This month, I subscribed to a challenge. Write, it says. And to aid in this endeavor, I get daily writing prompts from other writers who are inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Over the weekend, the prompts threw me a bit. It started with Friday’s, which required the writer (me) to ask myself what I want most, what is keeping me back, to put it on a sticky note and think about it for two days, then write.

Well, this does not work for a same-day blog entry, and yesterday’s (writing about some place I dream of going before I die) was also a bit… overwhelming. So I did not write. It normally would not stop me–the first day I wrote nothing to do with the prompt given–but this time I wanted to think.

And I have. Today’s prompt asks me to think of what I would do that makes me live–as in, what would I do if the end were imminent?

So, actually, all of these things tie in together nicely. First off, no doubt in my mind, I want to go back to Paris. Badly. Now! I have been there, and there are many, many other things I intend to see before I die, but I miss myself speaking French, being there, living and breathing French. It was the energy of the city, the strange pretentions, yes, but also that feeling that those things–art!?–do matter, that life is full of opportunities that can be made a bit more beautiful everyday.

And it is this that makes me live, as well: writing. I love this, love, to live and all the more to think of how I will express it to someone else. I think of how I dream, and see, and garden, and make love, and how I can not only capture these moments, but make them something grander… perhaps not more grand, but sufficiently grand. Because life is.

So strange.. I spend time cleaning, and I need to. I do not do it as much as I should, but then, shoulds are such a problem. Shoulds get in the way of life, and of the purpose of this exercise. What makes me live? Why, writing! And talking to new people, hearing stories, laughing and eating great food. I love to feel the wind in my hair while I drive too fast on Storrow Drive, across the Champlain Bridge into Montreal, anywhere else, as I talk up a stranger on a train bound for Barcelona, then spend a week with the family. I love, this, love people, love the possibilities in a forgotten alley, in a garden courtyard, in something hidden away and intensely pleasurable…

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