I find the quieter moments are when I ponder most "what could have been." 

Not a full-on lamentation. But a needling kernel disquiet as to why'd I turned from my more authentic self for so long. Why'd I taken a circuitous path—meandering in and out a series of dispiriting ventures— only to have wasted years denying that more genuine self: my creative self.

The undeniable folly of youth may be in their sense that that youth is an interminable state or glacially paced.

It's not. 

Time troops guilefully forward, indomitable and determined. Those who feel our ephemerality—as opposed to understanding it in some aloof academic sense—know how precious a commodity time is. And how tragic the notion of time wasted. So, in those quieter moments: the long rides home, the waking hours, the occasional after-dinner cigar is often where the question raises its head: 

Why had I not decided to be a writer from the beginning?

The answer is complex.

In truth, I can't attest to ever having been overtly discouraged from writing. I cannot single out any vocal detractor. I held dear the moments when commended for my aptitude to put pen to pad. So why then, when I was to troop off to college, I eschewed an English degree for the prospects of computer science? I can only crease out the rationale because creative writing is an art and a passion.

And how often are the arts, nevertheless passions, touted as sensible ways to make a living? 

As a black boy from an underserved community, this dilemma compounded. The precept, that you do not waste your golden opportunity on a frivolity. "Make that money, Black Man," I'd hear in my mind's eye. To carry the hopes and unmet aspirations of those who look upon you with twinkling eyes and open-faced smiles as you resignedly affirm to write code over prose. 

I failed miserably as a computer scientist.

Which led to a cataclysmic spiral where I found myself out of school altogether; for years, I was adrift, flitting from one unfulfilling job to the next. It wasn't until my second go at college that I'd come to embrace my raison d’être fully.

Raison d’être.

My reason for being.

I'd rediscovered my Element (where natural talents meet personal passions as defined by creative culturist Ken Robinson).

And so, in quiet moments, I wonder: What if I'd ignored the monolith of well-meaning authority figures that ushered me toward an ostensibly realistic future? What if, in some fantastical temporal blip, I could go back and tell them all, "Hey, you're hurting me. You're herding me away…diminishing my creative self." 

Tell them that that creative self has served me well in every professional and personal life capacity.