Here I stand. Today I turned 52. Seven years ago, this was a milestone that I decided was worthy of a plan. The plan that would last seven years and leave me transformed into a productive artist, an accomplished translator, a well-read and agile and lithe middle-aged woman. I’m still a middle-aged woman, anyhow.

It’s a very good thing that I realized somewhere around Year Three that planning has never been my strong suit. I think my poor skills at planning probably helped me when cancer struck three times in three years, because I didn’t need to spend any time mourning what I had been planning to do with those three years instead. Have another kid? We barely had room for two in our apartment in Brooklyn.

I think the moment I realized the Seven Year Plan wasn’t going to go well was when I began dreading writing a monthly check-in paragraph to let myself know how the plan was proceeding — that reminded me too much of work. Early on, I discovered that striking through text of my plans held some power, so part of the plan became modifying the plan. Still, in a world where nothing seems to go according to plan, my quaint effort met the end it would inevitably have found: obscurity. I think there was a notebook somewhere in which I was writing my plan updates. I have no idea which notebook it might be, in a home office landscape strewn with notebooks.

The impetus for the plan, way back when, was my admiration for a friend who had not only managed to pick up the pieces when a marriage ended, but also returned to a book project at a very propitious time for it. Dr. P was another person who inspired me, as she pursued her Columbia MBA on weekends, leading to where she is now: running the melanoma program she built herself at Weill-Cornell. At the time I thought it was what these women had done leading up to turning 52 which conferred their power.

What did I actually do in the past seven years? I had about 20 CT scans and 20 MRIs of my brain. I went through untold numbers of bottles of eye drops of different types. I moved from NYC to Maryland. I watched my kids grow into the enormous almost-men they are today (nearly 17 and 13) and watch them develop musical chops that far exceed any I ever possessed. I gave building a translation career my best try, ultimately deciding I was never going to earn more than a serious hobby might bring in. I doggedly pursued library work, enduring interview after interview, until at long last I found a library that was willing to accept me even though my resume had gaps, and even though I didn’t walk in the door knowing how to do the work. Now, just a year later, I am feeling more confident and competent in the job.

I can’t pinpoint anything I started doing in the past seven years that has made appreciable change in my life, career, or outlook. But I have begun to feel something like power that stems from deep competence. The way I can get an email at work, map out who and what needs to be done to address it, and suddenly find myself convening a meeting with five other people to start the ball rolling. The way I tend to panic when I’m helping plan a semester of adult education classes for my volunteer job, then sit down to list out the classes we have planned and realize we’re actually in better shape than I thought. I feel like I even cook differently, more confidently, when I get the chance to — being back at work has meant the burden has shifted more heavily onto J., who runs a business and somehow manages to cook dinner many more nights a week than he should.

Maybe I’m finally attaining what I had thought would be the product of seven years of dogged attention to productivity and the external metrics thereof. Maybe what this is all about is the solid feeling I get from doing things I have somehow learned to do by spending time on the planet that we scrape ourselves across every day to make our living, to prevent people from dying or even crying, to gather and to scatter and to dither and to matter. Meeting people and talking to them, making mistakes and more mistakes, ideally learning from some of them.

Signing off, because I’ve fallen asleep writing this about ten times, another benefit of my new 52-ness. Good night and good luck.