Mitch Albom wrote a book called 'The five people you meet in heaven' and it's definitely worth reading.
It made me cry on a plane going to Scotland to the point where the stewardess had to come to see if I was ok.
In the book one of the main concepts is that the most important people you meet through your life you probably don't realise and the hero in the book realises this when he goes to heaven. For some crazy reason or another walking around the field with the dog the other day I remembered the most important person I ever met and what inspired me most about them that I had forgotten for so long.
I went to a dental meeting many years ago (can't tell you which year but maybe 10 years ago) it was on genetic engineering from a Professor from Kings in London, someone reading the blog might know who it is. He had been able to isolate the gene for a tooth germ in a rat, grow a tooth from, growth a tooth germ and re-implant it in the rat's diastema and grow it again. There hasn't been a tooth in a rat there for hundreds of millions of years. He was able to out it in upside down and it turned itself upright and grew and he blew me away and inspired me. He wasn't growing teeth because he wanted to charge people to replace their teeth, he was growing teeth because it was an easy model to get to growing hearts and livers and lungs. He wanted to genetically engineer organs for people and he was getting closer to that point.
I bet they're away doing millions of other stuff that's amazing now and I can't even remember his name. That's kind of not the point though. The point is that before the lecture started I arrived (on my own as I often do at these things) and sat at the bar. I was dressed like a scruff (as I often do) and sat beside a guy who was dressed pretty scruffily with a rucksack and a beard reading the paper and drinking a bottle of water.
The dentist organising the meeting came in wearing his suit and his fancy watch looking for his speaker who he thought was late so he shouted in the bar "Has anybody seen Professor XXX" and the scruffy guy next to me stood up and identified himself as that person.
That was probably my opportunity to say hello, get to know him and change the course of my life to go and work in London and do something which actually makes an enormous difference to society or humanity. But I missed it and we didn't speak. I asked him a question in the lecture but it was facile and silly and I regret it.
I guess there are two points:
1. Sometimes the most important meetings in your life never happen because you miss the opportunity.
2. You don't have to wear a suit to be important.
Blog Post Number: 1126
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