In three days I’ll fly to Halifax (again…I was just there less than two weeks ago) to attend the final intensive week of my MBA and write my final exam. I’m excited about this, for reasons beyond the obvious…the obvious being that I really, really, pretty-please-with-a-cherry-on-top want to be done this fucker.

Ahem…like I said: beyond that. Even though I’ve lived in Toronto for eleven years now, I still very much think of Halifax as another home. A different kind of home than the family farm, which is two hours northwest of Halifax, but home nonetheless. I spent four years at university there, where I met my wife. I visited Halifax with my family several times as a kid and have visited many times since I moved away. I was married in Halifax. I have good friends there. Some of my favourite places are there: the Public Gardens, the Daily Grind, the bottom of a glass of Granite Brewery Special Best Bitter. If there’s such a thing as a spiritual home, I think Halifax is probably it. If I love the farm for feeling familiar and comfortable, I love Halifax equally for being liberating. Not liberating from the farm or my family, but liberating from the nearby town where I went to high school and the life I was afraid I’d slip into there.

I’m glad I’ll get to enjoy next week with new friends, good friends. It’ll be fun to be one of the two people who’ve lived there and show the tourists around and explain what a donair is. It’ll be fun being on campus, even if it’ll be quiet during the summer. I think it’ll feel like closing a circle too, righting a small wrong. I’ve never felt like I wasted my university education; in fact I think I’ve done fairly well by it. However, I look back (as most people probably do) and shudder at the weakness my work ethic in those years, and regret the sloppiness of my first two most especially. I’ve been lucky enough to learn some of the stuff I, quite frankly, probably should have learned (or remembered) from my first go-round at business school. Not many people get a second crack at that.

How lucky, then, that I get to wrap it all up in the city where it started. Where everything started.

[tags]halifax, dalhousie, public gardens, daily grind, granite brewery[/tags]