For the past few weeks, I have been enjoying the book “One Day” by David Nicholls. While I am just getting started, I am simply attracted to a format that follows two characters on the same day for a twenty year period.

As their adult lives begin, the young friends have a post graduation fling on June 15. While I’m not finished yet, each chapter checks in with the protagonists every year, on the same day, to see what has happened in their lives and how their paths intertwine.

Today I wondered what my life will be like on this day for the next 20 years. To me, each year is an adventure, and as I try to live in the moment, I can’t wrap my brain around the distant future. At the same time, life feels like a constant whirlwind of activity and change. I gaze at photographs believing they were taken days ago only to notice that baby faces staring at me where now near teens stand in their places. Many of my friends are the same people I have known for twenty years but so much has happened to us…gleeful moments, tragedy, celebration, and pain…we’ve shared all of it. Each year has invited new friends who have touched my life in ways I never considered possible and ways I wouldn’t have guessed only a year before. And there are others who I thought I couldn’t live without, and now haven’t seen for years….unpredictable and so good.

I’m curious about the future, but happy with the present. Life often feels like turning the pages of my own storybook, so today, I am beginning an annual blog entry titled “LABOR DAY WEEKEND.” For the next twenty years, god willing, I pray that I am blessed enough to write about the winding road of life and all that it will bring. To me, the first long weekend of the school year seems like a perfect time to process, reflect, and dream while telling the story of where life stands on each Labor Day weekend. Less a story about me than a narrative of where OUR lives will go.

Today, I will begin writing my entry for 2011.