What is the one emotion that you would like to feel for the rest of your life?

In many ways I was an independent woman. For years I’d made my own choices, paid my own bills, shoveled my own snow.

I guess the idea of stepping out from behind the “camouflage of routine,” as someone once described it, still intimated me.

How to stop rushing from place to place, always looking ahead to the next thing while the moment in front of me slipped away unnoticed.

I guess I’m too selfish to travel well with other people,” I told Anne later.

Maybe it was I who needed to learn how to be quiet instead of cluttering the moment with too many words.

I made dangerous choices in those years, thinking myself bold and adventurous. Later I would come to understand that I hadn’t been daring at all, just driven by confusion and hormones. The person capable of true daring, I knew now, possessed two admirable qualities: curiosity and courage.

Occasionally, when trapped by memories, I would mistake change for loss, and grieve...

The writer ended with a line from Eudora Welty: “All serious daring starts from within.

Most of the time I liked being in charge of my life, thrived on it, in fact. But occasionally, when I was tired or unhappy. I’d find myself thinking how nice it would be to let someone else run the show, at least for a while.