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I tell my friend Sharon something the other day, and it startles her so completely, it practically startles me right back. I tell her that this, right now, at eighty-five, is the happiest I have ever been in my life. She looks at me the way you look at someone who has just said something slightly impossible. And honestly, I understand her surprise. By every ordinary measure, this is supposed to be the season of slowing down, of loss, of numbness creeping into the legs and grief settling quietly into the corners of a house grown emptier. I have buried two husbands. I have felt my own body speak to me in a language of warnings. Not so long ago, I sat in meditation at five in the morning and felt myself standing at the threshold of the great mystery, curious and unafraid, ready to surrender into whatever came next. That readiness is still true. I haven't outgrown it, and I don't want to. But I have discovered something sitting right beside it, something I never expected to find sharing a room with my own mortality: pure, unguarded, riotous joy. For the first time in my life, I am entirely, gloriously myself. Not the woman who spent decades performing for the room. Reaching for admiration, hoping the work would land well, hoping to matter in ways she could measure and hold up as proof. That striving woman worked so hard. She built an extraordinary life, and I adore her for it, but she was exhausted in a way I never fully clocked until the exhaustion simply lifted, quietly, without asking my permission. The woman writing to you now has almost no attachment to whether these words are met with applause or silence. Inspiration moves through me daily like weather, and I have finally learned to fling the window open and let it pour in. I recently picked up Rick Rubin's The Creative Act: A Way of Being, and it has become something like scripture for this season, a permission slip I didn't know I still needed at eighty-five. Rubin writes about creativity not as striving but as listening, beauty moving through us rather than manufactured by us. I recognized myself on every page, and I recognized, too, that I'm only now, this late and this deliciously, becoming fluent in that kind of listening. I get ambushed by creativity almost daily. Not gently. Ambushed the way you are when a door swings open onto a room you didn't know your own house contained. Ideas arrive while I'm pouring tea. A sentence won't let me sleep until it's written down. My perceptions have sharpened so much that ordinary moments, a shaft of morning light, a memory of Grammy's sewing box, the particular blue of Luna's eyes, show up already wearing sentences, already begging to be poured out onto the page. Here is what I want you to know, whoever you are, wherever you find yourself right now in your own timeline of loss and beginning: readiness for the great mystery and ecstasy for this present, unrepeatable life are not opposites. They come from the very same open hand. Both ask you to stop performing your life and start actually living it. Both ask you to loosen your grip, on outcomes, on approval, on the fear of ending, and discover that hands, once open, are finally free to create, and free to catch whatever joy comes flying at them next. None of us knows how much time we have left, that has always been true, I've simply gotten more honest about it. But I know this: right now, I am more myself than I have ever been. More curious. More eloquent. More wide awake to beauty. If this is what it looks like to walk toward the threshold with your eyes wide open, then I am not walking toward an ending at all. I am walking, delighted and unstoppable, inside the woman I always wanted to be. If you are ready to meet her too, the human you always wanted to be, I would be honored to walk a little of that road with you.
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