Promise that you'll have a great life, no matter what happens. 

[old Jewish woman]

I've always made lists. It soothed me even as a small child.

I am a planner, but not a particularly committed one. I wrote lists for things to do and then lost interest, made a fresh list, each time convinced that this was it, I'd tapped into my purpose in the universe.

I was going to be a priest. A writer. An artist. Join the Peace Corps. No, be a small business owner. No, become a midwife. In between I would lighten my hair, work out three times a week without fail, and I was absolutely going to finish the box of tooth-whitening strips this time, so help me God.

They weren't just lists, they were my own road maps to meaning, to safety. To a life that was full of magic, as opposed to a life where I never found the core, never became the person I was meant to be.

I don't care about that any more. I know now that one of the biggest mistakes I have ever made has been counting on a career for fulfillment or meaning, and I don't think the person I was meant to be exists. There is no version of myself other than the one I am now: hair darkening with the winter. The first faint crow's feet spanning from my eyes. Sad on some days and happy on others. Marginally intolerant of dairy.

Things I thought I was supposed to have in order to live a good life have left or changed, or were never what I thought they were, and life goes on. Things I was convinced I would never want have saved my life.

 These days, rather than opening a notebook and thinking of new and different things to want, I walk through the plastic curtain substituting for the back wall of our house and sit on the edge of the addition we're building.

I sit with my feet dangling out where the French doors will eventually go, and watch the trees on the hillside behind our house. They change every single day. They change over the course of the day too, so as fall accelerates I make my tea in the morning and headed out to watch the show, then as soon as I get home from work I walk back to see them again, the morning light versus the sift light, the yellows and greens, the lone red tree right in the middle.

I walk out at night while I brush my teeth, and shout foamy-mouthed to my husband updates on precisely where the moon is. I can't see it right now! Oh wait, there it is! By the tree over the fence!

It's usually in the same place, sweetie, he calls back wearily.

Is it? I'm not sure, and I'm too lazy to look up basic moon facts, but I'm not too lazy to go find it. Oh, now it's behind a cloud. A big one! You need to come see this!

My dog always joins me. Her nails click against the subfloor and she flops next to me in the long-suffering way of dogs. She doesn't care about seeing the moon either. But I do. I don't care about much these days, but the moon always makes the cut.

It's formidable, the things you can control in your life. My days are what they are because I chose for them to be like this, for the most part. I have also been lucky, and been loved, and this has helped more than I can know.

And still. There are so many other things that I have no say over, and they cast a longer shadow the older I get. The one I've always overlooked the most is the sheer slippery speed of time. So many of my days have skated by without making so much as a blip.

I couldn't tell you what I was doing a season ago, a month ago. But yesterday, last week, the week before, I was watching the trees.

Sometimes I walk into the yard and stand in different places, looking straight up, to see which angle makes the stars look the brightest. Yesterday night my dog followed me, quizzically, and looked up at the sky when I did, no doubt convinced there had to be a squirrel or something up there. She held her gaze for a few seconds longer than I did, her ears perked, watching the constellations in the sky, delighting me.

My dog isn't my only constant companion, though. As I stand there, I hear the voice in my head, the one who's always been there. Is this it?

My ambition, my imagination, my obsession with what's next is a part of me, as integral as my memory or my sense of humor. I hear her whispering to me when I lash out at her, as done as a dog whipped one time too many. She says, I'm the one who got us here. It was me. And she's right. She's the author of my lists, the manager of my life. Without her I would only have a vague idea of what I should have tried. I honor her for that.

But I'm getting to a point in my life where I've begun to glimpse the other side of this truth, that even when you get everything you want, you are still here. You are the same person who startles from a midday nap just as the room begins to darken around you. You are the same person who laughs at a story you didn't quite catch and in the moment afterwards feels profoundly alone, for no apparent reason.

Decades have passed, but I don't feel tremendously different from the quiet girl who shoved one spent piece of paper away, seized a fresh one and began writing again. Despite my best efforts, I was never able to rescue myself from just being her- heavy dishwater-blonde hair flopping out of a ponytail, daydreaming, too earnest, intent on taking solo walks. I have always talked too much and too intensely. No one is ever going to offer you drugs, a childhood friend told me once, and she was right.

There's nowhere else I can think of to go right now. There just isn't anything that I want. It's freeing.

I once heard a wildlife tour guide talk about how to see a fox in winter, or a whale cresting over the water. Put yourself in a reasonable place, she said, and then shut up.

That's a short list. I can do that. I'm not looking for happiness. Contentment is closer, but not exactly right either. When he was your age his life was already more than half over.

I don't know how to describe what I'm looking for. I just don't want to miss the trees, and they will only ever look this precise way one time, this one autumn, this one year.

-

Today, it's the beginning of the new year. The trees are more bare every day. When I drive past the fields in the morning, the fog lifts and I can smell winter, cold but fresh. When I drive to my home visits early in the afternoon, the sky is already beginning to darken.

What were any of my lists able to give me, in the end?

I'm uncertain. That is the word that best describes me, after everything. Isn't this what the lists were supposed to prevent? That was my biggest fear, to not know, one way or the other. Even more so than doing the wrong thing. Doing the wrong thing always meant shame, but not knowing what to do at all is the deeper failure.

The thing about a map is that you begin to mistake it for the world. They are not the same thing. The map is just an idea you had. The world is wonderful and awful and owes you nothing. Nothing at all. And yet, here I am.

I'm home again. The sky is as black as it can be. I hug my husband, bend an arm around Norah as she winds around my leg. I can't see but I walk to the backyard anyway and watch the shapes in the dark.

Everything changes, always. I would never have been able to draw a map, to anywhere. I see too little and understand less. I've always been wrong- about my abilities, about my relationships, about my place in the world.

The thing that my list-making taught me was how to want, or maybe just how to try. The thing that I have to learn now is something else, and I don't yet know what it is. Maybe it's how to stop trying. How to accept whatever comes next, and how to like it, or at the very least how to listen to it.

I hear the ticking of Norah's nails and in the next moment she lays beside me, sighs, closes her eyes. The stars are shrouded by clouds, unfathomably far away. Minutes pass and she begins to twitch against my leg, dreaming dog dreams.

I can't see anything, not the trees, not even my own frozen breath, but that's okay. I don't need to know what's next anymore. I watch the night until the tea kettle starts to sing.