Speaking of 50...

Me, my three sisters, and my parents.

Speaking of 50, on Sunday evening we celebrated my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary by inviting a ton of their friends and family to meet up with us and honor them. We met in a beautiful coffee shop in Strasburg and covered tables with food and my sister brought helium tanks and balloons that blew up into the number 50.

This area where I grew up feels like such a unique place—nearly every single friend who came to help us celebrate has been a friend to my parents since they were kids. 60-year friendships filled the room, and because they had all grown up together, they were happy not only to see my parents but also to see each other. These were almost all close friends who have lived a lot of life in the last decade—nearly all of their parents are gone now, their kids are grown and living their own lives, they’ve had health challenges, and some have lost their spouses. Some have lost siblings, or children. Some have started businesses in their later years, while others have sold businesses, or chosen to slow down.

Two of my dad’s very best friends in the world have had strokes in the last few years, their lives changed forever. These were men who I used to watch play softball when I was a little kid, men who sprinted through the outfield or ran out a ground ball. When I went up and hugged them, they got tears in their eyes. So did I.

I thought of the 50 years my parents have been married—so much happens in 50 years. So much fun and joy and pain and loss. Those friends have played a huge part in their lives, and in my life, too. They’ve known me since I was a newborn. They came to my 16th birthday party, my grad parties, my wedding.

We all stood around and told stories and laughed and I watched my parents as they stood there, the two of them together, greeting their friends and hugging and sometimes crying. What better measure of a life than reaching that point and being surrounded by so many friends, so many people who choose to love you, to keep loving you, to walk with you right up to the end?

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Speaking of 50, I passed 50,000 words in the novel I’m writing and felt both full and empty. Full because I love the story and the characters and don’t really know where it’s going. A bit empty because I recently bought back the rights to two of my older books and I wonder if anyone will ever read this one, if anyone will ever care for this world and this narrator and this question the way that I do.

Then I remembered this quote from Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act:

“All art is a work in progress. It’s helpful to see the piece we’re working on as an experiment. One in which we can’t predict the outcome. Whatever the result, we will receive useful information that will benefit the next experiment. If you start from the position that there is no right or wrong, no good or bad, and creativity is just free play with no rules, it’s easier to submerge yourself joyfully in the process of making things. We’re not playing to win, we’re playing to play. And ultimately, playing is fun. Perfectionism gets in the way of fun. A more skillful goal might be to find comfort in the process. To make and put out successive works with ease.”

I’m not playing to win. I’m playing to play, to find comfort in the process.

I think of last night, how after the kids were in bed I sat with my laptop and entered this other world and wrote a scene I really loved. I think of how eager I already am to revise, to bring new things to the story that I’ve been ruminating on while I write the first draft.

There is no failure in creativity that’s done for the sake of being creative, done with the heart of a child going on an adventure simply to see what lies at the end.

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Speaking of 50, in a year and a half I’ll turn 50, and I feel like only recently have I started to have some kind of grasp of what an entire life might feel like. The stark unknowing of precisely what comes next, after this life ends, is enough to make me catch my breath. Every so often I’ll catch a glimpse, a blurred image in the corner of my eye, of that one that waits for all of us: death. I’ll realize with startling clarity that someday, not too long in the future, I’ll be gone. This is not a realization you can live every moment contemplating, but for fractions of time, I understand it, I think.

I see my children growing up, some now in college, some still in elementary school, and I remember being that age not so long ago. Their lives, too, will come and go like a vapor, and they will leave something of themselves on this earth, something that will remain but also, for the most part, eventually be unrecognized.

There’s such an incredible unknowing there . . . but also such incredible hope. And all of it brings me back to this moment, this day, this life. The sun shining in the office window. The dog waiting by the front door to go for a walk. Maile walking by, pausing long enough to put her hand on my shoulder.

What a life.

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Check out the latest episode of our podcast, So, We Bought a Book Shop. Maile and I are talking about what we learned in our first year as book shop owners, plus we’re discussing a book we both read with a fascinating first-person perspective.

Be sure to look over the events we have coming up! Some great folks will be here at Nooks.