In the beginning ...

At 6 I remember having my first real dream of what I would do when I grew up. I remember it like it was yesterday, and there are not many dreams I remember that well. Maybe one or another, but none so vivid. I wanted to be a football star. I had just watched my team, São Paulo, be beat by Gremio in the 1980 Brazilian Soccer Championships and I vowed that one day I would avenge that defeat. I was 6. How would I have known better?

So that dream never really came true, but when I think back to all those dreams, and all those plans I had for when I grew up, there is one thing that I can say is 100% true: not one of them involved grinding it out in a cube farm wasting my days away like so many millions of other drones. I suppose I should not be so surprised: somewhere along the line the dreams about playing football, becoming a pro skateboarder, a track star, a rock guitarist, were substituted with dreams of getting into a great college, doing something great with that education, becoming the best at my profession.

Now to be fair, I do sit in a comfy little office, and I have a comfy extra large aeron chair - which probably beats the predicament of 95% of the other drones. I have my iPod connected to 5.1 surround sound bliss, 3 large screen monitors, my own little plants, and even a door I can close to tune out the plebe. I am respected by my peers, and my bosses, I take pride in what I do, and the general consensus around the water cooler is that I do it well. By every statistical measure imaginable, I am fairing well.

Yet at the end of each and every day at the office, there is that question that lingers - that wonderement that never really quieted itself, in all the years since that simple child's dream. Is this it? I look at myself today, on the verge of hitting 34 and the way I see it I have two choices. 35 you see, is the point I picked as the midpoint. I know - a lot of people live past 70, but history is not on my side on this one. Dad kicked it at 48, Granps at 74. So you see, 70 looks pretty damn optimistic. So back to those choices: I can start the inexorable slow process of growing old, or I can push a couple of reset buttons and take a mulligan. Try it again.

What brings me here today, to pen these thoughts and lay them bare, is a conviction that I am not alone in this feeling. I cannot be. We humans are not designed for office work - it only makes us forget what we really are designed for. Like fattened geese we sit twiddling our twizzlers and slurping our slurpees, and never once pay a mind to what life is really all about. I cannot be the only one feeling trapped.

This is going to be the story about changing all that, and this record is the beginning of that change. I can't promise much about where the change will lead, if I knew that - well then there would not be much point talking about it, would there? But a hunch tells me that really will not matter too much. Because, life is not about always searching to get somewhere, it is about all the moments you live trying to get there.