The ordinary world: when the dream comes before the road

Colombia, the eighties. A boy repeats, to anyone who will listen, a sentence with no map behind it: one day I'm going to live in Brazil.

There is no ticket bought. No relative waiting on the other side. No plan. There is only a certainty spoken out loud, like someone who has already seen what has not yet happened. The grown-ups smile the way people smile at a child. He keeps saying it.

The country he announces is far away, speaks another language and does not know he exists. Even so, it is already the address of the dream.

That boy is Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, born in 1982. And this is the first stage of his journey.

What this stage is

Every journey begins at home. The mythologist Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), showed that humanity's great stories, from ancient myths to folk tales, repeat the same shape: someone leaves the familiar, goes through trials, is transformed and comes back bringing something for others. Decades later, the screenwriter Christopher Vogler organized that shape into twelve stages, in The Writer's Journey (1992). It is the structure of this series.

The first stage is called the ordinary world. It is life before: the rules of the house, the limits of the town, what everyone expects of you. Vogler explains why it matters so much: without knowing the starting point, no one can measure the size of the transformation.

The ordinary world is not a bad place. It is often safe, familiar, even comfortable. What marks this stage is something else: a restlessness that does not fit into life as it is. A sentence, a desire, an image that keeps coming back, even without explanation.

In Bairo's life

Bairo's ordinary world was the Colombia of his childhood and youth. The detail that sets him apart is a contradiction: he lived in one country and dreamed of another.

Many immigrant stories begin with an escape. His, as he tells it, begins with a desire. It was not about leaving a place. It was about reaching another.

Brazil came into his life through the body, before it came through the language. It was through capoeira, the fight that is a dance and the dance that is a fight, that he began to know the country he was announcing. The sound of the berimbau arrived before any document, any job, any ticket.

Seen from outside, nothing about that beginning looked extraordinary. An ordinary boy, in an ordinary place, with an unusual sentence on his lips. And that is exactly what makes this stage important for the reader: great journeys do not begin in great places. They begin with a sentence someone refuses to stop saying.

Years later, Bairo would sum up the way he understands his own life in an idea he still repeats: there are no coincidences and no accidents. There are purpose, dreams and execution. The boy who talked about Brazil without knowing how he would get there already had the first two pieces. The third, execution, would take a lifetime to learn.

What came next was anything but linear. There was arrival, shade, starting over, going broke, faith, the road and rebuilding. But none of it would make sense without that first picture: a boy, a certainty and a country on the other side of the map.

In your life

You may be in your ordinary world right now. And it can take many forms.

If you are an entrepreneur who went broke, your ordinary world may be the routine of putting out fires, opening the bank app in fear, telling everyone everything is fine. If you are an immigrant, it may be life split between two homes, neither of them whole. If you are starting over, it may be the place where everyone has already decided who you are and how far you can go.

Before thinking about leaving, it is worth seeing where you are. Some questions to ask yourself in silence:

• What sentence have you been repeating forever, even without knowing how it will come true?
• What in your life today is real comfort, and what is just habit?
• If someone looked at your routine from outside, where would they notice the restlessness you hide?
• Who set the limits of your ordinary world: you, your family, your town, or fear?

Three steps for this week

1. Describe your ordinary world in five lines. Where you live, what you do, what you expect of yourself, what others expect of you, what you put up with. Writing takes life off autopilot.
2. Write your childhood sentence. That old certainty, even if it seems naive today. It doesn't need a plan underneath it. It just needs to exist on paper.
3. Say that sentence to someone you trust. Not to ask for approval, but to hear your own voice saying it. That is how Bairo's dream began: out loud, before there was a road.

None of this changes your life overnight. But every journey begins the moment someone realizes they are at a starting point, not an end point.

The line for this stage

"There are no coincidences and no accidents. There are purpose, dreams and execution."

Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez

Next stage

Stage 2: The call to adventure, when life asks for more

Read also

• Capoeira was the bridge
• Bairo's Hero's Journey, stage by stage
• How to reinvent yourself professionally?