“Well, excited and scared.”

Happy Friday!  Congratulations, you’ve almost made it to the long weekend. It’s an especially eventful Friday for me, because today happens to be the last day at both my current job and my current apartment.  Neither of these are bad things, and in fact I’m excited about changes on both fronts.  But at the same time, the transitions feel bittersweet.  I like to blame my mixed emotions on being a Libra: I always have a lot of feelings even about a single situation.

I know people who wholeheartedly embrace big changes and jump headfirst into the unknown, into new adventures.  I had a roommate, for instance, who chose to move to new apartments 4 times within a year and a half.  I admire that (okay, maybe not that example, which seems more fickle than adventurous) but I’m not one of those people. Change doesn’t come easily to me, even when it’s good change.  As much as I like the idea of being adventurous, I really like the comfort of routine, and I prefer my spontaneity in small doses.

I think an appropriate soundtrack for the occasion is the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods.  In case you haven’t seen it, the premise is that a bunch of different fairy tales (Cinderella, Jack & the Beanstalk, Red Riding Hood, and so on) all take place on the edge of the same forest, in which all the characters run into each other and get entangled in each other’s stories.   The forest serves as a simple but apt metaphor for the unknown– in the prologue, the various characters prepare to enter the woods for their own reasons, each with varying degrees of confidence or trepidation (“into the woods, who knows what may be lurking on the journey?”).  We listened to this musical a lot when I was growing up, and “into the woods” has become  a family refrain, shorthand for any new adventure and the range of emotions it might inspire.

Readers, any advice or insight or music suggestions for big transitions? How do you deal with lots of things up in the air or about to change?

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3. Andrew WK is excited about some songs