Humorously – and mercifully – I've seen glimpses before. For example, I brought color into my yard, and the two 12-inch painted tin butterflies were wonderful—five years ago. So I added copper animal-topped plant stakes, brightly-colored flowered pots, wing-flapping giant dragonflies, and tin art forms that look like flowers in a picture frame. My neighbor admired how I brought the yard to life, but the summer sun is brutal and beauty rarely lasts a year in Arizona.

I foresaw my landscaping become a hodgepodge of faded birdhouses, feeding stations, ornaments and wishful thinking. I won't become a "cat-lady," but I will be an old woman peering out from a yardful of discolored ornaments that, to me, look as bright as the day I brought them home.

This week something changed. It hit me like a ton of bricks, though, gratefully, I've not yet been hit with even half a ton. Here's what happened. Even before we bought it, this Frank-Lloyd-Wright-esque house appeared to have little storage room. Moving in proved that correct. Living here nine years has emphasized it. We're regularly packing away cherished books, clothing and other items into our "short basement," at 5'7" technically a crawl space.

Streamlining, we sold our carpet shampooer at a fund-raiser, but living as we do, not exactly in a dust bowl but in the desert, I decided we needed serious professional help cleaning the bedroom and den carpets. I surveyed contractors, called one to book an appointment, and learned we'd need to move "little stuff" off the floors we wanted steamed.

In my mind, each room needed only two or three small things carried out for the carpet cleaning the next Tuesday. But as I relocated those few things, I saw more and more…five, six, eight trips I made from each room with armloads of stuff into the "short basement."

However, my first trip down that single step into the so-called "crawl space" shocked me. The aisle through was blocked by a tower of boxes that had fallen over. I didn't know from where or how, but it barricaded passage. Suddenly only two more days to move little tables, plastic plants, ornamental chairs, stacks of books—stacks and stacks of books—lamps, chairs, the sewing table, ad infinitum, seemed too few.

And there it was. My life flashing before me, in a more profound and final way than when I surveyed my two-dozen aging lawn ornaments. This house—all of a sudden I saw with all its tiny rooms 20 years from now with books and magazines and knickknacks and crafts and projects on every flat surface and piled knee deep from the floor up.

I indeed had not become a cat lady but a stack lady. Stacks of ideas to consider, stacks of books and papers to remember, stacks of fabrics with which to create, stacks of materials which might come in handy, stacks of sheets and towels that didn't fit this decor, racks of clothes that didn't fit this body – nor the last one I had…

That is the closest I've ever come to seeing the end of my life. I've fantasized being vigorous till 84 and wise till 92–possibly alive beyond that. I've thought about my fans and niece and nephews collecting my writings and publishing my incredibly amazing thoughts so that I become posthumously famous (I would have to be alive after death to appreciate this).

What I had not considered was leaving behind a vast wasteland of stacks and racks and packs of stuff of questionable usefulness for some one or ones to sort through or simply hire a hauler to take it all away.

This was the first time I felt so mortal, so close to the latter part of my life, definitely over the hill and on the side of it where gravity pulls all manner of things and stuff into my sphere so that I am surrounded by and encumbered with all of the things that were once important to me and things I kept because they might become important to me…ever full of hope, optimism and dreams for the future…

My life flashed before me, and I still have 20 or so years to pare down my hopes and dreams. That's tough. When you save something, you don't think about how ridiculous it may seem to someone after you're dead, because you do not even contemplate not being here. You collect and revere and save and store and stack stuff to prove you are here and that you will always be here, until you are not.

Then what?

First, we may have to eliminate people who are at a bare subsistence level. Or do they question themselves, too? I should have grabbed that cup of gruel from that old woman. She couldn't have caught me. Then I would be eating. She's probably going to be dead by tomorrow anyway.

Of course, I can think of people who to me appear to be grossly inadequate and yet I don't hear them questioning themselves. I remember the guy who was in my Ventura Publisher class when I taught at Learning Tree University in Los Angeles. He did not know the software (a thousand dollar program back in the days when virtually nothing was more than $250). I had written two volumes on it that were licensed for use by the State of Illinois for a sum that would still be a lot of money today. He planned to charge $65 an hour for his work. I, the instructor, was billing $25 an hour, and happy to get it, because people still thought print shop desk clerks were graphic designers.

Yes, I have met people whose egos seem to keep them from questioning themselves.

Being a woman, I'm more in tune with how women suffer, and, believe me, we can do it in more ways than you could itemize in a week!

• We suffer when we think we aren't good enough. And we suffer when we are so good that others feel bad they are not as good as we are.
• We suffer when we do too much and physically compromise ourselves. We suffer when we do more than those around us and are in psychic pain. We suffer when we do too little because we believe we should have done more.
• We suffer when we start something and wonder whether we should have begun it. Then we suffer when we have inklings we should abandon it. What about the people depending on me? What about sticking to what I started? And what will people think of me if I quit?

We also suffer when we're working hard to accomplish something, pulling ourselves through a keyhole as it were, and people around us are saying Do what you love. Don't try so hard. Believe and the Universe will support you.

Perhaps we suffer just a tad more when people around us are doing what they love, and prosperity attends them, and we cannot see when they paid their dues. Did they? Did they have a period of struggle while they honed their craft and found their niche? or did they just go out there and ask for it and believe and it fell in their laps? That really burns.

When I think about these people by name, the few I know, I tell myself they struggled at another time, when I wasn't looking. They paid their dues. We all must, right?

Does that make you feel any better? because it doesn't do much for me!

People are built differently. Some of us who grew up with the Calvinistic work ethic think we must earn every good thing that comes to us. Other people believe they do not have to earn anything. If they be, they be enough.

I wonder if we switched places, and Believers had to become doers and Doers had to believe and all would be well…I wonder whether each of us in our inimitable self-torment might find a way to suffer even more?

Win, lose or draw, we're still alive. Whitney Houston is not.

We've chopped a lot of wood over the last nine years. We're in our fifth winter of heating primarily with free wood (the last four years almost exclusively). We enjoy the exercise. I get to use the chain saw and carry wood. I have only recently been able to wield a wood maul after more than two years off because of a shoulder injury I sustained at the gym. I missed the splitting. And stacking and restacking (a good way to work through anger or impatience).

Recently while meeting someone new at a regular Saturday morning discussion group, I mentioned it was a difficult commitment to be there every week, because otherwise, I'd be chopping wood and hauling water. He asked whether I meant that literally or figuratively. We've done so much of both–literally–that I'd almost forgotten it was first a metaphor for being grounded, for doing humble things, for addressing with excellence the tasks lying nearest.

Chopping wood…whatever that means to you…

• forcing words onto paper
• folding clothes for your family
• forging new relationships, whether personal, political or professional
• serving on committees, because you're capable, and someone has to do it

I won't claim any great zen insights from these mundane tasks. I enjoy the sheer physicality of swinging a sledge hammer, maul or axe with all my might, often then facing a test of strength to extract the tool from an unforgiving stump. But it's oh so sweet when the log splits perfectly, revealing that beautiful grain and seductive fragrance. Or when it flies into three parts on one blow.

When were we ever charged to appreciate life and its chores in a certain way? Is it not enough to put one foot in front of the other, and continue life's tasks—whether the right one first or the other one first. How do you know So-and-So who said there is a better way—and a lesser way—to live knew anything at all more than you know? Whatever you believe about that is something you decided in your own mind.

Have you just thought of some mind wood that begs chopping?