Last night’s entertainment was The Life List, a sweet movie based on a novel by Lori Nelson Spielman, which I just added to my phone as my latest Audible acquisition. The movie (and I presume the book) is about a young woman whose life has not proceeded the way her 13-year-old self envisioned when she compiled the list of things she intended to do in her lifetime.

I wonder what my 13-year-old self might say about how it has turned out.

I wonder what my 72-year-old self would say. Bless the broken road that led me straight to this place? Perhaps. I did so many silly and/or stupid things along the way, but today wouldn’t have happened without all those twists and turns. I wanted to be a reporter, an author, a singer-songwriter, a disc jockey, and it all came true, just without the fame and financial independence and all that.

Wait. It’s too early for summing things up. The journey is still ongoing, and who knows how many more stops are on the way?

I wanted to be Ray Bradbury when I grew up, or Paul Harvey, or Lester Dent, or E.E. Cummings, but of course I was Warren P. Bluhm all along, incorporating snippets of the poetic storyteller and the radio commentator and the pulp novelist and the flaunter of convention into whatever this is that I am.

And let’s be clear: Early in that last run-on sentence, I said “I was,” but the last two words — the latest words — were “I am.”

It’s too early to put me in the past tense, and let me encourage you, too, dear reader. You and I may not have turned out the way we envisioned our lives way back when, and maybe there’ve been some painful endings that made us want to quit, but we have a pulse and we’re breathing, so the story is not over.

There are stories yet to be told, and adventures yet to be embarked upon. Stop looking back — look around — and keep moving forward. Who told you the best years are behind you? There’s still a future to live, and it’s just as possible the best is yet to be. You don’t know what the future will bring until you step into it.