I've been savoring "Without Reservations" by Alice Steinbach for a few days now. She leaves the comfort of her home for a bit of soul-searching at Paris, Oxford and Milan, sending herself postcards from each location. Sneaking a few pages every now and then at work, while waiting for the edits of my project. I particularly like this part:

It was a lesson I hoped to learn in the months ahead: how to stop rushing from place to place, always looking ahead to the next thing while the moment in front of me slipped away unnoticed.

I knew it once, of course--the feeling of connection that comes from seizing the actual world. When I was a child, very little that happened in the real world escaped my attention. Not the brightly colored ice in small paper boats we bougt at Mr. Dawson's snowball stand; or the orange-and-white pattern that formed a map of Africa on my cat's back; or the way Mother sat at her dressing table, powdering her beautiful face to a pale ivory color. It used to surprise me, the intensity with which I still remembered these distant memories. But when I entered my fifties--the Age of Enlightenment, as I came to call it--I understood their enduring clarity. By then I'd knocked around enough to know that, in the end, what adds up to a life is nothing more than the accumulation of small daily moments."

What I think: 8 unicorns