It was raining before dawn this week, and I was walking in it on the way to the gym. The cold kind of rain, the kind that finds the back of your collar. Somewhere between the dark and the wet, I was back in my first week in Canada, a new girl at a boarding school in Vancouver, frightened of a country I did not yet understand.

Then Canada started showing off it’s appeal and beauty beyond the Fall leaves of towering trees.

First, Halloween. Children in costumes knocking on doors for sweets, whole streets lit up, grown adults playing along as if this were perfectly ordinary. Chocolate and sweeties handed out with smiles. Holy cow. I had never seen anything like it.

Then, a few days later, someone told me we were changing the clocks. All of us. On the same night. You can do that? You can simply decide the country will have an extra hour of morning, and everyone agrees? I was certain I had landed in a magic country. A place that bends time, dresses up for fun, and somehow gets everyone to go along with it.

And I wanted in. Not a corner of it. All of it.

That was the first time I understood that a big vision actually works. You put it out in front of you, where you can see it every single day, and then you go and get it done. Those dark rainy mornings in Vancouver did not feel like the beginning of anything. They felt like survival. But the vision was quietly forming in them.

Many years, and a long way, from that boarding school, I am somewhere well beyond what a frightened new arrival could have pictured on those mornings.

The rain still reminds me. It is not a warning. It is where the vision started.

If you came to this country with nothing but a vision and a good raincoat, I would love to hear where it has taken you.