green
i want you to tell me about yourself. i want to learn everything i possibly can learn about you.
what are your dreams? do you have any regrets? what is your history?
what happened in your life that led you here?
do you believe in fate?
i've been driving myself crazy thinking about this lately.
just stop and read this for a minute.
when i was 11 years old, i made a decision that would change my life forever. i decided to go to saxton instead of oregon for 6th grade challenge. all my friends were at oregon, but i decided to take a chance. i met a lot of great people and made friends i still have today. the next year at 12, i decided to stay at saxton. this led me to greg. he's been one of my closest and best friends since that time and i don't know what my life would be like without him. there are so many other people i met at saxton who, when we went to the high school, i had connections with. this led in one way or another to hanging out with different people who had other friends at oregon. i can't be 100% certain that we would all have been the group of friends we became if i hadn't gone to saxton. maybe we would have all been led to eachother some other way but who really knows?
i went to nyu for my first year of college. met a lot of great people and some really shitty ones. i decided after that year that i just wasn't where i needed to be at that point in my life. i didn't want to stay at that college or in the city. so i transferred to hofstra. i changed majors from english ed to management and finance. now, wouldn't i possibly be better off at nyu stern for business? well, maybe. but would i have met all my friends at hofstra? absolutely not. and that's not something i would trade anything for.
and how about geico? if i didn't go to hofstra, i would not have been at that career fair at hofstra and would not have met with the woman from hr at geico who talked me into going on an interview. maybe i would have been led to geico some other way, but she actually steered me to the access team. when i was on the first interview and i had a choice between service, sales and claims, what if i hadn't picked claims? sales is closing down in woodbury and mostly being absorbed by buffalo. service is dwindling. and because i picked claims, they again steered me to access. i would never have gotten the job i have now. i wouldn't have met the people from access. some of the people closest to me right now are from access and what if i hadn't met them? would that be worth it for going to stern? hell no.
most of all, this all led me to you.
if i've been making one fuck-up after another, how can i be upset about that?
it led me to you.
maybe i would have been led to someone else, but who cares?
i have you. and for that, i am forever grateful.
what led you to me?
what do you think about someone's "plan" for you?
follow me on this. i don't think it's so much that everything happens for a reason. that's just not fun enough. there's no excitement in that. i think that when things happen, other things happen as a result of that first thing, and the new things that happen give the first thing that happened a reason for happening. read that a few times if you got lost. i promise it makes sense.
i've been a much more openly happy fellow of late. this is the reason. life is exciting! think about it. every little thing you do today will validate something else that happened before. you are giving meaning to something that has already happened.
have you ever read any of those "choose your own..." books where you have a choice to go to one page or another and each time you make the decision, the story becomes uniquely yours? that is life. and it is god damned exciting to me.
it led me to you. and i want to know how you got here too.
i want to sit with you for hours and discuss in great lengths how this happened.
let's validate all the stupid decisions we've made and make something beautiful.
no regrets. not then, not now, not ever.
sincerely yours,
philip g mazzola