There’s nothing like a stroke to make you take stock, to raise elemental questions that can get pushed aside during the busy-ness of going to the grocery, filling the gas tank, paying bills: “Who am I? Why am I here? Why was I always so worried about wrinkles?” Like most people, I have a deep spiritual appetite for something more, for a life behind the ordinary surface of reality. Church has never filled that, and I suspect that for me the search itself is more important than settling for someone else’s answers. Before my stroke, though, I’d lapsed into sleepwalking instead of searching. My prescription for waking up includes creating another University of One, something I did early on in life. When I was a 17-year-old child bride, I was certain that I’d missed my chance for college forever, so I started exploring the shelves and card catalogs (how I miss you!) at all the libraries where my husband was stationed in the Navy. I was so hungry for something I couldn't even name. One subject would send me down a rabbit hole to seemingly unrelated books until the world opened to me in a way it never had in high school. I’d fill the stroller with books and baby and push it home to our rental at the time to escape the dailyness of diapers and daytime soaps into the hubris of Louis IV’s court or the hubbub of Pride and Prejudice. I miss that old excitement of discovery, that headlong, indiscriminate rush into learning, so I’m going to try and recapture that way of looking at the world with a beginner mind again. My random syllabus for spring semester: a reread of May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude for an example of the creative life; for his essay on existential longing that I've seen recommended twice now, The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis; for inspiration to keep going, Specimen Days by Walt Whitman, who also had a stroke but continued to write and reach for the light (Doctors, why not make books and biographies like this part of your Rx along with the pharmacology?); The Wild Places, for lessons in nature by the amazing polymath Robert Macfarlane; for taking a deep soul dive, Raymond Carver’s poetry; and for the love of art, The Book of Change by “visual alchemist” Stephen Ellcock. If you created a University of One right now, what would be on your reading list and why? Inspire me!

I’ve been urging all my friends to read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin and I was thrilled when my college granddaughter started it. I was initially reluctant to pick it up because I thought a novel about video games would hold zero interest, but it’s about so much more: creativity, family, friendship, art, love, and loss. I could barely put it down to go to bed, and the video game part was surprisingly riveting. The game being developed in the novel is inspired by one of my favorite pieces of art-- Hokusai’s famous woodblock print “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa.” Just after I finished the book, I read about an upcoming show at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that explores Hokusai’s influence on art through time. Lucky for me, one of my daughters just moved nearby. I can’t wait!

I finally resubscribed to premium Spotify when I realized I’d stopped listening to music except in the car--maybe because my tiny Jambox died, and I hate listening through my phone. But when I decided I had to have a soundtrack in my life again, I bought a JBL Charge 3 that friends and family recommended. I love the way it looks, but my only regret is that I defaulted to the boring black version when I should have bought red or aqua. I don’t just need more music in my life—I need more daring.

One of my daughters gave me a year’s subscription to Storyworth for Christmas because they want to know more about my childhood and their ancestors. My daughters take turns choosing a weekly prompt that I write about and then upload to a shared site. I love being able to add photos with the option to print them all out into a book at the end of the year. One of the prompts asked me to describe my first boss. Here’s what I wrote about my first day on that job and a photo of then-me as a redhead: