I have the advantage of having kept a journal since I was fourteen years old. Never very consistent about making entries, large chunks of my life are missing. Writing is where I go when I'm confused so most of what I saved are the hard, annoying questions.
If there's a theme to my first forty plus years, it was, "What do I want my life to look like?" Which was almost always followed by a long list of the things I thought would make me happy.
Periodically I look back over my lists and, it's weird, I got most of what I wanted. New furniture for the screened-in porch. Christmas in Costa Rica with our kids. I was the first female producer to make Chairman's Club at Merrill Lynch. My picture was often in the newspaper.
But it didn't matter what I got or achieved. I just kept on asking.
"What do I want my life to look like?" - contentment always just out of reach. Even after I got divorced, quit my job, and remarried. It seemed like I'd never get there. Wherever there was.
One day I happened to stumble on a new book at the Public Library called, How to Live Well Without Owning a Car: Save Money, Breathe Easier and Get More Mileage out of Life by Chris Balish. The author had gotten in over his head in debt, was forced to give up his car and liked his life so much better he never bothered to replace it. Inspired, I decided to limit my driving and ride my bike 5 days a week even though I lived at the top of a steep, one mile hill. It was 2006 and I was fifty years old.
Riding the eight miles downtown and back made me feel like I was twelve years old again. Free and powerful and independent. Do you remember? How it felt to be able to go anywhere you wanted without your parents for the first time. I loved being twelve.
There was one special morning in particular. It was June, just after school had let out for summer vacation and my mother was in the backyard watering her azaleas - that part of the day when the air is still cool, but you know it's going to get really hot in the afternoon - which was something you noticed and appreciated before everybody got air-conditioning. I was standing in the grass in a patch of sun, my whole summer ahead of me. The birds were singing and I could smell the wet dirt in the garden. My best friend, Paige, and I had plans to spread a quilt under the elm in the backyard and work on the novel we were writing together.
Bingo. It took me fifty years but I finally figured it out, what made me happy. The exact same things that made me happy when I was twelve. Riding my bike. Sunshine. Free time to do anything I want. Writing. It had been there all along. I just couldn't see it. So that's the way I live my life these days, the same way I did when I was twelve. There is nothing I can pay for with money that could make me feel as good and have it last.
Of course, I still make lists every once in a while, but now they say things like, "Make pot of lentil soup." "Return library books." "Take a walk down by the river." And I never, ever, ever have to ask myself what I want my life to look like any more. Because I'm exactly where I want to be, doing exactly what I want to do. And I'm very, very happy.
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