I’m not really a joiner. I mostly regard cultural trends as a shoe that’s about to drop, and I mostly regard my life as too busy to consider improvements of my general experience. Why would I go on a meditation retreat when I haven’t read “Middlemarch” yet? Why would I do stand-up paddleboarding when what I really want to do is watch the season finale of “Widow’s Bay?”

I turned 50 last year. One of my resolutions for my remaining few years is to stop asking why I am the way that I am and to start wondering if I should just feel lucky — not just that I have a job that pushes me toward new experiences, but that sometimes we accidentally choose a life that gives us what we need.

I was reminded of this resolution recently when I went downtown for a cold plunge, a so-called contrast therapy wherein I spent a half-hour in a sauna followed immediately by two minutes in an ice bath. I’d been told by various people that cold plunges were the cure for nearly everything — panic attacks, arthritis, depression, confidence issues, “brown fat.”

I don’t know exactly what it cured, but I do know for a few days afterward I found a little less pain in my knees and, beyond that, some inner peace.

There’s no study that can quantify why I felt this way, at least not yet. Because how do you measure a treatment in the category where the disease you are seeking to cure is … you?

Because I have been changed by all the strange missions my job as a magazine writer has sent me on, from the brutal (multiday juice fasts that had me eyeing my toddler like he was a turkey dinner) to the truly bizarre (colonics!).

I would never have gone further than a movie theater if it were up to me, but I find that I think more about the experiences I’ve had doing strange experiments for my job than I think about even the movies I loved the most.

I think a lot about the hypnotist who held my hand while I told her about the grandmother I missed. I think about my mother and me going to a medical marijuana convention together to help find her some relief from her insomnia and the way we talked when we — me and my mother — were high.

I think about the team of geologists in Iceland who had to drive me down what I think I remember correctly was a volcano because I’d made a wrong turn. They laid me down in the back footwell of the car because they had to drive backward and I was too afraid to look and had to disassociate — all because I was sent to figure out why Icelandic people are so happy.

I think about a life coach teaching me how to make fire with my own hands, and how I didn’t believe it could happen until it did. I think of the hours I spent making a simple roast chicken with a world-class chef as she psychoanalyzed my fear of cooking. This somehow allowed me to put to bed my distress over said fear: I don’t cook; it’s fine.

I think about a woman I met at a spa who blessed me during my treatment, who placed me on a literal throne and said to me — I went back to the story to find the quote —

I want to tell you something while you’re here. I want to tell you that your life could be good now. I want to tell you that you don’t have to make it through your problems in order for your life to be good now. I want you to know that you have a power within you that is unique, and that is only yours, and that when you learn how to harness it, you are going to make a real difference in the world. You are really going to change the world, Taffy.

How I cried when she said that. How the 50-year-old version of me is made of all those moments, and now is also made of this cold plunge.

I often wonder, if I stopped working as a journalist, if I’d still choose to do these things. Then I wonder if I’m thinking about it wrong. I did choose it. I said yes to those assignments when there were others that would have kept me at my desk. I think this and realize that maybe I’m not as far gone as I thought.

Read Taffy’s column about the cold plunge, along with these specially selected stories.

Tick-borne disease cases are surging in America. Now is the time for the federal government to step up and win the war on ticks, Jonathan Mingle writes.

“The Shampoo Effect” by Jenny Jackson: Welcome to Greenhead, Mass., a quaint beach town where the flies are as vicious as the secrets threatening to unravel a group of friends. Jackson’s second best-selling novel (after “Pineapple Street”) unfolds from the perspectives of four women — an aspiring writer who falls in love with a local, the pregnant ex-girlfriend of that local, an old-money type with her head in the sand and a perennial caretaker who’s tired of cleaning up other people’s messes. Their lives are as enmeshed as they could possibly be, yet the question remains: Who gets to tell their story? And will they still be like family in the end?

“A lot of people in show business only hang around with people in show business, because they’ve got something in common, they can relate to each other, and you get disassociated from what people might call ‘real life.’”

— Mick Jagger, speaking with David Marchese before the recent release of “Foreign Tongues,” the Rolling Stones’ 25th studio album. Read their full interview here, or watch a longer version on YouTube.

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

Chicken salad can be superb when the mayo’s done right. Too little, and your salad is dry; too much, and it’s gloppy and dull. Luckily, Andy Baraghani shows us another path: Ditch the mayo and sub for cashew butter, soy sauce, lemon juice and honey. Emily Weinstein, the editor in chief of NYT Cooking, recommends Andy’s recipe, plus recipes for steak quesadillas, sweet-salty-tangy halloumi, pan-seared salmon and more.

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