I asked my dad (aged, cognitively declining) the other day if he had had a bucket list of things he wanted to do in his life. He answered quickly, “No! If there were things I wanted to do, I just went and did them.” This matched my observations of him. He had gotten a pilot’s license and flew himself to places like Death Valley and Bryce Canyon, which inspired me to visit the same places when I was older. He and my mom bought a sailboat and we all lived aboard (mostly docked at a marina in the Bay Area) for a few years when I was a kid.

I was asking him about this because I was preparing to fly my family across the country to see a total solar eclipse from a friend’s back yard. I thought if my dad understood my plan, he would be excited for me. (I’m not sure he grokked it, but the internal representation of my dad that lives within me was pleased.) My mom, at least, fully understood my plan and nudged me to commit to it: yes, experiencing a total eclipse is worth, and yes, visiting friends is always worth it.

Indeed it was worth it. Being welcomed into our friends’ home in Indiana, the excitement and anticipation of the days leading up to it, fretting about the weather (which ended up cooperating), and the few minutes of totality itself.

A few months ago, I had told my dad how on a trip to Slovenia many years ago (my husband was attending a conference) I’d spontaneously taken a day trip by myself to see the Postojna caves, an extremely large cave system outside Ljubljana. The tour involved riding a train into the caves and then walking a mile or so through underground paths. That tickled the right neurons in my dad’s brain for us to share a moment of awe for the natural world and things we’ve been able to experience (e.g. being deep inside the earth), even if not at the same time.

Throughout his life, I did observe my dad mostly go and do the things he wanted to do. Not in a greedy way, but in a spontaneous, free-of-others’-expectations kind of way. One time when I was about 12, we drove from our home (a house at that point) on the San Francisco Peninsula over the hill to Half Moon Bay to watch the sunset. This blew my mind that you could just do that, you could just decide to go somewhere on a whim, and that in our case, the beach was way closer than I realized. This changed how I saw myself in the world, that I didn’t have to stick to the usual tracks and routines, but I, too, had the freedom to move around and explore just for the heck of it. And maybe this was more The Point of life than anything else.

I’ve had a lot of adventures crammed into the last month that I’m reflecting on now. Opportunities where long time friends invited me along, and I said yes (even though it was chaotic and disruptive) because I’ve learned from my parents that that’s how I want to live my life.

• In early March, my daughter and I took a ferry and camped on Santa Cruz Island in the Channel Islands. We went with a big group, including a friend from my college dorm.

• In late March, I went skiing with my college best friend in Whistler, and it reminded me of a trip with my parents to Vancouver Island. One of the books my dad is still able to recall is M. Wylie Blanchet’s The Curve of Time about a mom spending the summers sailing around the waters of British Columbia with her five kids in the 1920s.

• Earlier this April is when that eclipse took place. The people we visited were yet another friend from college and his family. We also helped plant a bunch of trees, and met many of my friends’ current friends. Meeting the new friends of my old friends was a theme of the other two adventures as well.

Maybe it was witnessing the alignment of the celestial bodies, maybe it was just all the trips close together shaking up my schedule and broadening my view on the world and myself. I can see a consistent thread of exploration and appreciation that came from my parents, that I’ve been cultivating with my friends and partner in adulthood, and that I’m trying to model and share with my daughter. I may occasionally lose sight of this at the small scale, day to day, but zooming out a bit, I really like my life. More adventures are in the works for the spring and summer.