Purpose · fiction
How to become the person I want to be
A story about a Brazilian executive in Dubai who, at dawn, on a wooden boat on the creek, sees the woman she could be and doesn't know the way there.
A vision — a short story.
The wooden boat crossed the creek for a coin. She took that boat every morning, between the hotel and the office, because it was faster than the car and because it was the moment of the day when no one talked to her.
She was forty-two, Brazilian, and had worked in Dubai for six years for a logistics company. She had a long title on her business card, a high-rise apartment, a salary her mother, in rural Minas Gerais, thought unreal. She also had a question that woke her at four in the morning and wouldn't let her go back to sleep: is this all?
It wasn't ingratitude. She knew what she had. It was something else. A feeling of wearing very beautiful clothes that weren't her size.
That morning, the boat was almost empty. The boatman, an old man with a white beard, rowed slowly, leaving the engine off, because the water was calm. The sun rose behind the old houses on the other side, the ones of coral stone and wind towers, and the water of the creek turned copper.
She closed her eyes. And she saw.
She saw a woman sitting at the table in a simple kitchen. The woman had her face, but older, with deep lines around the eyes from so much laughing. She didn't know where the kitchen was. It could be in Brazil, it could be anywhere. Around the table there were people: young people, some from other countries, some in work uniforms, others with notebooks. The woman was listening. Only listening. And now and then she said a short sentence, and the young people wrote it down.
On the wall, a map full of lines. Routes. She understood: the woman taught logistics to people who had never had a chance to learn. People who carried boxes and wanted to know where the boxes went. People who wanted to open their own business and didn't know how to get the goods to arrive.
The woman in the vision seemed at peace. Not the peace of someone who has everything. The peace of someone in the right place.
She opened her eyes. The boat was reaching the other side.
She didn't know how to get from here to there. She didn't know whether she should quit her job, go back to Brazil, open a school, take a course. She had no map. She had only the image.
The boatman pulled up at the dock and held out his hand to help her up. She hesitated. And she asked him, in English, without quite knowing why:
"Did you always know you'd do this?"
The old man laughed.
"No. I was a fisherman, I was a mechanic, I was a sailor on a big ship. I ended up here. Now I carry people from one side to the other. Every day I see someone get off the boat different from when they got on."
"And is that your purpose?"
"I don't know the word. I know it's my boat."
She stepped onto the dock. That day, at the office, she opened a blank page and wrote at the top: what do I already know that that woman will need to know? And she began the list. Routes. Contracts. People. Patience.
She realized she didn't need to discover the whole path. She needed to remember the image and take the next step. Not to learn who the woman in the kitchen was. To remember.
On Saturday, she went to a community center near the port and offered two hours a week to teach basic logistics to workers. No one paid her. She had never slept so well.
Bairo says that, in a time of faith and silence, he saw his best version, came away with an image and no map, and asked not to learn the way, but to remember it. Read: The God of the impossible.
The way forward
Your best version rarely comes with a map; it usually comes as an image. Keep the image and ask what you already know that it will need to know. Then take a small step toward it, this week.