"Take a seat wherever you like," the man behind the counter said. It was familiar greeting for Samantha and I, as we had come to Calypso Cafe in East Nashville after church services a few times before then. We took our seats, and continued the conversation we had started in the car. I had just learned a few months prior that I was getting a promotion at MTA Distributors; she was making great strides in her work as well. We were steadily paying down our student loans and building upon our savings.

"Where do we go from here?"

It was a legitimate question. Perhaps it was too heavy of a question to consider over chicken and black beans, but it was one that had been on our minds for a rather long time. She pulled out her iPod touch and started keeping notes. Over the next hour, we went over in broad terms what we though we would have accomplished by the end of 2008, 2009, 2010 and so on. After we were done, we had managed to hammer out a bulleted list that had us covered all the way up to 2016 – eight years of our future. It was both a liberating and frightening feeling to have committed to these broad goals, even with the mandatory caveat of "subject to (and in all likelihood, will) change." She e-mailed the list to me, the Apple Mail sound playing as soon as we were in range of our apartment's wireless signal. I added it to Google Docs, aptly titling it "Big Timeline."

Just from that simple exercise, I am happy to say that we have crossed off quite a few items and moved a few forward and back along the way. A funny thing happens after you plot a course for the future: you start closely evaluating how the present is going to help you get there. I looked around at some of the things that I was doing and realized that if I were going to meet some of the goals, especially some of the more dramatically life-altering ones, a change or two might be necessary.

Later this month will mark three years since I started my first job since Samantha and I moved to Nashville. We came to Nashville with very little except our UT Martin diplomas, some dorm-room era furniture, a little bit in a savings account and two vehicles with more than 100,000 miles on them apiece. We still have some of that furniture and one of those cars, but a lot has changed since then. At the end of August, I parted ways with the company that hired me in 2006. The decision to leave was one of the hardest things that I ever done in my somewhat young career.

My time in the Publications department at MTA Distributors was a very fulfilling one. I was able to put into practice some of the Web development concepts I had picked up in college while working for The Pacer and on numerous freelance projects. The company always gave me enough room and time to explore new ways of meeting our business objectives, and our creative team was solid throughout. Our team did some outstanding work, even with tight deadlines and even tighter budgets. In the last year, when it had been mostly just two of us, we were able to keep things moving in spite of a really tough business climate. As cliché as this sounds, the men and women that I worked with were friends as much as they were co-workers.

So that brings me to this past week. I started work as a strategist/planner for CentreSource Interactive Strategies, a six-year-old firm located in the Germantown neighborhood in downtown Nashville. I first heard about them at BarCamp Nashville in October of last year, where they were a top sponsor and their staff presented many of the sessions that I attended. I also got to know them through a brief engagement they had with MTA Distributors and by attending their monthly Interactive Mixers, a fantastic event they host for Nashville's technology community. I told Samantha at one point in the last six months that I would want to work for a company like CentreSource. By some odd twist of fate, the opportunity to work for them came up in late August.

As I was driving home yesterday, I said a small prayer to thank the Lord above that I had this exciting new job and a wonderful wife to come home to. Now, He and I really needed to work through this horrendous traffic that had clogged up I-65 northbound ... again. (The prayer was actually initiated because I was convinced that little Geo Metro was about to bring about a swift end for all of us.)

But all in all, I am really blessed.