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18 | STEAMPUNKING OUR FUTURE: AN EMBEDDED HISTORIAN’S NOTEBOOK
thing with moments. As a bit of a heretic, I apply these methods pretty
liberally—considering my own experience as fair game as any one else’s.
“Well, how did I get here?”
This question is actually relevant to our inquiry in a broader sense, as
it’s tied up in the broader realm of “what’s possible?” Had you asked me a
year before where I expected to be in February 2012, I would not have
answered: “hanging out with Greg Broadmore in a Mexican restaurant in
New Zealand.” If there’s one thing I’ve learned from these adventures, it’s
that imagination can change the world.
Keep an open mind, follow your passion, and you never know where
you’ll end up. Probably in the right place at the right time if you…
Just Do What You Do
[Bilbo] used to often say there was only one Road; that it was like a
great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was
its tributary. “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door,”
he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your
feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
— FRODO BAGGINS
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)
“So do you get a lot of people who are just saying: ‘Wow, how the hell do you do
this amazing stuff?’” I asked. Greg was, it seemed to me, a natural magnet for
aspiring artists.
“I’ve never had a good answer for that because I feel like I just got here randomly,”
he said, sipping at his beer a little pensively. “Not randomly, really, but
there’s never been a plan, do you know what I mean? There’s no plan to get any
particular point. So anyone who is trying to get the same point, whatever that point
may be, is pretty much asking the wrong the question. But at the same time I want
to encourage them, because I know that what I ended up doing is such a satisfying
thing to do that if I can help people trying to get to some way towards that or
doing something like it, then that is what I would like to do. But there is no answer,
because ultimately it’s: ‘Well, what is it you are doing?’ You just trust your
decisions, take the opportunities that you like and build the opportunities that
haven’t popped up.”