It’s 7:00am, the day is beginning, and the streets are shifting from barren to flowing with life. Lines of cars are queuing at the traffic signals while commuters stop for morning coffee.

Me…? I’m taking a break from an early work start… stretching my legs and my mind with a leisurely 80 degrees cool morning stroll. Oh Yeh… It’s gonna be a sizzler of day… that much I can already tell.

There is this Seven-Eleven on the corner, I stop there often for all kinds of junk food; after all, I need to be consistent in the training of my powerful abdominal.

And in attempts to conquest the urges to eat garbage calories, I’ve outsmarted myself in leaving all methods of payment at home, sitting safely in desk drawer. So basically, I’m completely broke as I pass the temptation of “Oh Thank Heaven… It’s Even Eleven!”

Discouragingly void of ability to fall to the beckoning of freshly frozen Slurpee’s, I pass the storefront, and as I do, I am rescued from my woes by the distraction of a quite stranger walking towards me.

“A friend to meet!” I think, and with this intent, my path is redirected in introducing myself, followed by 365 explanation, to this unknown sharer of public sidewalk.

Now, I’m no creepy dude, but still there are many times where I sense trepidation in the faces of the people I blindly approach. This morning is one such instance, when at my hello, today’s friend, Gabby, faces me with a slightly guarded posture. And in respect to her, I keep my distance at the start-up of our conversation. I have put myself in her shoes, and if on the other foot was I, I too would be very cautious in being approached by a strange man (or should I say unknown man) in a Seven Eleven parking lot.

But after only a few minutes, the unseen wall is broken and we are comfortably talking face to face in discussing the 365 questions.

Time is very short, Gabby is on her way to work, so we keep our visit to less than five minutes. Yet, in our extremely brief dialogue, Gabby aligns with the thoughts of many of our 365 friends.

“Live life to the fullest…” Gabby advises,  “…because you don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. You don’t know if you are going to be here, or not. So, live today like it’s the last day.”

We take a few pictures and the smile on her face as she reviews our photos (got to love the LED screens on the back of digital camera’s) open a window to Gabby’s ability to live in the moment and of her appreciation for the words of others.

I tell her as much as I can about the mission of 365 as time allows, and in it, the walls of skepticism reduce a little further.

“What about the future?” I conclude, knowing that Gabby is in a great hurry to get to her job in the Mortgage Industry.

“I see a lot of technology and it is going to be the key to the future. But, I don’t know if it is going to be in a good way, or in a bad way. I’m just concerned with the plan.” She says in making a visionary prediction:

“We may even live to a thousand years… they are coming up with these new things now days.

Life is just not the same… There is just a lot of technology.”

So I sit here writing this entry, and admittedly, technology is all around me; to the right, my desktop system; to the left, my iPad; behind it, my older G4 laptop; and under my fingers, the new PowerBook that has authored so many 365 essays.

There is no escape, the high-tech era is irrevocably on top of us, and it is so cool that we can converse the way we do. As Gabby has pointed out, there is both a dark and bright side to the increase of technology.

But, as I create this entry with the ease of Microsoft spell check and through the speed of fiber optic upload, I cannot help but to think of one thing, I want to talk to someone.

OK, I’ll go buy that Slurpee now!

Talk tomorrow friends!