Every summer my husband and I pack our suitcases load our kids into the car and drive from tense crowded New York City to my family's cottage in Maine. It's on an island with stretches of sea and sandy beaches rocky coasts and pine trees. We barbecue swim lie around and try to do nothing.

Beauty is unbearable drives us to despair offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

There are amazingly wonderful people in all walks of life some familiar to us and others not. Stretch yourself and really get to know people. People are in many ways one of our greatest treasures.

When I was younger my whole sense of self-worth was based on whether or not I was working which was awful. And I had a baby at 20 years old so it wasn't just about me. At around the age of 30 there was a stretch where I wasn't working - certainly not on anything I liked anyway - and I started to do other things.