The Someday List

A week in the French Alps reminded me that some of the best things in life begin with being terrible at them.

There is a funny thing about the list of things you keep telling yourself you will get to eventually, it does not get shorter on its own.

At first, that list feels exciting. These are the places you want to go, the skills you want to learn, the adventures you imagine yourself having someday. But if enough years go by, the list starts to feel a little different. It becomes less about possibility and more about postponement.

I had been carrying around one particular item for years: learn how to ski.

Not because I was obsessed with skiing. It simply represented one of those experiences I always assumed I would get around to eventually, the kind of thing that quietly follows you from one year to the next while life stays busy.

Then one day I realized I was spending more time thinking about it than doing it. So in my 50s, I went to the French Alps and learned how to ski.

I based myself at Club Med La Rosière, high in the French Alps near the Italian border. I chose it for a simple reason. I wanted the support system. Lift tickets, equipment, lessons, meals, all of it was handled. I did not want to spend weeks figuring out logistics. I wanted to focus on the much larger challenge of learning how to ski.

Day one was humbling, with plenty of beginner slope energy and at least one fall that required both physical effort and emotional resilience to recover from. Learning something new as an adult feels different than it does when you are a kid. Children seem almost immune to embarrassment, and they bounce back from mistakes without a second thought. Adults, on the other hand, are often acutely aware of who might be watching. We carry a greater fear of looking foolish, and every setback can feel more personal. Skiing forced me to confront that reality from the very first day. Fortunately, the mountain provides a fairly quick reminder that everyone falls.

By the third day, something began to click. I started understanding how the skis moved beneath me. I stopped feeling like I was negotiating with gravity and started feeling like I might actually have some influence over the outcome. Each run felt a little smoother, and each day brought a little more confidence.

There were still moments that reminded me I was very much a beginner, including the time I accidentally trapped myself behind the chairlift safety bar because I had thoughtfully rested my feet on it. My instructor pointed out the painfully obvious solution, we both laughed, and a few minutes later I was back on the lift.

Somewhere around then, I realized that I was having fun. It certainly did not hurt that every day ended with spectacular mountain views, great food, and enough fondue to convince me that skiing might actually be worth the effort. But the real surprise was discovering how much I had missed the feeling of learning something completely new.

We spend so much of adulthood operating inside routines. We do what we already know how to do and stay in our comfort zones. It feels safe, but it quietly narrows our world. At some point, we stop giving ourselves chances to be surprised by what we can still learn.

That week became a reminder that the hardest part of most things is not doing them, it is deciding to begin. Most of us have a someday list: learn a language, take the trip, start the business, write the book. Whatever your thing is, it has probably been waiting patiently while life found new reasons to postpone it.

We tell ourselves we will get to it when life settles down, when work slows down, when the kids get older, when the timing is better, when we feel more prepared. But the truth is that life rarely creates perfect conditions. The list does not get shorter while we wait. If anything, it gets heavier.

One afternoon on a mountain in the French Alps, I was tired and cold and my legs hurt and I was on my third run of the day, and somewhere in the middle of a turn that actually worked, I stopped thinking about it at all. I was just doing it.

That’s the thing about someday. It doesn’t arrive with fanfare. It just quietly becomes today, and then yesterday, and then a story you tell over too much fondue.