I was reading an article on stewarding online communities the other day and it talked about balancing comfort and familiarity with newness and excitement.

I think we all need comfort and we all need excitement.  What varies is our individual ratios of one to the other.

Some of us like to eat the same thing for breakfast, take the same route to work, do our work in a routine way, take the same vacation at the same time of the year in the same place with the same folks.  Those routines are comfortable, knowable and knowing to some.  Pushing these folks to do something new can be anything but exciting, rather something to be dreaded.

Welcome our custodians of tradition our bearers of familiar rhythms and predictable cycles.

Others crave difference, the thrill that comes with being edgy and trying something new, whether it be a new idea, a new hobby, a new vacation destination, or a new way of doing something simply for the sake of newness.  Unpredictability is something they yearn for and seek out.  Pushing these folks into a routine can cause untold headaches and rebellion.

Welcome our seekers of adventure, our experimenters, our celebrators of change.

During the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics I’m sure this ratio is something coaches, athletes and officials are acutely aware of.  The desire for the familiarity of home coupled with the edginess brought on by adventure and novelty.

And you?  Where do you sit?  What drum do you beat with most frequency, that of familiarity and comfort or the one that’s new and exciting?

This is the view from the Athlete’s village in the Welcoming Ceremony area …. when you look down.  As a 2010 Vancouver Olympic volunteer I’ve learned a lot about details, alot about looking down.

I thought I was a detail person to start with.  I had nothing on the Olympics.

Names on athlete’s participation certificates are double and even triple checked.  Processes, like distributing mail, have multiple forms to fill in.  Allocating Victory Ceremony tickets for non-accredited participants takes a looooooooooonnnnnnnnggggg time.  I created the form (with multiple columns to check off) to prove it.

Allocating complimentary tickets to sporting events to the National Olympics Committees takes even longer.

As volunteers we have our heads down, focused on details, minutia, routines, schedules, counting medal pouches over and over, adding up numbers, double checking, triple checking until we’re all but cross eyed.

This so the athletes can look up.  Look to gold.  Look to shaving off a few hundredths of a second.  Look to making a difference on the world stage.

What do you look down at?  What’s your view of the details?

This is the view that greets me most mornings as I start my volunteer shift as a NOC assistant for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

Tim Hortons on the sidelines.  Cups of caffeine left behind, lined up along the garbage can, as we weave our way through security into the athlete’s village.  No liquids allowed.

There’s a million reasons to celebrate… the Olympics, this city, being Canadian.

The Olympics have taken over.  We find ourselves cheering for unfamiliar sports (who invented the skeleton race anyway?).  We burst into singing the Canadian anthem with pride and spontaneity.

Love them or hate them we’re immersed.  Schedules run amok.  Routines are out the window.  Familiar traffic routes are no more.

I have to concentrate to figure out what day it is and what time of day it is.  The other day I jumped out of bed at 5:37 am shouting expletives because I thought I’d overslept and missed my 5:35 bus which would take my sleepy butt to my next volunteer shift.

That is until a sleepy husband reminded me I was on the night shift.

When were you last immersed in something, when up became down and right became left?  And thinking of those lonely Tim Horton cups, what did you have to leave behind in order to move forward?