I love the writer Nora Ephron, even though I suspect she’s a bit of a snit. I love her because she plucks ideas straight from my brain, puts them on paper and makes big bucks doing it. If I can’t make the money, she might as well.
You might know the 69-year-old Ephron as the screen writer of When Harry Met Sally and director of Sleepless in Seattle and Julie & Julia. Or perhaps you read her first book, I Feel Bad About My Neck. She has a new book out called I Remember Nothing.
Here is something I could have written because my memory is wretched; but alas, she wrote it first.
“I have been forgetting things for years—at least since I was in my 30s. I know this because I wrote something about it at the time; I have proof. Of course I can’t remember exactly where I wrote about it or when, but I could probably hunt it up if I had to.” (Read this quote and the complete interview on NPR, which I heard just this morning.)
Ephron is nothing if not politically incorrect. And yet, I still love her work. Peppered within her slams against aging are nuggets of pure gold—wisdom that comes only with being a bit older and more experienced.
One piece of advice she offers in her new book is: Do it (whatever it is) now.
“You do get to a certain point in life where you have to realistically, I think, understand that the days are getting shorter, and you can’t put things off thinking you’ll get to them someday,” she says in the NPR interview, adding, “If you really want to do them, you better do them. There are simply too many people getting sick, and sooner or later you will. So I’m very much a believer in knowing what it is that you love doing so you can do a great deal of it.”
What do you love doing?
What are you putting off as you wait for . . . a child to get into first grade . . . your kids to graduate and leave home . . . a better job . . . retirement?
Get out there and make some memories.
Even if you forget them later.