That is the sound of inevitability

I think most of us remember the scene from The Matrix. Agent Smith is holding Neo on the subway track, waiting for the train to arrive and splatter them both.

"You hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability!"

"My name...is Neo!"

Excellent exchange, excellent moment, excellent character development right there and there! As Morpheus said "He's beginning to believe!"

What follows is by no means an indication that we should all have messianic ideations. Seriously, you can't fly. You're still plugged into the Matrix. Enjoy the ride, as our machine overlords use us as batteries.

But let's get back on track - pun intended. I recently had a lengthy conversation with a very good friend of mine. Following that, I couldn't help but think of this specific scene. The "HELL YEAH!" moment in the movie. And so I thought...why don't we have more "HELL YEAH!" moments in our lives?

Of course, this has a lot to do with how memory is formed as well. The younger we are, the more unique memories we form. Everything's new, so individual moments are easier to remember, each one a small "HELL YEAH!"...I think we'll just name these HY moments. Yeah, HY moments that gave us that high. Neat!

But I digress. Let's talk about the here and now. No longer kids, no longer in school, not even in our first few years actually working. Slowly, but surely, the HY moments seem to be fewer and further between. And the fewer we experience, the fewer we expect. We end up with "well, that's fine" moments. We'll call these WTF moments.

And we end up accepting the WTF moments as the norm. The issues is...we're not out of HY moments yet, dear friends! Not by a long shot! It's just that some HY moments...or a lot of them, rather, we've seen before. So they don't give the same high. Some of them even turn into WTF moments.

Does this mean we should be resigned to a life of WTF? Not in the slightest, I say! Neo was still at the beginning of his journey, so he had way more HY moments, but...I mean, he was already an adult, right? It was just...a shift in world view, in a manner of speaking.

I've had a few shifts along the years. I'll probably have more as the years go by. So there's no definitive idea that I'm offering here, just this: instead of saying "WTF" what could you do to go for a "HY?"

And I'll leave this article a bit open-ended for you guys to fill in some personal blanks, which I'd love to hear. What were the moments in your lives that made you say "no more WTF! I want a HY!" and you actually went and did something about it?

At what moment did you hear "that is the sound of inevitability" and chose to say "my name is Neo?"

Looking forward to your comments/questions!

Cheers!

Calin.