My husband and I are moving this week, and I’ve been reflecting on past moves and life in general.

As a child, my family and I moved frequently. It was a struggle to connect and make new friends at school, and I often felt like an outsider. And as much as I hated the constant upending of my life as a little kid, I learned resilience and how to deal with change.

In my first marriage, the pattern of moving often continued. Although I longed for stability, that marriage was anything but stable, and it ended after 9 years, when I was 28 years old.

During the past few weeks, as the collection of packed boxes grows and the closets and cabinets slowly empty, I am on the threshold of what I hope will be my last move. Little mementos of the past get tucked away in boxes, and I marvel at the journey of my life.

Perhaps that’s one reason that moving can be emotional. As we pack, we rediscover things that represent the places we’ve been, the people we’ve met, and the passage of time. Who I was all those years ago, in that first marriage, is completely different than who I am now, in my 60s, and yet, there are still echoes of that young woman within.

I look at a photo of me holding my son when he was four months old. At that moment, my life stretched before me, and now…now that life is a winding road in the rearview mirror. Now that life has left its scars, its imprint, and has shaped me in ways I couldn’t have possibly conceived as that young woman in the picture.

I pick up the framed slip of paper from a fortune cookie I opened years ago that said, “You are a lover of words. Some day you should write a book.” The dream of being an author grew from a tiny glimmer as a little girl holding a book while sitting up in a tree, disappearing from the world inside the pages of someone else’s imagination. For decades, I let that dream fade into the background until it disappeared from sight.

Isn’t it interesting that those slips inside fortune cookies originated as a Japanese tradition in which fortunes were given to travelers for good luck? Our lives are our journeys, sometimes following predictable paths, and other times branching down forks we couldn’t have seen coming.

When I ended my second marriage and moved into the first home I owned independently, it was in that home that I excavated my dream of writing and set in motion the physical manifestation of holding a printed book in my hands two years later.

Every move, every home, represents a snapshot in time of who we were at that moment. They create the historical markers of our lives.

Sitting here this morning with my coffee cup in hand, looking at the boxes that will be loaded up tomorrow, on their way to their final destination, I am thankful for the opportunity to start a new chapter.