The Tao of Wend

This website is the direct result of an hour of sitting in the airport in Calgary waiting to go to New York City: and getting to this point is a long story. My dearest and oldest friend Michi and her partner Greg saw some of the last postings and artwork on my old website and quickly determined that it was time for a change of scenery and within weeks I was on my way to New York for a time-out from my life. I am unbelievably thankful to the two of them for helping me reset my brain and find perspective again.

By the time I made it to the Calgary airport I was burnt out, frantic and desperate for a life change. By this point I’d already laid the ground work for change and put into motion wheels that I could not stop; but the wait for things to start to move forward was agonizing.

As I sat drinking coffee and waiting for the plane to arrive I could feel my head unmuttle and see the world unfold in front of me. I made several realizations: the most important being that I am no longer growing or moving forward and that has come to affect all aspects of my life. My life currently exists in suspended animation; an animation that I have always sworn to avoid because I fear a stagnant life. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life unhappy and waiting to die — and look back to regret all of the things I didn’t do.

Once I made this realization all of the questions and possibilities started to fill my head. What do I want to do with my life? Where do I see myself in 10 years? Am I even in the right industry for me? Am I doing the right kind of job for my personality? What do I want to be when I grow up?

Before getting on the plane I determined two things: I like to write and I love to travel. Why not try and find a way of combining the two online? After a week of scouring word sites, dictionaries and travel sites I came up with the accidental domain: wend.ca. Wend is a casual journey from one place to another: you wend your way home, you wend your way through a crowd of people, you wend your way around the world, you wend your way through life. In programming wend is the end of a while statement: the while/wend format is something I am all to familiar with. I say “accidental domain” because when I did a search for the domain on CIRA it didn’t appear in either whois or the available domain list. Somehow it got lost in their system and I had to make a special request for it.

Finding a clean focus for the site has been a bit more of a struggle and I’m still working on it. In development the first thing you always do is try and determine a target for the site. I don’t know what my target is but for now I think I’ll just tell stories.