What’s your story? How did you end up here, at this moment in time, doing what you’re doing right now? Coffee time turned to story time this week and our interest was piqued as we heard tale after tale. It’s fascinating to look back on your life and imagine the moments that led you down a particular road. It’s even more fascinating to hear about other people’s journeys.
coWORKer Erik is passionate about helping ‘under-networked’ teens find the right college and career path and this window into the real world of choice/chance/destiny is exactly what young people need to understand their own possibilities. Like how another coWORKer went from small Midwestern town to computer graphics to electronic scrapbooking cutters (and so much more) on thoughtful planning, last minute phone calls, and taking chances in the right place at the right time.
And then there is Aristotle. Aristotle is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, Aristotle is mortal. Sounds like computer programming, right? coWORKer Armand was a philosophy major. While studying symbolic logic, his professor scribbled out a huge equation on the board and made the off-hand comment that what they were looking at was actually how semiconductors work. The professor quickly moved on, but a decade later, Armand looks back at that moment, remembers his curiosity and wonders if that one idea had been elaborated on, would it have changed the course of his career? Now a few months in to teaching himself to code, he has gone back to that road not traveled and is testing that path after all.
I read recently that the mind is not very good at predicting how we will change. It assumes that ten years from now we will be pretty much the same as we are now. But think back ten, twenty years ago. Were you in the same place doing the same thing you are right now? Ten years ago I wasn’t a mom or a business owner or a member of this great Petaluma community, I was Senior Associate at a boutique architecture firm in San Francisco building stately homes for the Silicon Valley elite. Twenty years ago, I was practically penniless graduating from the Architecture program at the University of Oregon. Thirty years ago I was a child of the back-to-the-land movement living in a cabin with an outhouse, building tree houses in ancient redwood groves.
By 2024, who knows what our lives will be. Yet another chapter in a book we haven’t finished. Just keep turning pages.
Written by Natasha Juliana. Photo by my dad of me and my little sis in the hills of Humboldt County thirty years ago.