The names contained in this electronic book matter to me, but none of us are born knowing all of the people who will have an influence on our lives. We accumulate those names over time, and soon thereafter they feel like they've always been in our lives.
But perhaps I will.
When I think about those with whom I spend most of my time developing creative work, I sometimes marvel about how I could have gotten to this point in my life without them. It's as if I always knew these people. The funny thing is that for most of my life, I didn't. Examined closely, you'll find this is probably true of yourself, too.
That's how life is. Most of us spend very little time with the vast majority of those with whom we attended grade school, high school, summer camp, or family outings. We may remember a few more from our college years, but for most adults, the people with whom we spend most of our days ostensibly did not exist to us when we were much, much younger.
What were they doing? Where did they go? How did they develop the skills and personalities they have now?
If we know them well, we might be able to answer some of those questions with a measure of insight, the product of late night tales after work, or incremental data gathered pointilistically over time. Yet think of what you were doing ten, twenty, even thirty years ago, and it's possible that you can hardly conceive of how you would find yourself in the life you're living today, this very minute. It would have been impossible to calculate the intersection.
The truth is, that concept obtains for everyone you know. They have the same experience, and they could have hardly imagined you, too.
The moment this epiphany dawn on you is the moment time compresses. The past becomes precedent, and the future opens to great and grand potential. Just as you couldn't possibly have anticipated how a colleague from a different walk of life might vitally intersect your own, so, too, is it impossible to predict whom you might meet years from now. You have no way to know if the person you pass dismissively today is on on a long, slow orbit through the solar system set on a collision course with you in the future that not even the most astute mathematicians might deduce.
I may not have met you yet. But perhaps the opportunity will present itself, and I'll look forward to what comes next.
--Michael Starobin
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