I had the most amazing summer.  I spent a lot of time by myself–while laying by the pool, walking my dog, and just sitting at my dining room table, I spent a lot of time just thinking.  And I got a really good sense of why having fun in life matters and why it’s so important to pursue one’s uniqueness and have an unusual life, which is something that I’ve really struggled with in this past, given my Supergirl roots.

If it gives you an idea of how I used to be, when I was 18, my motto for moving to New York and making the most out of the city was this: “Live the most interesting life possible; then you can talk about it at cocktail parties.”

Today, my motto is this: “It was a musical thing, and there was supposed to be singing and dancing with the music was being played.”

The latter is a quote from the speaker Alan Watts, who has a beautiful speech called “Music and Life” where he talks about how we spend so much time working and not enough time absorbing life.  (The cartoon version is ironically animated by the same guys who do South Park.  Looks familiar, right?)

The last section of the speech, to me, is so magical and powerful:

“Then when you wake up one day about forty years old and you say, ‘My God, I’ve arrived! I’m there!’ And you don’t feel very different from what you’ve always felt. And there’s a slight letdown because you feel there’s a hoax. It was a hoax! A dreadful hoax! They made you miss everything. 

“We thought life by analogy was a journey, was a pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is or maybe heaven, after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or dance while the music was being played.”