A nurse and I were talking in an examining room recently, waiting for the doctor to come in. She asked me if I could have anything I wanted, what would it be?

I was surprised by how quickly I answered.

“I have everything I want,” I said.

She was young, and I saw that I had shocked her. “Oh,” she said, “I want a lot of things.”

Maybe, I thought to myself; she had the luxury of wanting things because she had so many years ahead of her.

Perhaps I don’t want things because I am closer to the end than the beginning. Maybe she just thought I was a crazy old man.

The nurse left the room, and I had a few minutes to think by myself. It was true, I thought. It was a big deal. Those sounded like sacred words to me: I have everything I want.

For the first time in my life, I don’t want anything that I don’t have.

Or put differently, I have everything I want or need.

I’ve wanted things I didn’t have my whole life – a different family, other places to live, other people to live with, more fame and success than I was given, more money, more children, more sales for my books, more fame and acclaim.

I wanted the kind of literary life animal writers doesn’t get; I wanted to be a famous writer with a house on a dune on Cape Cod, I wanted to write in the same Provincetown shack O’Neill wrote his plays in. I wanted to live with writers and poets and playwrights and artists.

I marveled at my own words. I’ve never been able to say this before in all of my life. I wouldn’t have dared to say it.

I love my life, and I accept it one day at a time.

I love Maria. I love our farm. And our farmhouse. I have love and work, which is all Freud said we needed to be happy.

I love our dogs and donkeys, even our sheep and barn cats.

I love my blog; I love to take my photographs; I love to write what I want. I love my study; I love Zinnia, who lies at my feet while I type this piece. I even love going to the gym.

I  love my poor Hybrid SUV, which is coming back to me tomorrow after a month of car surgery.

I don’t wish to be young again, or for more time to love Maria. I don’t wish to live for years and years. I accept my life and the nature of life. I do live in the now.

Every day I ask myself if I am good, and every day the answer is yes. That is all I need. That’s as far as I can go.

I can’t foresee the future, but I know what the future will bring: one day, the answer will be no, and that will be a different story.

I accept each moment fully, and I am at ease in the here and now and thus at ease with myself.

If I am good now, then I am good.

I will do my best to be grateful for what I have and graceful about letting go. As I grow older, I have found – crashed into – a safe harbor, and I put my anchor down right here on this farm.

People are always writing me to say how lucky I am, but I have never put much stock in the idea of luck.  I am responsible for my life, not the fates. Thinking that people are lucky enables me to take the credit away from those who work hard to have live meaningful lives.

I hear it all the time: they must be lucky.  But life is a choice, not just a gift.

I believe life is what we make of it, and I have worked hard and shed much blood and made horrendous mistakes to have finally come to the life I have.

I spoke of this with a friend last night, and she said her story was different. She is getting older and deeply mourns the loss of family and friends. These are shadows over her life.

Thinking about this conversation and wondering if I am a freak, I realized that having disconnected myself from almost all of my family and having made few lasting friends in my life, I have unknowingly insulated myself from the kind of loss my friend feels.

I don’t have many people to lose. Maybe I always meant to spare myself that.

I was too disturbed to know how to make friends or keep them, and now, it is not something I yearn for.

It’s too late; it’s not in my DNA.  I’ve moved on. I grew up as a loner and have lived as one until I met Maria. Writers work alone.

There is no loneliness in my life because there are not a lot of people in my life.

There are benefits from being solitary.

As I get older, I’ve entered a new and different space.

I am at peace with myself, comfortable with who I am. I have what I need.  I have what I have always really wanted – love, freedom, and peace.

I believe the future belongs to the young, the men, the women, the new Americans; it is for them to shape tomorrow and fight for what they need and want.

It’s not really for me; I need to get out of the way. In some ways, I am already the past. I am eager to live, not to fight.

My job is to do some good every day, mentor when I can, write until I drop, read every day, take pictures every morning,  share what I have learned, and safeguard my true happiness.

I have everything I need.