Spirit of Olympic athletes a reminder that seeing good or bad in things is a choice

Chris Jones reports from Milan.

San Siro either had empty seats, or it was nearly full. Because there were four parades of athletes across northern Italy, Milan’s was thin, or it was intimate. The pleas for peace were either naïve or necessary. The dance routines were mystifying, or they were spectacular.

The opening ceremony for these Winter Olympics was all those things because it was watched by millions, and they saw in it whatever it was they decided to see.

We know we have agency over our actions. We teach our children to make good choices. We can use rockets to deliver warheads into living rooms and blow babies out of their cribs, or we can use them to ferry ourselves to the moon and send satellites deep into space.

The tool doesn’t change. What changes is how we use it, and that’s up to us.

Sometimes we forget that we have the same dominion over how we perceive the actions of others, how we regard people and their capabilities.

Canadian athletes enter Olympic venues at opening ceremony festivities

That’s become the more difficult exercise in some ways. Our feelings and judgments can seem increasingly hard-wired. It takes a moment, sometimes, to stop and check that baked-in perception: to take a breath and decide to see things in a more hopeful way, through a different lens than the one we’ve been using. 

Before the Olympics began and the lights shined at San Siro on Friday night, Abi Strate, a 24-year-old Canadian ski jumper, talked about the view from the top of her sport.

Strapping on skis and launching yourself off a ramp seems like a mistake to most of us. Why not tie yourself to the hood of a car? Why not climb into a cannon?

“I’m very proud to be Canadian”