Commentary: There’s plenty of time to do everything on his and hers bucket lists

I have been bothered about the message in that otherwise wonderful movie “La La Land.” It’s that you can have your great love, or you can follow your dream, but you can’t do both.

I just don’t want to believe that!

A lot of things divert us from following the path to our vision, but does that mean we can’t have a life of love as well as a life of creative fulfillment?

As for me, I chose to postpone my writing dream for a different dream — the life I spent with Lee raising our kids. During the years, while enjoying children and grandchildren, I attended writers’ conferences off and on. I completed my bachelor’s at age 59 and then attained my master’s in fine art in creative writing, also dreams of mine.

But still I didn’t write much.

It seemed to me as if all good things would come in time. That sounds Pollyanna-ish. And Pollyanna was a fictional character. Probably. Or maybe Eleanor Porter, the author, was indeed that optimistic girl. Porter didn’t start publishing until she was 45, which was getting up there in 1913.

Like me, publishing in my 70s.

Although I’d published this and that, I only began writing for real in 2013. I wanted to write Lee’s life story while he could confirm the information I’d learned about him, and also get down the stories he’d told — interweaving mine as well — over our almost 50 years together.

Lee did read and approve “You and I and Love Soup.”

Then I wanted to write about what has to be done during the first year for a widow or widower, and then about some of the happenings in my life, and then a workbook for recording all the important information in our lives, plus what we want whom to get — once we’re not here.

I had a brief chat with my gynecologist the other day. She said it seemed to her that I was taking good care of all parts of my being: health, family, friends, travel, creativity — that I was doing it all.

She and her husband, both near retirement, had considered that they weren’t “doing it all.” They’ve only just drawn up their bucket lists. She laughed because their individual lists do not have a lot in common

I reassured her that they can do it all, his and hers, so long as they accept that they can’t — or that they don’t have to — do it all at once.

Perhaps many times in our life we’ve felt that we haven’t been able do something we want to do because of other commitments and responsibilities. But think about it. If we freely took on those obligations, then we are doing what we want to be doing! And if we’re lucky, we will also have time to do that thing we set aside.

So maybe I am overly optimistic to believe we can have both, that we can do it all. And although I’m a person who knew all her life what she wanted to do creatively, I just wasn’t in a hurry to do it.

I used to profess that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t have anything to say. Now I can barely turn myself off.

And there is still enough love to go around.

LIZ SWIERTZ NEWMAN lives in Corona del Mar.