Scott at 2012-08-06 20:38:22:

I had spent seven consecutive years going to college [UVA], then getting an Masters of Divinity degree [Yale], heading toward a doctorate and life as an academic (New Testament studies). But by my last year, the strangest thing happened: Nearly every day I made the short drive up the hill to the Div School, park my car, and enter the main administration building, I would get this gnawing feeling in my gut. An actual physical sensation. At first I thought it was just my body telling me I needed a break from school, but then after processing it with friends, I zeroed in on this fact: I was also a musician. Singer-songwriter with visions of doing that for a living. So I met with the dean of YDS Colin Williams, a truly wonderful man, who told me I needed to take a year off and pursue my music, seeing where it took me. He set me up with some research fellowship that technically allowed me not to have to start repaying my loans for that year, and off I went to travel around the country with my guitar and see what happened. I wound my way to my brother's house in Minneapolis, staying there for a month or so, checking out the music scene there a bit, but generally pretty bewildered. Then a college friend of my brother's visited named Tony. My brother asked me to play some songs after dinner. I did. Tony was impressed. He said, "You know I live in Aspen, Colorado, and there's a great music scene there. You want to see if you've got what it takes, you should come there." He sweetened the pot by offering to let me stay with him for a few weeks. And so in September of 1978 when I would normally have been in school, I drove west to Aspen. My 3rd night there, I played at the Hoot Night at Jake's Abbey, the very same event I ended up co-hosting with Pat Flynn the next year. While there Pat and I opened for Poco, Taj Mahal, Richie Havens, John Prine, among others. We played hundreds of gigs for two years, then Pat eventually wound his way to playing with New Grass Revival, and I wound my way to southern California at the behest of a musician who I met in Aspen. He told me to audition at a club in Ventura called Charlie's. That's where I met the owner of the club and its manager. I played music for 5 more years, stand-up comedy for 2, eventually co-writing K-9 with the co-owner of the club and marrying the manager of the club. And I never got that Ph.D. But I did circle my way back to teaching in my spare time, something I've done since 2002, only not theology, but screenwriting. All of that is one reason why I find so much meaning in Joseph Campbell who said this: “If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.” Or in screenwriting lingo, "The spirit of the spec."