Oh, the places you never thought you would go.

 In my current job, I get paid to travel to and hang out on college campuses. It's a great work environment, to be sure. Most campuses are leafy and lush with majestic brick, stone, or white columned   buildings. And the energy is infectious. I love hanging out and talking to college kids, just as I did during my 7 1/2 years as an Adjunct Professor. It's one of the prime times in a person's life, and even at my age of 48, I feel a much stronger bond and connection to 20 somethings than any one else my age. My body betrays me, but in my mind I'm still mostly 21.

So I am sitting there in a Starbucks at the student center, as I had 20 minutes to kill before my event started. I looked out the window at all the students rushing past on the streets and sidewalks above the cafe. It was a typically hot day in late August, 2nd week of classes. Backpacks, shorts, t shirts, flip flops and sandals moved back and forth across the brick layed walkways, and blocked off asphalt roads painted in giant splays of the school's logo.

So I looked at many of them and wondered: what would they become? They were all in the middle of hoping and planning for the rest of their lives, but what would ACTUALLY happen. For most all of them, most everyone, life would unfold in ways they could never expect. It happens to all of us. We envision, and dream, and plan how our lives will unfold, but only 0.01 % percent at best see things happen exactly as they planned.

Tall, short, trim, plump, neat, sloppy, brunette, blonde, red head, black, white, asian, indian: they all rushed by, a few stopping to quickly slap high fives or hugs and exchange speedy small talk. Which ones would get married? Which ones would get divorced? Which ones would have five kids, or make a million dollars, or go to rehab, or start their own business, or declare bankruptcy, or die in a car accident, or live to be 90? They don't know, I don't know, no one knows.

And then I wished I could see myself walking across my college campus, 28 years ago, late August, 1987. What would I forsee happening to me? It would be epically unkown. There is no way at that moment, I could have EVER envisioned or planned or dreamt about 99% of everything that would happen to me. Impossible. At that moment in late August 1987 as I scurried across campus with a backpack and most likely thin, loose dress pants, plain solid color t shirt, and rubber sandals, at that moment NONE of what would eventually unfold in my life would have ever been even the slightest vision in my head.

Even two months later it would have been incomprehensible, when I strolled across the plaza at the Tate Student Center and saw the table for the Peace Corps. Connect to that moment two months earlier as I walked, it was never in my head to ever consider joining that group that, when I graduated, would then find me a year later flying across the world to a tiny village in the middle of the Congo.

And then what about the endless parade of highs and lows that would follow the next 28 years: the stock market graph of all the sex, the travel, the booze and drugs, the failure, the depression, the success, the anxiety, the yearning, the searching, the lofty ascents, the devastating crashes, the marriage, the divorce, the births, the deaths, the joy of being a father to the best child ever born.

Then the ageless philosophical question: would you tell your younger self to do things differently? You would naturally want to avoid the pain, the stupid mistakes, but if you changed even one second of one day, would that have sent you on a radically different path? Maybe a worse one? Maybe you avoid that   disaster of a marriage, but then you never get to experience the purest, most intoxicating bliss of being a father to the sweetest 11 year old girl in the world.

It's been a very bumpy, painful ride, but if I saw myself walking across campus 28 years ago, I wouldn't say a word.