plan for the future’ and ‘what about your retirement’. I don’t have the luxury of youth anymore, the freedom to live my dreams with abandon. But I want to. Inside my forty-something year old body is the ‘why not’ girl screaming out ‘what’s the worst that could happen’.

And so I’m trying my best to listen to her because I know that if I don’t at least try, I will have regrets. And if you don’t take chances how will you ever know the possibilities?