It almost always starts that way doesn’t it? Progress, development, change. Whether you’re talking about the march of history, or evolution, or even just doing something in your own life. Some tiny little detail changes and forces you to adapt and before you know you have wholesale dramatic changes.
People always talk up big moments in life where you have to make some stark or dramatic decision that will alter your destiny. Moments that are portentous as they are melodramatic. But I’ve found that those times, although they do exist, don’t really determine the course of your life as much as those small seemingly innocuous decisions that end up making a big difference in your life.
Some examples.
Back in college my dad would send me his mining journal magazines from time to time. One thing that caught my eye was an advertising insert from a start-up Australian software company. The insert was a glossy colorful ad with a CD that had an evaluation copy of their software (ER Mapper). As I had access to computers with CD-ROM drives (a rare thing back in the early 90s) I tried out the software. I wasn’t too impressed but later on when I went to write my resume, in the software section I wrote down ER Mapper. That little detail along with my knowledge of computers landed me my first job.
In the mid 90s I loved going on newsgroup forums. One day a correspondent from the UK wanted to chat more and asked if I had ever tried Yahoo chat. I had not but I gave it a go. We had a nice chat but more importantly this led me to discover the Yahoo chat rooms. It was there that I found my first long-term relationship. The relationship didn’t last but this contact led me to Myspace, which led me to OkCupid, then to Facebook, and in a roundabout way eventually led me here to start writing this blog.
Last example, a few years ago the city decided to do extensive road repairs in West Houston. Up to that point I had been taking sedate short walks to promote my fitness levels and really not getting anywhere. The road repairs forced me to take longer detours and extend my walking route and to do some running to make up for the extra distance. This led me to taking longer walks and running longer distances. I began piecing together little half mile sprints here, quarter-mile jogs there and eventually I put it all together and found I could easily run 6 miles per day and on exceptional days 11 miles like last weekend. Not up to the level of a marathon yet but getting there.
Little things, they do add up to be a lot.
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