Someday is Today

I’ve mentioned Suleika Jaouad several times previously and can’t recommend her Substack (Suleika Jaouad | Substack) or her books highly enough. Each week I’m inspired anew by both her fortitude and her creativity. Something she shared a few weeks ago has not left me; she made a list titled “Things I Keep Wanting and Not Doing”. Not things she’d once wanted and no longer did, but things she thought would be nice, but she hadn’t yet done. She shared that “proximity is a kind of camouflage, obscuring what’s right at hand. Sometimes the things we can do anytime become the things we never do at all.”

The story of my life. This is why I never got to Portugal despite living right next door in Spain for almost three years. Why it took me nine years to visit an incredible, almost-200-acre Japanese garden and museum in my own town and eleven to visit a world class art museum two towns over. Why so many of my I’d like to’s are routinely relegated to someday.

So, I decided to start my own list. With both big things that I realize I may not realistically get to do (ride the Orient Express, for example, but hey, you never know), and all of the minor things that I’ve thought, more than a few times, that I’d like to do. Nearby places I’d like to check out, hobbies I’d like to explore, habits I’d like to adopt, changes I’d like to make to my environment. And I’m posting it prominently, and consulting it daily, as a reminder that someday is today.

The first item I’ve crossed off the list, which I’ll share more about next week, has been rewarding beyond all imagining. The plan is to keep crossing things off while listening to new “I’d like to’s” and adding them to the list. Then seizing the day.

Is there something you keep wanting and not doing?

Ways I Found Joy This Week

Checking out a reflexology spa with a friend

Sharing meandering Sunday phone calls with two dear friends, discussing books and ideas and the substance of our lives

Embarking on a spontaneous flower-sending spree

Attending a weekday matinee with the CWP

Pulling the trigger on reservations for an upcoming trip

Things I Learned This Week

That mosquitoes kill over 700,000 people each year

That Monaco has the world's oldest population (more than 36% of residents are 65 or older)

Quotes That Resonated This Week

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land.

Henry David Thoreau

We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand – and melting like a snowflake.

Francis Bacon

What I Watched This Week

Rooster (Hulu). The final episodes provided a mix of resolutions and cliff hangers that leave the door open for a second season.

The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare (Netflix). Well done, but I’d watched hoping to learn about motive and there was really no new information.

Voicemails for Isabelle (Netflix). A sweet, if predictable, romantic comedy/drama. Fun cameo by Nick Offerman.

A Private Life (Netflix). French with subtitles. Jodi Foster plays a psychotherapist who fears that her patient’s suicide was actually murder and decides to investigate herself. Atmospheric and mysterious.

I Want Your Sex (theater). A hilarious noir sex comedy that skewers both Gen Z prudishness and the avant-garde art world. Cooper Hoffman’s performance was amazing—I have no doubt that I’m going to love his work just as much as I loved his dad’s.

What I Read This Week

London Falling, by Patrick Radden Keefe. An incredibly dense, meticulously reported story about a young man who led a double life and became ensnared in a dangerous underworld. The economic and social transformation of London with the influx of Russian oligarchs, the mayhem that ensued, the pathology of a boy who wanted more, and the quest to prove that he was murdered all combined to make this a book that I couldn’t put down.

Life: A Love Story, by Elizabeth Berg. I’ve been reading and loving this author’s works for over thirty years. Her observation of detail and her character development are unparalleled. This novel follows Flo’s last weeks at 92, as she lives with gusto in between writing a final letter to a younger friend.

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Thanks for reading!