Ascend
Olympics
Welcome to another episode of the Ascend podcast with Curtis Vicari. So I've always enjoyed watching the Olympics since I was a little kid, and there's just something about cheering for your country and seeing the joy and relief on the athlete's faces when they won a medal or the team didn't. It's like it was so cool to watch. It was never really about cheering against a particular country either, or that I didn't want a particular country to win anything. It just felt like there was this connection that I had to, you know, the image of that American flag or the red, white and the blue jerseys that they were wearing that drove me to want to watch and cheer and helped me to actually slightly feel like I was kind of a part of the defeats and the heartbreak and all the triumphs, even though I obviously am not an Olympic athlete. But I'm grateful for the Olympics not just because of the amazing athletes and what they can do, but what it can do for kind of our soul, our well-being and our psyche. I feel like it can allow us to step outside of what we can do and to just genuinely support another person that we likely have no connection to at all. We don't know these people. The only thing we know about them is the name we see on the screen, you know, off the flag next to their name and seeing them compete a lot of times. And it's such, I feel like kind of a unique phenomenon, especially when it's a common thing that so many other people around you can feel kind of the same thing in the weeks of the Olympics, right? There's people talking about, "Hey, did you see this? Hey, did you see that?" You know, it's a topic of conversation often for people. And the question that I've been asking myself recently is, "Can the feeling that I feel when I watch the Olympics, can I feel that or something close to it even when it's over?" And in the short time that I've been thinking about that, I don't know if I can't exactly feel like that. But in a small way, I think that we can choose to be proud of the people that we know around us and that we can feel proud of the good that they do. We can be happy for the quality of work that they do, you know, maybe that we recognize the hardships that they overcome or the way that they positively contribute in our communities and the sacrifices that they give so that we can experience a better life in our local towns. But I feel like the way that that happens is that we have to look for it. The reason why I had the experience of the Olympics was that I watched, right? And then I liked the feeling I liked seeing that and then I looked for more of it. And I feel like we can do that in our own life is that we can look for those things and then it's a great opportunity for us to share with others too so that we can have those same experiences of like, "Hey, did you see this? Did you recognize that?" I thought that was really awesome and I'm just so grateful for that individual or that company or the people that put on this huge event in our town. I hope that you're willing to maybe experiment with this too and to see the joy that comes from being in another person's corner, just like the Olympics, and I hope it's a good experience for you. This has been another episode of the Ascend podcast. Keep climbing and join me again next time.