Katherine Lanpher

I was a few months shy of my 45th birthday and a confirmed daughter of the prairie, a lifelong Midwesterner, when I decided to turn my life upside down and take a job in Manhattan with comedian Al Franken. Before that move, I had been pretty settled in my life as a journalist and public radio broadcaster in St. Paul, Minnesota - but when I moved to New York on Leap Day 2004, more than my address changed. My whole life changed.

I like to tell people that I moved to midlife and had a Manhattan crisis.

I don't think that midlife is necessarily a chronological point in our life; I think it can also be the moment when you realize that our time on the planet really is finite and if there is adventure to be had, we should grab it. That's why I moved to New York and that's why I found myself climbing up a two-story platform at the beginning of "Leap Days'' to take my first flight on a trapeeze.

It turns out I like to leap.

I'm a writer and broadcaster who makes her home in Manhattan now. Among my varied jobs, I'm a contributing editor for More magazine and I recently taped the pilot for a satellite radio show for More.