A place in time.

Life is a question of time...
After hearing this phrase a couple hundred times, you feel like throwing the biggest heaviest clock at the next moron who repeats it to you! Obviously things are going to change, grow and develop but considering that we don´t live in the future, the time and moment is always right now!
As Impatient and impulsive as that may seem to most of you, I´d like to defend myself by reminding you of all of the good things that passed you by because you didn´t seize the moment.
One could argue that in the midst of these great moments you might´ve avoided some bad one´s, but I prefer to think that we regret more the things that we don´t do, than those that we do.

Anyone who´s ever chased after their dreams will tell you stories of harsh weather. When you seek the golden sun, you´re bound to go through cold showers, crashing thunder and blinding lightening... this is of course when you´re not being scorched by the heat and drought. Whilst recovering from my last hurricane, the wind blew in two cowboys from out of town.

I call them cowboys because they waltzed into the office with posture and confidence, and by the time I was aware of their presence, they were already standing in front of my desk anouncing their arrival. They looked out of context in the cold proffesional environment that we found ourselves in and a chill ran down my spine as I recognised them from another time and place... (Of course the chill could probably also be from the freezing cold air conditioning!)

My father once said that time works like the ocean, it brings people from near and far. Some are washed away too soon... others stay for years and it is impossible to predict the difference they´ll make in your life. This theory has been proved right over and over again through my existance and this feeds my quest to get to know people... I never know what novelties they´ll bring into my life. Adventure normally doesn´t come announced and people don´t come with name tags. You never know what it is that you can learn with someone until you get to know them. It is so easy to stereotype people, to lable and bookmark them like you do a book. But when you judge a book by it´s cover, you tend to miss out on a good story.

These two cowboys were completely out of context! Being the computer experts of the company, you would expect to meet pale nerds with thick glasses at the end of their noses and palmtops in their hands. Considering that their language is computer jargon, you would expect them to be either bore you with pc lingo or stare at you impatiently if you told them the latest office joke. Either way, I was predicting two microchip fanatics, whose skin probably only saw the light from their offices and who were going to become uncommunicative after realising the I didn´t know a thing about circuit switches and fuses... what I was faced with, was none of the above!

Instead of yellow striped shirts picked out by their mother, they wore comfortable well picked t-shirts. There was no hunchback from hours of sitting in front of a computer screen and these guys certainly had their share of time in the sun! Their language was understandable, their attitude far from distant and the glasses that the one had on the tip of his nose, made him look anything but nerdish! Equiped with the lastest ringtones and modern style they looked like more the hotshots of the movie than computer experts! But don´t be fooled by their exterior... they knew their stuff!

I thanked God for diversity and the young intuitive staff in human resourses! And prayed that more computer experts were made from the same mould that these guys were! Although I spent very little time with these cowboys, their presence was a relief from my boring routine. Their company gave more colour to your average working day and I find myself a little sad that they won´t be there on Monday.

Okay... so I guess this is another one of those: “When you least expect it, the most extraordinary people are brought into you life... blah blah blah”. And all this I could conclude with my initial paragraph about time and adventure...
However...
Considering that I was simply reminded of something I already knew, and that I would simply be repeating something i´ve already said in other columns. I leave you with just what happened and trust you all to take your own conclusions:

One of the cowboys left early after being victim to the common cold ( ...and office air conditioning!). The other, stayed a little longer so I got to spend more time getting to know him. The person I met was another voyager in transit. A fellow adventurar who´s destination was unknown and Madeira was another checkpoint. He impressed me with his knowledge of music (and shocked me with his age). We spoke a bit about work and people we knew in common and then he told me of all the places that he had travelled through. Although he didn´t know it, he was describing some of my dreams and the journey´s that i´m mapping out for my future. Time with him reminded me of some of the things I believe in and distracted me from some things I had wasted time worrying about.

I wish that I´d have more time to get to know them better, if they´d come at another time, I would definitely have organised to show them more of what this island has to offer... However, I know that paths will cross again, and this is one time in the future that I can patiently look forward to.