The 'core' of discovery....

These changes we make...

My friend Kevin asked me once what I would have seen myself doing right now if you had all the choices in front of you (he's an old mate with 20 years of history with me, and I couldn't have ever predicted he would create and conduct a Grammy-winning boychoir). I told Kevin that I would have been a cultural anthropologist and archeological writer, excavating old ruins and writing their history, being the scribe on many an adventure into the most unknown territory and telling its present story, engaging civilizations everywhere and linguistically unearthing their histories and telling their story to the world. And then there are all the acting roles which Will Ferrell took from me. We both agreed that each was valid and plausible. I am not either of those things. However, when I travel and write about my adventures I am really fulfilling my own version of my dream job, only a different manifestation of it. Often I romanticize about what that linguistic/archeological/anthropologic world would have been like, and definitely I know I would have owned a cool worn-in safari hat all the time. Yet, I also am my worst critic when it comes to the current choice of words in my blog, journals, emails, editorials... when really, perhaps I am just now beginning to realize my own version of my dream job. At 32, is it really possible that I am only now getting it?

What history begs us to do is create more of it, now and today, to take the experience that happened yesterday or a hundred years ago and make this moment the beginning of something similar. Every story we begin is something that will have its own life in our memory eventually for us to unearth it later or savor it just after it has passed. Or we can write about it now and be the present chroniclers for a later time, for our older selves, for our descendants or others we don't yet know. We should look to the idea of potential and the story to come because individuals, nature, incoming voices and new environments are waiting for us and beg our appearance, asking us to engage them to whatever end, if only just to engage.

Nothing grows backward, it just fails to grow over time. So each story begins with its own hope for a future, and some come with a soundtrack or a series of images in mind or eye. But life and its stories are not all wrapped in a warmth like that in a Ken Burns documentary.