Are we outsourcing our future? CRISPR is usually introduced with some version of the same promise: we may finally be able to fix disease at its source. That promise is real. So is the reason I find the technology impossible to stop thinking about. CRISPR gives scientists the ability to target specific sections of DNA and make changes that would have been unimaginable not very long ago. This is no longer something waiting for the distant future. CRISPR-based treatments have already moved into approved medicine, including therapies for sickle cell disease and transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia. That is extraordinary. It also means some of the questions science fiction has been asking for decades are beginning to lose the fiction part. What CRISPR Changes The simplest explanation of CRISPR is that it gives scientists a way to find a particular genetic sequence and alter it. The actual biology is considerably more complicated, and the process is not infallible. Researchers still have to contend with unintended edits, delivery challenges, long-term effects, and the fact that changing cells in a laboratory is very different from safely treating a human being. The FDA continues to identify off-target editing as one of the risks associated with CRISPR-based treatment. Still, consider what the capability means. For most of human history, an inherited genetic disorder was something medicine could treat, manage, or sometimes work around. Increasingly, researchers can contemplate intervening much closer to the source of the problem itself. Once we can alter biology intentionally, the difficult questions don't stay inside the laboratory. They move into hospitals, insurance systems, regulatory agencies, legislatures, courtrooms, and eventually families sitting across from doctors trying to decide what they are willing to risk. Who gets access? What counts as treatment? How much uncertainty is acceptable when the alternative is a devastating disease? What happens as the line between correcting illness and selecting desirable traits becomes easier to approach? Those questions don't have molecular answers. The People Around the Science This is the part of CRISPR that interests me most. The technology tends to attract two competing stories. In one, gene editing liberates us from diseases that have caused enormous suffering. In the other, we are approximately three laboratory mishaps away from ordering designer babies from an app. Reality is less cooperative. A technology can be genuinely life-changing and still create new inequalities. A treatment can be developed with good intentions and become available first to people with money, geography, insurance, or political access on their side. Regulators can act responsibly and still be working with incomplete information. Scientists can understand the biology better than anyone alive and still disagree about acceptable risk. None of that makes CRISPR sinister. It makes CRISPR human. And humans have a long history of taking astonishing inventions and immediately adding power, money, ambition, fear, and politics to the equation. That's where things get interesting. Why CRISPR Found Its Way Into My Fiction CRISPR sits underneath much of The Helix Chronicles, but I've never been particularly interested in using gene editing as a futuristic prop. What fascinated me was what people might do once the technology became powerful enough to tempt them. What happens when someone has the ability to prevent suffering and becomes convinced that gives them the right to decide what should be changed? What happens when a public-health argument starts quietly absorbing ideas about behavior, desirability, or social good? What happens when access to a breakthrough depends on an institution whose motives are considerably less advanced than its science? Those questions eventually became more interesting to me than the mechanics of gene editing itself. Memphis gave me the perfect place to explore them because I wanted the consequences to land somewhere recognizable. Families, courtrooms, hospitals, neighborhoods, politics. People who aren't debating biotechnology at a conference but suddenly have to live with decisions made by those who are. That's also why the technology in my books is rarely the thing I distrust most. The people making decisions around it usually earn that distinction. The Part We Don't Get to Outsource I don't think CRISPR requires us to choose between excitement and fear. I'm enormously excited by what gene editing may make possible. A technology capable of relieving suffering on this scale deserves that excitement. It also deserves scrutiny proportional to its power. Science can tell us whether an edit works, what risks researchers can measure, and what becomes technically possible next. It cannot decide how access should be distributed, which uses society should permit, whose definition of improvement counts, or how much authority we're willing to give institutions making those decisions. We have to do that part ourselves. And we're going to be doing it while the science keeps moving. That's the tension I keep coming back to, both here and in my fiction. CRISPR can give us remarkable new choices. It cannot make us wise enough to choose well. Unfortunately, that technology is still in development.

I have a complicated relationship with failure. I believe it’s useful. Necessary, even. I would also strongly prefer not to participate. This feels like a reasonable position. We talk about failure strangely, especially online. On one side, it’s treated like proof that you weren’t good enough, prepared enough, talented enough, whatever enough. On the other, failure gets polished into something almost aspirational. Fail forward. Fail better. Collect failures. Celebrate them. I understand the sentiment, but I’m not sure anyone has ever opened an email beginning with “Unfortunately...” and thought, Excellent. Another growth opportunity. Failure usually feels bad because we wanted something and didn’t get it. We tried something and it didn’t work. We made a call that turned out to be wrong. Sometimes we did everything we knew how to do and still watched the thing fall apart. That part doesn’t need better branding. What matters is what happens after. I tend to overanalyze things, so failure can become a fairly elaborate forensic investigation if I let it. I can revisit the decision, the timing, the conversations, the things I should have noticed, and several completely irrelevant details my brain has decided to enter into evidence. Some reflection is useful, of course, but eventually you have to distinguish between learning from something and repeatedly prosecuting yourself for it. Those are not the same activity. I’ve also learned that every failure does not contain a profound lesson waiting to transform me into a wiser human being. Sometimes the lesson is embarrassingly ordinary. I needed more time. I wasn’t ready. The idea wasn’t as good as I thought it was. I trusted the wrong person. I waited too long. I moved too fast. Or my personal favorite: I did the best I could with the information I had, and it still didn’t work. That one can be especially irritating because there’s nobody obvious to blame, including yourself. When something goes sideways now, I try to ask a few fairly boring questions. What actually happened? What part of it was within my control? Is there anything I would do differently next time? Then I try to take one useful thing with me. Not eleven lessons. Not a five-year personal development plan. One thing. Maybe I change a process, ask a question earlier, prepare differently, or stop doing something that clearly isn’t working. Sometimes the outcome was disappointing but doesn’t require a complete overhaul of my life. That is also useful information. The goal isn’t to become someone who never fails. I’m fairly certain the only reliable way to accomplish that is to become someone who never risks much, and that sounds considerably worse. Writing has made this particularly clear because failure is built into the work. Scenes get cut. Ideas collapse halfway through. A character refuses to become interesting no matter how much CPR you administer. Something you love may leave another reader completely unmoved. You can take every one of those moments personally if you want to. I do not recommend it. The harder and more useful skill is figuring out whether the failure is telling you something about the work or whether your ego has decided it is telling you something about your worth. A bad chapter is a bad chapter. It is not a psychological profile. A project that doesn’t work is a project that didn’t work. Sometimes that means you need more skill. Sometimes you need a different approach. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is stop pouring resources into it and move on. None of this is particularly inspirational, which may be why I trust it. Real resilience, at least to me, isn’t pretending the fall was secretly beautiful. It’s being disappointed, irritated, embarrassed, or genuinely hurt and eventually deciding what deserves to come with you when you get back up. Sometimes that’s a lesson. Sometimes it’s a scar. Sometimes it’s simply better judgment. And sometimes, after enough distance, you discover that the thing you once regarded as a spectacular failure was merely one stretch of road on the way to somewhere else. I can live with that. I still don’t plan to celebrate failure, but I’m getting better at surviving it without turning it into a verdict.

Yoda goes to the gym too There are days when it feels like everyone else somehow received the map. They’re publishing faster, growing faster, selling more, building something impressive while you’re still staring at the same mile marker wondering whether you accidentally took the scenic route through Nebraska. I know better than to compare my progress to somebody else’s. I also know better than to eat chips directly from the bag. Knowledge and behavior do not always enjoy a close relationship. Writing full time has made this especially obvious. I love what I do, but it’s also my profession, which means the creative part comes with all the less-romantic questions attached. Am I doing enough? Am I spending my time on the right things? Should I be farther along by now? The internet is remarkably well equipped to answer that last question with a resounding YES, LOOK AT THIS PERSON. There is always someone having a better launch, signing a bigger deal, writing more books, growing a larger audience, or casually announcing an accomplishment you didn’t realize you were supposed to be pursuing until five seconds ago. It can make perfectly reasonable progress feel suspiciously slow. I was thinking about this recently at the gym, which is not where I generally expect to receive useful life advice. I spend most of my time there trying to negotiate an early release. I hate exercise, and I’ve accepted that this is probably not going to change. What has changed is that I’m doing it regularly enough to notice the benefits. I’m stronger, my head is clearer afterward, and anxiety tends to burn off somewhere around the point when I stop resenting the treadmill for existing. That day, an older gentleman was walking on the treadmill beside me. He moved slowly and stopped every few minutes for a short break. After a while, I noticed something odd: he had covered parts of the treadmill display with little Post-it notes. The time. The distance. Basically every number the machine thought he ought to care about. Naturally, I became curious. Eventually I asked him about it. He smiled and said, “It doesn’t matter how fast I go or how long it takes. All that matters is that I keep going.” Apparently I had chosen the treadmill next to Yoda. We talked for another minute, and he told me that he judged his pace by what felt right for him. I’m not sure whether he intended this as advice about anything beyond exercise, but I was already stealing it. I looked back at my own display. Time elapsed, distance, pace, calories. Numbers everywhere, dutifully reporting how I was doing. So I stopped looking at them, put on my audiobook, and walked. Without watching every minute crawl past or checking how far I had gone, the time passed surprisingly quickly. The whole thing stuck with me because we live surrounded by measurements now. Views, followers, rankings, reviews, sales, word counts, open rates, steps, streaks. Somebody somewhere has built a dashboard capable of telling you how you compare, and if they haven’t yet, I’m sure an app is in beta. Some of those numbers are useful. I’m not suggesting we cover our analytics with office supplies and proceed entirely on vibes. I want goals. I want to know whether something I’m doing is working. I want people around me who are smarter or farther along and can tell me when I’m wandering into traffic. But numbers are very good at telling us where we are and surprisingly bad at telling us whether our pace makes sense for our lives. Those aren’t the same question. Someone else may have more time, more money, more experience, fewer responsibilities, different ambitions, better timing, or a completely different definition of success. Their pace can teach me something without becoming evidence that mine is wrong. That distinction is harder to remember than it sounds. I still catch myself looking sideways. I still have moments when somebody else’s accomplishment suddenly makes one of mine feel smaller, even though absolutely nothing about my accomplishment changed in the preceding thirty seconds. Brains are fun that way. What I’m getting better at is noticing when comparison stops being useful information and starts becoming noise. Then I can ask the question that actually matters: Am I still moving toward something I want? Sometimes the answer means I need to pick up the pace. Sometimes I need to change direction. Sometimes I’m doing just fine and should stop staring at somebody else’s treadmill. The older I get, the more I suspect that a lot of progress is less dramatic than we want it to be. You show up, do the work, make adjustments, and keep going. Then one day you look back and realize the miles added up while you weren’t watching. Turns out Post-its are surprisingly versatile. Photo by Paper Textures on Unsplash

Welcome to (Backstory - Monica's Blog) I’m Monica Chase, and apparently having a blog means I should tell you a little about myself. This is always the part where things can go sideways fast, somewhere between a résumé and an overshare, so we’ll try to avoid both. I’ve been a reader for as long as I can remember. The kind who disappeared into books, stayed up too late finishing them, and was perfectly happy spending an afternoon in a library while other people were doing things involving sunshine. Writing followed. These days, I write thrillers about technology, science, power, and what happens when very smart people become convinced they know what’s best for everyone else. Genetic engineering. Artificial intelligence. Biotech. The occasional conspiracy. Usually some perfectly ordinary person getting dragged into something they absolutely did not sign up for. I’m endlessly fascinated by technology, but I’m not especially interested in cheerleading for it or predicting our inevitable doom. The interesting stuff lives somewhere in the middle. What can we do? What should we do? Who gets to decide? And what happens when the answer to that last question is “someone with a lot of money and very little supervision”? That tends to be where my stories start. Before writing fiction full time, I spent years in the corporate world, which probably explains at least some of my skepticism about institutions, hierarchy, and anyone who says, “Trust the process.” I’m also an introvert who can impersonate an extrovert when required. I overthink things professionally and recreationally. I notice odd details about strangers and sometimes invent entire lives for them before they’ve finished ordering coffee. My brain has never shown much interest in an off switch, so eventually I decided to put it to work. This blog is where some of that spills out. You’ll find things about the books and the strange process of writing them, but also the real-world science and technology that sends me down rabbit holes in the first place. Sometimes I’ll wander into publishing, creativity, or whatever has been occupying entirely too much space in my head that week. And occasionally my rescue dog will make an appearance, usually because he has once again demonstrated that I am not actually in charge here. So welcome. Read what interests you, skip what doesn’t, leave a comment if you feel like joining the conversation, or lurk quietly from the back of the room. As an introvert, I respect the lurkers. Follow me here or on social media, leave a comment, drop me a note, or subscribe to my newsletter. Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

When I first wrote about this, I was getting ready to publish my debut novel. That sentence still makes me smile a little because it had taken me years to get there. I had been circling the idea of writing seriously for a long time before life finally gave me the shove I apparently needed. In 2023, I stopped thinking about the book I wanted to write and started writing it. You would think that making the decision would have settled things. It did not. One of the first things I learned was that creative work is wildly inconsistent. Some days I could sit down and disappear into the story for hours. Other days, opening the laptop felt like a negotiation with a small but determined hostage-taker. At first, I treated the bad days as evidence that I was doing something wrong. Surely “real writers” were more disciplined. More inspired. Less distracted. They probably woke before dawn, drank something involving turmeric, and produced two thousand beautiful words before breakfast. Then I started paying closer attention to actual writers. Their processes were all over the place. Some wrote every day. Some didn’t. Some outlined obsessively. Others discovered the story as they went. Some needed silence, some needed music, some wrote in coffee shops, and I’m convinced at least a few could finish a chapter during an active tornado warning. That was freeing. There are habits that help me enormously, but I’ve stopped confusing having a process with finding the process. For me, one of the most useful habits is simply catching ideas before they disappear. My brain has terrible respect for business hours, so I keep notes wherever I can get to them quickly. A line of dialogue, an article that sends me down a rabbit hole, a character thought, a question I want to explore later. Most of these fragments never become anything. That’s fine. My folders contain an impressive amount of nonsense. They also contain ideas I nearly deleted that later became something useful. Creativity is messy that way. The half-baked thought you dismiss on Tuesday may suddenly explain itself six months later. I’ve also learned to protect writing time without demanding that every minute of it be productive. That distinction matters. If I have twenty minutes and spend fifteen staring at a paragraph before finally figuring out what’s wrong with it, those fifteen minutes weren’t necessarily wasted. Sometimes thinking is the work. That took me a while to accept because I came from environments where productivity was easier to measure. You completed the task. Answered the email. Finished the project. Checked the box. Writing can involve spending an hour determining that the thing you wrote yesterday needs to disappear. Very satisfying metric. One exercise I still love when I’m stuck is seven minutes of completely unfiltered writing. No editing, no fixing sentences, no worrying about spelling, and preferably no stopping. Seven minutes is longer than it sounds when you remove your internal editor from the room. Something interesting usually happens around the point when I run out of the obvious things to say. That’s often where the good stuff is hiding. The larger lesson, though, has been learning not to make every creative struggle mean something. A difficult day doesn’t mean I’ve lost whatever ability I had yesterday. A slow chapter doesn’t mean the book is doomed. Somebody else writing faster than I am has absolutely no bearing on whether my work is moving forward. That sounds obvious. It is considerably less obvious when you’re in the middle of it. I still believe in discipline. I still set goals, seek advice, learn from writers I admire, and pay attention to what readers respond to. Writing is creative work, but publishing is also a business, and pretending otherwise doesn’t make the business part disappear. What I resist now is the idea that creativity improves when we bully it. Sometimes you need to sit down and do the work when you don’t feel like it. Sometimes you need to stop for the day because you’re rearranging the same twelve words and becoming increasingly convinced that commas are a personal attack. Knowing the difference takes practice. When I was approaching that first publication, I thought becoming a writer might eventually make me feel more certain about how writing worked. That has not been the case. What I’ve gained instead is a little more trust in the process, including the ugly parts. The false starts, deleted pages, strange notes on my phone, ideas that go nowhere, and days when the words simply refuse to cooperate are not interruptions to writing. They’re part of it. And every so often, one of those half-baked ideas turns into a book. That still feels a little like magic.

Lessons on Adventure, Illness, and Writing Your Way Forward “You don’t want to get to the end of your life having regrets about missing the opportunity to see the world. So, pick a destination and start planning your trip now.” Brenda E. Smith didn’t set out to climb Kilimanjaro, raft through hippo-infested waters, or become an author in her 70s—but she did all of it anyway. Her journey from accountant to explorer to memoirist is the kind of story that makes you pause—and maybe rethink what’s possible. I had the absolute pleasure of interviewing Brenda about fear, resilience, and the moment she realized sitting still wasn’t an option. Her answers are generous, honest, and deeply human. Brenda is the author of two memoirs: Becoming Fearless and Becoming Amazed. You can learn more about her work here. Whether you're facing your own unknown or just need a reminder that it's never too late to say yes—this one’s worth your time. Scroll on. You’ll be glad you did. The Moment of Yes What finally pushed you to say yes to rafting through crocodile-infested waters and climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro? Did you realize then how much it would change you? I’m not sure I ever said “Yes” to my boss, Richard Bangs, about going to Tanzania. He told me he’d planned for us to do the trip. I think he really wanted to expose me to the wonders that awaited beyond the boundaries of the United States. But I had no desire to leave this country. It terrified me to think of going to an unknown place whose language I couldn’t speak, whose food I couldn’t identify, whose water contained dangerous pathogens, not to mention unfamiliar plants, killer animals and potentially fatal diseases. I didn’t have the courage to say “No” to Richard for fear of being branded a coward by him and my fellow river guides. Only a few of the guides with whom I worked ever earned the coveted invitation to crew with Sobek Expeditions. My mother became nearly hysterical when I told her I planned to go to Africa. She ordered me not to go. That set off a spark of rebellion within me that opened my mind to the possibility of taking this trip. Still, fear and dread held me captive even as Richard and I boarded that plane headed to Tanzania. As we began the trip, I had no inkling of how it would change me. My brain focused solely on keeping me alive, never imagining I might emerge from the trip as a profoundly different person. From Accountant to Explorer You went from a safe, predictable life to venturing into the wild. Did you ever imagine those adventures would lead to writing books? I fell in love with the world, and dreamed of traveling to every country on the planet. I also loved reading books. But writing about my adventures never appeared on my radar until my diagnosis of a one in a million neuromuscular degenerative progressive, incurable condition called Stiff Persons Syndrome (SPS) promptly curtailed my international explorations. As I lost mobility in my legs, I found myself sitting for most of the day. Only then did I realize that writing books could be a productive and satisfying undertaking. Once I started writing, I couldn’t stop! Facing Fear From extreme weather to personal loss, your journey hasn’t been easy. What was the most challenging moment, and how did it change you? Receiving the diagnosis of SPS, then helplessly watching my world drastically shrink around me, by far, marks the most challenging moment of my life. But out on expeditions, I experienced several challenges that flooded my heart with fear. Being close enough to a wild lioness to see the gleam in her eyes, surprising a hooded cobra from a distance of 6 feet, threading an inflatable raft through a shallow pool filled with agitated hippos, and being medevacked from Pakistan to Germany after running an unexplainable high fever for two weeks are a few moments that come to mind. Surviving these challenges has made me grateful that I’ve experienced a full, active life. The Changing World of Travel You’re intentional about respecting cultures and minimizing tourism’s footprint. Through your experiences, how have you seen travel and adventure evolve over time? Forty-five years ago, when I started exploring the world, adventure travel appealed to a small group of people who didn’t mind roughing it on a limited budget with none of the enhanced equipment that has since enabled the industry to grow. We went into unexplored wildernesses, where we had no means of communication with the civilized world, often days from any sort of medical expertise. Adventure seekers today can helicopter into glamorous eco lodges, drink natural tasting water purified by high-tech filters, dine on gourmet foods, use cell phones to capture hundreds of photos they can blast in real time to friends around the world. The industry has changed vastly. Writing Later in Life What made you decide to share your story? What’s been the biggest challenge—and the biggest reward—of becoming an indie author? Although I enjoyed telling friends and family about my journeys, I never wanted to commit the time it would take to document the stories into print. At nineteen, my best childhood friend died suddenly from an aggressive form of cancer, but her mom and I regularly kept in touch. Whenever I returned from a trip overseas, she’d invite me for tea and tales. At the end of each visit, she’d beg me to consider writing a book about my adventures. I always answered, “Maybe someday.” In early 2020, my friend’s mom lost her own battle with cancer. During my last visit with her in hospice, she made me promise to write a book to share my stories with the world. I couldn’t bear to deny her dying wish, so I promised I’d do it. I launched that first book in August 2023. As a 70-year-old when I completed the book, I dreaded undertaking the ego-bruising quest to find an agent followed by the years it might take to interest a tradition publisher. Instead, I discovered I could work with a publishing services company to get my book into the world in about six months. I needed to front the cost of the services, but it would save me hundreds of valuable hours of my time. And I’d start earning a return on my investment much sooner. My biggest challenge has been marketing-getting my book in front of the right readers, but by employing various forms of promotions, my readership growth is on an upward curve. The biggest reward, for me, is hearing from readers that they enjoy my books. I want every reader that takes the time to write a review or leave a rating to know I consider their effort a cherished gift. Adventure Meets Reflection Your books blend thrilling experiences with deep introspection. Was it harder to write about the external journey or the personal one? With a memoir, writing about the external journey involves recounting actual events and facts about the environments I traveled through. My memories, slides and photos, and fact checking with the other people on my journeys makes writing the external journey pretty straight forward. Writing about the personal inner journey is tough. I’m not one that easily shares my emotions or private details of my life. Growing up in a home with an alcoholic father and codependent mother, I learned to keep secrets. I also learned that trusting other people could be dangerous and hurtful. My writing partners and trusted friends who read drafts of my writing often ask me to share more about my feelings and how the impact of obstacles I overcame affected me. Sharing that I’m afraid, confused, or sad requires me to be vulnerable in ways that are not always comfortable. But those genuine moments of baring my soul are what I think my readers most relate to. Stepping Outside the Comfort Zone For someone afraid to take their own leap into the unknown, what advice would you give? Just do it! Honestly, the rewards of exploring other parts of our world far exceed the risks, especially if you travel with any of the multitude of experienced guides or tour operators leading trips all over the planet these days. I had so much fun and learned so much from my travels that I found a job that assigned me to live in a few foreign countries for eight years. There’s nothing so enlightening as seeing your own country through the eyes of people from different cultures. You don’t want to get to the end of your life having regrets about missing the opportunity to see the world. So, pick a destination and start planning your trip now! Lessons from the Wild After decades of exploration, what’s the single greatest lesson you’ve learned—about the world and yourself? Fifty years ago, my boss told me, “We save what we love and we love what we know.” His wisdom convinced me to give up a job in the business world, which over a lifetime could have made me wealthy. I left that job behind to begin a quest for a different type of wealth: knowledge of the world in its entirety. I’ve never regretted that decision. I’ve learned how fragile our planet is, and that the most dangerous living creatures on Earth are human beings. Human greed upsets nature’s delicate balance, threatening to destroy our world at an alarming pace. Many of the wilderness areas I traveled through no longer exist. In their place, governments have constructed vast infrastructure projects needed to support the expanding populations in cities around the world that have doubled or tripled in size in just the last 45 years. Mega hydro-electric dam projects have drowned millions of acres of wilderness, displacing people and wildlife. Poachers and prolonged droughts resulting from climate change have decimated hundreds of species nearly to the brink of extinction. People need to know and love our entire planet for us to have any chance to save it. What’s Next? More adventures? More books? How do you see your writing evolving? Definitely more books. I’m about to embark on what may be the grandest adventure of my life, a new clinical trial which has the potential to improve if not cure SPS! I’ve written 160 pages about how living with this condition changed my life. I’d gotten to a point where I paused writing, unsure how to end the story. Karma arrived just in time to once again change the course of my life, as well as to provide a hopeful ending for my book. Also recently, three other first-time memoir authors I befriended through our self-publishing community and I, all in our 70s, agreed to collaborate on a book to inspire people who have dreamed of writing their own stories that it’s never too late. We explain the steps involved in writing a memoir using examples from each of our author journeys to show there are many approaches a writer can employ to document their own unique story. Finally, back to grand outdoor adventures. I have outlined a book about a journey down a tributary of the Amazon River through the rain forested lowlands of Bolivia with three friends. Another story I hope to write is about a seven-day canoe trip, a female friend and I took through the Florida everglades. That story is full of surprises, twists and turns. If I live long enough to finish those four books, I may just try my hand at fiction. Bonus Question: Looking back—on life, adventure, and publishing—what advice would you give your younger self? I honestly have to say that if I could lead my life over, there’s not much I would change, including living with SPS. In my 20s, I had an intuition that I should try to get out and explore the wildest parts of the planet while I had youthful energy and insatiable curiosity. I’d put off travel to Europe and more developed countries until later. I did that with gusto, including living overseas in three countries and traveling in forty countries. Only now, in my later years, do I feel I confident to write about the world, and my place in it, with wisdom and understanding. I embrace the idea that there is a season for everything in my constantly changing life and my time spent on rivers taught me the easiest path through life is to go with the flow. Brenda’s story is a reminder that the unknown isn’t something to fear—it’s where the good stuff lives. If her words lit a spark, go check out her books Becoming Fearless and Becoming Amazed, and learn more about her work here . The next chapter of your own story might just start with a single yes. Until next time, I’ll see you in the bookstores. Monica