The Good Villager on Wizzley

• Learn to Love the Blank Page
• Too Many Hats
• Needs, Wants, and Minimalist Living

• Once your belly is full, you discover that there are many kinds of hunger. Each more complicated than the one before it.
• My country is the world and my religion is to do good.
• The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.
• A wise person carries her possessions within her.
• Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

A lot of interesting and crazy things have happened in my life. Most people can say this. But sometimes, there are events that will always remain easily accessible to you no matter how much time has gone by. These are events that stand out as having more impact on your psyche than others. Here are three of mine:

1. Encountering the Internet for the first time in 1992. When I was 20 in 1992, I started university. I was given an email account, and a login ID for the school's network. A new world opened up to me. I had been computer-phobic just a year prior to this, but I went from finishing high school reports on a typewriter to programming in Visual Basic, writing statistical code to analyze my data, co-designing an award-winning psychology resource web site, and expanding my horizons by researching and applying online to grad schools abroad. I still wonder what my life would have been like without the Internet. I guess I wouldn't be sharing these ponderings with you in the first place...
2. A chance encounter with a complete stranger in 2009. For a spell, I lived in the strange little town of Nanaimo, BC in Canada. At the time, it was kind of down and out, and the sadness of the place found its vortex in a small, dingy, poorly-lit, half-occupied shopping mall on the main drag. The food court was the worst. Yet there I was one afternoon, reading a book alone at a table. I looked up suddenly to see a fit man in his early 50's looking lost and confused. I asked him if he needed any help. He was needing to get to the ferry terminal, and I sorted out that information for him. Killing a bit of time prior to departure, he sat down, and hesitantly told me his story. I felt profoundly changed following that meeting. That is a story to be told at another time...
3. Another chance encounter with a random stranger in 2012. I returned to Nanaimo for a short spell in the summer of 2012. I'm not sure what it is about Nanaimo, but I'm not the first person to say that people gravitate to the place for a reason. Usually, they're looking for something. I'd agree with that. Anyhow, the city's downtown had received a bit of a facelift in the three years I'd been gone. I was staying in a small guesthouse for about a month, and I met an interesting free spirit from Vancouver who was doing her own soul searching for about the same amount of time. One afternoon, we encountered each other in the reading room, and one of us made a comment - something about nasty female bullies on power trips. We got to talking about our mothers and found an incredible number of similarities in our tough growing up experiences. She passed on a resource to me, which upon exploring, brought me more clarity and understanding about my identity than any other resource has...

These are, of course, longer, more detailed stories. I will be collecting "Significant Moments" for future publication. If you're a writer, have had a unique, life-changing experience, and would like to submit an entry, please contact me at [email protected]