I heard Back to the Shack by Weezer for the first time on the radio this morning. Yeah, I know the song came out last year, so sue me for not keeping up with Weezer as of late.
Anyhow, a prominent line in the song is “Rockin’ out like it’s ’94.”
1994?
That’s the year I graduated from high school. Nobody rocks out like it’s 1994. You rock out like it’s the 1969 or 1973. You know to classic rock.
And then the depression sunk in. To today’s generation, Weezer is classic rock.
Now, I’m not saying I don’t like Weezer; that’s not the point of this post.
The point of this post is that I graduated from high school twenty years ago.
Twenty years a long freaking time.
I have very few regrets over the last twenty years. I have a pretty decent day job. I married the greatest woman on the planet and we’ve got the best kids anyone could possibly ask for.
But of the regrets I do have, one of the biggest is that I waited so long to start writing.
Throughout junior high and high school, I knew in my heart that all I wanted to do was write. But mostly due to my lack of knowledge, I assumed I could never “make it” writing, so instead of following that dream, I took up the consolation career path and went into computer science.
I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I remember a statement attributed to Warren Buffett claiming that his only investment regret was that he didn’t start sooner. He started at eleven.
I feel the same way about writing. I didn’t start writing fiction until I was in my mid-thirties. I’ve had some minor successes in the last few years, and I know there will be many more, but I still wonder where things would be had I not decided that writing would be a waste of time and really hit the word processor twenty years ago.
So for any of you “kids” out there, don’t waste one more second dreaming about your dreams.
Start chasing them.
Image by Ed Sweeney
