Lock Down Lessons

 

A bit of stream of consciousness about the past six+ months. As I imagine is the case for most people, the Covid “lock down” has been more inconvenience than  permanent life altering event. A few years from now it may be looked back on with nostalgia – like the last six miles of a marathon once the pain is forgotten.

Since we began the “viral journey” or should I say “viral avoidance journey” I have had many more good days than frustrating ones. On the other hand, telling myself regularly that I am blessed because many people “have it tougher than I do” seems like a hallow rationalization on those inevitable bad days.

I try to stay positive about “Covid life”; but this particular week has caused my wanderlust to kick in. A year ago, I was in Spain with my wife and some family members for the Camino de Santiago (for more on that subject read the blog post before this one).

A Few of the People I Met Along the Way

Looking at the dozens of pictures I took in Spain have me in a bit of a funk. My time on the Camino was an unusual two weeks for me – no work, no computer, just walking the trail, meeting people, drinking cortados and water by day and the “pilgrim meal” with local wine (or the occasional “upgrade”) at night. It has been almost a year since I wrote a post in this blog and it was about my experience in Spain. I guess I am surprised that with all the time I have had at home, my personal blog didn’t get any attention.

A couple of years ago I promised myself I would do more “fun” travel with Connie (my wife). The walk in Spain was my second “fun only” trip in 2019. In January of last year, we spent a couple days in London and then ten days in Sweden, Finland, and Norway chasing the “Northern Lights”, snowmobiling, dog sledding, spending a night in the famous “Ice Hotel”, etc. I thought I was just getting the hang of “non work” trips again which as a family we pretty well mastered during eleven years of “ex-pat” life. We hoped to do a river cruise in Europe and some other travel in 2020 – oops, I may be whining at this point. Sorry.   

The Ice Hotel was Literally and Figuratively "Cool"

For some perspective, I have accumulated about 6 million frequent flyer miles on business trips over the years. I have crossed the Pacific Ocean by air more than 350 times and the Atlantic, perhaps 200. I traveled out of the country every month last year except December and even then, I spent several days on the west coast but although enjoyable, business trips are just that – work. Of course, work that I enjoy but work, nonetheless.

I began 2020 with a west coast trip in January and then a quick three-day trip to Argentina. February saw me in Japan. And then.......  

On March 1, I boarded a flight from Tokyo to the US. I have been “grounded” ever since I arrived home that night due to the “hopefully temporary” Covid 19 reality we are all dealing with. After spending the last week of February in Tokyo at a conference with thousands of people, a good percentage of whom were from the Covid epicenters at the time - China and Korea. I expected when I landed at Los Angeles International Airport to at least have a temperature check and health questionnaire but I breezed through the Global Entry Kiosk and out of the secured area without having a word spoken to me except “welcome home”. It seemed a little odd that I wasn’t asked if I had been in contact with potential Covid carriers while in Asia. The lack of concern about the virus in the US gave me pause. Having lived in Asia during SARs and the Avian Flu outbreaks, people wearing masks and getting your temperature taken before boarding a flight and when you deplaned were just normal baseline preventative measures.

From March 2nd I self-quarantined for 14 days only to have the county I live in go on ‘lock down’ on my final day. I thought to myself “ok, this will be three months of no travel, no big deal”. As I write this in mid-September the county where I live in North Carolina is still not fully off lock down. It took some time but mask wearing in public places here is now the rule rather than the exception it was in March, April and May.

There are Worse Places to Lock Down than a House on a Golf Course in North Carolina

I had not spent 30 straight days at home since my younger daughter was one. She turned twenty-eight in June. As I write this, I have spent six straight months in and around my house. I have only been out of my immediate area once and that only to have lunch with my niece and her husband two hours away and immediately return home. So, my life has become very similar to that of most people in the US. Hopefully a vaccine that works is available as an early Christmas present. Travel is so ingrained in me that the question people have asked me most often on business calls is, “how are you dealing with no travel?”

I was happy to have a dose of normalcy with the return of college and pro football this month but the odd fake crowd noise in empty stadiums is a bit bizarre. Hopefully they appoint a “fake crowd noise Czar” to manage the process in the coming weeks.

I have learned a few lessons during this odd time and expect to learn more before life returns to a more “normal state”.

I guess the first one is that not traveling hasn’t been that bad – at least until this week’s “mini funk”. Perhaps knowing nobody else is doing international business travel (with the odd exception) has limited my FOMO (fear of missing out) but this extended period of being home has made me appreciate how lucky I am to live where I do. I have quick access to everything I need which includes a good supermarket, hiking trails and a golf course (yes, I am “needy”). We were fortunate to have installed a sauna in the house just as lockdown was starting. I have used the sauna almost every day the last six months. Having a big house enabled us to have our younger daughter stay for two months and our elder daughter and son in law stay twice for about two weeks each time. Remote work does have advantages. There were a few days when we had four Zoom calls going at the same time. Fortunately, our internet service rose to the challenge.

Having the Kids and "Granddog" Home was Great Fun

In April, I was still foolishly hoping that June speaking gigs in Germany and Argentina would happen or just be delayed a month or two. Of course, neither happened nor will happen this year. Zoom business calls are great but Zoom “Conferences” much less so. The biggest benefit of a conference is the face to face interactions that happen outside the conference hall. 

Overall, my business has held up much better than expected. Another surprise.

The second lesson learned is that you can learn just about anything via “YouTube University”. I started a podcast in late 2017. It was recorded in studios from Buenos Aires to London to Shanghai to LA to Perth and professionally edited. Not being able to travel forced me to rethink the podcast model. After a few hours on google and YouTube, I had the answer - recording via Zoom converting the sound file to something I could edit in an off the shelf program that was simple enough to use after watching a few YouTube tutorials. When Covid started my podcast had been downloaded in about 70 countries, now that number is over 100. Shocking, given that I talk with people about the arcane topic of lithium and battery related technology. I doubt I will go back to using studios post Covid.

As I was typing the last paragraph, I got an email to confirm the Berlin event I referenced earlier is now scheduled for December 2021. I guess you can’t be too careful.

While my younger daughter, Cailin, was home I decided to avail myself of her computer savvy and have her show me how to get a website for my business up and running. I had built up a consulting business with clients on five continents just on connections and word of mouth but after seven years I had grown tired of being asked for my website URL. Certain people seemed to think you aren’t serious if you don’t have a website. My podcast was on a hosted platform and all my business writing was posted online via Linked In. Since I had a strong online presence, I saw a website as unnecessary but in just two months of being live, I have had people from over fifty countries visit the site www.globallithium.net. 

During her time at home, Cailin also introduced me to yoga – she was doing online classes most days via the studio she goes to in LA. I said I would try it and haven’t gone more than two days without yoga since June. With Cailin back in LA, I have relied on the Peloton app for my almost daily yoga fix. After 40 years of running without stretching, yoga has proven more effective than physical therapy for dealing with my physical imbalances that started causing me pain a few years ago. Had Covid not happened it is doubtful I would have ever tried yoga. The fact that I embraced it was a shock to both my daughters and to me as well. The old dog is learning new tricks.

Seems Like A Long Time Since I Got a Global Services Tarmac Ride to Change Planes

This week I saw several pictures of friends and relatives on vacations in the mountains and at the beach. I haven’t been anxious to fly with the “new rules” and may wait until 2021 to get back on a plane but I do feel a fall “road trip” coming on.

The duration of the pandemic certainly surprised me. I am extremely interested to see if there are any long-term impacts on how we interact in public and how we travel. I am guessing no. I think by 2022 the world will look pretty much like it did pre-Covid with no fake crowd noise needed at football games. At least I hope so.

The Camino de Santiago

I wrote in a New Year’s blog post about “rebalancing” my life, feeling a need to spend more time on the “non work” parts and certainly less time mired in the mind numbing world of social media.

So far that desire has resulted in a two week “no work” trip to northern Sweden, Finland and Norway in January staying at the Ice Hotel, snowmobiling, dog sledding, XC skiing and “chasing views” of the Northern Lights as well as the more recent subject of this post. In September, I spent two weeks in Spain, most of the time dedicated to walking the Camino de Santiago aka “The Way of St. James” (Frances route).

The Camino has been walked for over 1,000 years and is one of the world’s oldest Christian pilgrimages. The entire route is approximately 780 kilometers beginning in France and ending at a massive cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, near the northwest coast of Spain. Thousands of “pilgrims” walk all or a portion of the route each year. Given walking the entire route takes the average “pilgrim” about 35 days, I only walked the final ~190 kilometers over an easily doable 10 days. Well, maybe not that easy. Those that walk a minimum of the last 100KM and pick up a couple of stamps (aka sellos) in a “Camino Credential” each day are rewarded with a “compostela” (certificate of completion).

I went to Spain with my wife, Connie, three of her siblings and their spouses. It is unlikely I would ever have taken the time to do this on my own but Connie really wanted to do it and since I was asked a year in advance, I responded “why not?” with no real knowledge of the Camino except a vague recollection of seeing a movie about the trek called “The Way” starring Martin Sheen.

Our group of eight people was of differing motivations, speeds and expectations. We covered between 10 and 16 miles a day on the actual route and once we stopped for the day I normally walked an additional mile or two seeing the local area (or a least that is what my fitbit told me).

As spring 2019 turned into summer my bride decided she needed to “train” for the Camino. Of course, the internet provided multiple “training programs” to guide her efforts. Although I didn’t feel a specific need to train and also felt my two college sport “better half” was up to the challenge just by taking some longish walks for several weeks, if she wanted to follow a “training program” – I was all for it. I happily joined her a few times a week as she upped her mileage. Walking 14 miles in the sunny, humid upper 90s of the North Carolina summer proved to be a confidence builder for Connie.

I was actually more concerned about being bored out of my mind walking most of the day every day for ten days. I am not sure why I felt that way because I spent more than two decades doing twenty to thirty-mile marathon training long runs about 30 weekends each year. I was never bored on those runs and never listened to music, I just let my mind go where it would.

Had I known this awaited me I wouldn't have worried about boredom

In attempt to give myself a ”pre Camino attitude adjustment”, I bought and read four books detailing “Camino experiences”.  By the end of 4^th book I was looking forward to heading to Spain. I wasn’t expecting (or seeking) a major spiritual experience but it seemed the disparate authors all came to a common conclusion – walking “The Way of St. James” was a significant and, in some cases, a life changing experience. Seemed like a better use of my time than tweeting…..

We landed in Madrid on a Saturday morning and made our way west by car to Villafranca del Bierzo where we spent a couple days before starting our walk. As part of the “pilgrim” experience we stayed in what I would describe as “basic” hotels. Certainly nothing like what I stay in as a relatively spoiled business traveler but that was part of the experience. I loved the historic vibe of Villafranca and, as luck would have it, there was a festival in town. We made our way to a city square and while enjoying tapas saw an 18 wheeler navigate the narrow road into the square, contort itself into a parked status and marveled as it became obvious the workers that suddenly appeared were unloading an building a stage worthy of a top drawer rock band. A few hours later we were back in the packed square marveling that this little city was hosting such a well-produced event but as often is the case in my posts I digress – back to the Camino.

Villafranca got our Camino off to a lively start

Early on a Monday morning, about 48 hours after landing in Spain, we began our trek to Santiago de Compostela. Our first leg was actually one of the two or three most arduous of the entire ~ 780 km route since we took the more difficult, steeper and scenic "upper" route out of the city. For almost an hour we trod an oxygen sucking and sweat inducing path despite the cool morning temperatures. By the time I got to the top of the first climb I was beginning to wonder if I had overestimated my condition, underestimated the challenge or both. Not to worry, the remaining several hours was much less challenging than the first 60 minutes. We reached our hotel, quite nice by comparison to our first accommodation, by mid-afternoon. In total, I walked 35,211 steps or 15.62 miles the first day. Because of the initial steep climb, I rated the day about equal to a 20-mile marathon training run in degree of difficulty. A hot shower and a few beers later, I was ready for dinner, sleep and day 2.

Day 1 started out with a long climb

Having been told day one would be the hardest, I was surprised when day 2 began with a climb almost as difficult although shorter than day 1. Since our eight-person group had an average age in the mid 60’s our daily trip plan wasn’t as ambitious as it could have been. Day 2 was only 24,000 steps or about 10.6 miles. We arrived before noon at one the highest points (altitude wise) on the trek – the small town of O Cebreiro. By day 2, I had developed an arrival routine of washing out my quick dry merino wool socks and shirt and finding a place to hang them to dry, taking a quick shower and finding the best spot to have a beer. The group descended on the tiny local super mercado (aka supermarket) where we loaded up on meat, cheese, beer, wine and water. Our hotel had outdoor tables and a great view so no restaurant was required for lunch.

Day 2 

At dinner I had one of my many enjoyable “cultural exchanges”. As was the case on most nights, we had a “pilgrim meal” which many hostels, hotels and many restaurants along the Camino route offer for a fixed price. We were to find quality of the offerings varied quite a bit. The meal is normally a starter, a simple main and dessert. This particular evening, we ate in a large, open room where a big group was already mid meal when we arrived. They were speaking Mandarin – very loud Mandarin. As the noise level began to irritate me, I decided I could be frustrated or be friendly. I chose the latter. Picking up my wine glass I walked over to the table and toasted them in Mandarin. The look of surprise was well worth the effort but just the beginning of the payoff. The toast turned into a conversation which morphed into group introductions and an invitation to attend mass at our next stop. 

Dusting off my weak Mandarin but I got the point across

It turned out my new friends were a Taiwanese group led by a catholic priest who had lived in Dallas for a year and a retired Taiwanese business man with a 5 handicap that had lived in Dallas for more than 30 years. Since the majority of the group didn’t speak English I had no way of knowing any of them spoke English until we were about ten minutes into our chat and “Walter” came clean. It seemed he enjoyed my struggle to chat in Mandarin.

We will come back to Team Taiwan soon.

I met "Father Joe" early in the day and a very large dog a little later

September 18 aka day 3 began with a beautiful sunrise. I was getting used to steep climbs out of the gate and took the attitude that it was good to get them done early. Although we had an afternoon rain after we finished yesterday, we had another beautiful day to walk. I ran into my newly minted Taiwanese buddy ironically named “Father Joe” early in the day. They started earlier but walked more slowly. This became a pattern the next few days. Three days into the experience a couple things were clear to me – I didn’t need all those podcasts I downloaded or to listen to music. The battery on my headphones remained fully charged and unneeded. Each day I walked alone 75% of the time. Our group liked to get a few miles or two to three hours in before finding one of the many small places to stop for coffee and snacks along the route. Once it seemed time for a break I would stop and wait at a coffee place and let the consensus decide whether this was the right place or if we would wait for a better option. After separating from the group post our coffee break I heard footsteps rapidly approaching behind me and was left in the dust by a young blond hiker whose legs seemed about 6 inches longer than mine. Her speed was impressive. About 20 minutes later I saw her standing by watching as a large number of cattle were entering the path. She greeted me, wondered aloud about walking alongside very large animals. I told her it would be fine. She tentatively followed me and quickly realized a stampede was not in the offing. Ten minutes later the cattle were in a new pasture and we walked and talked for about an hour. The young lady who identified herself as Lizzy was actually doing the entire route while taking a break from university in Vancouver. We parted ways when I stopped to wait for my group but would see each other several more times including at the finish. This was a typical interaction along the route. Conversations with interesting people who often shared their reasons for being on the Camino. For the record – day 3 was 36,344 steps / 16.14 miles.

Day 4 was another great day to walk. Looking down at clouds in the valleys at times and at other times being cooled by fog before the sun did its work and burned it off. The distance was almost exactly the same as the prior day 35,944 steps and 16 miles; but the day became special after we stopped walking and entered the hotel in Sarria. This is the last place where you can begin a trek and still qualify for a compostela. A group of Irish ladies was ending their Camino for this year, they will return to do the final section next year and make it to the cathedral in Santiago. We had seen and spoken to this friendly group from “the old country” several times. As I was exiting the lobby to go to my room, I was stopped by a friendly face who proceeded to explain that she wanted to give me her walking stick. At first I didn’t understand so she explained they were leaving from home and she was following a tradition by “gifting” her walking stick to me so that it could make it to the cathedral. It was then my obligation to get it to Santiago or pass it on to somebody that would. Not thinking, I started to decline but then quickly realized I would be a real jerk if I didn’t smile and accept the gracious offer. We took a picture of her presenting the stick to me and I pulled a business card out of my pack so she could email me if she wanted to see how the “stick story” ended. We parted and before I got to my room I knew who the next custodian of the stick would be…..

Sights of Day 4

Late that afternoon, walking stick in tow, I my made my way to a local monastery where my Taiwanese buddy was going to say mass. Despite a very cool reception at the door, the local in charge seemed to wonder why a white guy was attending the “Chinese mass”. Once I was in the chapel, it was all smiles as my friends from the other side of the planet were all glad to see me and no one questioned why a Camino pilgrim would be entering a church with a big stick.

Eleanor gave the stick to me and I passed it along

 As soon as mass ended I presented Father Joe with the walking stick. He was happy as was his entire group – it seemed the “gift” cemented our new relationship. My possession of the stick was less than five hours but who could be better to make the final 100 km westward journey with the Celtic stick than a priest from the east. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I felt a wave of positive “Camino karma” as I left the church and headed to dinner.

By day 5, another 37,378 steps / 16.6 miles, I had already decided that I was going to need a return trip to the Camino. I was enjoying the hours of what I would describe as meditative solitude as I walked. I was also enjoying the hours of social interaction with family and in some cases strangers during breakfast, coffee breaks, our group daily happy hour and dinner. Although I put a daily Camino picture on my personal twitter account and made an occasional Facebook posts to keep family and friends in the loop, I enjoyed the respite from “constant connectedness”. I felt like I was in a “flow state” much of my walking time alone each day. What I used to call “runner’s high” seems to have been renamed flow state in recent years but whatever the case when you are running or walking for a couple of hours or more and it seems like only a couple minutes have passed that is my definition of “flow”. Since my knees no longer allow me to run 2,500+ miles a year the feeling of total wellbeing from endorphins coursing through my veins doesn’t come as often as it used to but it came every day on the Camino. That may sound like a bit of cosmic rubbish to many but it is my reality. At the end of Day 5, I was having a beer with my brother in laws when Walter from Taiwan rushed up and said he needed my help. Father Joe was feeling ill and they needed to delay their mass time at the local church. The Taiwan group had heard me speaking spanish and assumed I could REALLY speak spanish. He wanted me to go to the church and negotiate a new mass time with the local priest. Fortunately my basic spanish was good enough to get the job done.

Days 6-8 The weather changed after five days of sun and we had clouds, mist and bits of rain bringing cooler temps and easier walking. The damp cooling towel I wore around my neck the first five days was retired. Days 6 was the longest day yet, 38,432 steps / over 17 miles. Our hotel was nicer than normal and the coin laundry was a bonus. Our happy hour and dinner brought several more bonuses. As we shared some wine before dinner, my sister in law who recognized polish being spoken across the room initiated a singing session in their native tongue with the friendly crew from central Europe.

At dinner, the table next to us was a Japanese group. This time I toasted them with beer instead of wine but the shock on their face to hear “white faced” Japanese was a high point for me. As it turned out one of the group lived very close to where we used to live in Kobe. We would be keep seeing each other over the next few days. Our fearless leader, my eldest brother in law, happened on an Irish lady who was carrying a bottle of fine Irish whiskey and a flask of 28-year-old. She is in the whiskey business but since her walking companion doesn’t drink she decided to lighten her load by giving an unopened bottle to us. She also shared shots from her flask of 28-year-old. One of our more interesting dinners. Another highlight from the day 6 was meeting a couple from Vancouver who didn’t have an EU charging adaptor for their IPhone – not sure how that came up as we chatted but since I had a lithium charging brick in my backpack I was able to walk with them until their IPhone was powered up. They were so grateful for such a small thing. Once the phone came to life, about a dozen or so text messages came in from worried relatives that hadn’t heard from them. 

Day 7 ended in Melide, the octopus capital of Spain. I am a fan and this octopus rivaled anything I have ever had in Japan.  

Day 7 found us enjoying world class octopus

As day 8 dawned, with only three walking days left I was beginning to feel a bit of sadness that the experience would soon be over. As often happens, all my preconceptions about the trip had proven to be off the mark. I was enjoying almost everything even the marginal hotels – we met some great owners of these little places.

As time passed, the group learned to draw on our mantra that we “are pilgrims not martyrs” which meant we got tired of lousy red wine that came with many of the pilgrim dinners and began to buy good wine from the bar or outside and bring it to the table. After all, a pilgrim can only endure so much.

Day 9: the final two days were supposed to be shorter than average but with side trips proved not to be the case. On the penultimate day I clocked 37,778 steps or 16.79 miles. It was an unusual day in that I got farther ahead of the group than I planned and stopped on a bridge entering the town where I was told we would be having lunch. I figured if the group was on the trail they had to cross the same bridge. Well, 20 minutes later they hadn’t shown so I text Connie a picture of where I was and told her I was going to have a beer and wait. Another 25 minutes passed and I got a text saying they were only 2 km away from the hotel but I was 3 km away. Seems there are two routes around this particular town – so I did what any pilgrim would do – I put the hotel GPS coordinates in my phone and took the quickest route there which happened to be on a highway and obviously a trucker’s route. Between trucks and some large dogs it proved to be my most pulse elevating 3km of the trek. Overcome by catholic guilt upon arrival... after lunch I backtracked on the Camino path just to see what I had missed which is why it became a high mileage day.

The views were normally great but I enjoyed the cool fog too

Final day. I really wanted to savor the last several kilometers of the walk. We left in the dark so that we would have more daylight hours in Santiago. I was actually glad the walk started with a relatively steep hill at what was marked as 15km from the finish but was actually about 22 km away based on the route we took which included a bit of a side trip to see a park where the pope had said mass a few years ago. We stayed together more as a group on the final day. From my perspective ten days had flown by. It had been fun spending so much quality time with family even though most of the time I spent with them was in the non-walking hours. Everyone seemed very happy about the experience. Our last few kilometers were very urban which was kind of a shock back to the normal world. For almost all of the ten days it was all pilgrims doing a common thing – walking a path toward a goal. Once we hit Santiago proper, we were a bit like oddballs making our way through city had to put up with a daily dose of pilgrims on the last leg of a personal journey who were apt to step into traffic or otherwise upset the rhythm of a working metro area. I found it a fitting reentry but was even more impressed by the rapid change back to a pilgrim dominated vibe when we entered the cathedral square. I took in the reactions of all those around me: smiles, tears, relief, high fives, etc.

All smiles at the finish

My eyes were immediately drawn to a red headed lady standing off in the distance. We had crossed paths many times over the ten days. Despite the fact I didn’t know her name she seemed like an old friend. She had pressed on and finished a day ahead of us but was just enjoying the spectacle of seeing people finish. I finally learned her name was Patricia. Connie and I chatted with her for a few minutes. We knew she was from Munich but got a little more of her story.  She then told us the compostela process had gone high tech and we should hurry over and get a number. Instead of standing in snaking line of hundreds of people, you now can get a number with a QR code on it, download an app and be updated on when your number will be called. We got our numbers about 2PM, had lunch and realized we had gotten about the last numbers given for the day as our times to present our credentials for the compestela came up at the closing time of 8PM. Fully documented we were off to a great “non-pilgrim” dinner.

We wanted to see the area and attend a pilgrim mass the next day so we had booked rooms for a couple of nights in a hotel which was an old monastery next to the cathedral.

We left Spain six days ago but I am still processing the experience which for me was so much better than I expected. I enjoyed the simplicity of focusing on nothing but the simple task of walking from one small town to the next day after day and just taking in what my senses perceived. Despite growing up in farm country, I have greatly expanded my olfactory inventory of the various grades of cow, sheep and horse poop which wasn’t overbearing but seemed to change by the day perhaps due to varying diets. This was definitely both a physical and spiritual (not really religious) experience for me. I couldn’t have done it with a better group of people.

Postscript - Connie lost her prescription sunglasses not once but twice on the trip. Once when they fell out of her backpack on the trail and then on the final night in the hotel in Madrid. We were having lunch about 3km from where Connie had rearranged he backpack and lost the glasses. Connie realized the glasses were gone and had planned to walk back and find them. Fortunately a couple found them. Connie's name was in the case so as we finished lunch the couple appeared and asked if a "Constance Lowry is here". 

Connie with the couple that found her glasses

A very unlikely scenario. She parted ways again when she uncharacteristically left something in a hotel room. Upon arrival at home she called the hotel and they sent them to her by Fed-X.

Aging Out?

“It is better to burn out than it is to rust”
Neil Young

I don’t obsess about the passage of time but I have to admit I think about it more than I used to.

A couple days ago I was in a trendy supermarket (not normally my style) shopping for raw material to do my weekly grilling of wild caught fish and grass fed beef to complement my daily “Bulletproof Coffee” habit. Clearly, I am not on the slippery slope to veganism but I do pay more attention to the quality of things I put in my mouth these days. As I approached the meat counter, my phone rang. It was my younger daughter checking in from LA. “Hey Dad, how do you feel about running another marathon?”

I was the crew when my daughter ran her first marathon

Like “Alexa” my knees monitor all my conversations. While I tried to say “well buddy, let me think about it” my knees were saying “hell no!, really XXXXing bad idea”. Not wanting to let my aging knees push me around, my rejoinder was “maybe doing a half marathon is a better idea”. So we agreed that we would try to find a half marathon that would be part of her training to run her second marathon of the decade. As the years seem to pass by faster and faster, I am finally learning to begin to accept my limitations….. Well, maybe.

According to my Fitbit, last week I walked, hiked, jogged and hobbled 78.98 miles. Half a lifetime ago when I was running 5 marathons or more a year, covering this mileage would have taken less than ten hours, last week if the “demon on my wrist” is to be believed it took me closer to 19 hours. What can I say, “stuff (aka shit) happens”.

Going the distance takes longer than it used to

In a few days I will leave for Spain to hike approximately 112 miles over ten days with several family members on a route “El Camino pilgrims” have been traversing for over 900 years. The entire route is over 500 miles starting in France and terminating near the Atlantic coast of Spain, I am only doing the “home stretch” this time. Time constraints make 500+ miles impractical although I am quite sure if I find the experience enjoyable, I will go back and do the entire distance. Hell, if an untrained Martin Sheen could "go the distance" in the movie “The Way” why can’t I?

I don’t write in my personal blog much these days but it seems in recent years I always feel the need to memorialize getting fired on 9/10/2012. For several weeks after the actual event I felt like I had experienced “the end” of my career only to realize by 2013 I had really experienced, as my wife put it “Christmas in September”. As usual she proved to be correct, in five years on my own I made more money than I did in 23 years as a “corporate executive”. I spent less time working and had a LOT more fun doing it. That said, success only happened because of all the friends I made along the way. Fortunately "being of a certain age" hasn't limited my ability to make a living.

Time has done its job and given me perspective. Seven years after getting fired, I have only good things to say about  "the axe falling”. I never pretended it didn’t hurt at the time but fortunately I was able to move on and, with a lot of help, prosper.

I still love the (lithium) business I grew up in but now I spend almost as much time thinking about how I can support younger people in their careers – lithium or otherwise while I spend more and more time trying to slow down my mental and physical decline curve. 

Lithium has been "a long and winding road"

Today I held my breath for 4 minutes and 35 seconds while doing my normal breathing exercises. I couldn’t have done that at age 20, 30, 40 or 50 but I also know running marathons in the 2:40’s as I did “back in the day” is off the table. So I have to take the good with the bad and look for the upside.

I won’t belabor this post. If I do the math and use actuarial assumptions I still have over 40% of my adult life (assume it started at 20) left. Why wouldn’t I focus on the many things I still want to accomplish?

Learn another language or two, write a book and maybe run another marathon with my younger daughter when she turns 40 in 13 years. Of course the more immediate issue is running a half marathon in late December.

I am hoping my remaining glass is more than half full. I am not asking why the engineer designed the glass to be twice as large as required......

Fifty Years Later: From the Moon to Twitter

I am writing this one day before the fifty-year anniversary of man landing on the moon. On July 20, 1969, I was a 12-year-old watching on TV in glorious “black and white” – the broadcast was in color but we didn’t have a color TV. Holding my less than month old first nephew on my lap as the drama unfolded, life was good. I felt a kinship with all the serious faces at mission control in Houston as “Uncle” Walter Cronkite guided us through the events of the day on CBS.

"Uncle" Walter Cronkite

I started writing to NASA a few years’ prior to Apollo 11 – addressing the envelope simply: NASA, Houston, Texas. Every letter I sent got a response and came with a lot of cool, space related stuff. I am not sure how I got the idea to write NASA but in a world where most of my info came from the encyclopedia at home or the small library in my hometown of several hundred people, I think the librarian taught me at about age eight that if I wrote to the chamber of commerce of any city; they would send me information. I was a curious kid that figured if the chamber of commerce in Richmond, Virginia or Huntsville, Alabama would write me back, why wouldn’t NASA?

The people at NASA were smart enough to know that public support was critical to funding the space program so they were great at responding to even handwritten inquiries written by left handed eight year olds. I was already flying my own model rockets with “engines” containing gunpowder that I “launched” by sticking a thin piece of wire into the bottom and giving the wire a “little juice” from a battery about 30 feet away. My rockets went up several hundred fee and even had a system to release a plastic parachute to bring the rocket to the ground, normally, undamaged. The first video games were still about a decade away but I certainly didn’t feel a void.

Early astronauts had visited my little hometown and skied at our local ski area while running tests at Bell Aerospace a little more than an hour north of us. As a pre-teen, I absolutely felt connected to the space program.

Getting model rockets via mail order or swag by writing NASA was my early version of Amazon Prime. I had to pay for the rockets but the swag from NASA was always free. I was doing all this when Jeff Bezos was in pre-K.

Smoking wasn't a Problem in the Apollo Era

On July 20, 1969 the chain smokers at mission control were my heroes and so were the three men in space and all those who came before them. I obviously hadn’t been in space but I had flown in a two seater plane my dad kept in a hangar at a local farm. Unfortunately, the fact that I was legally blind in my left eye DQ’d my long term space ambitions but living the space dream as a kid was a great part of my childhood.

Now I carry more computing power than put man on the moon in my IPhone. Fifty years later technology has brought many improvements to life but, in my opinion, has brought as many negative consequences as well.

On New Year’s Day of this year I wrote a blog post about taking more time for myself and family in 2019. In January, I did well sticking to the concept of spending less time working and more time on other things that interest me. My wife and I flew to London for a couple of days before going on a tour of Sweden, Finland and Norway. We spent a night in the famous ice hotel in Sweden, a few nights at a reindeer farm in Finland and more time at a wonderful resort hotel on the edge of a Norwegian fjord.

Most evenings (which at that time of year pretty much starts at 3PM) were spent in search of the “northern lights”. During the short days we hiked, snowmobiled, went dog sledding, XC skiing, wandered in the small towns and just generally had a good time. I didn’t need to take ice baths when it was so easy to pop of a sauna or hot tub and into a snow bank. It was a great couple of weeks but my old habits returned as soon as I went “back to work”.

Over the next four months I logged over 100K flight miles with visits to Asia, Oz and multiple trips to South America. I wasn’t really traveling more but I certainly wasn’t cutting back. I wasted way too much time on Twitter. Don’t get me wrong – properly managed Twitter can and has been a great tool but it can also be a HUGE time waster. My elder daughter warned me of the dark side of Twitter long ago but I gradually got sucked in. It was my mistake to respond to people that baited me. Of course, me responding helped them gain exposure and followers. It was a rookie mistake that I made too often.

Numerous friends tried to counsel me to “take the high ground” on social media but the message took a long time to sink in.  

In late June while I was kayaking for a few hours in Vancouver with my wife and some friends, I reflected on my abysmal 2019 performance in balancing work and other activities. I noted my first half failure and decided that I would focus on doing more non work things in Q3. Like many in my generation, I often confuse being busy with meaningful work output. Learning to say “no” is a skill I need to get better at. As a recognized expert in a niche industry I get numerous requests for comment from reporters, companies that hold out a carrot of retaining me while trying to get me to work for free by requesting an “introductory call”, small investor questions, etc. Just reading the large amount of unsolicited electronic communication takes time. Although I probably delete more than 40% of my email without reading anything but the caption; far too often, I try to “be a nice guy” and respond to people in a meaningful way which probably is a waste of time in most cases.

It is amazing how so many of my followers on social media seem to think I have an obligation to answer their questions. Most questions that I get could be answered with a little research by the person asking but they are simply too lazy to do the work themselves.

In reality I probably have more than enough time to support my real clients podcast and write monthly posts on the industry which I do as a public service. Those are the things I want to focus on work wise.

I just need to get better at saying “no” to both myself when I am tempted to scroll around mindlessly on social media or when the DMs from Linked In start coming in asking me for “a little time” or “a small favor”. Probably my all-time favorite request was from a lady in India who emailed me on five separate occasions pleading with me to tell her “the best Chinese lithium stock to buy” so her young son could “have a bright future”. She said she “found me on Linked In”. I responded only once saying that if she read what I post on Linked In the answer should be obvious.

Me, Two Years before Apollo 11

I am hoping the remaining 24 weeks of this year are more “balanced” than the first half of the year. July is off to a good start. My wife and I are going on daily hikes to prepare for the 112 miles we will hike on the “El Camino” in Spain over several days in September. I have used both of my Spanish learning apps every day this month, I finally played more than a couple holes of golf today and plan to be back on the course tomorrow.  

Fifty years after man landed on the moon, life is better in some ways and less good in others but at the end of the day the problems any of us have with technology are often self-inflicted. I am a big fan of shopping via Amazon Prime, banking without going to the bank, working from home, communicating seamlessly and cheaply with people all over the globe, watching what I want when I want via Netflix and other platforms. Yet, I still remember the joy when I would get a package from NASA after waiting two weeks. Something to be said for deferred gratification. Still pondering that……

Good to Be Back

The first day of 2019 seemed like a good time to return to my long neglected personal blog. No, it’s not a New Year’s resolution; just something I always enjoyed and decided to make time for.

I started a blog several years ago to help me adjust to living back in the US after over a decade living in Japan and China. A respected Asia expert that advises many large International companies was hired by my former employer hired to “help” me decide to move to China from Japan. We became friendly especially after he told me that my employer “was terrible at supporting ex-pats” and I should only go to China if I “thought I could handle it without proper support from HQ”. You have to love a person with that level of honesty.

Ex-pat life provided all sorts of interesting experiences

We spoke again before I returned to the US after living for more than five years in China and five plus in Japan. He congratulated me on my success in Asia, told me I would have trouble adjusting to life both in the US and back at HQ and suggested I write a book about my experiences. A book seemed out of my wheelhouse but I thought writing blog posts might be both good therapy for me as I adjusted to life back in the US and if I ever changed my mind about a book about my ex-pat experiences it could be a good resource to draw from.

No book yet but the my wife got the blog bound

Time passed, my adjustment to life in the US took a couple years but my adjustment to life back at HQ never happened. Less than two years after returning I was jettisoned from the corporate world and got busy reinventing myself as an advisor to various stakeholders in the lithium world. I signed up for Twitter and Linked-In, starting writing business posts and my personal blog was, for the most part, neglected.

For me, the Christmas – New Year’s Holiday period is a time to reflect on where I am in life and where I want to go next. I have been extremely blessed to have been at the right place at the right time in the lithium world. The “survival” worries I had when I no longer had a “corporate master and safety net” are a memory thanks to the largesse of the growing lithium market.

New Year's is a good time to "reboot"

Like many “type A” people when I get into something, I tend to narrow my focus on the whatever the “new thing” is to the exclusion of other interests. Reading and writing for pleasure were one casualty of my focus on communicating with the world regarding lithium via social media and more recently a podcast. I may have fallen prey to those Silicon Valley types who have designed an ecosystem that has many of us behaving like gerbils on a treadmill seeking small dopamine hits (whether we know it or not) as we collect more followers and “likes” on our social media sites of choice.

So I am planning 2019 to be a year of re-balancing how I spend my time – more quality time with my bride, books, hobbies, etc and less “screen” time with the “app” creations of teens and twenty somethings.

I am not retiring or leaving the lithium world just as things are getting really interesting in the transition from an oil based to a renewable energy economy. I just want more of my “flip phone” era lifestyle back. Of course this is both a personal as well as a general “first world” problem – that many readers of this blog probably have too.

Now that the lengthy preamble is over I can get to the topic I had in mind. Over the past 28 years I have accumulated over 5,000,000 frequent flyer miles. I have circled the globe 103 times on Around the World tickets. Including those trips plus normal point to point, round trip tickets I have crossed the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans more than 250 times. It takes absolutely zero skill to board a plane and accumulate miles but it is difficult to travel to six continents and not be humbled by what you don’t know.

The older I get the more it strikes me how many interesting people you come into contact with when traveling and how much you can learn just by engaging with the locals. I am still learning travel tricks on a regular basis because I started paying more attention a couple of years ago after having some obvious travel hacks I had been missing pointed out to me. I will save those tips for another day.

When I interviewed people for jobs during my days in the corporate world, I often asked people that said they had “five years” experience if they “really had five years’ experience of if they had one year of experience five times”. I wanted to know HOW they were better in their thinking and work in year five than they were in year one. Very few people have a good answer to that question but upon reflection I realized I need to constantly be asking myself a variation of that question – am I spending enough time learning new things and making sure I am having new experiences?

Last year I had a situation where my “normal” hotel in Tokyo was sold out and I had to stay somewhere else. It turned out to be a great hotel – much better than the one I was comfortable with and showed me I had gotten into a travel rut of always staying in the same hotels in various cities and eating in the same restaurants.

There is something to be said for making travel easy and as stress free as possible but there is also something to be said for walking into a place called “Champagne and Gyoza” at 1am in Tokyo with another gaijin and just seeing what happens. Turned out to be great gyoza and marginal champagne so we had beer instead. Ninety minutes and two dozen gyoza later I was back at the hotel with a memory I won’t soon forget.

Lately, when I am alone in Asia; I seek out places I have never been. It takes me back to some of the great experiences we had when my family first moved to China and we communicated with sign language, flash cards and a few spoken words. Almost every day brought a new experience when we first arrived in Shanghai.

My wife and I always tried to teach our kids to “ask for the order” when they wanted something whether it was a room upgrade, a discount or a pet sitting job. The best examples of this concept I ever saw were from kids selling things on the street in Cambodia and Viet Nam. Both times they were pre-teens who learned enough English to try to sell things to tourists. In both cases, they made eye contact, established where we were from, said something to establish credibility.  One young lady sold us by knowing all the state capitals in the US, proving it to us and then using the positive impression to sell us a travel guidebook that was clearly printed locally. My wife started to leaf through the book and was stopped in her tracks by a firm response: “lady the book is $2, just buy it” which is what happened. It always amazed us how entrepreneurial kids were in places like Ho Chi Minh, Angkor Wat and Lhasa.

This little guy rowed his bucket out to our boat and "asked for the order"

On another occasion we were walking along the street in Ho Chi Minh a boy of about twelve came up to us with nothing to sell; he just wanted to beef up his language skills. We talked for about ten minutes and suddenly a late model BMW pulled up to the curb. Our new friend politely said “Oh that’s my mom, I have to go she drops me off near international hotels a couple times a week so I can chat up foreigners and improve my English”.

The passion for learning I found traveling in Asia and working with young people in China, taught me that I needed to consider how much time I was spending consciously focused on continuing to develop myself.

If nothing else writing this blog helps me re-live great memories of the time I have been privileged to spend traveling the world and living in Asia. Sorry if this was a little too much stream of consciousness but thanks for coming along.

Escaping the "Bubble"

My ex-pat days are long behind me but their impact on my life remains.

Fortunately, unlike many “former expats”, I don’t have to rely on my memory of the time abroad because I return to Japan and China multiple times each year. I see the constant change in the Middle Kingdom and marvel at how slowly things change in the Land of the Rising Sun. I find both situations comforting and, from my perspective, as they should be.

My first trip to Asia was 23 years ago. Since that time I have spent almost the same amount time in Asia as I have in the US. I am writing this after a five-mile stroll through the quiet backstreets of Tokyo beginning at 5:30am and finishing at a coffee shop where the idea to write a blog post seized me.

Room with a View - 33 floors above Tokyo

Despite my strong Irish catholic origins, I have always appreciated the Confucian belief system that drives much of the behavior on this side of the world. I am more comfortable in the major cities of Asia than most big cities in the US. Moderate language skills certainly help when traveling in Japan and China but truth be told one can easily survive in most cities in Asia with only English fluency.

Few Americans truly appreciate how easy the Japanese have made getting around even for those who can’t speak a single word of the local language. It is easy to create an ex-pat bubble and have what amounts to an ersatz overseas experience. Not getting out of your comfort zone and embracing the culture is probably the biggest mistake most ex-pats living in Japan make.

Although I did a pretty good job of avoiding the “ex-pat” bubble trap when I lived in Japan and China, in recent years I fell into the trap of never pushing out my comfort zone on business trips – staying at the same hotels, eating in the same restaurants, taking the same running routes, etc.

Fortunately, when I lived in Japan I was not working a big company office with a large number of expats and bilingual staff. I had to set up an office and also worked in a joint venture company office where I was the only non-Japanese person. Unlike many of my peers, I went of my way to have a local experience – to the extent a foreigner in Japan can.

Tokyo is a Great City for Walking

My trip this week presented an unusual opportunity to move out of my self-created business trip rut. I was asked by a client to fly to Japan for a single meeting that had the potential to morph into additional dialog – or not. I decided to book myself for three days in Tokyo. Trips from North Carolina to Japan with just an overnight in-country actually are two nights sleeping on a plane and one night in a hotel. As the years go by I have lost my enthusiasm for Trans-Pacific “day trips”.

So I had three nights and the better part of four days on the ground in Tokyo and the unusual situation of mostly free time. Over those days I met socially with multiple local friends, stayed in a hotel I had never stayed in and walked over 120,000 steps (or approximately 50 miles/80km) in and around Tokyo. I purposely rode subway lines I had never been on, entered small suburban restaurants where non-Japanese don’t normally go and certainly not without a local friend. I speak Japanese well enough to go where foreigners don’t normally appear. It was refreshing to get outside my comfort zone in my “second home”.

Just Point to it - You don't have to Speak Japanese to Order Food in Tokyo

Walking for hours at time was great. Despite a population far greater than any American city there is a lot of green space in Tokyo. Surprisingly, in the early morning hours, I could walk for several minutes without seeing another soul. There is a peacefulness in Tokyo I never feel in NY, Shanghai or LA.

Best of all, thoughts of work left me. I thought about the time my family lived in Japan – learning how to get by in a very foreign world, my first feeble attempts at speaking the language, the joy of learning how to relate to people with a completely different world view.

My brief sojourn was more vacation than business (please don’t tell the client picking up the tab) but it was also a great reminder of how much my life has been enriched by spending more than a decade on the other side of the world. That said, it is important to take time to really see and experience  what is around you.  It is easy to take world travel for granted after so many years. Hopefully last week is a reminder that will stay with me for awhile. 

Continuing Education

Time flies. It is an unrelenting truth. It doesn’t seem or feel like so long ago I was the youngest player on the varsity football and basketball teams or later the least senior person in business meetings. Fortunately, I will always be the youngest of six siblings but at meetings these days I am more often than not one of the oldest people in the room.

During my career I have covered the age continuum – back in the day working with and having people more than twice my age report to me and in the last decade plus, especially when I lived in China, working with people half my age. I never thought too much about it until a few weeks ago……

I was sitting in a small conference room in Bueno Aires. Across the table from me was a young lady that my millennial daughters would consider a “kid”. I was meeting with her to learn about podcasting. An American college junior on a semester abroad who through a series of chance meetings became my “podcast mentor”.  My first business related experience with a “Gen Zer”. If this young lady is representative of Gen Z, I think we are in good hands but as always I digress.

Among the lessons I learned living in Asia for over a decade was to accept help and lessons from any and all demographics. That bit of wisdom is serving me well now. I started cohosting a podcast several months ago with an American living in Argentina. In addition to studying abroad, “Miss Gen Z” is an intern working in my cohost’s company. Although the podcast has gotten good reviews and quickly built a solid following, our newly minted podcast mentor spent the better part of three hours discussing “potential improvement areas” – also known as telling us we were doing just about everything wrong.

I am not known for patience or humility so having someone on the cusp of being three generations my junior reading me the “podcast screw-up riot act” would seem problematic.

Fortunately, in this case, I was able to check my ego and take my lumps (and a lot of notes).

My most recent “mentor” experience got me thinking about past mentors.

Twenty-three years ago I showed up in Japan yet another “clueless American”. I, like most people experiencing Japan for the first time, was impressed by the obvious positive aspects of the culture (civility, helpfulness, strong work ethic, attention to detail, etc).

I began making bi-monthly trips to the Land of Rising Sun. Fortunately, one senior person in the company I did business with (Murai san) watched me try to learn what was beneath the surface of the culture. Gradually he seemed to take an interest in helping me learn how to succeed rather than finding my weak points to exploit in negotiations.

In the 1990’s there was almost no English signage in Osaka making it tough for foreigners to get around. Almost all new western visitors required “handlers” to get to and from meetings if any travel complexity was involved. On visit four or five, I told my Japanese hosts I no longer needed help getting to the office and started ordering things myself in “pidgin” Japanese at dinner. I also started speaking to the caddies when we played golf. My pitiful but determined efforts earned me respect and provided an unceasing stream of laughter on the part of my hosts. I made every conceivable language mistake imaginable but over time I was also understood – well, most of the time.

Besides the obvious benefit of earning my independence when visiting Japan, I also gained a mentor almost three decades my senior. Murai san became my first of multiple mentors I would have over the years in Japan. In general Japanese culture is much, much more subtle than western cultures. It is very difficult for Japanese to tell naturally overconfident Americans when they are wrong, full of sh**, or otherwise off base. Fortunately for me, Murai san and later, after I moved to Japan, my Japanese sensei (teacher) were kind enough to be brutally honest with me when circumstances dictated. Learning Japanese is complicated by the fact that foreigners speaking unintelligible Japanese are always told they are “jouzu” aka skillful. Fortunately, I had multiple mentors more than willing to correct me on a constant basis.

When I moved to China my two most significant mentors were my driver Philip and my assistant Sabrina. Readers of my blog are no strangers to these two. To this day I am not certain if I (or my family) would have had the successful experience we did if we had not crossed paths with Philip and Sabrina.

 Mentors are great when things are going well and they are helping you learn or navigate the vagaries of culture or business life but they are even more important when you are in crisis mode. Fortunately, when my corporate life came to a screeching halt in 2012, a former boss one journey around the zodiac younger than I was there to help me make a quick and successful transition to my reincarnation as an independent. He understood me as well as the situation and was kind enough to share his experience and wisdom. Thanks Jon.

If you are lucky, as I have been, your most important mentor will be your children’s other parent. My wife has been my mentor since she was my girlfriend. When we first started dating, I was a socially inept 24-year-old who needed adult supervision to get through customer dinners back in my days in the fire extinguisher business. Her mostly subtle guidance got me through graduate school. After we got married, we began a peripatetic life where no move was made without her counsel. When I was being bullied by my company into moving from Japan to China and essentially told the company to “kiss my hindquarters” more than once it was my better half that guided me to “look at the big picture” rather than making a sub-optimal decision out of stubbornness.

I wanted to stay in Japan or go home. I was angry that the proposed move to China was driven by corporate tax minimization and that my family would be forced to move to a much tougher environment so the company could save what amounted to a “rounding error” in the grand scheme of things. The company tried to play hard ball with me which is rarely a good idea. Left to my own devices I would have refused to lose the “game of corporate chicken” and moved home to a very uncertain future while my daughters were in their teens.

My bride, along with the well placed tears of my daughters at a family meeting, convinced me to put my entrenched ego aside and “just say yes”. So, we moved to China. Had I not listened to my better half, the groundwork for what I am doing today would not have been laid.

I love the saying that “you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with”. Ok, so it is a concept not an exact algorithm but likely there is a potential mentor in that five if you are careful about who you spend your time with.

My oldest mentor is 66 years older than my youngest. Take help where you find it. If you are fortunate enough to find capable people sincerely trying to help you, do yourself a favor and listen.

When I start writing a blog post I usually have an outline in mind, this one went in a different direction than I had intended but that is the beauty of blogs. Thanks for reading.