Six months ago today, my last childhood dog, Cooper, died. I knew his time was coming, but the actual event was quite sudden. I sat in the vet's office and passed my hand through the fur of his neck in gentle, sweeping strokes as the pentobarbital coursed through his veins and slowed his shallow breaths until he passed. Our tears dampened his graying coat.

"Yeah, I can see the house from my window. I'm doing better now. I can drink ice water now."

These were the last words my paternal grandfather spoke to me, said brightly and with the optimism of someone nowhere near his physical age.

At the time of my November post, I really was not at all sure what direction to take with the netting business. Over the nearly three years of running the business without outside income, I did manage to increase revenue and inventory levels, but I also incurred $13,000 in debt.

My last post was about a letter I didn't write; today's is about a letter I had wished I didn't have to write. Two months ago today, my grandma on my father's side died very suddenly and very unexpectedly. Geography had kept us from being close in my childhood, and it also kept us apart in her passing; every effort made to make it to the funeral was in vain. Regardless of the distance between us, I felt close in writing a parting letter to her, which I posted with my dad to be placed in the velvet lining of her coffin before it was lowered into the Illinois earth where she will forever lay.

10 years ago today, my best friend died. I wasn’t there. I hadn’t been there for months. I don’t know what time he died or what his last moments were like, but he died on the couch where he had lain for months as cancer slowly took his jaw, his voice, and his life. I never said a proper goodbye.

I have eight more days of enjoying the mid-point between my teens and my thirties. Some in their senior years have described feeling like they're still young people in old bodies and I could never reconcile how that could work in one's mind, but I'm starting to understand. I'm approaching 26, but still feel 21 inside, as if the id and ego were set in stone in 2013 - more experienced and with more responsibilities now but fundamentally the same.

2018 begins tomorrow and I'm still wondering where this year went. In some ways, it felt like each month of 2017 was longer than the year itself. January started off very strong, February was lackluster, and March through May all had average growth of 38% for the company. By June, between caring for the new dog, helping with renovations, and preparing for moving, I was totally burned out; growth stalled to 11% from June through August. After the SOCOM contract mess in September, I was ready to write off this year as a so-so year for the business, but all of that changed last month with a single November phone call that has set me on a different course going into 2018.

As the sole purpose for this site is to collect my current thoughts about business and life and write them for reflection by my future self, I do not know whether to be impressed or disappointed in the fact that this post comes exactly one year after my previous post. I have been meaning to write something for the past two months, but my impediment has been finding a whole day in which I can focus and capture my state of mind, and since I had set a rule for myself in the beginning that I would never go more than a year without writing, today is my deadline.

I am leaving for a flight to Oregon in nine hours. The final hours before a flight always leave me in a state of mild anxiety, so now is as good of a time as any to write about how the past six months have progressed. I have been self-employed now for six months and two weeks. It has been quite the experience, I must say! When I quit, I had twenty thousand dollars, but after a trip to Thailand and a nine-grand tax bill in April, my accounts going into the summer months totaled about seven-thousand. This is just to give some background on where things started from.

Six hours ago, my life as an employee came to an end. Nonetheless, the reality of it has not completely set in yet. From this point forward, I will no longer be answering emails, returning missed calls, or receiving paychecks. Even though I have had this point in the forefront of my mind for six months, it still feels rather unreal.

About a month ago, I was on a red-eye flight from Phoenix to New York. On my left, a 20-something-year-old art student from New York whose only goal on that flight was to sleep from the time we left the gate until the wheels touched down on the tarmac at JFK. In front of me sat dozens of passengers in various stages of dozing off. And behind me, in the last row on the plane, a young boy, maybe 4 or 5 years of age, sitting alone (though rarely wanting to actually sit) and heading to meet his aunt from The City.

My performance of two Yann Tiersen compositions, Le Matin and La Corde at The Welcome to America Project benefit concert

Dear Future Self,

It has been quite some time since I last wrote, but I have not felt a burning desire to write. Not a lot has changed since November, but the keyword for the past five months would simply be, “progress.” To give a little overview, I will go through the changes that have occurred in the areas that I wrote about in my last post.

In my last post, I wrote about how I was constricting and downsizing my belongings, but I did not write so much about how I was constricting and opening my time. I want to cover that and how I am in the process of restructuring my life and overcoming my main fears at the same time.

On July 31, I sat in a seat in the sky, headed to Vancouver, British Columbia for a 9-day retreat from everything. I had left behind my laptop, my phone, my Facebook, my business, and most of my friends. It was just myself, a good friend, and a backpack’s worth of clothes, travel documents, and books in the bin overhead. Over the next 9 days, I rediscovered a little bit of myself that I think I had lost sight of during my normal daily rush: the simple me. And I liked it.

Five hours from now, I will be at my poker table, playing Texas Hold ‘Em with a group of friends, and trying my luck for a few bucks. I’m really not a very good poker player, but somehow, after two months of playing poker on a weekly basis, I still have a positive balance. I play very conservatively and I usually know when to stay in a hand and when to fold. I know how to play just well enough to survive, and I can play out until I have a hand that I know can undoubtedly win, at which point I force my competitors further into a pot that already has my name on it.

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different. – Peter Drucker This is essentially how I feel right now. In the month since I last wrote down my thoughts, everything has been going really well. Too well, though. Life is lacking turbulence right now and it is a very strange feeling. I am just waiting for an aileron to jam or for an engine to go out.

For the past month or so, I have been in the process of executing my new goals. I started a new ecommerce store, though I am taking an approach to it that is entirely different from the one I made to GlowStickJunkie. I am doing a lot of experimenting in building many different aspects of the business simultaneously instead of focusing on the business itself and then trying to spread focus to the other areas later. Of course, there is the risk that this business will not be viable, and I risk not finding that out until later, but I feel that going with this route will be far more advantageous in the long-term. Besides, isn’t taking risks all part of the game? Of course it is.

Finals week isn’t even on the horizon yet, and already this summer is looking like it is going to be the greatest summer of my life thus far. Needless to say, these next 3 weeks of school are going to be quite unbearable. Everything is on track for graduation, but I still have 30% of my grade at stake in the majority of my classes, and with each passing day, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain focus! Must…stay…focused.

Letting go is never easy. Whether it’s a relationship or a business, it’s difficult because we know that it will mean giving up all of the time and resources that we had invested in that person or in that venture. We have to take a step back and say, “This isn’t what I had planned for it to be,” and learn to accept our loss with humility. As human beings, this is exceptionally difficult for us.