Imagine yourself plucking low-hanging fruit from a nearby tree - your lunch as you and your gaggle of friends run barefoot, entirely unfettered through sandy Jamaican streets.
Imagine your grandmother, beckoning you out into the yard in humid, dimly lit summer twilight to help her slaughter a goat for the next evening's curry.
Now, imagine yourself on a freshly trimmed, well-kept NFL field, hand-fighting in the trenches with mammoth offensive linemen, a mass of bodies and humanity crashing around you while the lights shine bright on the peripheral of your vision, your pulse pounding inside your head as you grit and grind your way to the quarterback.
For former NFL defensive lineman and Tennessee Titan Jovan Haye, his life has already offered these experiences and many more, but ask him about the notion of success, ask him if he feels as though he's accomplished something having graduated from a quiet, island youth to the NFL, if he feels he's "made it," and he's likely to do nothing more than shrug his shoulders and return the question to you in another form.
"People tell me, they say 'Javon, you've made it,' and I'm like I don't know what made it is. I'm 32-years-old, I don't know what made it looks like," said Haye, who spoke to HNGN recently about all things life - football, family and the next step of the process, finding the future and opportunity and melding them together in a manner befitting of a man who came from humble beginnings and is always, will always be striving for more.
"What does 'made it' look like? You could be fine financially for the rest of your life but mentally you're stuck in a jail cell - you haven't made it. You might be mentally free, but financially down and out. I don't think you made it. What does made it mean? I don't know."
Haye isn't just about money though - far from it, in fact.
Haye published an autobiography titled "Bigger Than Me" in 2013 chronicling his lifelong struggle with dyslexia.
"I live it. Breath it. Eat it. That's who I am. I wrote an autobiography just to let people know what I've gone through and just to encourage people; let them know that I've been to the bottom, I've scraped every piece of the bottom and I found a way to dig my way up out of it, but still be in it."
Many players struggle to find meaning after their professional careers end - not Haye.
"Years ago football was all I knew, I thought it was all I cared about, but you realize there's more to life than sports. I know. When I watch sports now, I enjoy watching, so I'm OK."
Haye, a proud father to three daughters, says that while he'll always love sports, what has become clearest to him in his years away from an NFL field is that there's so much more beyond the pigskin and the gridiron.
His goals now are more centered, focused - humble.
"Just trying to progress in life, trying to be a better man, be a better father, be a better husband. You're going to go through trials and tribulations but you've got to stick with it if you want whatever you want bad enough."
What Haye wants bad enough now is to live his life well, create business opportunities and, most of all, provide for his family.
"I got three little girls, I don't live for myself anymore I live for them."
Still, Haye says there are experiences in the NFL - experiences like road trips, gamedays the camaraderie developed by being part of team - that you just can't find elsewhere and which will stick with him forever.
"Gamedays. Can't beat gamedays. Road games were just awesome, being able to share that with your teammates. Road trips, greatest thing ever. You just can't beat that. The locker rooms, you could never replace that. You could leave football and make more money off the field than you did on the field but you can't manifest that locker room feel, being able to chill with the guys - you can't do that. You can't buy that.
"There's a lot of things money can buy, but you can't buy that."
Family, love, success - these are things measured by our own wants and desires.
For Haye, it seems a lifetime of experiences both in and out of the NFL has taught him that there's more to be had than quarterback sacks and cheering fans and that's ok, because as the saying goes -"it's about the journey, not the destination."
While the question of what, exactly, "making it" means may forever remain unanswered, Haye, like the rest of us, will spend his life trying anyway, because he knows the trying, not the making, is what really matters.
