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The best time to follow your passion is now

© Kelly L. Henderson

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. -Mark Twain

This is your life. It is not a dress rehearsal. You won't get a second chance at it. If you misuse it chances are nobody will notice or care much. Most will only have seen the surface of it anyway. They'll know that you were a good, law-abiding person, who raised a family, held down a job, walked the dog, and kept your lawn trimmed. Indeed, you were a perfectly acceptable citizen of the world and a credit to the human race.

They won't know that the whole time you were yearning to learn the flute, to open a coffee shop, or to live in France. Or maybe you wanted to teach school, or study art, or work with animals. You kept those dreams to yourself, living your perfectly acceptable life of quiet desperation.

Deep inside you believed you weren't worthy of pursuing the thing you wanted most, or that to do so would be selfish. Anyway, it was just too difficult to accomplish. It would take too long, cost too much, or be too inconvenient, so why even try? So the years passed. Your dream faded a little bit more. You got older.

A friend of mine, a crackerjack number cruncher, in midlife like myself, recently decided to revive his old ambition to be an accountant. (Yes, accounting can be a passion too!) He was commiserating the fact that the accreditation process might take as long as five years, so maybe it wasn't worth the time and the trouble.

"If you don't go ahead with this plan," I asked, "then tell me, what will your life be like five years from now?" The truth is, time is not our friend. I remember years and years ago idly calculating that in 2000 I'd turn 43 years old. At the time, 2000 seemed impossibly far in the future. And - joke of jokes - there was no chance that oh-so-youthful I would ever be as old as 43!

I was wrong.

Time passes whether you're working toward your goals or lying on the couch eating pork rinds. It passes whether you're actively planning your trip to the tip of South America or just daydreaming about it. It passes whether you're taking that accounting course or sitting around wondering if you should have taken that accounting course.