Splendid living begins not with a plan but with a YES
Five Most Splendid Years™ is a growing community and a series of books built on one idea: the best chapter of your life is still available. It begins with Inspiration from 9,000 Miles Away.
How Splendid Living Begins
It was nine o'clock the night before my birthday. I had changed into my pajamas and was in my office, working on my book.
Somewhere in the house I heard doors opening and closing — the ordinary sound of a delivery. Then my husband called me into the living room.
I walked out still half inside my manuscript. It took two full seconds for the surprise to land.
My brother. His wife. Two friends who had flown in from Seattle. They had planned the whole thing in secret and pulled it off completely. I stood there in my pajamas trying to catch up to my own life.
The next morning, I treated them to breakfast at the Wynn hotel on the strip.
We opened a bottle of champagne earlier than anyone would admit was appropriate, yet entirely appropriate for that morning. Somewhere between the French bubbles, a shared lox board, and my fried chicken and waffle, I raised my glass to thank them, and heard myself say what I had not planned to say:
I am going to live my five most splendid years.
I had been circling the thought for months, but that morning was the first time I said it aloud. The champagne, the people, the floating lightness of it all — together they made space for something that had been forming quietly for a long time.
That is where Five Most Splendid Years™ began. Not with a flash of inspiration, but with a conviction that had been gathering long before I had words for it.
A year later, I have come to understand something about how splendid living works. It does not announce itself. It gathers. And one day — sometimes over champagne, sometimes at 5 a.m. — it speaks.
[ Say Your Yes ]
Why Splendid?
Meaningful. Awesome. Excellent. I had felt all of those already. I was looking for a word for something I had not yet lived — and it arrived on a morning walk, under a desert sky, unannounced.
Why Five Years?
Not a plan. Not a bucket list. A chapter — with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and a reason the number is five and not two or ten.
The Proof
Before there was a project, there was a year that gave the idea form.
At 5 a.m. on a winter morning, I heard a voice I was not looking for — a Macanese singer, on a stage I barely knew existed, singing in a language I had left fifty years earlier. I said yes to it without knowing what I was saying yes to. It took me to Macau, into an endangered cuisine, and back to a book I had stopped believing I would write.
That book is Inspiration from 9,000 Miles Away. It is the founding book of this project and the first proof of its philosophy.
What would your year look like?
What Are Your Five Most Splendid Years?
Every splendid chapter begins differently. Mine began with a voice at 5 a.m. and a birthday toast I did not plan.
Yours will begin elsewhere — with something set aside, something waiting, something improbable that turns up when you are not looking for it.
Five Most Splendid Years™ exists to help you imagine, name, and live yours.
[ Say Your Yes ]