Lost and found.

Today was a hard day for me, I found that what you lose you can find, and what you thought you forgot can be forever etched in your memory.

I have started a journey in the past weeks that I have held close to my chest because I have the opportunity to not only seek change but to aid in real change. My love of education has always been a large part of my life, I was brought up to view education as something with higher value than money because it gives you the opportunity for that and so much more. I have always been a great believer in the idea that literacy alone can change the world, that it can solve all of its problems, give a man a library card and he can travel the world and beyond.

So I am in the process of teaching a GED course in a facility where many people would not normally teach, a place of very little freedom and let's say very little privilege. There are people who need this education because without it they will have nothing when they take back their freedom and their lives.

I was asked by someone just last week, "Why are you doing this? What does it hold for you?"

Being a woman, 30, educated, an immigrant, growing up in what people might term the "ghetto", and not exactly a saint I have not found myself at this sort of place before even though maybe statistically I was supposed to. However, I know of it, of its pull of people just like you and I, of its normalcy for many families. I made choices that put me where I am today, but it was also a profound sense of luck that put me here as well, I could be any of these young people by the gentle swish of time.

I told this person that it was because I knew of a young man that I had befriended over 20 years ago who I knew ended up somewhere like this but that I had not been able to help because I was too young to realize that our lives were going to lead in two different directions. We were born in the same place, to the same type of parents, we had much of the same but he would choose one thing and I would choose another and there was that gentle swish of time...

I could not help him then but I could now, I could make a difference just by showing someone that you can change your future, you can attain something greater than the sum of your choices. All you needed was you, a book and a clear head...

So I went through the process, I did everything necessary to make my way to this point where I would stand and assess those in need and give them this chance by facilitating; I didn't know that I would face my reason so bluntly.

I stood in a hallway that I had to enter via six doors, to hold a stack of requests in my hand...with his name on it, requesting the very help I had started because of him, I was faced with my reason in front of me in the letters of his childhood that I still remembered.

You see when our lives changed, he made choices that brought him here...
When I made mine a few weeks ago, it bought me here...

To the same place.

Choices are choices, but sometimes they go hand in hand with the rest of your life...

I have never been more proud of a choice I have made in my entire life.