Life Is More Than Travel

This is essentially a memorandum to myself. Given that I’m losing a major body part or incurring a significant surgery every year,1 I’ve been forced to reflect.

Moving to Miami has brought significant, unexpected changes.2 As I lay there for two hours waiting on the team to take me back for a quick thirty-minute biopsy, I had a lot of time to reflect, with the primary thought being:

I’m running out of time.

An annual biopsy makes you take stock of where you’ve been, the things you wish you could do over, and the things you've yet to do. I think for most people, January is a time for reflection: what exercise should be done to meet a deadline, where the next trip should be and when, and how many calories must be cut to meet some weight requirement. These things, honestly, are superfluous.

I have only two things I want going forward. Time with my children and time with my spouse. I do not care where, how, or when. Just more.

So what has to change?

• No more scheduling travel within an inch of my life. I need flexibility so I can spend as much time as possible with my family.
• Writing will take a back seat. I have been trying to write full-time, building a backlist of novels, but eight hours a day takes away time from too many other things. I’ll write what I can and move on. I’m lucky that this is my fourth career, not my first.
• The stress of the business of writing needs to take a hike. Being an author is just as stressful as being an attorney. Is it because I’m just wired this way? Probably. I cannot change the bots, the scams, the way people treat each other on social media. I can change how I view them and how I interact—or not.
• It’s time to pare down the “things.” I’ve seen people talk about culling out their household items, but for us, this needs to become a priority. If we do not need it or use it, it needs to go. I took the first step last week by donating an expensive sequinned evening gown that I had been carrying from city to city, closet to closet. Now someone else can wear the beautiful blue dress and have as much fun wearing it as I did.

So What Do I Want?

There will be more days like this, watching the flamingos and egrets with my husband over a long breakfast capped by a Turkish coffee.

There will be long mornings and afternoons simply watching these two silly, muddy monsters live their best retirement lives.

And there will still be travel, but…life will be lived, not simply passed through on the way to some previously planned destination.

Is it time for you to reflect? Or will you wait, like me, stressed and tired, always pushing toward a goal until your body absolutely grinds everything to a halt?

Please don’t wait. To be cliché, life is simply too short.