My Life List

I’m a planner, I’ll admit it. I tend to envision what I want to accomplish or experience in life, then set out to do it. But I had never bothered to write any of it down into a list. I didn’t really see the point, because my head is always full of a swirl of ideas. But then Laura Mayes and Maggie (Maggie’s one of those few people who gets by with a single name, although I know she has a last name floating around somewhere) invited me to the Mighty Summit, a truly amazing weekend with 26 brilliant, creative women doing this-that-and-the-other, and suddenly, I had to make a life list. SO, here it is. And one day, in a universe far, far away, I will finally write up my post about Mighty Summit and my life list. But for now this will have to suffice…

☞ Speak Turkish, Spanish and Italian fluently

☞ Start and finish my son’s infant scrapbook before he graduates from high school

☞ Take a train trip cross-country with my son and boyfriend; then do it in Europe later

☞ Start my own brand-consulting business, In Her Words

☞ Make a difference in domestic violence, child abuse and sex abuse awareness and prevention

☞ Climb all the tall peaks in the Adirondacks

☞ Live in Canada for awhile

☞ Master photography

☞ Become a public speaker about resilience, grief, loss and turning life’s disappointments and heartbreaks into wisdom

☞ See all the Grand Slams around the world

☞ Live in Paris with my son

☞ Learn how to make a perfect macaroon

☞ Go to an oyster festival

☞ Find my running rhythm again and stop worrying when I lose it (it always comes back)

☞ Live in a small house on a wind-whipped northern coast for a year

☞ Keep writing books

☞ Dare to publish poetry

☞ Start writing fiction

☞ Get married in the Adirondacks

☞ Live long enough for my son to see his ADHD gives him gifts, too

☞ Live in the same town/area with my two brothers for a couple of years

☞ Master the fine balance of writing the truth about my mother in my next book so people can see both that she was crazy and she was wonderful

☞ Be brave enough to adopt two more kids

☞ Get over money

☞ Learn tennis or at least stop caring that I suck at it so I can play it with my boyfriend

☞ Find a bunch of women I trust, respect and adore to start a business with, so I can stop grieving about the loss of working with the amazing team at Redbook: it was a ten-year slumber party where we kicked ass, took names, expanded people’s ideas of what could be accomplished, and loved each other like crazy

☞ Find a way to harness the spirits and hearts of women in an actual, reproducible way, in order to bring the change into American politics, corporations and society that we so desperately need

☞ See my blog take off (note to self: make time for blog is probably a good first step)

☞ Make my meditation practice a more consistent support in my life

☞ Travel to Laos and drop to my knees at Ankgor Wat; go to Cambodia and weep over the bones

☞ Drink bourbon with Anthony Bourdain

☞ Drop internet shopping as a hobby and distraction

☞ Live long enough for laser hair removal to work on blondes

☞ Have sex every single day for a year straight

☞ Get my license to drive 18-wheelers and take a payload somewhere

☞ Live in Marfa and have a bookshop and herbal-remedies store

☞ Finally get around to planning the annual family vacations with my college girlfriends and their families, so I can know their children and they, mine

☞ Escape New York City and never look back

☞ Live somewhere I can canoe every single day

☞ End therapy and accept my frailties (which is the denial of my frailties)

☞ Learn to play the piano

☞ Paint

☞ Have an eyeglass wardrobe

☞ Indulge in buying art with no regrets

☞ Go to Virginia with my brothers and retrace my mother’s coal-holler history, and unearth the past she worked so hard to distance herself from

☞ Wear all my fancy shoes again in my daily life, instead of having a fashion museum in my closet

☞ Grow my own vegetables, salad greens especially

☞ Join a choir again

☞ Invest in a winery

☞ Go on a silent retreat once a year to learn to live without the accompaniment of my own endless internal chatter

☞ Live in a real house and wallpaper and paint the rooms myself

☞ Collect china

☞ Plant a huge garden that commemorates everything my late parents taught me about gardening, using all the same plants and trees from my childhood

☞ Buy a rose-gold heirloom watch, even if it’s not really an heirloom and is a pointless extravagance

☞Figure out how to make the ultra-rich believe it’s their responsibility to support the children and the infrastructure of America

☞ Teach people not to fear fear

☞ Really come to know that it is always enough, whatever it is.