I'm Adeli Mone and this is The Slowdown.

I have always been interested in those times in our lives when things feel like they could

change, like a sea change could happen at any minute, what my father called a paradigm shift.

Those moments when you choose a new way of life or commit to a different path and decide

this is what you will do, this is how you will live. Sometimes the decisions aren't so clear

and sometimes they are. I remember when I first moved to Kentucky, I struggled with the new

landscape albeit beautiful and what it meant to live away from my family in California and my

friends in New York. I felt stuck in the middle of nowhere and not just in the middle of nowhere

but in the middle of the middle. This was at the time when my husband Lucas was launching a new

business and worked constantly at all hours of the day and night. He thought only about work

and making a new business idea successful and I was left to my own devices. I wrote, I read,

I walked, I took pictures of barns and owls and trees and I worried. I worried because I had

started to resent my love. I resented him for moving me to this unfamiliar place. I resented

the isolation. I still remember feeling torn as if to love this new place would be giving up

on my dreams of ever living in California again. Still I started to warm to the blue grass state,

started to praise the green landscape, the horses dotting the pastures, the snowfall erasing

the back roads so that everything was a blank slate. I remember having a moment by myself during

a snowfall standing in all that blankness and realizing I didn't have to be torn. I don't know

why that came as a surprise but it did. Later that day I told Lucas that I didn't think I could go on

with the low grade resentment I was feeling about moving to Kentucky and so I was going to let it go.

I was going to live where I lived and I was going to love it and the funny thing is I did. I do.

Today's poem shows us what it is to be at a halfway point in your life. I love this poem for

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