New Rivers to Cross.

Phew.

Well.

I'm exhausted.

It feels like I just left for Ithaca yesterday, but in fact I've been back after my initial dive into business school for more than a week.  Surprise, surprise I haven't had a moment to catch my breath since.  This means a) I'm running on fumes, b) feeling behind on pretty much every single aspect of my life, and c) coming to grips with the fact that this is likely how I'm going to be feeling for the next 22 months of my life.

But you know what?  That's okay.

During my drive back to Boston from Cornell I had these grand intentions and plans about the post I was going to craft telling you all about my first week back in the classroom.  Given how drained my brain felt by that Sunday though I was pretty ecstatic simply to be able to focus on the pavement ahead of me, one mile at a time until I made it home to collapse in my own bed that evening.  I was exhausted as all get out, no question.  Yet utterly exhilarated as well.  Earlier in the week, while grabbing yet another cup of coffee during a class break, a classmate of mine coined the term "exvigorated," describing himself as exhausted yet invigorated.  Totally on point.

As you can imagine, and just as I wrote about before I left, my thoughts on this new adventure ran the gamut; back and forth between excited and nervous with a healthy dose of "what in the world am I getting myself into" thrown in for good measure.

But then?  After 6+ hours in the car and dealing with nightmarish traffic, I arrived.  I parked my car.  I checked in. And there I was, for better or for worse, giving it a shot.  Woody Allen says that 80% of success is just showing up.  Now, I'm only a few days into my Stats course, but I can tell you that those odds are pretty darn good.

On our third or fourth day of class, we had a professor come in for a lecture on critical thinking.  She put up a slide of Brad Pitt fly fishing in the film A River Runs Through It.  ("Because who could forget a slide with Brad Pitt on it?" she asked rhetorically.)  Next to young Brad's photo read this quote, one I've heard before but never really ruminated on until that afternoon as I walked to get (yet another) cup of caffeine. 

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.
-Heraclitus-

There are certain moments in life that feel like clear divides, when you can easily think about a Before and an After.  I've collected a handful of those already - Before/After my parents got divorced, Before/After I left NJ bound for college, Before/After my Mom moved to Georgia, Before/After I moved to London, Before/After I moved to New York, Before/After I left New York and called it quits on the longest relationship I've had, and now, this.  Before/After business school.

When I last wrote, I talked a lot about that idea of throwing your knapsack over a wall.  I knew I was tossing my own knapsack over when I said yes to Cornell's admissions offer this past spring.  That was my Before.  Even throughout the early part of the summer, even as I was working on class pre-work and talking about the program with friends and family, I felt I was still in the Before.  Now though, I finally feel like I'm climbing.  I'm climbing over that wall to get my knapsack. For in between the Before and the After, there's the Doing.  Right in the thick of it.  And the most exciting and crazy and wonderful notion is that even now, only after my first week (and piles of homework) I know I'm already a different, evolved woman from the one I was just a few weeks ago.  Already I've met interesting, funny, smart, and engaging classmates.  Already I've stepped into a complete unknown and forced myself to take it day by day even when I was feeling nervous or unsure.  I don't quite know where this MBA path will take me.  But that's really part of the beauty of all of it.  As I get older I think I'm finally getting better at this idea of the journey rather than the destination.