Plus, I imagined I would always know these people all my life. Even the kids in school who teased me or the housemate of a boyfriend who annoyed me–I just thought the world was a lot smaller than it is. Or was–before Facebook.

Still, getting the occasional or regular status updates is not the same as curling up on the couch for hours of talk, hot drinks in hand. It is not the same as taking over the highway together in our determination to stop the war. It is a lot shorter than a three-hour-long consensus meeting to decide what brand of toilet paper to use. Less detailed than surviving third grade side-by-side. More succinct than wandering the city in the middle of the night with feather boas askew.

I just thought I’d have enough time to live the thousands of lives each connection and context promised. And I don’t. “Life is what is happening while you are busy making other plans,” is the line that has been attributed to John Lennon, though it’s uncertain he said exactly that. In any case, while I love the life I turn out to have, it is just the one life and necessarily excludes the hundreds, nay thousands of others that lived as close to the surface of possibility at one time or another.

This is where fiction comes in. The art of imagining other lives is nurtured in us, the more so now that we have so many opportunities (the good and the bad) that we have to pass some by. I don’t know about you, but I am constantly carrying on little imagined conversations in my head–with the cop I fear will stop me and whom I am, before he exists, assuring misunderstood the situation because I would never merely slow at a stop sign or speed to make a light; with the jerk from high school whom, I’ve learned, lives very near where I buy my vegetables; with the person who assumed I had no artistic role to play in making our film because I was looking after the children. Those are the defensive or vengeful fantasies, but of course there are lovelier ones.

There are fan letters I write in my head but never send. I’ve been doing that since I was a child. Now there are blogs I imagine but don’t get down on the screen before life rushes in and demands my attention. There are futures I imagine, multiple, irreconcilable futures. There are worries and fears, the scenarios I concoct when someone is very late and can’t be reached by phone.

The reason there are meditation practices and self-help books to try to pin us to the moment, to reality, is that all of us, I venture, are close to spinning off into the fabricated possibilities we conjure at each juncture. What if? What might . . . ? It could have been . . .

That’s the business of fiction–to explore the truth of what doesn’t happen.

When I was in high school, I used sometimes to imagine that I was somebody else who had been transported into my life and my body and was getting to experience this entirely other, different life and perspective. In reality, I was ten years younger than my next sibling, and lived alone with my mother. I longed for a big family. In my fantasy, I would imagine that I was a kid with seven brothers and sisters who was getting to experience, for the first time, having my own room and no other kids around. It’s a little twisted, I know. But it’s a good training for a fiction writer. We are all tangled up with each other, are each other’s might have beens and could have happeneds.

Want to live a thousand lives? Wonder what it would be like to be him . . . or her . . . ? Write it and see.

As the New Year approaches, and we all begin to make resolutions and create–in our minds–a life in which we eat perfectly or exercise daily or read as much as Junot Diaz or write as much as Joyce Carol Oates, remember that you are using right in those moments a powerful muscle that may not create changes in your life, but which can create worlds on the page: your imagination. And even if you don’t make it to the gym on Jan. 1, you could probably make it to the laptop, which unlike the exercycle can be dragged into bed.

When someone catches you staring off into space, rehearsing a conversation, playing a small smile across your face, you can just tell them, “I was practicing writing fiction.”

Next step? Get those fantasies onto the page.

Happy New Year! Come join my online Building Your Book course, starting Jan. 15, or sign up for my monthly newsletter for writing tips and discounts on classes. http://www.elizabethstark.com/courses

Last year, I would be nursing, changing diapers, bathing, and at the same time, I would be reading, day-dreaming, plotting my novel’s next turn of events. This year I am charging around the park, agreeing that yes, that is an airplane overhead (Charlie has superears and notices everything that flies by no matter how distant), and yes, that is a kitty cat, and no it won’t hurt you and yes it says meow (or emwo, as Charlie said until recently), and no, you can’t bring your stick into the car but look, look, here’s another toy and plus we are going to sing every possible verse in Old MacDonald Had a Farm and BINGO and LEO (which follows the same pattern but is shorter) and CHARLIE (which is a tongue twister) and on and on.

This is fun, but it is not contemplative. That has meant that this month I arrive at 8 p.m. with everyone asleep and the kitchen interacted with enough to hold the health inspector at bay, and I sit down and look at my novel and it’s as if we have never met before. And not in a fun way. Not in a “I am well-rested and just curious to get to know you” way. More in a “what are you doing in my house and how can I get on with it and go to bed?” way.

As I told my fabulous friend Judith, who whizzed through town this week and was kind enough to drag herself and her Zach to the Y to hang out with my family, I am so domestic, I am feral. What I mean is, I am so locked inside the time-pressured, time-packed world of my life, that I am not really interacting with the world. Friends? Phone calls? What are those?

This is not, however, to be a litany of complaint. Well, not only. First of all, I want to inspire all of you who perhaps have not (or not yet) taken up the particular joys and challenges of having children. If I could have bottled what I’ve learned about the value of time and taken it before I had kids, I really do not know what could have stopped me. The pressure of forward momentum that has built up in me in immense, and yet when I had very little blocking that forward momentum, I have to say I was not more productive. Probably less so.

The other night, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about my father’s dieting. He would gain weight and then he would diet. When he was younger, he took up running for a while and ran the Bay-to-Breakers. He would get thin and then he would focus more on eating and less on running and he would gain weight, and then eventually he would diet again. He used to joke, “I’m trying to get back to my original 7 pounds, 8 ounces.” There was a fantasy that accompanied each diet, that he would transform into the person he was trying to become, that he would stay thin, fit and healthy in his eating habits (I’m not conflating all three, but I’m sure he did). Each diet was viewed as a journey to a destiny. The destiny was viewed as permanent, held out as a prize, a goal, but most importantly, something that he would become for good.

Now that he’s been dead for over four years, it suddenly occurred to me that the experience he had in his life was all those little diets, not one of becoming a certain body-type. That John Lennon expression, “Life is what is happening while you are busy making other plans” hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks.

If you diet, you are not becoming a thin person, you are dieting.

If you plan, you are not becoming an organized person, you are planning.

If you clean, you are not finally going to have a clean house, you are cleaning.

If you work, you are not becoming a rich person, you are working.

If you write, you are not becoming a writer, you are writing. (But if you don’t write, you are also not becoming a writer, and you are not writing!)

Right now, I am embroiled in budgeting and money woes (I alone, I know), and in the middle of the night, I realized that whether or not I solved those problems, I was spending my life worrying about them. Arrival is just a moment like any other. Life doesn’t truck in identities; it trucks in actions and experiences.

Does this mean, don’t do anything in hopes of achieving something? Of course not. But it does mean that looking at what and how you are doing on the way to something else is worthwhile, because that is what you are actually doing with your life. I probably cannot convey how starkly this appeared to me in the middle of the night.

And that also means that this month, I am writing. It’s doesn’t look like I want it to look. I want to be sitting in the early morning in a wooden beamed room with a large window overlooking the ocean, while the smell of waffles and berries wafts up to me, and the distant murmur of my family’s laughter blesses my ears, until I can descend, having written a pleasurable and brilliant chapter, to go play with them on the meadow that stretches toward the sea . . .

Even if one day, I have that life, it’s not today. And for all the pleasure and power of visualizing and visioning the future, there’s something to be said for visualizing and visioning the present. For me, right now, that means seeing myself in a place called “The People’s Cafe” in Berkeley, people of all stripes clustered around me at shiny wooden tables, a crazy woman making commentary about the West County Times, my steamed milk cup empty now, my blog drawing to a close, my kids at the Y with the babysitter, the book I am studying about organization sitting enticingly beside me, promising a future that could look altogether different from the present . . . but which by its very definition does not exist.

This is an exercise in visualizing the present. What does your life look like right now?