Writer Kelly Kathleen Ferguson, of the Three P’s of Post-Montana MFA blog, responded to my goal question from a few weeks back in her own blog post. Her take on the issue of goals is fascinating and very true, and I highly recommend you have a look.

And now for something only slightly different: it’s a complete cliché to talk about someone—especially a female someone—finding that first grey hair and being thrown into a state of reflection about his or her life and what little time remains of it. Yet it happens all the time, and it’s precisely what’s been happening to me, in an extended sort of way, for the past few years.

I have exactly one grey hair—one, at least, that I’m aware of. It made its dramatic entrance about a year and a half ago, when I was visiting my parents in sunny San Diego. My parents, my husband, and I were on a walk, and I guess the sunlight hit my hair just right and my mom—who is much taller than I—caught a glimpse of that meddlesome grey hair. She pointed it out to me, and I laughed it off and tried not to panic, and then, for a while, forgot about its existence.

Every now and again since then, I’ve caught sight of it in the mirror and wondered if I should pull it out. It seems if I have one grey hair, more will follow soon, and pulling it out won’t really change anything. It won’t, after all, make me any younger. A few weeks ago, I got a haircut, and the lady once again brought the grey hair to my attention. I laughed and said, “Yep,” like it was no big deal, and secretly wondered if I’m wrong to think it seems like kind of a rude thing to point out to a complete stranger.

I’ll be turning thirty in a few weeks. Thirty. Fairly young to be going grey, if you ask me. The grey hair, really, doesn’t mean I don’t have much time left. I’m pretty healthy; I exercise and count calories; I don’t think I’m going to die at an unreasonably young age—I probably still have at least another thirty years in me, and probably many more.

Yet another thirty or forty, even fifty years doesn’t actually sound like all that much, when I really think about it.

It took me the first thirty to get my first book published. I’m sure the books that follow it will come more and more quickly and easily, but still, the fact remains that the amount of time I have to actually write all the things I want to write does have a concrete boundary. Thirty or forty or fifty more years is a lot of time, but it is not an infinite amount of time. My time will eventually run out, and whatever projects I haven’t gotten to by then will simply die along with me.

This all seems terribly grim, and I don’t mean it to. I’m not actually depressed or anything like that. Instead, I’m eager. To write this stuff now, while I still can. As of right now, I have plans for two more story collections, four novels, and six children’s books. Those are just the ones I already have ideas for. Who knows how many more will come to me over my remaining years? It seems fair to guess that I won’t get to everything before I die, so the best I can hope for is to get to as many as I can. But the only way that’s going to happen is if I (to quote that awful Nike slogan) just do it.

And so today I suppose I’m thinking about goals in a slightly different way. My goal, right now, is to finish the current draft of the novel that was my MFA thesis, so that I can finish the second draft of my next novel, so that I can write however many more drafts will be necessary until that novel is finished, so that I can write the first draft of whatever novel will come after it, and so on and so on. Until my time runs out.