At the start of each decade of my adult life,  I've had a moment when everything changed.  

Of course,  I can identify these  moments only in retrospect.  Usually, they involve a combination of choice and serendipity.  

At twenty, I accepted a college friend's offer of a double date.  To put it plainly: a blind date. I would be paired with with some friend of her boyfriend.   Why not, I figured.   Nothing to lose.   My date was  a cute guy from New York, a little shy, and very earnest.  And it turned out we'd shared a class the previous semester.  I was immediately taken with him.  But I certainly wouldn't have guessed that we would be married just over a year later.   

At thirty,  I finally finished my Ph.D.  That cute guy from New York and I celebrated with a six week trip through Canada.  We had another travel companion, as it turned out.  On the morning of our departure, we learned that another "project" had come to fruition.  I was happily pregnant with our first child.  

At forty,  he took me on a  fateful birthday trip to New Orleans.  On a whim, I signed us up for a swamp tour and heard some Cajun music.  Accordions started to infiltrate my dreams.  That trip turned me into a musician, and eventually into a writer.

At fifty, I decided to sign up for a creative writing class.  I'd been thinking about it for a few years and decided it was time to stop putting things off.   I enrolled in a creative nonfiction class at the UC-Berkeley extension and met the woman who would become my writing mentor.  She believed I had a book in me.  Eventually, I listened to her.

It certainly seems like a pattern.  

Now I'm into the next decade and waiting for something.  A sign. A moment.  

Less than a week ago, we returned from a two week trip to the Middle East.  Israel and a little of the Palestinian Territories.  Our first visit.   It was nothing I would have chosen on my own.   But, as my father-in-law says, he made us an offer we couldn't refuse:  An anniversary trip to a place he thought we needed to see.  And he wanted us to see it while he was still around to share it with us.

My father-in-law was right.  We did need to see it, with all its complexity and contradictions.

Each morning since we've been back,  I dream I am still there.  I wake up confused, unsettled.  I ache for all the people caught up in the latest round of violence.  I need to do something but don't know what.

Maybe this is another moment that marks a change.   A moment when everything shifts.