Setting the stage for a letter to me

In my "re-launch" post, I confessed my love of country music, and told you about my favorite song currently on the country charts. At present, my favorite country artist is Brad Paisley. Almost without fail, I find every Brad Paisley song that hits the radio to either be very clever and funny, or to be rather profound. In addition to that, he's a terrific guitarist, and I really enjoy his voice. He also writes most of his own stuff, which I always appreciate.

I added Paisley's latest album, 5th Gear, to my collection shortly after it came out. Given how few albums I buy this days, that's a pretty strong statement about how much I enjoy his stuff at this time. Since I got this album, my favorite song off it has been one called "Letter to Me", in which he sings through a letter he would write to himself at age 17. I was pleased to find out recently that "Letter to Me" was about to start hitting the airwaves as the 3rd single off of 5th Gear. If you want to hear the song, which I highly recommend, you can check out this YouTube video. If you just want a glance at the lyrics, they are here.

This song has had me thinking about what I would write in a letter to the 17 year old me since I first heard it. Now that I'm back in the writing mode, I've decided that I will be tackling this task here at some point in the near future. So that's something you can look forward to if it interests you.

As I've been thinking through what a letter to the 17 year old me would look like, one thing I've definitely decided against is a laundry list of do's and don'ts related to specific decisions I've made throughout the last 10 years of my life. First of all, I don't know that's necessarily productive to go back and list 10 years worth of specific regrets, which is basically what such a list would amount to. Also, I can think of a number of decisions I made that, had I known how they were going to turn out, I wouldn't have made, and yet they ended up having a tremendously positive impact on my life in a roundabout way. I can think, for instance, of my rooming decision for my junior year of college. Anyone who was close to me that year knows just how chaotic and difficult that environment ended up being, and yet as a result of it, I got to know a guy who would become one of my best friends, and a roommate for 5 years.

Instead, I want to focus on principles that I wish I had used to guide my life over the last 10 years, and that I desire to have guide the rest of my life. Rather than looking back and just coming up with a variety of different decisions that I think would undo the regrets of my past, I want to look at my past and write down the big lessons I can take from it that will help me going forward. As I've thought it through, I'm convinced this is something we all need to do at one point or another. The past is a powerful thing, and the mistakes of the past can either define us and hold us back, or they can be learned from and used to propel us into our future. It's my desire to make the latter a reality for me.