Life Glows On

LIFE GLOWS ON: Reconnecting With Your Creativity to Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life

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Packed with fun ideas and solid, practical strategies for reconnecting with your creativity and making the rest of your life the best of your life. Ditch all those worries about getting older and embrace what can be the most vibrant and empowering chapter of your life.

Equal parts creativity guide, mood boost, midlife manifesto, self-help salve, and breath of fresh air. 100% witty, wise and generous Claire Cook, who shares everything she’s learned on her own journey that might help you in yours. Filled with great stories and insider tips.

If you’re a forty-to-forever woman who’s interested in making your life glow on, don’t miss this inspiring and motivating book.

“Dust off those what-ifs and get ready to glow on.”—Book Perfume

“This is exactly the book I needed right now.”—Looking on the Sunnyside

“Filled with inspiring quotes and strategies.”—New York Journal of Books

“Life Glows On jogged me out of my funk.”—Kathie C.

“Fabulous book to help get your creative juices flowing!”—Patricia A.

Life Glows On excerpt

Copyright © 2021 Claire Cook. All rights reserved.

UPSIDE DOWN AND DOWNSIDE UP

For so many of us, the COVID-19 pandemic has been an uninvited catalyst for figuring out what’s important. We have a deeper appreciation for our family and friends. We realize how little we really need and how much we already have. We have a keener sense of the passage of time, and since we’ve been lucky enough to have made it this far, we’d love to extend our happy and healthy years. We have a renewed interest in finding purpose and joy, and we want to grab the gusto while we can.

But for all the silver linings in the dark coronavirus cloud, it’s been a long, strange, terrifying, upside down downside up trip, and we could all use a little something to take the edge off our late-stage and post-pandemic reentry anxiety right about now.

Reconnecting with our creativity can not only reduce our anxiety, but it can relieve our stress, soothe our souls, clarify our thoughts and feelings, nourish our resilience, and bring us a ton of much-needed fun. Creativity is magic. It’s the medicine we need right now. Our creativity can help us love our lives again.

Wherever you are on your own creative path, my hope is that this book will help your creativity soar like never before. I’ll share my own creative journey, including everything I’ve learned along the way and also the bumps in the road. Plus lots of tips, inspiration, ideas, encouragement, as well as plenty of practical and impractical strategies.

And if you’re thinking this book might not be for you because you’re soooo not creative, knock it off right now. Of course, you’re creative. We’re all creative.

Okay, we know we put it somewhere, so let’s go find that creativity!

HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?

My own run-in with COVID-19 planted the seed for this book. I have to admit I’ve had more pleasurable gardening experiences.

My husband Jake and I were both stunned when we caught the virus early on, way back before anybody else we knew had been infected. We were healthy and so, so careful. We stayed home, ordered essentials online. When we absolutely had to go out, we kept well beyond six feet away from other humans, even resisted the urge to pet their dogs. We wore masks. We washed our hands constantly.

We doused our groceries with disinfectant and quarantined them in the garage until they were germ-free, hoping they’d still be edible when we finally brought them in. (Remember that?) We walked before sunrise in isolated areas, where we often never saw another person, even from a distance. The whole nine yards. 

And then it happened anyway.

As soon as we knew we were going down, we had a conversation about whether, if things got bad, we wanted to go to the hospital or stay home and fight. We both felt strongly that we wanted to stay home if we possibly could, for lots of reasons that made sense to us personally. Maybe the biggest was that we couldn’t picture going through with that tragic scene in the hospital parking lot when one of us would drop the other off, and we’d have to separate like aging actors playing some twisted version of star-crossed lovers.

I got really sick, but Jake got really, really sick. Finally, he seemed to be getting a little bit better. Then, bam, on the eighth day COVID circled around and came back hard. For exactly three days I wasn’t sure he was going to make it. I know because writer that I am, I chronicled it in one of my notebooks. Day 1, Day 2. . . Nothing fancy, just our temperatures and symptoms and a few random scribbles like OMG or WTF in handwriting I barely recognize as I look at it now.

Foggy, groggy days were followed by crazy nights when delirium descended on the husband I’d been married to practically forever. Once I tiptoed in to find his designated sick room covered in a snowstorm of white tissues. Tissues everywhere—his lap, the bed, the floor. Semi-sitting, mostly slumped over, a look of extreme concentration on his face, Jake held the square cardboard box and counted each tissue as he pulled it out and wrist-flicked it away like a Frisbee. He’d lose count, grimace, start counting tissues again.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

“Shh,” he said without looking up. “I’m counting.”

Unless he didn’t make it.

The next night I was curled up under a blanket in the living room, trying to lose myself in an episode or twelve of Schitt’s Creek. A glassy-eyed imitation of his former self, Jake stumbled down the stairs and came in for a landing on his favorite chair. To get a jump on hydration before his next bout of vomiting, I handed him a glass of Pedialyte on the rocks, and he sipped it like Scotch. I took a long drink of water and tried to pretend we were almost back to normal.

Our rescue cats, cuddled together in a long wicker basket on the floor, looked worried, maybe hoping they wouldn’t have to figure out how to open their own cat food cans in the near future.

After Jake finished his drink, he staggered across the room, delirium-drunk, and started climbing the stairs. That little voice you should always listen to, even when you really don’t feel like moving, made me kick off the blanket and follow him. Halfway up the stairs he teetered. And then he dropped straight back as if he were doing a trust fall in a team-building exercise. Maybe in his mind he was.

I turned sideways and managed to block some of his fall with one shoulder. We bumped down the stairs together and my head crashed into a massive framed print on the landing. It was my first big poster for my very first book tour. Words Worth Readings Presents in Person: Claire Cook.
The thick glass that covered the poster held, but I knew some serious bruising was in store for both my husband and me.

Because I didn’t have a choice, I managed to drag Jake up the stairs and roll him into bed. Then I sat on a step halfway down the stairs and stared at the poster hanging on the wall in front of me, now as cockeyed as I felt.

I took a moment to wonder whether I was already as sick as I was going to get or if I was on the precipice of getting way sicker. I knew I was worried about Jake not making it, but what if after whatever came next—adult kids to the rescue, the dreaded trip to the hospital—I didn’t make it either?

What if I died?

I rolled my stiffening shoulder back a few times, traced a finger around the burgeoning egg on my head, stared at the poster some more.

That poster had probably cost more to frame than I’d made on my first book. But after a lifetime of being too afraid to do the thing I most wanted to do, I’d finally gathered up my midlife courage in my forties and gone for it. I’d written that first book in my minivan outside my daughter’s daily 5:30 AM swim team practice during one long cold New England winter, day after day after day, before I went to work as a teacher.

Miracle of miracles, the novel sold to the first publisher who asked to read it and was published the year I turned forty-five. I know how many worthy books take forever to sell and how lucky I got. I like to think that the good karma I’d built up over a lifetime kicked in for me. Or maybe it was more that I’d been hiding out and procrastinating for so long that the universe decided to cut me some slack. Whatever it was, I’m forever grateful.

After my first book, I’d hung in there and written the next book, too. And the next.

And somehow, after years of putting one foot in front of the other, jumping across potholes in the road, pushing forward again after plenty of backslides, and making every mistake in and out of the book along the way, I’d managed to cobble together a body of work. Must Love Dogs had been turned into a big romantic comedy movie starring Diane Lane and John Cusack, and I’d walked the red carpet at the Hollywood premiere the year I’d turned fifty. My books had been translated into fourteen languages. They’d hit the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists, teetered at the top of the Amazon lists.

I’d learned and grown while writing each book. I’d judged writing contests, won writing awards. Traveled the world to speak. Given keynotes at big conferences. Best of all, I’d found wonderful readers, likeminded women (and a few good men!) who cheered me on and looked forward to reading my next book.

Twenty books over twenty years. Each one containing bits and pieces of my heart and soul and pain and laughter. Books that would continue to touch lives—maybe just a few, maybe more—long after I was gone.

Like scrawling graffiti on the towering wall of the universe: CLAIRE WAS HERE.

Sitting there on the stairs that night, I still didn’t want to die. I mean, I really, really didn’t.

But if this turned out to be the end of the road, at least I’d finally found the courage to tap into my creativity, to write the books I wanted to read, to follow my passion, to find my purpose, my life’s work. I’d done enough of what I’d set out to do that I was oddly at peace with it.

And if I made it to the other side of this ridiculous virus, I’d use my gratitude as fuel. I’d figure out how to write a book to encourage the forty-to-forever women who’d given me the gift of my late-blooming career to reconnect with their own creativity. To help them scrawl their names on that towering wall and say I WAS HERE, too.

So there, COVID.

LIFE GLOWS ON

For me, the lessons of this pandemic have been to go with the flow (not my strong suit!), to live each day with gratitude, not to try to press my opinions on others, to remember to be kind because we’re all doing the best we can, and that sometimes the most helpful thing you can say to someone is I’m thinking of you.

For me, this book is one great big I’m thinking of you.

It would take some serious hindsight analysis to figure out that I’d actually come down with COVID-19 first. A virtuoso of denial, I’d managed to mostly ignore my headache and weird facial and joint pain, as well as assorted other random symptoms. And because he was living with me, Jake not only caught it, but got a bigger viral load from constant exposure to his lovely wife, which made him sicker. In the yin and yang of decades-long relationships, one person gets it and the other has to clean it up. Even though it didn’t always feel like it, I probably got the better end of the deal this time around.

I stopped taking notes after Day 21 because I was just so over it. Sick and tired of fevers spiking yet again, forcing enough fluids to float a boat. Sick and tired of being sick and tired. Jake would have residual symptoms—inflammation of one ankle, a foggy brain—for months.

My own foggy brain began to clear as soon as I was virus-free enough to walk the beach again.

One morning just before dawn I strolled solo across a deserted beach, my eyes watering with sea breeze and joy. Tiny pieces of broken shells crunched under my sneakers.

Sanderlings were dancing in the dark at the shoreline. A ghost crab dashed in front of me, a fluorescent scamper under the light of a full circle moon. Shadowy silhouettes of pelicans flew over the ocean in tight formation, dipped down in a black ribbon to catch an early breakfast. The waves splashed in their never-ending game of hide ’n’ seek with the sand.

What a time to be alive.

A midnight blue sky glowed salmon-pink at the horizon, a slowly expanding band of hope.

Life glows on, I whispered. To myself. To the whole crazy world.

To you.

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