The Markermen

When you are asked about the people who influenced your life at most, what would you answer? A common answer we can hear from our friends and relatives is something like 'Edgar Poe changed my life drastically' or 'I learned how to make relations with people after reading Dale Carnegie's book, which has turned my world upside down' or even 'The example of Oprah Winfrey's success kicked my ass, so I threw away my TV and got a good job'.

It is obvious that our life is largely led by the great people and the ideas they put to our minds (not sure whether the great word is in the right place, but let's call them that way; another word that came to my mind, famous, is definitely worse). Their books, biographies, operas and movies, or just real life examples they give affect on the way we think and act deeply.

Besides the answers above, you will surely get responses like 'my father made a real man from me' or 'my mother taught me to respect people around me'. The other social group that forms our minds are close people, such as relatives and friends. It's them who puts common values to our hearts and heads, who builds our nature and widens (or, sometimes, restricts) our horizons.

One interesting thing I have noticed recently is that there does exist a third group. I found out that some 'ordinary' people influence our lives significantly; their contribution to our minds and lifeflows is sometimes even bigger than the one made by our parents and favourite writers. They seem to follow us for some period of our life, helping us in bad times and supporting or even leading us in good times. I have generalized all such people under the markermen term.

Markermen usually act implicitly and unintentionally. They drop a meaningless phrase which attracts our curiosity to some idea or thing that later fills a significant space in our life; they give us wrong advices that makes us go in a wrong way which appears to be the only right one in the end; they accidentally spill a cup of coffee on our jacket -- just to push us to meet our future wife while washing out that arabica from the jacket in the restroom. What is doubly is that they are likely to never guess about the consequences of their words or actions.

A meticulous reader might object that all of those are just accidents in global sense (i.e. a fallen brick and not a markerman might have suggested a revolutionary idea; I might have read a wrong-right advice in a newspaper or journal; it could be my fault to spill the coffee on the shirt). He would be right in the sense that our life is highly influenced by a sequence of random events in general. However, my idea is slightly different. My experience shows that markermen are unlikely to 'fire' only once. All the markermen that influenced my life did that several times (often with a large time gap though). That's why I cannot consider that as 'pure' accidents, thinking of markermen as of a kind of 'dedicated', personal angels.

Cinematography provides several good examples of such people. A classic example of a multi-target markerman is Forrest Gump. Wilson is a markerman of House. François Perrin is a markerman of Campana in La chèvre (Knock on Wood in English).