I was going to be an astronaut, one of the men on the moon who dropped like weighted balloons from the metal gangway of the Eagle in the summer of 1969.

I was going to be a fireman, a farmer, a forest ranger. An archaeologist dusting ruins in the Valley of the Kings. An actor, or maybe a playwright. An artist with a studio in Montmartre, or a novelist with a drink in one hand and a pipe in the other, gazing into the harbour light of some down-on-its-luck port town, waiting for a sentence to arrive.

I didn’t do any of those things.

What I did instead was build a life. Not the life I imagined, but a strange combination of every one I dreamed of — if you squint sideways.

I married. I moved. I stayed. I raised. I paid. I failed. I worked. I tried.

It was never all at once. That’s the problem with dreams: they arrive complete, in a rush. But life is a leaky faucet. It drips. Sometimes warm. Sometimes cold.

I’ve done more than I expected and less than I still want to. And now, at 65, standing on the headland between the Pasture of What-Was and the Bluff of What-Might-Be, I’m not done. I haven’t been to Greece. I haven’t run a jazz bar. I haven’t bought a Harley. I haven’t raised chickens or built a proper boat.

I’ve never smoked a Cuban cigar with a dictator. I’ve never saved a man from drowning, though he saved me once. I’ve never owned a pair of shoes worth more than my groceries. I’ve never published a bestselling book, though I’ve been accused of writing a couple that cured insomnia.

I never made peace with long division.

I did learn to juggle, play the guitar, tie a bowline behind my back, and recite all 20 stanzas of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in order, on one Guysborough summer evening when I was 29 and the living was easy, if the sleeping was impossible.

I never stopped believing that small towns are the true centres of the universe, that public libraries are holy ground, and that music, especially when played badly in a kitchen, is the closest we come to grace.

There are worse things to leave undone.

It’s tempting, as the calendar rounds the corner, to treat life like a ledger. To add up the jobs, the journeys, the joys, and the junk, and declare it surplus or deficit. But if age teaches anything, it’s that what you do is the only thing that matters.

The things we never got to do aren’t failures. They’re coordinates. They outline who we were, or thought we were, or still might be. They keep us curious. They keep us from rusting. They’re the reason we put on our boots and go for a walk, even when the wind feels like a reprimand.

So, no, I never became an astronaut. But I’ve seen the stars over Canso on a clear night, when the ocean holds its breath. I’ve stood on a sidewalk in Manhattan after a hard rain, watching steam rise from the manholes like the city itself is dreaming.

I’ve sat in the cockpit of a billionaire’s private jet, feasting on fried chicken as the bowl of the Earth tilted toward infinity. I’ve held my one-year-old grandson in my arms as he, transfixed, pointed to a hot air balloon rising at dawn and whispered “good-bye.”

I’m a writer. I’ve tried to be funny when it mattered and serious when it didn’t. I’ve walked my neighbourhoods and counted the windows lit at suppertime, hoping someone, somewhere, read one of my screeds and said, “Well, at least that guy gets it.”

Maybe you did. Maybe you didn’t.

Thank you anyway.

There’s still time.

Go ahead.

Do the thing.