Transitions

I have been surrounded with transitions lately and it has caused a combination of melancholy and gratefulness to descend around me like a heavy fog.

I've spent time the past couple of days making the transition from Google Reader to The Old Reader.
In case you've been under a rock and don't know what a Reader is, it is a subscription site for blogs and other web pages. You subscribe to a blog, for example, and every time there is a new entry, it will pop up on your blog reader. So, if you read a number of blogs, you don't have to check each one daily because they are all there, in one central site. It's extremely handy.

Anyway, I was moving subscriptions one by one, manually, because I couldn't figure out how to just import everything. As I moved down the list. I saw some blogs that have been languishing in my Reader for a year or even two, with no entries. I had to decide, each time, whether to move the subscription over or to let it go.

It was surprisingly hard to let some of them go. Some were blogs of folks I know personally and while I miss having that snapshot into their lives, I keep up with folks pretty well and often know what's going on without the blog. Others, though, I have not met but felt I had come to know through the pictures they posted and the words they told, which painted a story of their lives. Some of them I moved over in the hopes that their blogs would be revived and to others I bid a sad goodbye.

Like many things, it caused me to reflect on the passage of time, and lives. Folks come in and stay awhile, some for a very long time, others more fleeting. Our family has been touched by several losses in the past couple of years and with Rob's grandfather ailing (he's almost 97!) it feels as though the cloud will be descending again.

Just a week or two ago, in an uncharacteristically black mood, I commented to Rob that in a hundred years, it will be like we were never here. Poof. Just like that. Fortunately it's not in my nature to dwell or get bogged down in thoughts like that. We do what we can in this life, to share love and help others, and hopefully leave the world (or at least a little corner of the world) at least as good if not better than it was when we arrived.