I Learned to Dive in my 30s.

The cannonball had gotten the job done my whole life. It's dirty, but practical. Truth be told, water and I are not friends; we're friends-of-friends who play nice but prefer not to be around each other. So when I have run out of excuses and find myself compelled to jump in, there's no time for wading. There's no time for gracefully slipping in-between waves like silk sheets. There's only time to make a big splash, balled up like a scared toddler who's also hoping to do a little damage.

In the end, it wasn't the water that upset my perfect plan. It was my wife who got in the way.

So there I was on the edge of a swimming pool, feet flat on the rim, body crouched till I was nearly sitting on the hot tile, and my wife was towering over me like a Catholic-school nun. Just about ready to tip into the water, I heard a father at the other end of the pool say to his 5-year-old daughter, "Look, Honey. Do it just like that man over there."

The 5 year old in me would have scurried away from embarrassment, but I had the advantage of being nearly middle aged. No, I didn't recoil. I tipped into the pool water with a beginner's dive that would have made any kindergartner envious. And so I learned to dive.

In my defense, I would have learned to dive earlier in life if I weren't such a good listener. Or if not a good listener, a literal, overly obedient listener. "No, you don't jump. You just fall in," my wife and everyone else would say. Lies. You do jump. There's a little hop as you spring into the dive. Intuitively, I've always known this. But driven by some latent need to follow directions perfectly that future psychotherapy will need to root out, I've followed diving advice perfectly and never gotten anywhere. Oh, and I'm generally not an athlete. So there's that, too.

Years later, I find myself still pathologically seeking and following advice. Adopting some well-meaning advice has led me to a current state of self-unemployment, for example. It's one thing to be a rule follower, and another to seek for and follow rules when no one is keeping tabs. Possibly why I became an attorney?

Am I afraid to take credit for my mistakes? Or am I afraid to go against the grain?

Either way, it's never too late to start following your own rhythm. And it's never too late to learn how to dive.