After seven decades of doing everything for everyone else, a retired teacher discovers she's never once acted on pure desire—until a moment in a craft store changes everything.
I wake at 5:30 AM because that's what teachers do, even retired ones. I volunteer at the women's shelter because I remember what it felt like to count quarters for milk. I write in my gratitude journal because a grief counselor suggested it after my second husband died, and I never stopped. Each habit, each routine, each supposed interest reveals itself as another adaptation, another response to circumstance.
My daughter insists there must be something. "What about yoga?" she asks. Doctor's orders for my knees. "Your reading?" Lesson planning that became habit. "Travel?" Visiting grandchildren. Everything I've done has been in service to something or someone else.
The watercolor revelation
Virginia Woolf wrote about moments of being, those instances when life suddenly becomes vivid and real. Last week, I had one in the craft store of all places. I was buying a birthday card when I passed the art supplies. The watercolor sets caught me, their little squares of color lined up like promises. Azure blue. Cadmium yellow. Alizarin crimson. Names like poetry.
I stood there for fifteen minutes, just looking. There was no reason to buy one. No grandchild's school project, no therapy directive, no practical application whatsoever. Which is exactly why I bought the most expensive set they had.
My first painting was spectacularly awful. I'd aimed for a sunset but produced something that looked like a crime scene. But sitting there at my kitchen table, brush in hand, making something ugly and unnecessary and entirely mine, I felt something crack open inside me. This flutter in my chest, this lightness. It took me a moment to recognize it: this is what wanting feels like when it's not tangled up with needing.
Learning to want at seventy
In a previous post, I wrote about rebuilding after loss, about finding strength we didn't know we had. But this is different. This isn't about strength or resilience or making the best of things. This is about admitting that I've been so focused on surviving, on providing, on being responsible, that I forgot I was allowed to want things just because.
I've started a list. Small things and big things, practical things and absolutely ridiculous things. I want to read romance novels without hiding them behind literary fiction covers. I want to take Italian cooking classes even though I can already cook perfectly well. I want to buy the impractical red dress I saw downtown, the one that would have nowhere to go. I want to learn to tango. I want to eat dessert first sometimes. I want to quit the church committee I've been on for fifteen years, the one that feels like homework.
But here's the biggest thing I wrote on my list: surfing lessons. The young man at the surf shop looked at me like I'd sprouted a second head. "Are you sure?" he asked, glancing at my gray hair, my weathered hands. "At your age?"
Every sensible part of me wanted to apologize, to back away, to list all the logical reasons a seventy-year-old woman with replaced knees shouldn't learn to surf. My arthritis. The danger. The sheer absurdity of it. Instead, I thought about those journal pages, still empty of want. I thought about my daughter's question and the silence that followed it.
"No," I told him. "I'm not sure about anything. That's exactly why I'm doing it."
Final thoughts
I bought a wetsuit that makes me look like an anxious seal. My first lesson is next week. I'm terrified and exhilarated in equal measure. My daughter worries this revelation means I regret my life, but that's not it at all. I did what I had to do, and I did it well. I raised good children, survived losses that should have broken me, built something solid from necessity and grit.
But at seventy, I'm finally learning what my students always seemed to know instinctively: wanting things isn't selfish. It's human. It's what makes us more than just survivors. Maybe it's not too late to discover what I actually want, even if I'm just now learning to ask the question. For the first time in my life, I'm doing something for no good reason at all. And perhaps that's the best reason I've ever had.
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