The plan keeps coming back again...

I am 31 years old, I am married, I have a fun job, I have a puppy and I own a home. Things are looking up for us kids over here. The only thing is, we aren't actually kids anymore. I know that this is the time when many of us start panicking about our place in life. It used to be that we would worry about our futures, and now it seems we are worrying about whether we have made it. As though we are running out of time. But I have a secret, a secret that helps calm the panic of the ticking clock. I made a plan when I turned 30 and I owe it all to these women.

I worked for a great little kitchen store for many years, the owner, a woman, started her first business when she was 39 years old. She had two young kids and just decided to make the leap. She started her third business (while the other two were still going strong!) when she was in her mid 50's.

Julia Childs was a strong and successful woman her whole life. While she may have not known where she was going or where her passion was in her twenties she still did everything with fervor. When she met her husband she ended up following him to Paris for work, she was 37 years old. While she was trying to figure out what it was she was going to do with herself in Paris she decided to take a cooking class at Le Cordon Bleu. That class turned into a full course which eventually turned into the groundbreaking cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking and at 51 years old ms. Julia Childs starred in her first cooking show The French Chef.

Syrie Maugham is an important interior designer from the 1920's and 30's. She was most well known for being the first person to do an all white room. When you think of old Hollywood boudiors it's her your thinking of. Mirrored walls, 'antiqued' white furniture, feathers! All Syrie. She would take vintage pieces and refinish them, she faux finished antique dressers, she had an eye that was unlike anyone at the time. She was 42 years old when she began her career as an interior designer.

Lucille Ball was 40 years old when I Love Lucy was created.

Life does not end at 30, or 40, or 50 or any age. Life begins when you say it does. It's not that these women didn't have accomplished lives before they made the leap, that's the most exciting part. They had wonderful adventurous lives, they played, they worked, they struggled, they discovered, and they grew all before they found their niche. They had lives before their lives and that is what is so striking to me. My plan that I created at 30 was to follow in their footsteps. To enjoy the journey and learn from it and just know that when I finally fulfill my dreams it won't matter what age it's at. What will matter is that I did it at all. And I that I did it with the grace, humor, and intelligence you can only gain from having had a life before your life.