“There’s nothing I hate more than nothing. Nothing keeps me up at night. I toss and turn over nothing. Nothing can cause a GREAT BIG FIGHT.” – Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians
We’ve been cruising through the Seinfeld catalog of episodes, watching one or two every couple of days. Its basic premise is that it’s a show about nothing,the minutiae of daily life. Every episode is ridiculous and inane, but like coming upon a relationship accident, I can’t look away. We will finish watching the whole series. Nothing is going to get in our way.
Unless something does. On any given day, all of my best-laid plans – to exercise, to not procrastinate writing my latest blog post, to watch the next episode of Seinfeld – can so easily get derailed by…nothing. Nothing is another word for regular life. “What’s new?”, an friend will ask and the first thing that comes into my mind is: nothing.
Which isn’t true, right? If you keep any sort of diary or journal or even if Facebook assaults you with some weird anniversary (Celebrate 10 Years of Friendship with Your Accountant!) and you look back two, five or ten years ago, you can quite plainly see that things do change – maybe at a snail’s pace but still. Even a snail moves at 0.048 km/hr. That’s better than the average couch potato. I can plainly see my routine has changed from two years ago (because: Covid), my face looks different from five years ago (hello: wrinkles) AND I have a different accountant from ten years ago.
This blog is sort of about nothing. I’ve been trying to shape it and figure out what it’s about since I started. I write about writing (very meta!), about memories (how ephemeral!), about what I read lately and occasionally about stuff that happens. It’s a pretty good antidote for thinking that nothing happens when I read a post from two years ago or a throwback from twenty years ago.
Sometimes I wonder why I keep writing. And then when I write, I figure out why I do. It’s nothing, really.
In any random list of writing prompts, this is a question that often pops up. After all, everyone thinks about it when you hear what the Lotto 649 Jackpot is this week: What would it be like to win a million or ten million or fifty million dollars? What would it be like to really be rolling in the dough?
There are, of course, the stock answers, the ones that kind of make sense: I’d pay off my mortgage and maybe all my family’s mortgages. I’d quit my job. I’d travel the world. I’d never have to shovel snow/mow the lawn/clean the bathroom again – unless I really wanted to. I would buy a new [fill in the blank]. And then I would ridiculously wonder to myself if a million or ten million or fifty million dollars would really be enough, you know, to do it ALL.
The brilliance of the question is that if you’re really honest with yourself, you can figure out a lot about what you really want – right now – without the lottery. If telling your boss “I QUIT” is your first impulse, then maybe that job isn’t serving you so well anymore and you need to find a new job or a new attitude. If travelling is first on the docket, then maybe you need to figure out how to get to Mexico or Moose Jaw more often. Me, I would buy up all the tired little houses and fix ’em up and sell them without worrying about making a profit. Maybe even give them away. Not practical, probably, but it would be kind of fun, right?
There’s also the darker question, the one we might not think of right away: what kind of lottery are we talking about? A Shirley Jackson lottery? You remember her eerie story that you read in high school, the one that pinged in your brain when you watched the movie The Hunger Games– where A PERSON is selected by lottery? And not for anything good. No thanks, I don’t want to win that one.
In Neil Pasricha’s book The Happiness Equation, he admonishes his audience to REMEMBER THE LOTTERY whenever we start thinking ridiculous things like “my life sucks” or “there’s never enough”. Our human brains have a propensity to look for problems, so such pessimistic thinking is actually natural. It’s a bit of a survival mechanism. It’s what spurs us to keep buying lottery tickets in the first place. But we can also remind our brains: Hey, remember? You’re alive, you’re here. And that means you’ve already won. You’ve survived this far.
Remember the lottery. Being alive means you’ve already won.
Failure – in the conventional sense – is not an attractive word. It’s the kind of event – whether it’s getting turned down for a date or the demise of a multi-million-dollar company – that we never wish for. Indeed, what precipitates failure is the optimistic progression towards what we hope will be success. No one, in the particular sense, hopes for failure.
In the general sense, however, failure is actually not such a bad thing – it will, in fact, teach you way more than success. For example, in high school English, my teacher took one look at my name at the top of my paper and assigned me exactly the same grade almost every time. I was 85%. But in university, I learned that I was only 50%. But I didn’t want to be a 50% student forever – in English, anyways – so I learned that I had to learn, to listen, to try, to fail if I was going to succeed.
It’s not a lesson that’s easy for a semi-perfectionist – my husband reminds me that I fail at little, but mostly because I risk little, but I resist hearing the message from him, as we often do from our nearest and dearest.
I just finished another book byNeil Pasricha – You Are Awesome – and it’s all about resilience. Pasricha’s style resonates with me but the chapter Lose More to Win More really hit me. (Don’t tell my husband.) At the end of the chapter, he writes: “Admitting failure is hard. But you can do it! Trumpet them! Be proud of them. Because you learned from them and they were fumbles on the path that got you here. You wouldn’t be here without there. And you can’t get there without here.”
So this is me trumpeting my failures, of which this is by no means an exhaustive list:
In Grade Two, I peed my pants in school. For years, I felt such humiliation – and failure – about this incident. It helped once I realized that I was not alone in this experience and it gave me empathy for pants-wetters everywhere. When a co-worker had an accident when we were both in our twenties, I covered for her as she slunk home and then never mentioned it again. I was the only one she invited to her wedding.
The story of me trying to do better in my university English class? That didn’t hold true for Intro Physics – a course I enrolled in and dropped – twice. I had no desire to get better and it helped me recognize that pursuing a degree in the Sciences was totally wrong for me. And I can enjoy learning about Einstein without a full appreciation of E=mc2.
When I was 21, I saw my car’s dashboard light up with “check engine” when I was two hours away from my destination. I ignored it. I will NEVER do that again. R.I.P. Chevy Nova.
I failed to visit a dear friend in the hospital when he was dying of cancer and I deeply regret it now. I hope I never make that mistake again.
I have barely read any classic novels. I have yet to add any Dickens, Dostoyevsky or Doyle to my list. But I have learned that while actually reading the classics is kinda boring – especially if I already know all the plot points – listening to one on audiobook is a painless way of increasing my literary street cred.
When our boys were little and I was first starting to write publicly, my hubby and I created a family newsletter – the kind you needed people to subscribe to and pay real dollars for and that we would send in the mail in a manilla envelope. How quaint! We did four issues, had even less paid subscribers and I thought the whole thing was a silly mistake. I was reminded of it in Pasricha’s book when he recounted how many years and blogs he went through before his 1000 Awesome Things landed. I no longer see that as a failure but as a stepping stone. Plus, the kids had watermarked scrap paper to draw on for years after that.
I have started more days with the effort to “eat perfectly” than not and most of those days have ended up in perfectionistic failure. I have tried programs, paid for classes, bought fitness equipment and I’m still unhappy with the size of my pants. But: I’ve learned that working out – especially on a regular basis – and eating lots of vegetables and not so much artificial food, FOR REALS makes me feel sooooooo much better. Maybe someday the message will get to my heart. Both the metaphorical one and the beating one.
I haven’t written as much as I should have. I haven’t risked, haven’t prioritized, haven’t queried enough in my writing career. To my own detriment. Because if I don’t fail, I won’t learn. And if I don’t learn, I won’t get better. Which is what I want to do. *Sigh.* But for some reason, this blog gets written every week – somewhat mysteriously. Not like elves who helped the cobbler, but like I don’t know yet what makes me write this every week and not work on my other projects.
The real success, it would seem, is in failing better and dwelling just long enough on it to learn the lesson behind it.
I’m a huge fan of picture books, but I especially love picture books that aren’t necessarily aimed at their usual audience. Or, at the very least, clever books that have plenty of Easter eggs for the older person reading to their teeny tiny audience.
P is for Pterodactyl is the kind of book that a burgeoning reader might throw across the room. But it also might be just the thing for an ESL teacher to read to a graduating class – just to show them that the English language is weird and mean, even to us native speakers. It’s full of all the nonsensical words whose first letter doesn’t make a sound. (Whose idea was that, anyway? And how did it get such traction?)
One of the co-authors of P is for Pterodactyl is Raj Haldar, whose other occupation is: Rapper. a.k.a. Lushlife. Which makes sense, since songwriters are such purveyors of words.
A lot of picture books get written by famous people who aren’t known to be authors, per se. Your Baby’s First Word Will Be Dada(Jimmy Fallon), Outlaw Pete(Bruce Springsteen) and my favorite, which is sort of an anti-picture book, The Book With No Pictures (B. J. Novak) are all celebrity offerings. But it’s not like these people don’t regularly traffic in the currency of words in their primary professions: songwriters and actors and talk show hosts write stuff all the time.
The latest celebrity/picture book writer to hit my radar? The Edmonton Oiler’s new forward,Zach Hyman, who has penned three picture books now. (And only one of them about hockey.)
Zach Hyman’s latest book.
My favorite part? When I Google him, he shows up as a Canadian author, not a Canadian hockey player. I guess it depends on who’s writing the Wikipedia tags – there is after all, a lot of power in the written (another silent letter!) word.
It’s true. In land-locked Derwent, Alberta, where I grew up, there was no community swimming pool – and the closest one in the ’70s was probably in Vermilion – where I currently live and where my own children were thrown to the Sharks. (Relax! it was a level in the Red Cross swimming program.) There was no one driving me to swimming lessons a half an hour away when I was a kid. Sure, I guess I could have been thrown into the slough but I think my family was all a bunch of landlubbers and couldn’t have taught me, either. We didn’t hang out at the lake – unless it was frozen and we could skate on it.
Among the many athletic pursuits that I attempted (and quit) during my stint at the U of A was The Time That I Signed Up For Swimming Lessons. I was in a learning environment, I had a full-course load, ergo I thought to myself, “Self, let’s learn how to swim for no apparent reason.” Well, maybe the reason was because I really wanted to go on the cannonball waterslide at West Edmonton Mall without feeling like I was drowning when I got pitched into the 12-foot-deep pool at the end of the rapid-ejection-tube. Also, there was that time I went canoeing with friends at Sunset Lake and, for shits and giggles, my bestie (you know who you are!) decided it would be fun to tip the canoe and dunk us all. OF COURSE, WE WERE WEARING LIFEJACKETS. Henceforth, I developed a deep and abiding love for floatation devices – they are magic to me.
Fast forward to 1986 when I signed up for BEGINNER swimming lessons at the giant pool at the U of A. (In my memory, it was about an acre squared (farm-girl measurements) and easily that deep as well. The first question that the instructor asked our group of (supposed) non-swimmers was: “Who here has some swimming experience?” Nine people raised their hands. One (that would be me) didn’t. This meant that I was left at the shallow end of the pool to learn how to float with the instructor’s angry assistant (I’m pretty sure he was the same angry T.A. from my Organic Chemistry lab) while the rest of the happy crowd went to the deep end and started doing back flips off the high diving board.
I tried. I floated. I came back the next week and floated again. And then I stopped going to the lessons – I just flushed that money down the drain of the U of A swimming pool. Because I wasn’t learning anything.
I suppose I could boo-hoo about this situation, and to be frank, I did for a long time. And then, years later, a lifeguard friend told me about teaching “an old guy” (he was in this 40s – which is ancient in learning-to-swim terms) to swim. This Old Guy was going on a cruise, the trip-of-a-lifetime and he knew that he wanted to swim in the pool on the ship. That’s it – not for the ocean – just for the lido deck on The Love Boat. But then my lifeguard friend said something revolutionary, that the lessons weren’t the most important part, it was the practicing time. And this guy wanted to swim so badly, that he went to the pool everyday – and practiced.
As Despicable Me‘s Gru would say: Lightbulb!
This lesson has stuck with me ever since: if I see a flashy new class for something I think I want to learn, I need to figure out if I also have the time to practice the new skill. This is the reason most people head to post-secondary education immediately after high school: they have the time to devote to it – well, hypothetically anyways – without any pesky spouses or kids or mortgages or full-time jobs to get in the way. That time spent studying? It’s practice time. And practice time, for something you really want to learn, is time well spent. Or even, well-wasted, as the saying has morphed.
I suppose that the reason I didn’t write a lot before the last couple of years was because I didn’t have enough time to devote to practice time. Granted, a person can always find time for something they REALLY want to do. Julia Cameron of The Artist’s Waysays that if it’s a love affair we’re talking about, you always find the time to sneak away for a tryst. Why not translate that into other long-lost or new-found “loves”: writing, disk-golfing, learning Italian (the language or the cuisine), mining bitcoin, whatever. But decide not just to learn, also to practice. Because signing up isn’t the same as signing on.
I probably won’t be learning to swim anytime soon. But dang it, I’m sure going to practice my writing. Because that’s where I want to waste my time.
One of the reasons I love to write is because it allows me to get into my own virtual BTTF DeLorean and travel Back in Time (cue: the Huey Lewis song). I’ve been working on a document for a few years now, a journal of sorts that I call My Narrative Timeline. I use questions to prompt me to think about people, places and situations in my past so that I can explore them for all they’re worth. One thing that never fails to surprise me is that I always wind up writing more than I can think about the topic in my head. Writing helps me go so much further and remember so much more. It’s like a secret ingredient to a recipe: just add ink.
An easy place to start with time travel is with artifacts. The memoirist Ian Frazier said, “Objects suggest narrative.” Sometimes we can see a thing and realize that there’s a story or even just a whole slew of associations or memories that you have made in your brain with that particular thing.
That being said, the creators of the show, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, were pretty genius in creating a show about nothing because nothing translates into Endless Possibilities for subject matter. What I find fascinating, in creating essentially a character-driven show, they’ve simultaneously put together a unique time capsule that highlights objects and artifacts, like giant shoulder pads, diner booths and yes, telephones.
It seems in every episode, Jerry makes or answers a phone call. The show launched in 1989, which was essentially before cell phones and even before cordless phones were a regular household thing. I get a real kick out of watching Jerry dial his rotary phone, willing him not to make a mistake, because – you know – you’d have to hang up and try all over again. (Jerry is one of the characters I actually like, at least more than George and Elaine, but sometimes not as much as Kramer.) When he is talking on the phone, he often hooks his index and middle fingers into the little shelf under the receiver cradle and walks around his apartment dragging 50 feet of telephone wire with him which keeps him securely plugged into the telephone jack in the wall – because there was no magic back then. When I was a kid, I used to think it was a LUXURY to be able to walk around with a phone like that, especially since our phone on the farm was stuck securely tothe wall. My brother, however, was a telephone installer and had access to miles of this phone line stuff and so I recall that the phone in my parents’ next house could be walked around the kitchen and living room à la Jerry Seinfeld. I could even MOVE THE PHONE to plug into a jack in a bedroom or in the basement if I really craved privacy. Which didn’t last long because inevitably someone yelled, “Get off the phone!” – and not because you were using too much data.
In a recent episode we watched (Season Three: The Alternate Side), Jerry is using a new phone: a cordless one, albeit the size of a compact car with an antenna to match. It reminded me of this picture of me and Rick, circa 1990:
Yep, there it is, behind us on the fridge, a giant cordless phone! And talk about Time Travel! A classic alarm clock with flippy-numbers! Rick with a long hair and a perm! Me drinking a beer!
Of course, I’ve barely started on the whole phone thing. Remember “party lines” – when you had to SHARE A PHONE LINE WITH ONE OR TWO OF YOUR RURAL NEIGHBORS? Crazy and hard to explain to the young folks, but it was kind of like putting the whole neighborhood on speakerphone. And last week, when I was at my friend’s dad’s house – she found some really old telephone lists in his cupboards with phone numbers with only two digits! I don’t quite remember that, but I do remember only having to dial only 7 numbers instead of 10. And now we don’t even have to memorize phone numbers – it’s all there at the press of a “button” on our pants computer.
Before you know it, I’ll be waxing poetic about flip-phones and Blackberries. Because eventually everything new becomes old and is therefore fodder for the pen. I don’t want to forget and it’s actually fun to remember, so I will keep writing about such silly old things as telephones and time travel.
It’s nearly birthday time for me and since I started this blog on my birthday two years ago, it’s time for my annual checkup: How’s the blog doing? Am I still enjoying it? And maybe, most important: Do I keep going? Or in a paraphrase of Dr. Phil: How’s it working for me? Although I’ve had the occasional blank mind in the last year when it came time to write my post of the week (resulting in one of my Throwback Thursdays) I would have to say that the blog IS working for me. Or maybe I’m working for it. Either way, the writing is getting done.
I will keep blogging because it’s good for me. The every-week self-imposed deadline makes me write AT LEAST one blog post a week. I am trying hard to establish a healthy writing habit but the daily-ness escapes me. I’m working up to it. The blog lets me say, “Yes, I’m still writing!”
I will keep blogging because I believe in the written record. It makes me unreasonably happy when I read something I wrote twenty years ago that I would probably never remember if I hadn’t writtenit down. It’s why I keep writing erratically in several journals at a time and keep ridiculous notes on my computer. It all might come in handy someday, even if it’s just to reminisce when I’m one hundred years old, at the tail end of my journey of a century.
I will keep blogging because it keeps the pump primed. I’m working on a book and as I said before, sometimes it’s hard to get my writing in. While it may seem counterintuitive to write something else when I should be working on a chapter, the blog keeps me honest. It legitimizes my desire: I write, therefore I am a writer. Therefore, I should be able to write a book. Whether or not I ever get it published, I have to keep going because it’s in me and it wants to get out. I just need to trust the process that all this “extra writing” is part of the process not unlike the gardener who plants an extra zucchini seed or the photographer who takes a thousand pictures to get “the one” or Connor McDavid who just keeps practicing every single day.
I’m thinking in the next little while this blog may evolve a little. I might narrow my focus, I might spend a little more time on the bones and the makeup and make it look a little different. It’s worth spending the time on it because it gives so much back to me.
Exactly how did Shakespeare manage to write all those rhyming couplets? Or Emily Dickinson or Shel Silverstein or Dr. Suess? My one-minute feeble attempt at poetry is really about as good as it gets for me when it comes to busting rhymes. My admiration for those seasoned (and patient) poets goes up that much more.
Professional admiration is one thing. Reading and enjoying poetry is something completely different. Everyone knows that poetry is good for you like doing yoga or eating vegetables or wearing a toque in winter. But barely any slim volumes of poetry grace my bookshelf and none find their way to my bedside table to compete with my usual fiction picks. And yet, once in awhile, some random poetical lines will stop me short when I meet with them out in the wild like one of Mary Oliver’s geese.
During my first year university, I flipped open my Norton Anthology of English Literature and encountered the familiar “poem” Big Yellow Taxi by “author” Joni Mitchell. Ummm, hello? Mr. Norton? That’s a song. But noooo, I learned in class, actually, those are lyrics, which is a form of poetry. Adding music is what makes it a song. But the music in my head made the poem that much more palatable and understandable for me, adding that extra sensory experience. And poetry is supposed to be all about the senses, right?
I was reminded of this the other night while we were watching TV with the closed captioning on. The lyrics of an ambient song came up and I was struck at how much music plays a part in my being able to engage with the poetry. Suddenly, I felt deeply what the lyricist meant when The Faces sang, “I wish that I knew what I know now…” because I could hear it in the singer’s voice: there are some things you just can’t really understand until you’re older.
I’ve also discovered that I can enjoy entire novels in verse. When my online book club choice for the month was Elizabeth Acevedo’s YA novel The Poet X, I had my usual apprehension about reading poetry. My library solved that problem for me when only the audiobook version was available. Read by the author – without my botched Spanish pronunciations of her lovely dialectical additions – it was an immersive experience that would have lost something if told in prose.
Years ago at a writers’ conference I had a similar experience. At the closing banquet, I turned up my nose when I read that part of the entertainment would be someone performing Cowboy Poetry. How quickly I was schooled by the masterful recitation by an old gentleman cowboy telling his story by heart, in verse, with the mesmerizing lilt of an ambling horse. If I had read it for myself, I would not have done it justice.
In her book The Cloister Walk, poet-author Kathleen Norris advises against dissecting a poem in order to try and understand it, as if the parts are more important than the whole or “as if the purpose of poetry is to provide boring exercises for English class”: simile, metaphor, image. Maybe I need someone to read or sing poetry to me. My husband actually does a pretty good job of this when he gets into one of his let-me-read-you-all-the-lyrics-to-this-song-and-tell-you-exactly-what-it-means moods.
The whole act of writing is communal, after all. Unless it’s a diary (and even then sometimes), the transaction is only complete when someone reads it. It becomes that much more complex when someone reads it to you or an artist performs it, especially in person. I look forward to engaging once more in such communion of concerts and theatre, recitals and school concerts, hymns and choruses when this dang pandemic is finally over.
It’s weird, you know. After Christmas is done, after all the extra tasks I’ve given myself of shopping and card-writing and wrapping and cooking and cleaning and celebrating, by the time January 2 rolls around, I’m looking longingly to the return of my mundane routine.
I’ve worked primarily from home for a long time and have been able to “set my own hours” while I homeschooled my boys and managed my home and work responsibilities. For years, I sort of flouted a set routine, I’m sorry to say (or am I?) When my kids were young, we sort of flew by the seat of our pants: we got our schoolwork done (somehow) but we didn’t always start at the same time of day and sometimes we spontaneously took a day (or two or three) off. As the boys got older and busier, it felt like the calendar dictated my days and weeks as I ferried them to music lessons and youth group and theater and part-time jobs. And because I still had to make sure we were all fed and the house was cleaned and my work-work was done, it was a pretty busy season of life.
As an empty nester, you would think that there’s plenty of time to get all that I want to get done in a day. But for some reason, it doesn’t work that way. If I let time go unbridled, I can easily get sucked down an Instagram or Internet or Organizing vortex and then NOTHING gets done – because really, I’m kind of a minimalist and the house doesn’t need to be organized, again.
Schedule, schedule, schedule! That is what gets me down to the basement to work out regularly or out the door to walk, it’s what gets my butt in the chair to write and what keeps me from falling into those vortices. And because I have #goals when it comes to writing, I have learned this last year or so to give myself small assignments every day. Have I always been good at following through? Noooooooo. But I keep trying and refining and failing and getting back up again.
Because no one else is telling me what to do, I have to tell myself. Everyday I write down three things I want to work on. The first one is the most important and the thing I really need to do that day. The second thing is the thing I do when I’ve completed enough of the first task or finished it completely and I need to switch tasks – after a break and a coffee and maybe a small amount of time in the Instagram Vortex. The third thing I may not even get to that day – but that’s okay because it’s not as important as the first and second thing and at least I worked on those and the whole day wasn’t lost. And sometimes it helps to write down the three things the day or night before so that I don’t have a brain lapse when I look at an empty day and think I don’t have anything to do that day.
For the most part, I have a routine: I get up, read, drink some coffee, exercise, drink some more coffee, etc. But then it’s time to get to my three tasks. All the other stuff – laundry and lunch, errands and extras – that gets fit into the spaces in between of what I’ve decided are the most important things to do that day. And yes, sometimes lunch or laundry is the most important thing if a friend is coming over (that used to happen, right?) or we just got back from holiday (that used to happen, too.)
Is it boring? Well, yes, maybe it looks that way on the outside. But if the outcome is between finishing a writing project or finishing Netflix, Future Bonnie is gonna be happier if she finishes the writing project. And if I get to my writing chair on time everyday, there still is plenty of time for Netflix.
I am a big believer in writing things down and a lover of lists of all sorts. So when I came across an idea from author Laura Vanderkam last year, I knew I wanted to try complete it:a List of 100 Dreams. Well, not complete it in the sense of get everything on the list “done”, but first just try to actually write down 100 Dreams.
I’m not talking about the visions – or nightmares – that visit you at night. This list is about writing down all the things you want to do, places you want to go, people you want to meet – no holds barred. And like a lot of things, it’s easier said than done.
I first heard about the idea from Vanderkam on her podcast Before Breakfast – she’s known for time management and working from home – two things that were especially hot in the work world after March last year. And she likes to address not just the working side of a person, but the other rest-of-life person, too. All work and no play makes for an unhappy person all round.
And so, The List of 100 Dreams.
The first thing I did was cue up a world map on Google and I systematically wrote down all the places I would love to go: Italy, France, Ireland, Poland, Hogwarts, the Shire. Remember, this was before regular people (a.k.a. not Alberta MLAs) had to shut down all travel plans. But it was a list of dreams and therefore perfectly okay to write down even the most frivolous desires of the heart.
On the one hand, I dream about travelling. On the other, my dreams are things that can be accomplished for the most part at my desk at home: write a memoir, write a novel, learn Greek and Latin, read all the books. I haven’t finished my list yet – there’s a lot of things in between going and staying – and I plan on writing a full 100 in my new 2021 planner. But even though the list’s title gives me permission to dream with abandon, I still find it hard to Dream Big.
It all comes with getting older, I think, and more…realistic? After all, I’m over 53 now. It’s not exactly Over the Proverbial Hill, but let’s just say, my age precludes any Olympic aspirations yet unmet. Reasonably: I don’t have that kind of time. Or, that kind of bod.
But that very reasonableness – or wisdom – is actually a gift. When we’re babies, we can dream all kinds of things: become the first woman to live on Mars, finish Netflix, read the Wikipedia, become a hermit, become famous. But getting older, we are able to filter out the things that are just Frankly a Waste of Your Time to Dream. For you. Because everyone gets to decide what dreams they want to cherish and what dreams are just downright Cuckoo-For-Cocoa-Puffs. For them.
The other gift of getting older? An awareness of your own mortality. Not in a morbid kind of way, but more in a way to galvanize your sorting: this thing matters, this thing doesn’t. And there’s nothing like your impending death to make you sit up and say, “Wait! I just need to get this one thing done first!”
You get to decide what to dream and to express what dreams still lie in your heart that you never did decide on – they were always just there. It is never to late to Just Dream.
![P Is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever by [Raj Haldar, Chris Carpenter, Maria Beddia]](https://i0.wp.com/www.amazon.ca/images/I/51SJ%2BF1DprL.jpg?resize=593%2C463&ssl=1)
