Adam's Epic Journey

One of the guys involved with us here at Mosaic is going on an epic journey to the Philippines, here is some thoughts he has had so far...

Today I found myself sitting in Starbucks in Circular Quay in Sydney, sipping my addiction in silence. This silence was soon broken when a man asked if he could sit in the seat next to me. As he sat across from me, I began doing what I love, hearing people's stories.... His name was Peter, and he had been a steward for Air Canada for 30 years, had an IT business on the side and he was in Sydney for 24 hrs on a layover.

We talked about life, relationships, and he stressed to me some wisdom that he wished he had grabbed hold of in his youth and wished that he worked harder to put money away for the future. He said that he was away for about 5 months of the year, and got about 7 months off, but that his family were always complaining that he was not around, but the pay was good. Sometimes he would get back from a trip and he had missed key moments in his children's lives. He also began to explain how the company he worked for had constantly screwed him over, and that he felt it had begun to effect his attitude towards costumers.

After a while we ran out of things to say, so we both left like we had something else to do (which we did not), and I thought even a steward on a plane who might provide bad service, has a story.

After the conversation with Peter ended I jumped on bus to meet a friend at Bondi Beach. When I got on the bus, I asked the girl in the seat in front of me which stop to get off at Bondi, and at this very moment she also asked me this same question, which resulted in some awkward laughter. I asked where she was from and why she was in Sydney, because I could tell she was not a local (she was asking what colour the sand was going to be!). She said she was from Pakistan and was in Sydney for the Oxfam International Youth Conference. She began to share her heart for community development, and how she had been sponsored to come out to this conference, her face was beaming as she told me her journey of how she came to be in Sydney.

She said that there were representatives from 90 countries around the world, and it had been such an amazing experience meeting all these people who journeys in life had been so different to each other- then we were suddenly stopped at the bus stop and parted ways. As I walked down Bondi strip, wondering how people could be wearing such a small amount of clothing in such a cold wind, I asked myself how is it that I seem to meet such random people?

I saw all the people down at the beach, and all the people in the restaurants, and the people driving by in their cars. I wondered where they were going, I wondered if they were meeting a friend, or if they had suffered through a bad day at work, I wondered what their story was, and what their journey was which brought them to be a the Bondi strip in this moment. Stories explain a lot.