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came before.
    By the time the cowboys and I had arrived back at ranch headquarters, I had made up my mind that I would spend my fifty-ninth year excavating my life—examining the strata of my years.
    I had also decided to make a short video based on my research that I might show, if it was good enough, to guests at my sixtieth-birthday party a year hence. This would give me a concrete narrative project with a deadline that I would have to meet. Maybe from the vantage point of fifty-nine, after surveying, observing, and reflecting upon the events and people of my past, I might gain a new understanding of them. And a new understanding might lead me, loins girded, into a successful last act.
    I had a lot of experiences to learn from. We all do. There is a very human tendency to deny the failures and tragedies in our lives, but these are the very things that sometimes deliver us to ourselves—if we can learn from them.
    I have known failures of all kinds: career failures, wrong paths taken, time wasted, relationships spoiled—the bumps along the searches and meanders of my life. Those failures that I ran from taught me nothing. Those that I confronted, cozied up to, and understood were the ones that permitted me quantum leaps forward. In another way of looking at it, they became the compost from which new growth emerged.
    There are usually no rewards without a price. You can’t learn much that is new by playing it safe. Someone once said to me, “God doesn’t look for awards and medals, God looks for wounds. God enters us through our wounds.” I decided I would look at my wounds, see what they could teach me, let them help me set my compass and rechart a course for the time that remained. What I had to continually bear in mind—and heart and body—was the knowledge that life isn’t a dress rehearsal. This is it. I may have conceived of life in acts, but this coming period wasn’t an act! I had to try to get it right.
    I saw some things that I needed to work on in this Third Act: my sense of fun and humor; my capacity for intimacy. I knew I didn’t want to die without succeeding in an intimate relationship with a man. I realized that I might have chosen the partners I did in Act II because they, like me, were challenged in the intimacy department.
    I saw what I wanted to do in Act III: keep myself as fit and healthy as I could; repair the breaches with those I felt I should be closer to; learn to avoid stress and be more patient; lead with a loving heart; and stay useful and engaged with issues that matter the most to me, such as helping adolescents see a bright future for themselves and ending violence against women and girls.
    I saw what I wanted to stop doing: judging people who disagree with me; being impatient.
    What would you say about yourself? What do you want to have as goals for your life? What do you want it all to add up to?
    A Life Review
    When I first began excavating my life, I found myself reviewing events as someone perched on the outside, chronicling what had happened: I did this; then I did that. It helped me get started, but before long I felt it to be an empty exercise. The power of the memory of my experiences was muted by my focusing solely on the fact that they had happened. I was on the outside looking in, as if I were watching a movie.
    What I needed to do was to go inside my experiences, to delve deeper—to try to recapture them more fully by bringing myself back into how that little girl and then that adolescent had felt back then. This involved active remembering—that is to say, remembering not just in my head but also in my body. I needed to envision my experiences and bring the accompanying emotions back into my body—which, if we really think about it, is where these memories and feelings existed most pungently and where they exist still; memories reside not only in our linear minds but also in our bodies, our cells, our tissues, and our senses.
    My Life Review
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