On the Friday after Thanksgiving 2018, the View from the Mountain blog will have its fourteenth anniversary. It was not my first adventure on the web but it certainly has been my most persistent presence. We have not lived on the mountain overlooking Roanoke, Virginia, since 2012 but I have kept the blog going. I am happy that I did since much of my WordPress content written from a coastal perspective is locked away in a difficult to access database. There are close to 1,500 posts here.
I suspect View from the Mountain would have been an even more successful blog if I had picked a focus for it, but I never found the need to do that. I was never looking for commercial success or for mastery of a specific topic. The special topics that interest me are covered by other blogs. I have a blog that talks about the Crystal Coast, another that has a focus on living/gardening/fishing on the coast, and my Applepeels blog about Apple. There are even a few other odd ones that I have written over the years but none with the diversity of content that is here.
This blog has always been my honest view of the world whether it was operating systems, cameras, life, places or how people treat each other.
It seems appropriate today to look back at some of my first thoughts here and speak to some of the changes since I first start writing. It is hard to start this without mentioning that the Crystal Coast, where I live in 2018, as I am writing this is something of a changed world since Hurricane Florence visited us on September 13, 2018.
Even in my early posts, I wrote about how life has shaped my views. The older I get the more thankful I am that I have had the opportunity to see the world from a number of perspectives. Little did I realize how impactful my time in Canada would be when I became a landed immigrant at Yarmouth, Nova Scotia in the summer of 1971. It is a great privilege and a humbling experience to view your own country through the eyes of others especially a country like Canada which in spite of all the talk has a lot of affection for its southern neighbor. The deep personal ties between Canada and the United States are far too strong for lasting damage to come from the hateful rhetoric that sometimes spews out of Washington, DC.
American and Canadians have fought shoulder to shoulder in too many wars to have their friendship destroyed. Both countries have their own challenges but like most things in life, the opportunity to solve those challenges is a lot brighter with the help of friends than with hectoring from the leader of one of the countries.
All through my life whether in a Boy Scout troop, with my farm neighbors, or on a corporate team, it has been clear that when people work together they achieve more than when working just for themselves and falling to the temptation to tear down each other. I will always believe that the reason (besides price) Apple's computer market share is stuck in the 12% range is that the sales executives at Apple think that Apple sales teams should compete against each other for business instead of working together.
Taking an adversarial position with everything in life is a harsh and self-defeating way to live. Taking a win-win approach has always worked better for me. Thinking that you can go it alone as an individual or a nation might achieve short-term results but it unlikely to bring lasting positive results. If life is all about making the other person the loser, you can count on that coming back to haunt you at another time.
Even as hard as I have worked, I certainly could not have gotten through life without the help and support of others. It started with my extended family and mother, continued through high school and college, and got even stronger during our days on the farm. I am pleased that even my suburban life has been filled with friendships and support. We could not have moved from Roanoke without the help of friends. I certainly could not have survived the challenges of living in an HOA community with occasional strife without the support of friends and the sanctuary of our Presbyterian church.
When all is said and done, friends and allies are much better to have in your corner because there will always be enemies and competitors in another corner. It is much easier to stand up for what is right when those friends and allies are with you.
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