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No, it doesn't Does it get any better than this?
Some context... I think it was around this time of year, in 1991. My son Peter was eighteen. We were in a parking lot in downtown San Carlos, where he had just pulled some money out of an ATM machine. He was getting ready to drive off to the desert in his beat-up old Audi — and perhaps also out of our lives. He had no agenda, other than finding ... well, all he could say was "a teacher." Somebody who might do for him what Don Juan Matus did for Carlos Casteneda, but without the drugs. Pete was a great joker and an extraordinarily charming young man. But when parting time came, he suddenly got serious. "I have to tell you, Pop, I might not be back," he said. "What are you talking about?" "I need to be open to everything. That includes not coming back." I challenged him on the absoluteness of the statement, or something like that. I don't remember. I do remember his reply. "Because I don't want to end up like you." "What do you mean, 'end?' I'm not dead. I'm only forty-three—" "—Because you're not living your dreams." He had me there. I defended myself, but it was pointless and we both knew it, as only a father and son can know The True Things they never talk about. And now here I am, sitting on the deck of a beach house in North Carolina, looking out over the ocean and under the Milky Way, at the discovery I made yesterday while I was flying east in an Airbus 320, looking down on the Grand Tetons, the Big Horns, the Black Hills, the Badlands, and all the other scary, beautiful, inscrutable landscapes I've always loved to watch slide under a silver wing from thirty-seven thousand feet. I am living my dreams. I really am. And I am just starting. Tomorrow I fly to New York, appointments, board meetings, and other events around PC Expo. I really don't want to go, but I'm committed. And all the things I'll do there are already in my dreams, along with the next speech, the next book, the next chance to share a new and treasured truth with Joyce, Jeffrey, Colette and everybody else. Including Peter. Wherever he is. It's all just love. That's all people need, John Lennon tells me. It must be true. The surf is singing the song. And I'm even getting paid for it. Not a bad life at all. Obey your dreams After Dave wrote about the Microsoft Dot-Net annoucement a few days ago, I wrote to Jeremie wrote back, I didn't have many thoughts, until all of a sudden I realized that we have the same shared vision :) Instead of sleeping, I attepted to summarize my thoughts in an article at: http://jabber.org/news.html but it didn't turn out like I wanted, probably related to the fact that the sun is now rising... It does summarize my thoughts on this topic though, and really excites me as to the possibilities in this future XML-connected world that we're all helping create. I love it. And the timing is ideal, since I'm busy trying to write the Septmenber cover story for Linux Journal, which is roughly about the intersection of Instant Messaging, Embedded Linux and XML. Jabber, which Jeremie created, is a rapidly-growing open source instant messaging project that embraces all three. I love what Jabber is doing, and consider Jeremie the next Linus Torvalds. I don't have the time or the energy to go into the reasons. If you're curious, do a search around the Linux Journal for stuff I've already written on the subject (don't know if it's posted or not, and since I'm writing this unconnected to the Web (but very connected to the deck, the Atlantic Ocean and the Milky Way), I'm not in position to find out. You can and read about it in the September issue eventually anyway. Meanwhile, pay attention to what's going on around Jabber.org, and the Instant Messaging space. AOL may dominate the instant messaging conversation right now, but Jeremie and the Jabber People (a label I love because it sounds like they're creatures out of Star Wars) are creating Something Else Entirely. Jabber's scope is a whole that far exceeds the sum of any variety of parts AOL (or any commercial IM developer) talks about today. And yet it works with all the leading IM systems, adding enormous value to every one of them. It doesn't compete, it transcends. If it goes where I expect it to go, it'll lead a breakthrough on the scale of, say, the Web. Sez me. And who knows? Maybe I'm full of shit. But if I am, we'll find out soon enough. That's how fast things are rolling already. Gotta go to bed. Man, I hate to leave l this spot, and all the good people sleeping inside while I "work" out here on the deck. But the dreams beckon.
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It seems like a legitimate question, because the answer is in the headline above. I used to dream about the life I'm living now. Now I'm living it.
