Sometime last year, I must have opened a fortune cookie that read: "The next year of your life will be full of changes. Seriously, put down this little piece of paper and buckle your seat belt tightly -- you're in for quite a ride."

My first step off of my plain vanilla path began simply enough when I took an Artist's Way class, which got me in touch with my inner finger-painter and started this narrator's voice running in my head -- kind of like the one on The Wonder Years, but with a voice that sounds a lot more like mine. My narrator noticed things more than I usually did -- moments, really, like the things a camera would zoom in on in a movie: the way large yellow and brown leaves crunched under my feet and smelled a little like bay leaves as I packed them into tall compost bags, how puppy-like my dogs acted when they ran off-leash on the snowy golf course, and how fragile my daughter's bigness seemed as she dressed up and went to her last elementary school dance.

The next step off of the straight and narrow came when I responded to a Dallas Morning News announcement seeking Community Voices columnists. The pages in this newspaper became a place where my narrator got to share observations about life. It's not that I'm quiet and keep my thoughts to myself; it's just that the narrator lingers and really thinks about things. If I'm out having drinks with friends, for example, he's noticing how a friend's eyes look so nice and smiley when she talks about her dog -- while I'm trying to be funny or flag down the waiter.

I felt more alive and less buttoned-down as the year went along, and less willing to be the owner of a very practical compact car. So, between the opening of Christmas presents and the ringing in of the New Year, I got into a Mini Cooper and pushed the gas pedal down hard enough to take another step off my predictable path. It was like a big toy, and it didn't shout midlife like a sports car or hair plugs.

In the springtime, I came across something that would be the beginning of the biggest change in our lives in nearly a decade -- a job announcement for the kind of work I love doing, in the San Francisco office of the federal agency I work for. We had talked for years about wanting to go back to California someday, and this online job posting popped up in my e-mail and called our bluff. Within a month, we were planning for the move and wondering if we were doing the right thing.

It's been about three months since we drove off of our farm-to-market path and onto the winding trail that runs along the rugged Pacific coast. On days when the sun shines and everyone is as happy as our two dogs at suppertime, life seems to work here and we feel like we made the right decision. On other days, when it feels like we're gathering good material for a twangy country song, it seems like we walked away from a good thing -- a really good thing.

I know it takes a while to feel like you're home after you move somewhere, to feel connected to the people around you. You have to share enough of each other's lives to have their stories inside you. And that takes time, so we try to be a little brave when we need to be and laugh hard whenever we can.

I guess you need to be careful about opening fortune cookies -- you never know what you might find inside. I'm ready for a new one now, but I need this one to say that I can take off my seat belt for a while ... and also, if it's not too much to ask, that I'm going to be receiving a really large sum of money soon.

Darrin Swartz-Larson, formerly of McKinney, is a Community Voices volunteer columnist. His e-mail address is darrinslarson @sbcglobal.net. In the next few weeks, the 2008-09 Voices contributors will be introduced on this page.