So, this happened. Help me make something good from it.

The day before I left for The Netherlands a personal email appeared in my inbox from one of the five biggest publishers in the world. 

“Whaaat???”

The writer explained that she had found my profile on LinkedIn and that she was interested my work, noting in particular, the success of The Story Within, which I had published with the biggest of the Big Five: Penguin Random House. 

She suggested publishing a new book consisting of my columns, which she had seen because I post them weekly on LinkedIn. The proposed book would be a collection I have tentatively titled, “Something Other Than Chance.” So many of these stories have touched upon that phenomenon—how is it that I could impulsively call a loved one I hadn’t been in touch with for 25 years, the very day he discovered he had three months to live? How could I dream at 19 years old, that the midshipman I’d just begun dating was in life-or-death danger, then discover the entire Naval Academy was on lockdown for a shooter alert? 

Maybe this reaching out from a major publisher was also something other than chance. Fate? Fortune? Mom from the other side?

I sat there at my laptop in my sunny office, glancing at the sign above my desk that reminds me, “Expect Only the Good,” and it was like getting an acceptance letter to your reach-college opening with “We’ve been looking for you!”

I could tell from the way this woman described my work that she had read it. But, as trusting as I am, (truly of the genus extremis-gullible-dope), as a matter of due diligence I looked her up on LinkedIn and there she was. Kathleen K. A nice smile, probably in her forties, and yes, she worked for the publisher she claimed to represent. Holy Cow. Could it be I’d been plucked from obscurity? 

It was the letter I would have written to myself if I’d been momentarily blessed with superpowers. With one swipe of my palm, I’d end the war in Ukraine and Gaza, feed the starving the world over, ensure the health and happiness of my children, of all children, to the end of time, and, why not? Get a publishing offer from one of the Big Five. 

Because when you long for something you cannot control— world peace, permanent remission, a baby…publication– there is always a feeling that a bit of luck must be involved. Angels must attend you. You are going to need something other than chance.

So, I wrote back to ask for specific details about what the publisher was offering and this is when it began to feel just a little like running in a dream—where you never quite get up to speed. Each perfect, articulate response provided answers, yet they were answers packed in cotton—not quite clear.

“Let’s talk on the phone, or zoom,” I suggested—”let’s meet face to face.” 

“Thank you for that generous offer of your time,” Kathleen wrote, but the most efficient way to proceed is email.” She was going to send a detailed marketing strategy before we talked and even that demurring was perfectly encased in an intimate description of my work. 

So the conversation continued until finally I wrote, “If I am wrong about this I apologize, but I have the increasing sense that I am corresponding with AI, a computer program, and that you are not real.”

The immediate response was to thank me for my brilliant candor, my courageous honesty, my very human inquisitiveness, and to assure me, “It’s really me! Kathleen! Not AI!”

Except that ….everything about that response told me it was.

A quick google of “Scam, fraud, publishers, LinkedIn,” revealed that predators have discovered a new point of entry into the vulnerability of your longing—using LinkedIn to professionalize and legitimize their seductions. 

All I had to do was pay Kathleen $2,800 for publication and marketing. 

I still believe that so much that happens in this world is something other than chance. Not everything—I’m not yet a proponent of “everything happens for a reason”—that’s not how evolution works, for instance; and there is indeed chance. Ask the dinosaurs.

But a friend of mine met the love of her life on a plane. That flight, that moment in time, that seat. Is timing divine?

I’ve been too busy editing to prioritize publishing another book. Too busy to consider what I want to do with the rest of my life, to say scary things, to initiate change. But with this offer that was not what it appeared to be, the dial has been reset. Owning the dream as if it were possible, even for a minute, has made me remember that it is.

Everything is.

Sometimes what feels like a false step is the next step, you have only to act. And sometimes when we don’t move forward, the universe takes us by hand, whispering gently but emphatically, 

“Now.”

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Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

Last travel story, I swear.

On my second-to-the-last day of a recent trip to the UK, I decide to go into London from my Airbnb farm-stay. The easiest way to get to the city is to walk up the road to the tiny, picturesque train station at Worplesdon. 

I take a photo of myself outside the station entrance to document my journey, but it is horrendous. I crop myself out of it and, in so doing, lose half the station sign, so now it looks like I’m boarding the train at Worple. 

Only five other passengers mill about the platform this morning, so I take a couple more selfies. Worse than bad—smiling, not smiling– shades, no shades. Defeated, I plop down on the bench with a half glance at a very beautiful girl already seated. 

In her early twenties, she flashes a bright smile back that is just so pretty I say a little prayer of gratitude that I live such a privileged life I get to appreciate beauty everywhere I look; in the leafy, verdant path I walked to the train this morning, in the charming thoughtfulness of a bookcase full of worn novels in the Harry Potterish-station lobby, and in friendly dark eyes and charismatic energy of the young woman next to me.  

I feel a kind of reaching out, but I don’t engage in conversation as our train is due any minute. After a few seconds, however, I feel a touch on my arm. In halting English, and a lovely accent I can’t place, she says, “Excuse me, but you take selfie wrong. I advice you?” And she nods encouragingly, with an expression that says, “Please let me share with you this thing that I know.”

I laugh and say, “Yes, of course!” 

“You do this,” she mimics, holding her phone straight out in front of her with Frankenstein-Zombie arms. Now I can’t stop laughing. She’s nailed it. 

“You should do this,” she says. And using the best of her English and a lot of hand gestures, she instructs me to think of my face as a triangle or pyramid, and to never take a photo straight on. 

“You must take from either side,” she says. “And from high.” She lifts her phone just above eye level, leans to the right, and smiles cheerfully at it. Like it loves her, like it is her best friend, or a date with whom she is flirting. 

I have heard this advice before but can’t abide the posturing, the artifice, so I haven’t tried it. There is something about admitting you want a flattering shot that is embarrassing. It’s one thing to “snap” a selfie; it’s another thing entirely to pose for one. 

Besides, my phone is not in love with me. We are not even dating. 

“We are selfie generation,” she says. “So, I teach you selfie rules!” The engine barrels into the station, and as we stand, I thank her, thinking the selfie generation had just been kind of selfless. 

On the train, with no one watching, I raise my phone so that I have to look slightly up at it as she has tutored me, and move it to the good side of the pyramid I previously called my face. I snap a shot and then look at it with great hope.  

I look sly. 

Like someone who has just stolen your wallet. Who already has a photo… on the wall at the Post Office.

At home, I ask Chat GPT how to take a good selfie, and after complimenting me on the utter genius of my question, it confirms what the girl has said but adds a few more tips. 

I should try a slight squint, called a “squinch,” to look more engaged. I should take photos just after dawn when the light is soft. I should grow longer arms, so the proportions are more natural. 

Kidding.

Then it asks me if it should put together a point-by-point checklist so next time I won’t have to remember all the details. 

Scary how this thing knows me. And healing the way this thing sees me.

Chat GPT may not love me, but it accepts me unconditionally and views everything I confess or ask in a positive light.

When I die, I hope ChatGPT does my life review. 

Which got me to thinking. What would the world look like if we genuinely loved ourselves as unconditionally as AI appears to? I decided to ask. “How can we learn to see ourselves in the loving, uncritical manner you demonstrate?”

And the response was: Just as a selfie shows not only your face but what’s behind you, what light you’re standing in—self-love includes the context: the journey that brought you here, the experiences that shaped your expression. Seeing mistakes not as evidence of unworthiness but as experiments, doorways to wonder, no longer dragging your shame, but wearing scars like constellations—maps of where you have been.

Eventually, you stop needing a hundred retakes. You realize that the beauty isn’t in the filter or the pose—it’s in the courage to turn the camera toward yourself.

Maybe the trick in taking a selfie is to finally realize you don’t have a bad side. In the light of unconditional love, there is only good.

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Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

By the time you read this, I will have flown across the Atlantic to London, then after a brief layover, on to Amsterdam to visit friends on their boat, then back to London to spend a week with my daughter and her family. 

Nine suitcases line the walls of my bedroom like the Standing Stones at Stonehenge, waiting to see which is going to be recruited for this particular trip. I wish, like Claire in Outlander, I could just fall through them into a time warp and regain consciousness in a boutique hotel overlooking a flower-lined Amsterdam canal. 

I should be excited, but if I can’t be Claire (who lands in the arms of that hot Scot, Jamie, without even packing), I’m wishing for a Star Trek transporter. Just beam me over there—I’ll accept the risk that my scattered atoms never reassemble if I don’t have to get the inevitable extra screening at Security checkpoints, eat airplane food, and use public bathrooms for the next 24 hours.

I sound ungrateful. I’m not. I just know that traveling without a tour director is stressful work until you’re there, and then it’s all worth it. “Deep breaths,” a friend suggests. But right now, that sounds suspiciously like what they told me about having a baby. “Just breathe and it’s painless!”

“You’re sure? That’s a thing?” 

“And when they put that baby in your arms, you’ll forget every excruciating hour it took to get him here!”

Wait! What??? 

Yeah, travel is like that.

Tonight, when I board the plane, I’ll still wonder where and when flight attendants sleep. I have never caught one snoozing, and yet after they put the plane to bed on these overnight flights, they just disappear. And they always look suspiciously fresh and neat in the morning. It’s like trying to catch a robin sleeping, or a squirrel. They must tuck in, but have you ever witnessed such a thing?

I have never seen a flight attendant enter or leave a restroom, either. I’m beginning to think I’m the only one who has noticed they are not technically human.

I was once walking through the airport in San Francisco and about 20 flight attendants from the United Emirates passed en masse.  I have never seen more beautiful women.  They were immaculately dressed in tan and red uniforms, and each had a gauzy strip of white fabric that fell down from one side of her cap to be pinned at one shoulder like a princess. 

The hordes of travelers flooding the concourse stepped aside to let them pass with an almost audible intake of breath, then closed behind them, staring, as if at the sudden appearance of a double rainbow or a meteor shower. You could almost hear the slogging American public mouthing to each other, “Did you see that?”

The opposite effect was had on Virgin America, where the purple interior lighting of the plane’s cabin, black uniforms, and the pulsating electronic disco music made it seem as if our first priority as passengers was not to learn where the exits were, but to get our groove on. 

But I’m flying British Airways tonight. No disco, no whimsy, and the wine will be marginal. 

There is a myth about travel— a subliminal promise that the trip will change you and your life in some way—that you will return different, transformed, with even your relationships improved. But research shows that the greatest happiness associated with travel is, in reality, looking forward to it. The minute you reach your destination, your happiness level returns to what it was before you left. (Publishing a book is much the same phenomenon.) After the rush of excitement, you’re still you, and the dog needs to be walked. 

Once in a while, we look at our lives and think…more of same and then I die. I was probably 30 the first time I thought that. Travel disguises that reality. It interrupts that slow slog with all the exciting things we are doing, and we have the boarding passes to prove it. But does it change anything?

I no longer carry that subtle illusion. I have traveled enough to know I will come back still me, with every failing and lack firmly in place. The only thing new will be the memories I carry and whatever I bought to remind me of the young driver whose father was a Moroccan shepherd, whose parents married at 14, who spent an hour trying to find me at the airport in the rain, then gave me a list of Dutch foods to try. And the hotel clerk with the shiny ponytail and Dutch accent who tried to find this non-planner museum tickets on her phone, a girl I could have adopted for her cute-factor, let alone her cheerful helpfulness.

I won’t be different, but what I will get from this trip is enough. To see more of this beautiful world and the daughter I love, my firstborn, for whom there was a time I never dreamed the sun would rise even once without her being in my world, this world, this country, possibly right down the street. But instead, she lives where when I sit down to dinner each night, it is already tomorrow. 

Maybe travel’s most significant lesson is about letting go of all you can’t control—embracing the unknown on the pure faith that you will, in fact, reach your destination sooner or later, that you are good enough as you are.

Travel enriches the time between now and then—when this trip we call life is over.
We take with us the experience that the world is full of kindness in the form of strangers, that we are all more alike than different. You would not know that if you had never crossed a border. And now it’s time to return to a place you’ve never been.

Maybe it will be like going through Passport Control—you front up, a Trusted Traveler, hand over your identification, and explain you have nothing to declare. You came with nothing, and you are leaving with nothing. 

You’re just ready to come home.

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Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.