I love my passport. I mean, not the picture. Washed out, dated, unsmiling…that’s not what I like to see in the mirror. But I love the possibility and the excitement inherent in my passport. It gets me places, it takes me away from what I already know, it opens up borders and makes a way.
Recently my wife, 3 children and I had planned a trip to America for 6 months, a trip that needed a visa. After an excruciating trip to the American Consulate we were issued our visas. Our 5 passports were posted back, but they came back forever changed by their experience at the consulate. They came back stamped with our visa’s attached. With this new experience our passports now opened up even more doors with greater opportunities.
I think this is a great analogy for life. Our experiences, what we learn and take from them, open up our ability to make the most of the new opportunities we face. Whether we chose to learn from our past, whether mistakes, successes or simply the things we note, determines the size of the opportunities we’re able to access in the future. Jaimie and I could have suffered through our consulate experience, but if our passports weren’t forever marked, nothing would have changed. The size of the opportunities in front of us would have simply been the same.
It’s made me wonder; what other consulates have I stood in line for, paid the price for, yet left without my passport being stamped?
I heard someone quote once that there have been a grand total of 108 billion people to walk the earth, and all but 7 billion of them are now dead. I've no idea how they tried to figure out the actual numbers, but regardless, the point still stands. We leave more experience in the past than there is in the present.
My wife and I are in our 30’s. That doesn't mean a whole lot, except that we've already left university, had a few jobs, started a family, brought and sold houses, developed relationships and undeveloped a few along the way too. Our lives are rich. But along the way, I can say with hindsight, there are a lot of things I wish I knew before I waded my way into failure. My mistakes, my experiences, those are the real things that taught me, those are the visa’s I wish I got at the start.
Put a different way my life is filled with ways I could finish the saying; I wish I knew ____ before I ____, and I have a story for them all. I wish I knew how to manage my time before I went to work. I wish I knew how to manage people before I started managing people. I wish I knew how to buy a house before I brought a house. I wish I knew how to hold a baby before I had babies (Fortunately, despite colliding with a table at the ripe old age of 2 days old, my son turned out ok!). Jaimie even lets me hold the children again, I got that stamp in my passport.
But here's the biggest lesson of my life so far, I can borrow stamps from other people’s passports. I can learn from others experiences. Sure, I’ll still learn from my own experiences, but other people combined have far more experience than I will ever get. Their experience in my passport, opens doors.
This is what these series of thoughts is about. Whether you think of them as stamps in a passport, or opportunities to perceive the world differently. We've made some mistakes and had some fun, and we wanted to open those opportunities up to others as well.
It seems to me that life is a journey, and our experiences do stamp us. But so does what we learn from others. So as we open our passports to others, we thought we'd allow whoever's interested to borrow some of our stamps. Maybe they help, maybe they don't, maybe they serve only to assure you of your thoughts already. Either way, our hope is that in some way they help, and if not to open up opportunities, then at least you might be able to have a laugh at us on the way.