Time Bandits

No, not the classic 1981 movie by Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin with time-hopping dwarves. I’m thinking of another group of little people–kids. Kids steal time like it’s candy. Preschoolers are so self-absorbed they can’t imagine that their demands consume an adult’s time.

There are times I find this egocentricity entertaining. There are also times I’m stunned.  When my daughter threw up in the car recently, she immediately advised me that the next time she had to throw up I should make sure I’m not in the middle of an intersection so I can pull over in time to get her out of the car.

Really!?! I need to take a route that avoids intersections so she’s not inconvenienced!

Granted tossing your last meal all over your lap while you’re pinned in place by a 5-point harness is pretty nasty, but cleaning the mess is no picnic either. And between the two kids this has happened three times this year.

For Christmas this year, I’m asking for empathy–and a couple of barf bags for the car. That is if she remembers to ask what I want.

Thoughts on having it all

Last night the Banff Mountain Film Festival road show pulled into town and my wife, Kimberley, and I got see a selection of entries from the festival. At each venue they screen a grab bag of short and long films from the festival entries on anything from extreme sports to cultural and environmental topics. When the MC announced the long film for our evening was about fishing I groaned.  Called Eastern Rises, it turned out to be the best movie of the night. By far.

The film follows a group of flyfishing guides exploring the Kamchatka Peninsula—a stunning, untouched world on Russia’s Pacific shore. One of the guides, Ryan, recounts how when a client asked, “Ryan, how do your parents feel about how you’re wasting your life?” he replied, “Um, jealous, like everybody else.”

I’ve been going to see movies from the Banff Film Festival for something like 16 years now and every time there has been at least one movie that gets me thinking, “Why don’t we just quit our jobs, sell everything, and go ______.” Fill in the blank: live off the grid, work as a ski guide, ride across China, et cetera.

It hasn’t happened yet.

In the sober light of morning, I guess worries about paying for college and saving for retirement win out—afraid that the lifestyle we want won’t support the future we envision. Perhaps I’ve gotten too risk adverse since becoming a parent. But, watching my kids sleep at night I want to supply their every want and give them every advantage I can provide.

Heck, when it comes to kids even planning to have a child gave me pause. I was plagued by worries that we should wait until we’d saved more or gotten another promotion at work. Kimberley argued that no time would be perfect, we should just go ahead with it.

Allison Pearson describes this conflict in her book I Think I Love You in which there’s a woman working at a magazine who has postponed and postponed having children. Pearson writes, “This was the great delusion of our age, that love could be held waiting in a holding pattern like airlines above an airport, waiting for you to call in the plane until you were good and ready. But love and motherhood and pregnancy will not wait endlessly.”

Thankfully, Kimberley convinced me to put my concerns aside. And I’ve since learned something about being happy. Happiness is a matter of setting expectations. Identify the two or three core things that make your soul sing and you can have it all without the attendant mortgage, car payments, and 80-hour work week.

Two-wheeled artistry

I’ve never ridden a Soulcraft or any other frame built in a small custom shop for that matter. But after watching this short video I want to pick up the phone and add another bike to my stable. Or better yet, learn the craft and make my own. The naked steel frame before powder coating is a thing of beauty.

Watch the video. It’s incredibly well shot.

 

Winter Rorschach test

The first storm of the season blew through last week and left behind a nice solid foot and a half of snow. Once the sun broke free of the horizon I headed out to clear the driveway. I actually like shoveling snow. It’s straightforward work with no special skill involved—move the snow from here to there and the harder you work the more you get done. I find the effort invigorating and the repetitive motion and post-snowfall quiet conducive to reflection. Except this time after about twenty minutes one neighbor fired up his snow blower. He was followed by another, and another, and then another. The noise was like accidentally wandering into a tractor pull.
Which got me thinking: Why do people so readily choose motorized means of doing things over human powered means? Are we really so busy that we can’t afford to shovel a driveway or sidewalk? Is the time saved worth the noise and CO2 spewed over the neighborhood? Is the notion of physical labor (and it’s effort) so unsettling that it’s to be avoided if there’s any other alternative?
I think one of the reasons I don’t mind shoveling is the physicality of it—the sensation of engaging muscles and twisting through the torso. There’s got to be something primal about it because I watch my kids run everywhere just for the sake of running and skip for the joy of it. It’s only in adulthood that we carefully schedule these motions for workout time and skirt hard labor when we can.
These thoughts were on my mind again the following day when I took the kids cross-country skiing. We started both kids skiing by their second birthday. Our son is 5 now and he has no idea what a chair lift is. I’d be happy if that doesn’t change in the next 5 years. He loves skiing uphill so he can ski down it. And as he and his sister get older and graduate from hills to mountains I hope the joy and reward of earning their turns in the backcountry continues to grow. Plus, there’s nothing to give you mad skills like ripping on Nordic skis from the time you can walk. Just check out Chris Milliman’s shot of Andy Newell catching major air in the terrain park on his skate skis.
When we lived in D.C. we used to ski in West Virginia’s Canaan Valley at a wonderful, quirky place called Whitegrass . It began life as a lift-serve ski hill. Ditching the chair lifts and snow guns Chip Chase has been making a go of it as a Nordic hill for the last 30 years or so. He farms snow with snow fencing to hang onto every flake he gets. With 1200 ft. vertical there are plenty of opportunities to step off the set track and drop a knee through the trees. His son grew up on x-c skis and the way he can ski the glades on skinny skis is incredible.
The next time you look out the window on a fresh snowfall what will you see? A nuisance to be cleared before slogging through traffic to join the hordes in the lift line or a chance to gather your thoughts before exploring some backcountry?

The problem with HGTV

“This was work of the hand and of the mind and of the muscle. Work that left some hint of itself and yourself behind after you were gone.

“Craftsmanship, his Uncle Cornelius had once told him, was just a fancy word for what happened when labor met love.”

This passage from Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day has been bouncing around in my head for a week now as I’ve plugged away on a remodeling project. I’ve gotten bogged down with a bunch of unexpected work correcting things done by whoever worked on it before me.

One of the great lies of the last decade has been the propaganda spread by shows on HGTV, TLC, etc. that remodeling is intuitive and easy. It’s hard work, it’s tedious, it’s time consuming, and it’s humbling. The trades are one of those areas of knowledge where you don’t realize the depth of your ignorance until you work beside a taciturn gray-hair who’s been doing this for 30 years because he takes pride in crafting something that will outlast him.

Now I get that for many people there’s no romance to building something or wiring a circuit. I’ve had my days of self-loathing, cursing every nail driven and board cut. But if you’ve taken the time to do a project, why not do it in the best possible style?

There’s something to be gained in a task well done and leaving the small part of the world you’ve touched better than you found it.

Breaking free of gravity

If you follow cycling at all you’ve probably heard of Danny MacAskill.  A couple of years ago a YouTube video of his incredible street trials skills went viral. Well, today he’s got a new video, Way Back Home. I’ve got to say I’m in awe.

Every time I watch him I’m left wondering how much we limit ourselves by our perception of what is possible. Think of the 4-minute barrier in the mile: For decades it was considered unbreakable–faster than the human body could move. Once Roger Bannister cracked it in 1954, everybody was suddenly running sub-four. By 1975 the record had fallen below 3:50. What changed? Mostly runners’ expectations. Once they believed it was possible, it was.

It’s great to see guys like MacAskill, regardless of their sport, raising the bar for everybody else.