If…
Last night may have been the last time I'll have seen an incarnation of the Grateful Dead.
Not that it was a Dead show, exactly.
With only two surviving members of The Grateful Dead on stage, it would be disingenuous to name Dead & Company for anything other than what it is: a cover band.
Don't get me wrong - the music was fantastic, despite being somewhat overproduced and, perhaps, a little slow on the second set.
And I couldn't help but notice that Bobby, in a fashion that reminded me of Willie Nelson's last decade, was doing much more "talk-singing" than he used to.
But hey, he's old.
At 75, Bob Weir has now spent 60 years of his life traveling and making music.
Said differently, he's spent most of his life doing exactly what he wanted to do.
In contrast, by age 15, most of us are assimilated. By our mid-twenties, we're trapped. We live in towns for no other reason than having been born there, work jobs we hate to pay off student loans we can't afford, and can't wait for the day we can retire so we can start enjoying life.
Weir was just 15 when he met Jerry Garcia. They formed Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, which became the Warlocks and eventually The Grateful Dead.
He may have been just a kid, but he was intentional.
Of the Beatles, Weir once said, "What we saw them doing was impossibly attractive. I couldn't think of anything else more worth doing."
That's powerful and worth repeating.
"I couldn't think of anything else more worth doing."
All of us have thought about what we really want to do.
What we would do "if."
Very few of us have actually done it.
Today, Bob Weir is worth $60M and spends his time doing whatever he pleases. He's amassed his fortune while having the time of his life for most of his life.
He figured out at 15 what took me nearly 40 years to understand.
We can all do whatever we want.
There is no "if" except our own excuses.
We don't have to ask anyone. We don't need permission, and we don't need to wait on anyone to tell us it's OK.
We just have to go out and do it.
We have to make it happen.
And nine times out of ten, the only thing stopping us is ourselves.