View from the Mountain

Fifteen Years of My Own Words

The Point, Emerald Isle, NC

The Point, located on the far western end of Bogue Banks in the town of Emerald Isle, has great significance to me. For over a decade it has been the local place where I feel the closest to nature. I have written about it many times and even specifically about going to the ends of the sand which is not far from where this picture was taken.  The Point is also where my love affair with the Crystal Coast began in 1969 when my uncle Austin and I had to drive down the beach in my old Bronco to reach the Point.

I do not have to look back nearly as far as 1969 to remember that I wrote my first post on Typepad in November 2004.  This is post number 1,445 on View from the Mountain.  It has been seven years since we left the Mountain, but the blog continues to be one of my favorite soapboxes.  It is something of a minor tradition that I write an anniversary post. I hold up the tenth-anniversary post and the fourteenth-anniversary post as examples.

Much like the moment of clarity that I wrote about in this post, I have come to a few conclusions about our world.

1. First, there are many people in the world whose actions either intentionally or unintentionally are hostile to the rest of us. Often we are little but roadblocks in their schemes which often have more to do about their insecurities than anything else.
2. If you are trying to do what is right for the majority of the people, you are going to run into people who will oppose you. There are people out there who care more about themselves than about anything. The concept of the greater good is foreign to them. I have seen these people, had to deal with them and felt the hurt long after they have disappeared.
3. I have also come to realize that there are people who really do not care for facts unless the "facts" happen to bolster their own opinion. It is hard to understand but they seem to love to cling to the worst stories about people. Even if the narrative has no factual basis, it lets them rationalize their dislike, distrust or divorced from reality thoughts.  They deal in lies and rumor.
4. Another fact of life is that many people have trouble admitting that they are wrong. They will try to shovel the blame over on you even when it requires unbelievable contortions.  It is never their fault mainly because they dress in Teflon and everything slides off of them.
5. It is incumbent on us in our thoughts, our writings and our actions to call out the people who are trying to destroy our world. If you are silent, you are complicit.
6. If it requires a struggle to demonstrate balance in your subject matter, maybe you need to see if you are having to manufacture the balance.  To equate the influence of evangelical right on our politics with that of the religious left is a stretch that I am not willing to make.

That is it for the fifteenth-anniversary post.  As another fall comes to a close on the Crystal Coast, we are settling into our winter routine here along Raymond's Gut and the White Oak River as we finish this adventure and look forward to the next one.

Keeping Our Brains Wired

Our minds are amazing but like most things, they perform better if they are used regularly.

For most of my life I have been an avid reader. For the last one and half decade I have spent much of my time writing. That includes thousands of articles on the web and five books.

Most of my reading beyond the proof reading of the long proposals that we produce at work has been newspapers. This past fall I decided that for my own mental health I needed to read a few books. The first one I tried failed to interest me. Now that I have read a couple of books including the last one which was 479 pages, I am not certain that the first book was the problem.

As I really got into the third book, it occurred to me that my brain was starting to make connections more easily than it did in the second book. Though I read the book over a period of six or seven weeks, I found myself more engaged than I was by the second book which had the same author and a similar plot. It was also easier to pick up the book after having missed a few days reading. When I wanted to go check on something about one of the characters, it was easy to thumb back to the passage I needed. My hands seemed to find what I was looking for quickly.

Could it be that reading complex books primes our brains to keep track of more information than if we only read short articles?

While this is just anecdotal information from one person, I cannot help but wonder if this might be a big problem in our society. Reading a long book with a complicated plot, a number of characters or ideas takes far more skill than reading a newspaper article or a tweet. Reading a book takes more thinking and stimulates your imagination far more than consuming a short article in just a few minutes. Of course any kind of reading (along with drawing your own conclusions) does far more for your mind than passively absorbing the pronouncements of a television talking head. 

We seem to have an overabundance of people whose thoughts appear unconnected at best. Perhaps there could be many reasons, but maybe one is the decline of reading, especially long books. According to an article in the Washington Post, " the share of Americans who read for pleasure on a given day has fallen by more than 30 percent since 2004." Leisure reading has hit an all time low.

One way to think about it is the dining table pictured at the top of the post. Imagine that the newspaper articles you read are mostly from the same few authors who join you regularly at your table and sit at the same places each time. Like good friends coming to dinner, you have a pretty good idea what they are going to say. The conversations are pretty simple and typically exactly what you expect.

A complex book is a far more complex dining scenario. Imagine the author as a puppeteer who carefully places people at the table and removes them before you really get a chance to know them. Of course the characters at the table change rapidly and you have to stay on your toes to gather as much information and connect the dots as the author/puppeteer gives you the opportunity. Figuring out the story takes concentration and some skill as the characters rotate around your dining table often taking different seats at the table. Even the light on their faces changes. The whole thing is challenging but very rewarding when it all comes together.

I know that I am pleased to be back in the reading grove. A good book beats good television any day.

Fourteen years of posts

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.

Patience is a Great Leveler

Age brings lots of things and some are not so pleasant.  Among the obvious things, it is harder to exercise. When you are older there are things you should not eat unless you are willing to suffer the consequences.  As you age it is even more of a challenge to roll out of bed early every morning. That is especially true for those of us still working well into our Social Security years.

Even some of the things that I love to do are more challenging. I find myself lacking the desire to take my boat out every week. That is certainly the case when the water is cold. Now I am a fair weather boater. It also takes a lot longer to accomplish what I want to get done.

Mowing the yard, going for a beach hike, doing some kayaking and biking all in the same day is unlikely to happen.  Even the less physical things are more challenging. I used to write a lot in the evenings before bed. Now that writing in the evening is far less frequent. Certainly building things is more of a planned exercise than a fire drill to see how fast I can get it done.

However, there is one great blessing that comes with age and that is patience.  As you get older you learn that while the world seems to move at breakneck speed, not everything requires an instant response. Age teaches you that sometimes sitting back and observing things is the right thing to do.  If you believe every email that you get, we are obviously in a do or die struggle for fundraising almost every evening.

I ignore most of the fundraising emails and all of the fundraising telephone calls.  I rarely answer a telephone call unless I recognize the person calling me. If an unknown caller has an important message, they will leave a message and I can call them back.  The unrecognized callers rarely leave a message.

Our country is potentially on the brink of a constitutional crisis, but we are not there yet.  We have survived over a year of attacks on honesty and our institutions.  Yet I cannot let myself be worked up into a frenzy every day.  It is impossible to sustain that level of energy until the mid-term elections.

I believe that our institutions will survive this formidable attack.  I was around for the sixties so I have seen my fair share of turmoil and change. Life has taught me that those in power often overplay their hand and that the great pendulum of power held by the people can easily swing back and quickly wipe out those who have threatened this country.  Many have given their lives that our country can be a beacon of hope in the world.  That kind of firm foundation cannot be so easily destroyed by those who daily trample on the truth.

Having patience is more than lack of action, it means waiting until you know you are doing the right thing. It also means picking your battles and planning for a true victory, not just a symbolic one. It means learning the real facts and being willing to stand up for them when the lines between good and evil are clearly drawn.  Perhaps patience is just another element of the learning that seems to come easier as you age.  We are not marching in the streets every day but a cleansing tidal wave of good is building all the same.

You Cannot Ignore The Waves You Create

We live in a society where many people think they can say or do whatever they want even if it harms others.  They actually do not care since they have an agenda where they and perhaps a friend or two who refuse to see them in anything but a favorable light are the only ones who matter. 

While they might protest that they are doing things for the good of others, a close examination of their rhetoric and more importantly their actions leads only to the conclusion that whatever they are doing is designed to benefit or entertain themselves and everyone else can go to hell.

Almost all of us come in contact with these people who love to quote facts, rules, and precedents as long as they support their intended outcome.

Most of these folks tend to try to get their way by shouting louder than others, trying to control the opinions of others, and threatening or insulting those that do not agree with them.  If they are in government of any form, the last thing they want to do is to face the people whom they represent in a meeting.

Few of these folks are truly interested in a process that will actually solve a problem unless it resolves it in their favor.  They attempt to bully anyone involved in issues and end up looking like a toddler having a temper tantrum.

They are the self-proclaimed experts on everything and of course their way of looking at things is the only way to look at anything. True facts are just confusing.

I have spent a life standing up for what I believe whether it was equal funding for the education of children in rural New Brunswick or running an HOA by following the rules.

Over the years I have seen people threaten to do this or that if I did not do something.  Experience has taught me that you can only live your life to your own standards if you refuse to bend those core principles you have chosen for your life.  The only response to a threat is to stiffen your resolve.

What surprises me most is that so many of these scorched earth people who will do or say anything to get their own way, think that the horrible things they say and do have no impact.  They might attack your reputation one day and act like nothing has happened the next day. They are oblivious to the consequences of their actions and part of that is because people are afraid to stand up to them.

One of telling signs of these people who sow discord is accusing the very people trying to solve a problem of sowing discord.  It is their fall back position of choice. While oblivious to the discord they have created, they are quick to point fingers at those hoping to resolve issues.

Their inexcusable behavior creates waves of consequences that wash over us all.  Often we end up having to do things that we would never had done if we were dealing with normal people who care for people besides themselves.

It is long past time that we sentence people like this to life without real contact with the rest of us.  If society is going to survive, why do we coddle those that seek to destroy it?  Certainly we should stop electing them to any positions of authority.

If your agenda is to take advantage of the rest of us while you get your way,  why should you expect me to be so stupid as to help you do it?  It has never worked on me in the past and is unlikely to do so in the future so just save your threats for someone who has not seen it all before.

Remember if your role has responsibilities that effect me, count on me to hold you accountable if you do not fulfill those duties.