The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

by Diana Marcum

It’s such a pretty fantasy that we can let in the world and stay the same.

“Here’s to nothing,” he said. “That’s when anything can happen.”

Seemike the rjght way to live

I find it to be an uncontested truth that at newspapers regardless of whatever happens at the corporate-overseers level, someone in the ranks will still find a way to get things done. Actually, I find that to be a truth about the world in general.

If this was the last night of the world, I wanted to do something different.

We have this one life. But all the roads not taken, all those other lives we might have lived, are a part of it too. Yearning—that terrible, beautiful gaping yawn of want for a person, a place, a chance, a change, or something we can’t name—leaves craters, spaces for us to hold more of life. Saudade might be a strictly Portuguese word, but aching want is a universal condition.

There’s a much-quoted line by Portuguese writer Raul Brandão: “Já percebi que o que torna as ilhas belas e as completa é a ilha em frente”—“I have come to understand that what makes the islands beautiful and complete is the island that’s across the way.” Maybe life is like that. For all our talk about living in the moment, what makes the present beautiful and complete is also imagining what we will do next.