View from the Mountain

The Long Ago Escape From Holiday Madness

Our dock on Raymond's Gut

One of the most memorable Thanksgivings for me is the first one that I enjoyed on my own as adult when I moved to Nova Scotia.  That Thanksgiving is part of our book, A Taste For The Wild - Canada's Maritimes.  Some of my good college friends came up to visit our farm on the Nova Scotia shore.  None of us had ever cooked a turkey on our own so that alone made for an interesting time.

Perhaps having American Thanksgiving in a foreign country for so many years prepared us a little for having one of my favorite holidays without decending in madness.

When we moved back to the states in 1987, we were really surprised at how many people got on the road for Thanksgiving.  Interstate 81 which took us back from Maryland to Mount Airy, North Carolina for the holiday was nearly a parking lot the first time we made the trip home Thanksgiving week.  The long trip with a car full of children added a lot of stress.

We were only in Columbia, Maryland, a couple of years before we moved to Roanoke, Virginia.  Somehow holidays in the Columbia area seemed to feed off the hyperactivity of the area.  You could almost feel the buzz in Columbia during Thanksgiving.  Columbia was a pretty competitive place. A lot of people there worked very hard to have the perfect Thanksgiving from decorations to meal.

Roanoke was a different place much closer in attitude to rural North Carolina where my wife and I both grew up.  Roanoke was also only a couple of hours instead of seven hours from our family home base of Mount Airy.  We enjoyed Thanksgiving even more in the laid back atmosphere of Roanoke, but it was a long time before we managed to stay in Roanoke for a Thanksgiving.

It does not matter how old you are as an adult, Thanksgiving usually means going home to your parents home.  We did that for many years after moving to Roanoke until my wife's parents died and my mother moved to Roanoke to live with us until her death in 2004.  We did manage a few Thanksgivings in Roanoke before she came to live with us in 2000, but mostly we traveled to Mount Airy.

Since 2006, we have been living on North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks. With all our parents gone, Thanksgiving has come to reside with us except for one year when we enjoyed it with one of our daughters and our granddaughter.

In spite of all the changes over the years, we have successfully kept our Thanksgiving a low key holiday.  We usually manage to cook a turkey.  The rest of our traditional menu includes stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, broccoli casserole, sweet potato casserole, homemade cranberry sauce, and hot rolls.  There has never been much flexibility in that menu but we do sometimes get a little creative with the dessert.

With people spending three or four days with us, we end up cooking several meals to go along with all the leftovers.  We managed to raise some picky eaters so generally we also cook a pork loin and if it works out we grill some pork chops another night.  I generally try to handle breakfast and we often forgo our healthy eating habits for one meal of Neese's Country Sausage and another breakfast of Country Ham.

While having a Thanksgiving feast is wonderful, what we really enjoy is getting as many members of our family as possible together under one roof. With our children's generation generally the only way you can get a good update on their lives is to get them under your roof and feed them until they lose all their inhibitions.  We are pretty good at that.

Generally there are a fair number of hikes around the neighborhood or along the Croatan Trails.  The outside activity is usually followed with some serious naps.  If the weather gets warm we might end up doing a boat ride or a beach walk.

This year the highlight for me will be my son helping me repair a broken iMac that has been in my equipment closet for almost a year.  It is always nice to do something together beyond eating, walking, and napping.  I suspect the children will find something on Netflix or Amazon Prime that we will end up watching.  We almost always manage to find at least one movie which we can all enjoy.

Some of our other holiday traditions like playing rook and making peanut brittle usually have to wait until the longer Christmas holiday. Unfortunately Thanksgiving always ends too quickly, and before we know it, we are worrying about our children traveling back to their homes.

We always hope to make a memory or two that we can cherish. It is hard to say what this year's memory will be, but I look forward to discovering it with the greatest possible anticipation.

Being with your family and loved ones is what the holidays are all about for us.  While I enjoy having a turkey feast, it is not the important part of the holiday.  Actually just having our children back under our roof is all that really matters.  

We even try not to worry about when meals are served, it is a key part of having a stress free holiday.

 

Seeing What Others Miss

Oyster rocks under the shining surface of the White Oak River

In a world filled with big personalities, sometimes it is very hard to keep a situation from getting personal.  If you work with others as most of us do, you will face situations where the temptation will be to respond to what appears to be a personal affront.

It can be as simple as a comment on some of your work or perhaps a valued idea that you put forward and it was rejected with little consideration.  Sometimes you find yourself in a situation where you are unfairly put on the spot in what appears to be an attempt to make someone else look better.

The easy thing to do is to strike back or even cling to your rejected idea.  Nearly one hundred percent of the time, the best thing to do is to lose your negative or combative thoughts and try to focus on the big picture which most people miss. 

When I am kayaking on our river, I am mindful of those oyster rocks under the shining surface of the White Oak River, but mostly I try to glide over them and focus on the blue skies without spending all my time worrying that I will get stuck on them.

Your work might sometimes seem like a series of battles, but there is almost always an overarching goal that you are trying to achieve either personally or corporately.  If you lose sight of your goal because of a situation that gets personal, you might never reach it.

It can seem like you are in a corner and you might feel the need to battle your way out, but you need to measure how much damage a combative attitude will cause to your long-term goal even if you win.  Losing a particular battle can sometimes be the best way to set up an eventual victory in a corporate war.

There are times that resolving a situation is as simple as stepping back and understanding that a comment which upset you might have had more to do with the situation of the person who made the comment than anything you did or did not do.  Seen in that light negative comments are easier to let go.

Often silence or even a slight retreat on an issue can you give you enough room to actually position yourself to achieve a long term victory.

Email and voice-mail often make a problem even worse instead of leading to a resolution.  People will say things in an email or voice-mail that they would never say in person.  

While writing down what has happened in a logical manner might make you feel better, actually sharing your logic might acerbate the person who started the situation and bring a real attack on you. 

Similarly clinging to a position that is going to lose in the hopes that you can turn the tide usually will cause you more trouble than accepting that one battle did not go your way. If you continue to fight a losing battle, you are more likely to the miss real opportunities to advance your larger goals.

Sometimes you have to decide what is most important to you, saving face, or making real progress towards a long held goal.

Finding Strength When You Need It

The Oyster Rocks Near Red Sixteen Buoy, White Oak River

The older you get, the more resilience you need.  Life for most of us has ups and downs, great moments and serious challenges.  

Life will put you flat on your back when you least expect it.  Sometimes it is hard to get up unless you draw on your inner reserves and confront your challenges.  Often it is really hard and you need the support of the people around you.  Then there are times that you have to stand alone and face what fate has dealt you.

A lot of what I learned about life came from the ten years we spent farming in the small village of Tay Creek, New Brunswick.  Keeping our farm, Tay Ridge Angus, running was more than a full-time job.  There were plenty of times that I took two steps forward only to realize that somehow I had gone backwards three steps.

When you are twenty miles from a real town in a place with weather that can cook you in the summer and seriously freeze you in the winter, you mostly have to depend on your own skills and the help of your neighbors.  You learn to fix or build just about anything with whatever you can find at hand. Quitting or not finishing the job is not an option.

Surprisingly a lot of what I learned on the farm served me well in my technology careers. Certainly at Apple, there was no one waiting around the corner to offer a helping hand.  Often if you wanted something done, you had to do it yourself or convince other very busy people to help you. Doing a job well when no one is watching or will find out becomes the way you live.

One of the things I have learned is that strength often means learning to keep your mouth shut when it would be very easy to point out the error of someone's ways.  If you survive through enough jobs, you will run into people who seem to spend a lot of time trying to shift the blame for their inaction or inability to perform a task to you.

It takes a good deal of finesse and inner courage to not let them get the best of you.  I have always found focusing on the task and not the person is a good way to solve a lot of problems.  

Try to understand what you are trying to accomplish and do what is needed to keep moving forward without irritating people who are in a position to help or harm you. Sometimes people will figure out that your determination to be successful has the power to sweep others along with you. Most often they will figure out that joining in your success is easier than standing in the way.

However, modern work places are not simple places where doing the right thing for the company or the customer is always looked upon favorably.

There may well be a day when you have to take a stand and let things take their natural course.  Sometimes it is unavoidable.  No company or product is worth compromising your ethics.  More often than you might guess, a job is not worth the emotional damage that it can do to you. In the end sometimes the best solution and the one which lets you sleep at night is moving on to another job.

I actually like to work and feel fortunate to have another great boss at this stage in my life.  After a handful of really bad micro-managers, it is particularly nice to be working at something I enjoy for someone I respect and who appreciates my efforts and skills.   A good boss can be a great filter for the bad stuff that can happen to you. Unfortunately bad bosses are often unavoidable and good ones are hard to find especially when you need one.

Still there are times when other pieces of my career drive me to distraction and I need to get away from it all.  Out on the oyster rocks of the White Oak River seems to be a place that has the power to restore me. Certainly the view from my kayak is a lot different than when driving over the river on one of the bridges.  It is nice that one of my special places only takes ten minutes of paddling to reach.  I wish that spot in the river had been nearby during my last few months at Apple, but there were some other stops on our journey before we could find peace along the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina.