My wife Brenda and I started participating in Couchsurfing Link to our Couchsurfing Profile several years ago. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a kind of a “pay it forward hospitality exchange network” where you host travelers or may be hosted when you travel. One of our first guests was a young Frenchman named Guillaume. On his first night in our home, we struck up the dreaded political conversation that you typically avoid with friends and family members for fear of damaging your relationship. In this case, Guillaume was a stranger so the conversation was fair game.

I must say, Guillaume had some pretty radical political views that challenged our belief system. Some of his comments were offensive and he didn’t have much good to say about our state of affairs. While we certainly have our own complaints about American politics, overall, we’re proud to be Americans and we love our country. Without going into detail for fear of offending anyone, let’s just say that we chose to bite our tongues and withhold judgement of Guillaume that evening. We listened to what he had to say and, with some skepticism, immediately turned to Google for some searching about the things he’d shared. Although we still don’t believe half of what he said, through our research that evening, we became aware of some pretty undesirable facts that we were previously unaware of and also became a bit more open minded as to what foreigners think of us and our country through the blinders of the media.

Now for the rest of the story:

I took a day off work to spend with our guest from France and thought I’d take him on a nice mountain bike ride around Rampart Reservoir just West of town. Guillaume sounded excited about the idea of a bike ride and was eager to see the beauty of the mountains so off we went. In case you don’t know, I’m a bit of an outdoor exercise enthusiast and enjoy making a workout out of most any outdoor activity – ie. a “hike” is really a “mountain climb”, and a bike ride usually involves pedaling up steep hills as fast as I can go. I also love living in Colorado and always appreciate the beauty of the expansive mountain vistas as I am running, hiking, or biking but I’d never really noticed the thousands of “weeds” that I’ve walked or rode over.

We put on our helmets and set out for the ride. I was in the lead going at a much slower pace than I’d normally go since I had a newbie along. We hadn’t even peddled 1/2 mile before I realized I’d lost Guillaume. I stopped and waited a few minutes wondering if he may have crashed but soon saw him catching up so we peddled on. Not much further I stopped again when I realized Guillaume wasn’t behind me. He caught up again and I was beginning to wonder if we should turn around before committing to the rest of the loop. This process went on a few more times with Guillaume assuring me he was eager to proceed until I finally realized that he was stopping and dismounting his bike to take photos. OK – so now I understand – the reservoir and the mountains are certainly beautiful and photo worthy – after all, I had taken a few pix myself that morning:

We continued to ride the rest of the 15 mile loop and it took nearly 5 hours to do what I normally do in 2 but I we covered the distance and spent a beautiful day in the mountains so all was good.

When we got home that evening, Guillaume downloaded his photos and showed them to Brenda and me. He had some of the same great pix I’d captured of the peaks, valleys, and reservoir but he had something more – he had photos of some really beautiful and colorful flowers. At first I assumed they were from his visit to the botanical gardens in Denver the day before as I’d certainly not seen them along the trail but Guillaume assured me that he took those photos during our ride around the reservoir that afternoon.

Needless to say, I was shocked! While I was impatiently waiting on Guillaume to catch up, I hadn’t noticed that the “weeds” I was standing on and riding over had some very dainty and colorful flowers on them. I’d been on that trail many times and had never noticed the incredible beauty of the weeds! I had only seen the big picture and was focused on the outcome while missing the details!!

In addition to a lesson on opening of the mind, Guillame will always be remembered as the guy who made me realize the importance of taking time to recognize and appreciate the small things in life. Many times since that day I’ve caught myself stopping to take closeup photos of fallen leaves, butterflies, bubbles rising from a hot spring, spiderwebs, ants at work, and other such trivial things – Brenda and I now refer to these as “Guillaume Moments”