How Many Lives Can You Live?

"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one."
- Henry David Thoreau
__________________________________________________
I am not a woman with a plan; I am a woman with 10 plans... 

I wrote an essay this week that started just like that, and then I paid someone I've never met $200 to read it. If they like it, maybe I'll pay them a lot more money to teach me something about the world and myself. Then again, maybe I won't. Such is life and the graduate school admissions process.

Choices. Choices. Choices.

What do you want to be when you grow up? asks the teacher, preacher, mailman, best friend you met on a neighbor's trampoline...

"A princess, ballerina, astronaut..."

What do I want to be when I grow up? I ask...

Myself. 

Poetically.

Unapologetically.  

Sometimes full of adverbs. 

Sometimes full of crap.

I send myself e-mails all the time, full of prayers, ideas, stories, lists, plans, articles, poetry...and the occasional TEDTalk that I want to listen to someday. I sent myself an e-mail with a link to Sarah Kay's TEDTalk--How Many Lives Can You Live--back on December 6. I finally got back to it last night. Sometimes good ideas have to wait...and the timing doesn't matter. Other times, the waiting makes everything better.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kay_how_many_lives_can_you_live.html

When and how? You choose. So will I.