Tomorrow I embark on my second drive across the United States in the last 15 months, and in less than 3 hours I'll no longer be able to tell people I'm a librarian at Yale Law School. The last year has allowed me to grow professionally in ways unmatched by my first three years in the profession. I'm a better librarian and a better web developer. I've developed a strong network of professional contacts all over the country. Perhaps most importantly, I now have a stronger confidence in my own abilities and a better understanding of what library "service" should strive to be.

I also now know that these self improvements can occur anywhere, not just at a top ranked law school.

In addition to these professional growths, I hope I now possess a better ability to take control of the aspects of my life that are actually under my own control, and to recognize all of these things as part of a larger self, and not as a number of unrelated problems to solve. For a long time I've laughed at the phrase "Free your mind and your ass will follow." Instead, I believed I simply had to do the things that were difficult and eventually my attitude about them would change. Well, I'm now trying to embrace both points of view, because simply doing something that is difficult will never change my attitude if I resent having to do it in the first place. This holds true whether the difficult task is losing weight, responding to a faculty research request, or finally getting my personal financial situation under control.

And those things outside of my control? Pffffffft... Anger won't change them. That's a wasted emotion.

It's no coincidence that this "zen" awakening is happening less than a month before my 35th birthday. I'm too far into this life to keep accumulating negative experiences that I look for reasons to regret. No, those so-called negative experiences are my LIFE, and it's time I embraced them and began reaching out for new experiences to add to that scrapbook.