Where you work has just as much impact on your life as where you live. For many of us, they are one and the same. For a man to achieve his highest level of performance, he must create a space that represents the world that he is working to create for himself and his family. This space can be physical- the walls, doors, ceilings, and floors that confine us- or this space can be mental and spiritual. The difference is that one space confines you, and the other sets you free.
A leader doesn’t defy the wind, or blame the wind for pushing him off course. A leader doesn’t blame those around him for the way the wind blows. But most of all, a leader doesn’t allow the wind to decide his direction. Instead, they understand the wind, embrace it, and know how to use it to arrive at their chosen destination.
A boat can sail against the wind by slightly tilting its sails in a direction ahead of the vector of the sail. Birds fly against the wind not by beating their wings more furiously, but by cutting across the eddies and currents of the sky. A leader, like a boat or a bird, must understand that the wind is never against them, although they may occasionally need to tack against it when the journey so demands.
There is a sleeping giant in the middle of Utah- a place where the world’s largest organism has lived for millennia. Pando was ancient when Christianity was new. It lay dreaming in loam-filled beds near the shores of Lake Bonneville while humanity was covering itself in animal skins and inventing names for the stars. When North America was covered in ice, Pando waited, drawing its roots in around it like a cloak, and waited for the years and decades to pass until the sun returned.
Our lives are as brief as that of a mayfly when compared to Pando, the great Old One of the American southwest. He was here before the first bipedal primate trudged across the primordial land-bridge and settled the land. God willing, he always remain.
– Allan Lacoste
There are some who will tell you that watches are a sign of modern slavery, a mark of our subservience to the Almighty Dollar and servitude to modern obsession with productivity. The mark of an OCD mindset that we’d all be better off without.
I disagree.
I believe that watches are merely a tool that, like any tool, can be used or abused. Or maybe they’re not even that- maybe they’re just a fashion statement. Something fun that doesn’t have to have much more depth than that. For instance, the watch on the left is whimsical and utilitarian at the same time, a wearable piece of art.
The one on the right is minamalist, striking, and somehow manages to be both retro and futuristic at the same time. Is it a sundial, or the nose-cone of a rocket? Or neither? Or both?
Then thare are watches like this one by Ferrari, which say “I had a quarter of a million dollars to spend on a watch that doesn’t actually show what time it is.”
There comes a time in the life of every man or woman when they ask themselves why their ancestors ever went to all the trouble of crawling out of the sea. The ocean has always fascinated me- the long, flat horizon, the hum of water against sand, and most of all the feeling one gets of being totally isolated from, while simultaneously instantly connected to, every other living thing on Earth.
They say the oceans were formed when an ice-giant careened recklessly out of orbit and crashed into Earth, like a galactic game of billiards with God running the table. I don’t know if that’s true, but if it is, I prefer to think of it as one planet embracing another, fully aware that the total of the two would be infinitely greater than the sum of their parts.