A YEAR OF TRYING

Expeditionvision - The way I'm doing it.

For a long time, my writing has been about remembering … and the fear of forgetting.

Remembering the noise of the house when the kids were home. Remembering the chaos, the schedules, and the confidence of being needed. Then the kids were gone. My world packed up and moved away. I was alone, feeling sorry for myself, and blaming my husband.

Those memories became Empty Mess, and eventually they became a habit—one essay a week—and a small way to try to make sense of the quiet.

But lately, I’ve felt a shift.

Now, I don’t want to remember quite as much as I want to try …

Not “try” in a dramatic, reinvent-yourself way. I’m not launching a program or offering a system. I’m not chasing transformation. What I’m curious about are the small things—the ordinary things that I’ve thought about doing, postponed doing, or quietly assumed that I was finished doing now that the kids are grown and have left the nest.

So, I’m starting something new, and calling it my Expeditionvision. I created this smashup word last year and announced it as “My Word of the Year.”

Well, I’m now ready to start.

Expeditionvision is simply one small experiment a week, tried on to see how it goes, and written about honestly. No mastery. No optimization. No advice. Just action, attention, and reflection.

Each week, I’ll try something related to the things I love … food, marriage, usefulness, joy, better health, forgotten lessons, the house, the garden … or the everyday things that make up my life after being Mom. Then, I’ll share my experiment with you.

“The Way I Did It.”

This phrasing matters to me. I’m not interested in telling anyone how to do anything. There’s no shortage of how-to content in this world. What I’m interested in is what it feels like to do something because you want to—to notice the hesitation, the resistance, and the small surprises that don’t show up until you try it.

If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know I’ve written about usefulness, competence, overthinking, marriage, and the quiet fear that creeps in from a lack of purpose. Expeditionvision isn’t a departure from those themes—it’s a way of moving through them instead of circling around and dwelling on them.

My hope is that you don’t think of it as “Here’s what you should do” but more as “Here’s what happened when I did this.”

Some weeks, the experiment will be tiny. Some weeks, it might feel oddly gargantuan. Sometimes I’ll learn something. Sometimes I won’t. That’s part of the point of it all. I’m not looking for tidy conclusions—just honest observations.

And I don’t want to do this alone.

If there’s something you’ve wanted to try but haven’t—something small, ordinary, or quietly intimidating—I’d love to hear about it. Maybe it’s cooking, asking for help, leaving something unfinished, using the good stuff, letting something grow wild, or doing nothing when you’re used to being useful. I can’t promise that I’ll try everything, but I’m open to reader suggestions as part of this experimental year. This feels like the right next step for me—not a reinvention but a continuation with action.

So, if you’re willing, come along. I’ll try something each week and let you know the way I did it.

A Year of Trying.