You are eating at an up-market restaurant in town. Suddenly, the waitress who is serving you breaks out in beautiful singing fit for a concert hall. Before you know it, another waiter at the other corner of the restaurant replies back in an equally beautiful and complementing voice. And then another and another and another joins in at random places in the restaurant.

A row of chefs begin dancing and singing, They take their pots, ladles, or whatever cooking utensil they have in their hands and starting juggling them. The music is upbeat and you start tapping and clapping along.

Suddenly a waiter crawls from under a table in front of you. He makes a couple of jokes, goes to a diner and begins singing and teasing the diner. Then they all break out again into singing

You are at a concert except the performance is happening not on stage but you are right in the middle of it all. The rhythm and harmony is all around you. You enjoy every single one of the repertoire of songs.

You are tapping your feet the rest of the meal and you go home still singing the songs in your head. And you know that what looked like an accidental, random, spontaneous performance was really the mastermind of a genius. What had novel concept, what precise choreography. You know the waiters, waitresses, and cooks didn’t just happen to have beautiful voices — they had been trained to sing in harmony.

Do you know what it’s like when four people from different walks of life meet. You each come with what seems like a random piece of jigsaw. You share your stories and then suddenly your piece makes sense when you put them all together? Well… that happened at my Digital Storytelling team meeting yesterday. Awesome! Epiphany.

I had arranged for my team to meet SY, a Social Entrepreneur that I was introduced to at DiSC (Digital Storytelling Circle) on 4 January.

I got us to share our stories, our life journeys. We talked about the dreams in our hearts and how we wanted to do to make a difference in the world through the things we could do albeit small. For me, it’s using digital storytelling. For the others it was different things.

And then we saw that the melody we each were singing was the same, even if we were playing different instruments or were singing a different part.

We were for a moment awed, silenced. What we each had been growing and developing into fitted into a bigger jigsaw puzzle. And we were resonating with each other.

I am awed that a Mastermind, the Chief Composer, Musician had orchestrated and choreographed this. It couldn’t have all just happen by accident.

There I was standing in awe knowing my life has meaning and purpose and calling beyond the everyday grind. And I know I was made for bigger things. And that my life is not my own and I exist not just to live for myself but for others in service.

We decided we would come together to collaborate so that the sum total of what we do together could be far greater than if each of us tried to make a difference on our own.

BTW, I dined at that restaurant in the Philippines several times. Fun!