Learning as you go.

How do you know when the decisions you make are right in your life? How can you be sure that you are doing things that make sense in the long run, and not just protecting yourself in the short run?

Living this far away from Michael has been brutal. My job is strange, strange to me as well as to him. Its wonderful, but strange. While we worked hard to make sure that our places in each others hearts were honored well, protected and held sacred, somehow, it just wasn't enough.

I have been invited by clients on amazing adventures, to go to Paris for the weekend, to Huston for a concert for the evening, to Italy to teach, to Mexico to surf over the summer. I go to dinner with my clients occasionally, and I develop personal relationships with them. I believe that all of these offers for trips come from an honorable place, several of my clients are women, most of my clients are married, and it feels to me like we have a wonderful time together skiing, and that something shifts for them, there is an opening or a facilitation of their energy, they discover playing and their own athleticism, and I've done my job.

And because we connect on a personal level, the idea of spending more time together is appealing. Its for that reason that I'm fortunate enough to have been booked through the rest of the season, with most of my clients from the begining of the season coming back two or three or even four times. They've booked for next year in some cases.

Michael was amazingly supportive of my goal. He loved me going for the demo team. Understanding how we were going to mesh our family of five kids and get everyone in the same town was hard. We were pretty sure it would just work itself out, and we were willing to wait. We might have pulled it off, too.

But the nature of my job coupled with the distance between us and the complexity of our situations made it seem unnavigable.

Michael is entering a huge adventure in his life, his career and path are opening and unfolding and propelling him forward as we step apart, and that is at once gratifying, I'm so very proud of him and happy for him, and at the same time so sad, as I had hoped to stand next to him, to cheer from right there and watched him become.

And so we are apart, looking across a gulf, and I wonder, again, at what price? Would we have made it if I hadn't needed to be here, in Aspen? Would we each have had all that we gave to each other if we hadn't had goals like we both do? Were we meant to be in each others lives so we could learn to love big and free and unafraid, to learn to trust, in each other and in ourselves? Did it have to end for us to learn that lesson?

I'm at a loss for answers, but I do know that I learned to stand on my feet and believe in myself to the sound of Michael's guitar and the sound of all our kids laughing together. And letting go of that because it just doesn't seem to exist in the present, not longing for what was but looking at what is seems to be the lesson I'm to learn today.