I read this and immediately wanted to do it: take a midlife gap year.  I never took a gap year, going straight from high school to college to grad school to working full-time.  I traveled a lot during that time, but it three-week-long trips; not a gap year.

I sometimes ask Josh if there’s any chance that we’ll live in Oxford for a year.  For a half-year?  A few months?

But then reality kicks in because my life is very different from Caroline Harper’s life.  I have a career, and I love my career.  While I can work from almost anywhere since I work remotely, I still need to have my bum planted in a seat or be available for meetings for the bulk of east coast daytime hours.  There is no natural break in that timeline to slide in a gap year.

There is Josh’s career, the twins’ education, loved ones I want to see on a regular basis.  There is the question of money, the house, the pet.  The friendships, the committees, the communities.  There are a thousand reasons why this isn’t practical or responsible.  Why doing it would bring bigger drawbacks than any lessons gained.

And yet I still see myself hanging out in Oxford, reading a book on a grassy space.

I like the idea of a gap year.  I don’t know if I’d like the consequences of a gap year.  But if I could take one, I’d definitely head to Oxford.

What about you?  Where would you go?

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I can’t find the blog post right now, but I once wrote that I wanted my eulogy to be, “she was nice.”  I thought that if I could live a life where people walked away saying, “she was nice,” it would have been a life well-lived.  I’m not aiming for brilliant or world-changing or important.  Just nice.

Which is why I was taken aback by Psychology Today’s piece about the dangers of being nice.  Dangers?  How can there be dangers to niceness?  There are dangers to being a pushover or a martyr.  But niceness, in and of itself, doesn’t have dangers, or as Psychology Today puts it: “There are often psychological dangers lurking below that friendly surface, a downside that can take its toll.”

Gulp.

At the end of the long list of problems and advice, the writer asks: “So, are you ready to give up some of your niceness?”  But the answer is no.  I still strive to have people say, “she was nice.”  We can use more nice in the world.

Do you aim to be nice?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

I am going to blow your mind.  At least, my mind was blown when I read this piece on how to make better big decisions.  Like life-changing decisions.  Like family building decisions.

The idea is that when most people sit down to make a decision, they give themselves two choices and then list the pros and cons of each choice.  They go with the option that has the most pros.  THIS is the problem because sometimes things don’t work out as planned.  And then you’re left feeling like you should have made the other choice.  You think that it comes down to the cons you didn’t consider; that there were two roads and you took the wrong one.

But researchers found that the way to make the best decision is to give yourself more alternatives.  More options.  Not just column A or column B, but columns C, D, and E as well.  That if the decision is down to this or that, you’re not being creative enough or thinking deeply through all the possibilities out there.  If you want to be happier with your decision, come up with more options.

According to the New York Times article,

Over the years, Professor Nutt and other researchers have demonstrated a strong correlation between the number of alternatives deliberated and the ultimate success of the decision itself. In one of his studies, Professor Nutt found that participants who considered only one alternative ultimately judged their decision a failure more than 50 percent of the time, while decisions that involved contemplating at least two alternatives were felt to be successes two-thirds of the time.

So how do you come up with the options?  This is a place where three (or more) brains are better than one.  To get more possibilities, ask other people to help you come up with the options.  This is why everyone needs to start a blog; so you have a place to gather these kinds of thoughts.

And then once you have all the options, you make three scenarios for each option: (1) things working out, (2) things not working out, and then (3) things going sideways.  So it’s not pros and cons: it’s stories.

The article continues with other ideas on decision making, and they’re all brilliant.  But that first point?  That first one blew my mind.

P.S. I put his book (Farsighted by Steven Johnson) on my TBR list.  It sounds so good.

We finally saw Three Identical Strangers this week.  If you don’t know the documentary, it’s about the Louise Wise Services adoption agency, which purposefully separated several sets of multiples back in the 1960s and studied them over the years without the children OR their parents knowing that they had a twin/triplet somewhere in the world.

The triplets found each other back in 1980s, and the film covers their unification and life in the aftermath.  At least two other sets of twins found each other, too — one set is featured in the film (and have their own film) and another set found each other because one saw Three Identical Strangers and wondered about the possibility because her parents also used the same agency.

It’s interesting how you see a film through a certain lens. I focused on the fact that they were multiples. Josh focused on the fact that it was an adoption story. Another person could see it through the lens of family or loss or mental well-being or science.

But the night we saw the film, I had just come from going through the twins’ fourth birthday pictures. They were standing next to each other outside in front of the house, and then one took the other one’s hand. The pictures are the two of them running around the yard, ending with them hugging by the fence. And I felt physically ill watching the film because while it’s not a given that your twins will be close, to purposefully separate children after five or six months together in the bassinet is unfathomable. To withhold the possibility of that hand-holding moment is cruel. Their story has been in my heart all week.

Have you seen it?

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff…

Okay, now my choices this week.

My Perfect Breakdown explains her decision to continue her blog, despite being creeped out about some privacy issues.  She writes, “I never want someone to feel as lonely as I did when we went through our first miscarriage, or made the decision to terminate for medical reasons or even or even when we went through our last miscarriage. Experiencing multiple losses has become a defining part of who I am, and so I feel compelled to continue to share my experiences so others know they are not alone.”  I love that this is the impulse in our corner of the Internet; to give people a space to find other people who understand.

No Kidding in NZ has a great quote about bravery setting you free.  I can attest to the opposite — that a lack of bravery makes you feel really stuck.  It’s a great reminder that sometimes we have to do the hard thing and trust that we’ll get through it.  And that getting through it will release us from what is weighing us down before we take that first, brave step.

Lastly, Inexplicably Missing doesn’t know what to do next.  She begins: “I was heading somewhere, at least I thought I was. Yes, I’m sure. I had an idea of where I was going. There was a journey I was on. I was heading somewhere. But I have discovered that the trail just petered out and kind of… led to… nowhere.”  What do you do when the path you’re on doesn’t take you where you want to go?  It’s a moving post about not knowing what comes next.

The roundup to the Roundup: Three Identical Strangers is still bothering me.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between November 23rd and November 30th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

No spoilers.  I promise.

The librarian and I both stared at the slim book.  “It’s much shorter than I imagined,” I admitted, fanning through the pages of Ira Levin’s Stepford Wives.

“Me too,” the librarian agreed.  “I thought it was longer.”

It’s the sort of book that you can finish in one sitting, and you probably will because it demands that you devour it.  I’m not really a reading-while-cooking kind of woman, but I stirred the risotto while turning the pages.  I was really blown away by the story.

Without ruining the ending (I promise!), part of the horror for the book is the fear of your personality changing against your will.  Joanna, the main character, is a photographer who fears she’ll change and become like the other women in the town who eschew their own interests in favour of supporting their husbands, raising their children, and cleaning their homes.  She’s a feminist, not a likely candidate for giving up her own beliefs or activities, but that’s the point: She believes the personality changes are outside the women’s control.

Discussing feminism and control will ruin the incredible ending (how did I not know the ending despite the term “Stepford wife” being part of the everyday lexicon?), so I don’t want to go there.  But the middle of the book: that idea that we can be changed against our will and how scary that is, made me think about… what else…

Infertility.

I’m not the woman I was before I started trying to conceive.  I don’t know how you can go through infertility or loss and still be the same person you were before you started family building.  I changed against my will; I don’t want to be the woman who avoids pregnant bellies and newborn babies.  But that’s who I am.

I’ve become someone I’m not, except, well… I am, so this Melissa is someone I am.  If you had told hopeful, excited 28-year-old Melissa that she would someday be this way, she would have never believed you because personalities don’t do a 180.  Except they do sometimes because life changes you.  Big events change you.  I am who I am right now, though I may not always be this way.  If I changed this drastically once, I could change drastically again and return to being a baby-loving, onesie-cooing person.

Part of me wondered about that idea of change as a horror technique when we do all have the potential to have our greatest wish become our greatest sadness.  To lose part of how we define ourselves.  But maybe that is why it’s so scary.  Because we feel like we lose ourselves when life changes us.  I liked 28-year-old Melissa.  I liked her hope and excitement, and I wish she could still muster those feelings when it comes to babies.  But if it wasn’t my love of babies, maybe it would have been my belief in the power of love or my happiness about marriage or my feelings about parenting or writing or publishing or reading.  I’ve gotten to keep those things.

Life transforms everyone.

I was listening to Serial, and one of the people they interviewed for this season admitted that he isn’t sorry for things he’s done because he did them.  Feeling sorry means applying who he is now to who he was then, and that’s not helpful because he can’t go back and change himself any more than we can stop ourselves from changing in the future.  He states that it doesn’t come down to right or wrong; just done or not done.

Maybe it’s easier to not fear change when you like the direction you’ve moved; to chalk up then and now simply to then and now because you’re in a better place.  But I think it’s more peeling back the horror of change and understanding that it will happen, even if we fight hard against it.

Time is a monster, changing us all.