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(This is an excerpt from Mary Farr's newly published book, The Promise in Plan B: What We Bring to the Next Chapter of Our Lives. Posted by permission of the author.)

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them - that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

-Lao Tzu

I'm convinced that few of us actually choose to change much. Instead, we tend to resist moving with the flow until all else fails. Rarely do we resist, like a woman I knew who simply said no to the altered life that stood before her when her husband died. Instead, she retreated to an empty farmhouse on a remote hilltop. At age 94 she had no intention of changing anything, including her cloistered lifestyle. Living with other people would have required more adjustments than she was willing to make. She chose isolation.

I met Florence Sedgwick in the hills of western Wisconsin. Over the decades following her husband's death, she had withdrawn from her small farming community. Only an occasional bit of gossip reminded local residents that she ever lived there.

Jason Bauer in the Mondovi Co-Op Equity claimed she buried a fortune under her hay shed. A butcher from Bob's IGA insisted that she was once committed to a mental institution. A World War II veteran in the local nursing home insisted that she set fire to a bunkhouse up the valley on the Werlein farm, a fire that killed her supposedly philandering husband.

Nevertheless, after years of speculation, nobody really knew much about Florence, or Flossie, as she chose to be called. All this struck me as curious, because the unpainted fortress she called home was only a few miles from town and within riding distance of the place where I kept my horse Dixie. Every time we rode through the hills, I wondered.

Flossie's story was both troubling and seductive. I saw something deliciously alluring about the idea of vanishing, of casting off the complicated relationships, damage and responsibilities that sapped me of energy. That trip back to the drawing board to plot a new course for my children and myself had often felt daunting. Yet as she told her story, it was evident that Flossie bore the burden of estrangement and sadness that accompany a choice to retreat. Though she spoke with enthusiasm about her life on the forty, she clearly longed for human contact.

And so it happened that Flossie Sedgwick and I became unexpected friends.

- Mary I. Farr

Mary Farr is a retired pediatric hospital chaplain, teacher, motivational speaker and author who has devoted more than 30 years to exploring the worlds of hope, healing and humor. Her latest book, The Promise in Plan B: What We Bring to the Next Chapter of Our Lives, has been published by Shorehouse Books. In all, she has written five books, including the critically acclaimed If I could Mend Your Heart and Peace (Intersections Small Group Series).