When Sunday night rolls around, and I haven’t noticed that tiny little pop around something that has happened in the week (fodder for this blog), I turn to my journals. I don’t keep them on any kind of regular basis. But when I do, I write one or two lines (more if so inclined) on what inspired me that particular day, what surprised me that day, what touched me that day. Those prompts are from Rachel Remen’s My Grandfather’s Blessings. Remen is a M.D. who specializes in the treatment of those who have chronic or fatal diseases, not only patients, but the doctors who treat them. Those three questions make me think about my day in a new way (they were Remen’s advice to an extremely successful and extremely burned out physician–a kind of physician, heal thyself), and when I go back and read what I’ve written, I find I have often captured the day’s tiny nuggets of gold that I cover over with fret and worry and unexamined ambition otherwise.
All of which is to say that I don’t know what to write about tonight, so I flipped open a journal and came across the page I wrote after seeing The Bucket List with my mother as my movie companion. I loved the idea of the movie, writing down the things you would do before you die and doing as many of them as possible. What a way to live. So I’ll share some of my list with you.
- learn French
- live for several months in Paris
- learn to embroider
- make a quilt for each of my grandchildren
- write a young adult novel
- learn to watercolor
I’ve already jumped out of an airplane, as the movie heroes did, and already kiss beautiful men (my son, son-in-law, husband, and grandson) on a regular basis. Kiss a beautiful woman was on the movie heroes’ list, and that moment in the film is priceless. Anyway, looking at this list reminds me that answering those three questions in my journal is also priceless. Already, the texture of my day has changed by my simply writing this….
I am seeped in history to the bone. Today I took myself on a walking tour of Maastricht using an old guide book someone had 
recommended. I was just swept away by narrow alleys and bits of old wall and relics in churches. Historian Dirk Jansen has shared all his theories and research about d’Artagnan. He’s taken me to city archives to look at old maps. We took a train to Paris and went to the war museum and looked at a special exhibit on the musketeers and talked with a French historian and curator 
he knows. Yesterday, I thought to have a quiet day and ended up seeing the American WWII soldiers’ cemetery maintained by the Dutch, then heard Bach’s Matthew’s Passion, then went to Dirk’s friend’s house and wonderful garden outside of town and ate her homemade soup.
Karleen Koen — writing life 
