This beautiful short film is so painfully real for me it’s hard to watch without getting clenched up. Getting a second chance at life was a precious gift, but damned if I’m not already bombing bikes again for exactly these reasons. The first minute of dialogue alone is a nearly verbatim transcript of internal dialogues I’ve had over and over with myself since I was a 3rd grader.
Powerful and humbling.
We’d had spotty electricity all day due to an automobile accident up the street taking out a power line, so when the lights started flickering back on and off Monday evening my son and I figured maintenance was still in progress. The sound of helicopters in the distance were a bit non-standard, but we still tucked in and went to sleep anyway – not knowing that the Thomas fires now ravaging the area were the new reason for the outages. It wasn’t until the sun peeked up and shone a blood-red glow into my bedroom that I realized things had gone seriously sideways while we slumbered.
Today would have been my nephew Jesse’s birthday. We lost him due to still-undetermined medical reasons in his sleep, late last year. The unexplained cause of his death makes it all the more unsettling, unresolved. I’ve had to process a lot of loss over the last few years but Jesse’s death may have been the final straw, bringing me lower than I’ve been in decades. I write to heal, and this is no exception. However, I’m writing this a few days earlier and scheduling it, as my hopes are to be somewhere along the coast with Devin at sunset to wish Jesse a happy birthday by the ocean he loved so much.
I woke up suddenly around 3:30am this morning. It wasn’t just a minor stirring amidst the sheets, a quick mid-sleep water break or dazed round-trip to the bathroom. My eyes came fully open and my head was clear, although my thoughts were anything but. I’d gone to bed early after my Sunday rehearsal and a quick dinner. However, despite pleasant company throughout I felt unsettled and withdrawn the whole evening, and not in a particularly social mood. Some words I’d spoken still hung in my ears:
“I feel like a stone in the eye of a tornado. Like I’m barely holding onto balance while everything around me goes crazy. And I mean batshit crazy.”
At that moment, I hadn’t made any connections between that phrase to any other particular event or circumstance. There’s been an awful lot on my mind over the last couple years, and I know at times things have seemed a little scattered. It’s been sometimes hard to put a finger on exactly which brush fires are causing me the most heat, generally speaking. But when I looked at the calendar again things started to come more into focus.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had my ass handed to me. Last month I got the comeuppance I’ve been due for quite some time, and it’s been incredibly humbling. I love to mountain bike, and in particular jump and hop said mountain bike around, between, and over obstacles both large and small. The feeling of flight and weightlessness is something I’ve chased since my skydiving days, and frankly, only get to experience when leaping a bike these days. Having been a rider for most of my life, this type of risk is really nothing new or unexpected for me. I’ve been doing it for so long I take my skills for granted, as the feeling of flight, speed and weightlessness are as close as I can come to feeling superhuman.
However, on October 12th of this year I took what was to be a simple, innocuous ride up and back on the coast- which ended in utter disaster. Approaching one of the many ravines I traverse on this trail, I really didn’t feel differently- no sense of foreboding, hesitation or even concern- I’d jumped off this particular ledge so many times that it’s almost become reflexive. A quick bunny hop off the top and I was floating over the edge, slowly rotating my center of gravity to match the angle of the transition 18′ below me. But as time compressed and weightlessness engulfed me, I knew in my gut something was wrong. The bottom of the hill had been churned up from the normal hard-pack and was instead loamy and soft. The angle I took over the edge had me going a few degrees left of my usual line, and despite a last-ditch effort to push my rear wheel out and down to adjust and shift landing weight off my front wheel, it still dug into the soft dirt and washed out just as I flipped my heels to pop the clips and get free of the bike, and everything went wrong. Horribly wrong.
It’s been a wonderful 12+ years in the Bay Area, but as of July 1st Des, Devin and I are packing up our East Bay house and renting it out, and moving down to Santa Barbara county. Carpinteria in particular, and to a new job at Lynda.com as their developer content marketing manager. My last day at Adobe is June 28th. I’m really going to miss Adobe- and all the wonderful friends and colleagues I’ve made during my oddly-erratic 12 years there (including the Macromedia years).
In some ways it’s not the choice many would have expected- bad time to sell a house, tons of jobs flowing through the Bay Area/Silicon Valley, HTML has never been more pervasive and full of promise than it is today for someone of my background. The easy path would be to stick with my job and the amazing Dreamweaver team and keep cranking out the hits, or hang out around the Bay as a free agent jumping from startup to startup making a pile of cash but with little personal time to enjoy it. The decision was a tricky one for me, and my family/quality of life factored in more heavily than ever before.
It really came down to the need for change. To shed the old skin I’ve been in for the last 12+ years and reinvent my career with a family I adore, in a town we both love, working on a set of challenges I’ve always wanted to, and the right balance of my time to enjoy both. I’ve been working around and with the same company, products and technology for over a decade and despite the maturity that sustained focus can bring, it also has it’s drawbacks. Whenever you view the same problems through the same lens for so long you run the risk of becoming complacent. Predictable. And I don’t care for either of those traits, honestly. Although I love the Web like an old friend, I’ve slowly come to realize that I needed to do something else entirely. I love Dreamweaver (and Adobe) like crazy and can’t help feel an almost paternal separation anxiety leaving them after so long at the helm, but it’s time for both of us to fly free.
So here we are.
My managers and closest colleagues are all who’ve known so far, and have been working with me to transition the multi-million dollar business of Dreamweaver, Inc. out of my hands in the next 10 days or so. I’ve been dreading the infamous ‘Goodbye Email’ to my broader team and colleagues, but that will go out today as well. Followed by a rush of exit paperwork, legal documents and the like as the door whooshes shut behind me at Adobe’s SF offices and a new rush of realtors, moving vans, renter screening, school hunting, and general busywork required to move a family and 12 years worth of their collected junk 6 hours south so I can hit the ground running on July 23rd, my first day at the Lynda.com offices.
I’ll admit in some ways I’m nervous as hell undertaking such a huge change, but mostly I’m just looking forward to a complete change of environment and challenge, and to work at a company 100% focused on educating and enriching people’s lives and careers in Lynda.com. A privately-held company without shareholder pressure to elevate the stock price quarterly, serving customers with problems that I can help solve with a team that’s sitting in the same room as me and not a distant voice across a Skype or VoIP bridge. And those customers are largely the same ones I’ve been building tools for the last decade or so, old friends who I’ve only been able to help by building better hammers, not elevating the craft of what they do, of who they are. It’s time for me to focus on that for a while.
And that’s exciting as hell.