five

Ocean is five years old today. Five years – that’s not exactly a generation, but it is a big chunk of life. For example, five years ago, I thought and wrote like a person just entering her fifties. Now I think and write like a person who thinks fifty is on the childish side of things.

People talk a lot about finding your writing voice. Yawn... But I’ll admit this much: when you write publicly, everyday, for five years, you get into a mindset – for me, an Ocean mindset – and it is there every time you think about your next post and the next. The mood varies, but the mindset stays.


It’s never easy to post daily. When traveling, stories throw themselves at me, but time pressures and Internet issues are huge. On a work day, I often do not sit down to post until after dinner. I fight tiredness. If I hadn’t thought of a story yet, or taken an okay photo, I feel defeated.

It’s good to challenge yourself. To try to improve, do better stuff, to think of ways to tell a story. But every story lives not only because of the teller, but because there is a person who listens.

Thank you for being there, for listening.


A P.S. on this day – daughters and I went downtown…





…to see if the world was really on sale, 75% off. It was. I survived, sure, I did, but I think the best moment was at the end, as the evening seeped in and we settled for a while at a Rush Street bar. I watched and half listened as the two of them laughed and bantered about years past and the weeks ahead. And the city lights outside sparkled and the air inside was warm and life felt pretty damn good.