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It was a day, that for me was not much different than any other day in my recent life. I got up early, ate cereal for breakfast, stayed in the shower longer than I should have and went to work the way I normally do. I got upset at the same things that always made me upset, and got excited about the kinds of things that made me excited. I walked through the day the way I always have.

Until Michelle A. showed up in my doorway, life was pretty much the same as it had been. At 9:20 AM EST, things changed. Everything else was the same as it had been before. The sun was shining brightly with a nice breeze, Canadian Geese took to the air as they ever did.

But my whole life changed at that moment. A rubicon was crossed, and it marked a division in the landscape of my life as clearly and unequivocally as a land mass is divided by an ocean on a map. When I crossed that ocean, I closed my door and was unable to look back at the land I had left behind me, because I knew it was in the past, and the voyage ahead of me was going to be very different than the one I left behind.

This was an email I wrote to myself on that day. I keep it in my inbox.