Scenarios
The rental car you got back in Nashville breaks down in the middle of nowhere near the state line between Texas and New Mexico. Smoke comes out of the hood, you pull over and turn off the car. Your missus starts to get all antsy because what if your sorry ass, whose greatly tech-savvy but terribly real-life inept, can’t fix it. Since you’re in the middle of nowhere, chances for anyone to come to your rescue are slim. Data reception is very weak in the best cases. Where is the nearest mechanic? What if there was a mechanic only a mile ahead from you, and what if the shop is actually there but there’s no one there, or it’s closed, or whatever.
You’re about to rent an apartment in a city where you got a job doing something exciting. A whole life-changing decision was made, part by impulse, part for the need, part for the adventurer that you’ve always believed you are. You’re moving into Istanbul, or Dublin, or Beirut, or freaking Caracas. It doesn’t matter. You’ve got sufficient local help and know that the apartment is a good deal and is a decent area where you won’t have to worry a lot about your significant other. A few days in, you start hearing constant couple fights in the apartment above you. Every now and then you listen to a jazz band rehearse in the middle of the day during the weekends. The Internet connection your landlord enabled for you starts dropping very often and you decide to get your own. It’ll take weeks. One of the walls feels damped and you wonder if the apartment behind it has a broken water pipe or something. Your life becomes miserable because you barely speak the language and can’t really talk to people. You reconsider your potentially not so smart life decisions.
You walk around a busy shopping street in an European capital. Since it’s spring, there’re packs of tourists everywhere, everyone enjoying the sunshine. You complain that it’s obnoxious and whine about it all even though you barely realize you are also a part of the whole damn thing. You’re looking for a place with a decent sense of home, where you can be treated with respect, camaraderie. Since it’s Europe, most servers don’t make a living out of customer tips, so service is terrible and subpar. You are cheap so you don’t really care much but you know deep down that you wished things were just easier.
You’re old. Sixty, seventy years old, with grandkids, something like that. You stand in that corner in New York City near Union Square where you first kissed her and began an absolutely amazing journey together. First it was rocky, then it was life-changing, then it was messy, then it was cool as fuck, but it was overall beautiful: You smiled at each other, kissed each other, yelled at each other, cried at each other, hurt each other, built a family together, built a legacy, had kids, those kids had kids, moved together from one place to another, and then to another. And now old and wrinkly you stand there where it all began, that day when you asked her how to say a word in English that you could only spit out in Spanish. However, she’s gone now. You wish you could just plant a post sign there for everyone to see and everyone to know that the journey of a lifetime was born right there. It’s so incredibly meaningful.
What do all of these very supposedly different scenarios and stories have in common?
