One of the things I do is talk to people who aren't exactly on this plane. Like my dad, teachers who died thousands of years ago, and friends' dogs. (Sometimes the dogs are still on this plane, but they don't speak English.)

One of the people I talk to occasionally is my daughter.

Yesterday, she said "Faster."

My daughter isn't even conceived yet and she's already demanding. That better not be what she says to me when I'm making her a smoothie or we'll be having a discussion.

Now, most adults with their feet firmly planted in reality would say that I don't have any business having a baby right now, for a variety of reasons. Many of those reasons I agree with, at least when I'm pretending to be an adult with firmly-planted reality feet.

But if we all stuck to what we think is possible, realistic, and responsible - what society has trained us to do and believe - nobody would ever get anything done, whether extraordinary or magically ordinary.

Maybe if we focus on what we really want, life rearranges around us to support it.

Just because we’ve been trained to belief that things must be done a certain way doesn’t mean there isn’t a whole universe of expansive possibilities, new ways to get what we really want, what would make our souls happy.

It’s not that I could never be happy without biological children. Life without children is great. Free time, travel, sleep, reading a novel cover to cover, parties with friends without securing a babysitter.

But I know that if I don’t at least try, no matter what the circumstances of my life, I will never forgive myself. I need to go after this desire as best I can and surrender the ultimate outcome to god/universe/flying spaghetti monster/whoever is up there. And trust that by devoting myself to this, my life will rearrange to support it in surprising ways.

All I know is that I can’t keep putting up barriers around what I really want. Because there is always a way. There’s always a way to have what you truly want, even if it doesn’t look the way you planned.

Hanging out with somebody else’s daughter.