At the exact moment this blog is published, 4:26 pm on March 14th, I will turn 50. As you read this, if you come across it on that day, I will be on the sand in Assateague, listening to the waves and looking at wild horses. Arguably my happiest place, and the only place I would like to be on all of my momentous occasions (anywhere near the ocean).

As I write this, though, 11 days earlier, I have sprung up from my yoga mat to make notes. I was following yoga with Adriene’s hip and heart practice in an effort to become a more open person with better balance on a horse, and once the video ended and I lie there breathing quietly, the YouTube automatically forwarded to Ethan Hawke’s most recent TEDTalk.

I thought, well, I’ll just take a nice extended savasana and listen, but only a few minutes in I found myself reaching for my phone to take notes. I have been reflecting in the past several months about creativity, my own in specific, and curiously watching the well dry. I have felt disinclined to write poetry and have not completed a painting (or even put together a canvas) since mid-2020.

And as 50 approaches, I have begun to consider the next 50 years (my grandmother is 102, so that’s not outside the realm of possibility). Among other quotes, this one stands out for me:

“The time of our life is so short, and are we spending it doing something that’s important to us? Most of us not.”

Just this morning KWeeks and I were talking about doing what we love – getting up every day and going to work that is not just a way to fill the endless daytime hours before binge-watching TV and falling asleep on the couch but is instead a buoyant expression of what we love.

Because as Ethan Hawke says above, “If you get close to what you love, who you are is revealed to you.”

I am lucky enough in my life to have the time and space to move ever closer to what I love – to unravel the tangled past and dive into things that are troubling, joyful, and deep. But there is no formula or self-help book here – no treatise of any value that gives legitimate steps to finding out what you love and thus meeting yourself. Ethan Hawke continues, “There is no path until you walk it.”

I returned to the mat, listening to the last parts of his talk and reflecting on my own life and considering the conversation with KWeeks. I want the next 50 years of my life to be spent getting closer to what I love, peeling away the layers of my experience to become more fully revealed to myself. It is only this, as Ethan Hawke says, that allows us to connect with the world and the people around us more fully, this act of walking our own particular path, that we make, that is what marks our place in the infinite, swirling universe. I know as spring comes the groundwater of my creativity will begin to dampen the earth again. I will be filled up, as the well itself.

I imagine as I write this the feeling of sand between my toes, gritty but melting away beneath me as the sea swirls around my ankles. The salt wind brushing the hair from my face as seagulls whirl and cry above. The hand of KWeeks in mine, in that moment and for the next 50 years.

Against all odds and at the impossible age of 50, I am hopeful, on the path and laying flagstones ahead as I walk it.