Andy Andrews wrote a short book a while back called “The Butterfly Effect.” One of the stories he talks about in the book is Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s role in the Battle at Gettysburg. Josh (can I call him Josh?) was a 34 year old school teacher guy who, at just the right moment, decided to charge instead of retreat.
Forgive me if I’m butchering history here, but apparently people think if he’d retreated, the rebels would have won at Gettysburg and then they would have won the whole Civil War. And I guess that would’ve divided up our country to a bunch of small countries to the extent that our lives & the lives of a lot of people around the world would be so completely different that it’s impossible to imagine.
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It’s Friday. You just walked out of your boss’s office. You’ve been working 60-70 hours a week for months, and it seems to go unnoticed.
You’ve been thinking about quitting for a year or two now, but you still have a wife & child to support, and you’re not sure how soon you could find another job.
Your boss is just a middle manager whose job is apparently to make your life more difficult while squashing all of your good ideas. So when he stopped by your cubicle and told you he needed to meet with you after lunch, your first thought was that the downsizing had reached your department and they were going to send you packing.
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I’ve been working in my little office at the marina—only steps from the boat I’m living on—for a few weeks. So far, the greatest struggle I’ve had is figuring out what to work on.
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There’s this song by Train called “Marry Me” that’s been playing a lot on the radio lately. The first few times I heard it, I thought it was just your typical mushy love song, so I’d change the station before listening to the whole thing. But one time I was in a particularly sappy mood and listened to it all the way through.
If you listen, you’ll catch the line “Marry me, if I ever get the nerve to say hello in this cafe.”
Dude wrote a whole song about this girl, and he hasn’t even gotten up the courage to say the first word to her. I thought that was pretty pathetic. And then I remembered about this time I did something eerily similar.
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A week ago I left the place I’d called home for nearly 4 years. The dreary fog masked all but enough road to barely keep moving.
The scene was eerily familiar, but it took a few hundred miles to fully sink in.
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