It all begins here...

Here.

Welcome to here. We all arrived from some place, and now we’re all here. How did we get here? Why did we come here? We all have a background story…

January 26, 2003. I never really believed it would be an important date in my history…I couldn’t even recall what the exact date was…I had to google “Super Bowl 2003” to rediscover it. That’s right, the Super Bowl.

I found myself rolling out of bed to an empty house this particular morning. It seemed no different than every other lazy Sunday prior…the fact that it was Super Bowl Sunday was of little consequence to me. Truth be told…I hated the Super Bowl. I still hate the Super Bowl. I don’t care for American-rules football and I really loathe the so-called Super Bowl advertisements. Actually, I pretty much despise all advertisements. A fairly telling statement for someone who graduated with an undergraduate degree in marketing eight months prior to this particular Sunday…

So as I came to I realized I had a decision to make. I could get myself together and go to the Super Bowl party I had been invited to, or I could find some other reason that would enable me to not go. Visions of piles of inedible food and zombified friends entranced by an electrified box started to weight down my consciousness. What is so super about this party?

Actually, that’s probably how I envisioned it looking from the perspective where I currently reside…I probably was not in a very sociable mood at the time.

So I meander to my bedroom and take a glance at the dusty bookshelf…specifically, the second row form the top. Lying there was a book I had purchased six months prior to that day…and for six months it had remained there unopened and unattended.

Whenever I had a term paper, research paper, or any kind of time-consuming academic project that did not hold a shred of interest to me…I usually found myself doing the most horrific of activities…I cleaned. I would rather wash all my clothes, reorganize and combine the various piles that I had chronologically placed all over my room, windex my windows, and vacuum the entire house than sit down and hammer out a dreaded project.

So I made a deal with myself…I would sit down on the couch and start to read this book. If for whatever reason it did not hold my interest after twenty or so minutes, I would go to the damn Super Bowl party. I made this deal with myself at 10:20 or so…

By about 1:30 (or so) I had completed the book. Being a very slow reader and all, this was of course 1:30 AM…a full 15 hours after I had picked it up. I had sat on the couch for nearly the entire day before moving back to my bed to finish reading the book in relative solitude. I was that interested in what I was reading…and completely compelled to continue until there were no more pages to be read…

Here.

Now I am here…nearly six years later. It really seems far far longer than that. I am but a shadow of whoever that person was… I am completely different now, but very content with the person I have become.

Was the book solely responsible for my transformation? I don’t know. It certainly is not the best book I’ve ever read…but it got me thinking, and viewing, the world in a completely different light. Perhaps my environment had conditioned me to be ripe and receptive to the message I was taking in. That is certainly a strong possibility...

This is the short version of how I ended up here. How did you end up here?