Yesterday, unlike other Mondays, we dropped off our son at camp and headed straight for the Parkway. Our family are inveterate fair weather hikers and even though the forecast was for rain, we (my wife and I) decided that discretion had nothing to say to valor. If we must be wet, we must be wet; the Parkway has a beauty to match any kind of weather. So we headed west in the MINI and climbed the mountain.
On the way, we stopped for an early lunch in Wilkesboro at a delightful cafe named Talia Espresso. Fresh food, good coffee, great atmosphere. Then up Route 16 to the Parkway, then north to Doughton Park and the Bluffs. We did a 5-mile out-and-back hike across a big meadow, over granite outcroppings and down into a sun-dappled forest. We passed the bleached bones of an old oak along the way; some beautiful patterns in the exposed wood but I can’t show you that because the picture is mostly of a big fuzzy thumb covering the iPhone’s lens. Nice.
We left Winston-Salem around 10:30, were back in town by 5:30 and it felt like we had been away for a week. That little trip and hike worked wonders. A tramp across high grass to take in a panoramic view of the world below clears away all cares and distractions. It also allowed us to make a fresh start on some short- and long-term planning while we walked together or rested in the shade of a scrub pine.
I’m telling you this little story because I was reminded of something Seth Godin wrote a few weeks back. He said:
One way to do indispensable work is to show up more hours than everyone else. Excessive face time and candle-burning effort is sort of rare, and it’s possible to leverage it into a kind of success. . . . The problem with using time as your lever for success is that it doesn’t scale very well. 20 hours a day at work is not twice as good as 18, and you certainly can’t go much beyond 24. What would happen if you were prohibited from working more than five hours a day. What would you do?
He’s talking about something else here, but I began to think about how productive a five-hour workday could be. And how productive an 8- or 10-hour day could be if we took the time (i.e., those of us who have some control over our work schedules) to make the time to forget the time. That’s how this trip fits in. Seven hours away is not seven hours wasted. In some ways it was some of the most concentrated, useful time we could have spent. It means we return with a spring in our step and a new conviction. We figured things out. We breathed fresh mountain air. We saw the world from a different perspective.
All that to say that a vacation needn’t last a week to be a vacation. Seven hours can be plenty of time to renew the flagging spirit.
Now back to the shop to build a new jig.
Your Correspondent: Still delighted by the barn swallows and butterflies sailing above the meadow grass.
