I Thought It Was Too Late to Want a Different Life. Here's What Changed My Mind.

There was a box in the corner of my bedroom here for just over a year, still sealed with the same packing tape from the move, SOMEDAY written across the top in my own handwriting. I hadn't labeled it that when I packed it in Tuscany. I'd labeled it that years earlier, packing a different apartment for a different reason, and I'd just kept carrying it forward, sealed, from one life into the next, without once looking inside.

I finally opened it on a wet October afternoon because I needed packing tape for something else and it was the only roll in the house. Inside was mostly what you'd expect: a chipped mug, some photographs, a cardigan I don't remember owning. And at the bottom, a spiral notebook I recognized the second I saw the cover, because I'd bought it at a drugstore near my old office and never told anyone what was in it.

I opened it standing there on the bedroom floor. The handwriting was mine at thirty-four, a little rounder than it is now, under a heading that just said Someday. A list. Learn Italian. Live somewhere I could grow something. Learn to sit still without a task attached to it. Write down what actually matters, not just what's urgent. Eleven lines, and I had absolutely no memory of writing a single one of them.

The math I did on the bedroom floor

My first feeling wasn't warmth. It was something closer to a punch to the stomach. I sat down right there on the floor and did the arithmetic without meaning to. Thirty-four to fifty-two is eighteen years. Eighteen years between the woman who wrote that list and the one sitting on the floor reading it, and in between there was a marriage that used up most of my attention, a divorce, an ocean crossed, and not one single line of that notebook touched in all that time.

I've caught myself in this exact feeling more than once since the divorce, usually around three in the morning. It's the sense that the interesting part is already finished, that whatever you were supposed to become, you'd have become it by now, and what's left is mostly maintenance. Not a crisis exactly. Just a quiet closing of a door you didn't hear shut.

What Elena did at seventy-one

My neighbour Elena is seventy-three now. Two years ago, not long after she lost her husband Renzo, she decided to learn to drive. She'd never had a license in her life. He'd driven her everywhere for forty-six years, to the market, to her sister's, to the coast on their anniversary, and after he died she found herself standing at the bus stop most mornings, waiting for a ride that used to just be there.

Her nephew Marco taught her three-point turns in the empty church parking lot on Sunday mornings while I watched from my kitchen window with a cup of tea, half expecting her to give up after the first stall. She failed the test once. Passed on the third try, at seventy-two, and now drives herself to the coast alone some Sundays, just to sit and look at the water for an hour before she comes home.

What stayed with me was different: grieving, at seventy-one, she never once said to me that it was too late to start. She wanted to see the water without asking someone to take her, so she found a way to see it. The whole decision seemed to skip a step most of us can't skip, the one where we calculate how many years we have left to justify starting something new.

What I've been reading about the word "someday"

I've been slowly working through Sonja Lyubomirsky's research on happiness again, and one thing keeps standing out to me. None of it measures how many decades you have left before a small, chosen habit starts to count. The return seems to show up close to the week you actually begin, not thirty years down the line as some sort of interest earned on an early start.

I think the belief that it's too late is quietly built on a different assumption, one I'd never said out loud until I found that notebook: that wanting something different only counts if there's enough runway left to fully arrive at it. Under that belief, starting at fifty-two feels almost embarrassing, like showing up to a party as everyone else is leaving. But nothing in what I've read supports that math. A small return seems to matter on the day you make it. Not on some earlier day you missed.

What I did with the list

I didn't try to do all eleven lines at once. That felt like exactly the kind of all-or-nothing thinking that had kept the notebook sealed in a box for eighteen years in the first place. I picked one: learn to sit still without a task attached to it. Not the most urgent-sounding item, which was precisely why I'd never gotten to it.

Now on Tuesday evenings I sit in a small room above the library in the next town, in a watercolor class with six Italian women, most of them over sixty, and I am genuinely bad at it. My horizons tilt. My olive trees look like broccoli. Nobody there seems to mind, least of all me. For an hour I'm not managing anything or catching up on anything. I'm just sitting still, badly painting a jar of lemons, and something about it feels like the thirty-four-year-old who wrote that list finally getting an answer back.

If today is someday

If you'd like one small way to test this for yourself, without deciding to overhaul anything, I put together a free ten-minute practice called One Small Thing. No email required, right there on the page.

This is also close to why I made 21 Days of Caring for Your Body After 40 exactly twenty-one days long and not a minute longer. You don't have to redo your whole someday list, or become a different woman by the end of it. Twenty-one small returns, one at a time, the same size as sitting in a room for an hour with a paintbrush you're not very good at using yet.

The box is still in my bedroom, open now, notebook on top where I can see it. I haven't touched most of the list. But I stopped believing the door was shut. It was only ever closed. Turns out you can still open a door from this side, even eighteen years later.