On the way to TEDx

# 2 -- "Submissive to everything, open, listening."

Ok Jack, for this one, many ways to go. I like to think of this re-manifesting itself in my life August 2009. But things actually started in February 2006 with an in-passing remark from Emily as we watched the Olympics.

"I want to go to the Olympics" was basically her decision after watching the figure skating. "I'll go with you."

So I began a coin collection four years ago, setting my goals in the back of my mind. And I am incredibly pleased that I am here now. It is still slightly unbelievable. As things in the rest of life began to go places, things had been working themselves out. The coin collection ends up around $60.

I get a call, working at 602 Pecan, it is VANOC, verifying housing for all volunteers back in August. "Do you have confirmed housing?"
"No, not yet," I reply.
"Well, that's the last thing to do before you're considered for an interview. I can uncheck this box if you can make an effort to find housing. Any idea where it will be? North Van? Burnaby? West Van?"
"How about Squamish?" I reply after thinking for a moment.
"Perfect," the woman replies.

Squamish was all I knew existed after traveling there for our bouldering trip, it was Chris Sharma's will upon my brother to find that inner rampage, to tear our tips, somehow get a call from Fischer, we're on the West Coast, picked up in a Prius and days later to Squamish, but only so quickly, so much left undone. Chris Sharma had first been here in 1999.

There was no other obvious choice for housing, nor a method to find it -- enter Craigslist. I click on eeny (too much money) meeny (nope, grammatical errors), miny (nope) and settle on moe.

Moe, besides being the Minnesota Daily's mascot, ended up being a random selection epitomizing "cosmos favoring the brave" (Correy's words) -- has brought me up to Whistler, introduced me to a brand of Squamish local, real people living here, I know these people now, everything is positive with an open mind and listening to what direction things are taken.

One of the people I met was able to get tickets to the Cross Country Sprints yesterday. Last minute she offered them up to me, knowing that it was my sport, a former passion, dormant recently but I know it always comes back to me with the seasons.

Submissive to everything does not mean I do not take time to stand firmly on things; it is that time when the conscience is not there, nothing is stopping things from being acted out when the doors are opened. Coming out here I had no idea I would be in for - tickets, events, dinners on behalf of the gracious nature of people and so much more is a result of a new attitude as a lifestyle and way of being, a perk to jumping at the opportunity to help others simply because there is no such thing as an inconvenience when the outline was defined four years ago and is finally being roughed out with detail now, edited on the fly to make sense of this opportunity.