Friday night I was at church trying to coax Lily out the door. I thought I had that I’m-going-home-now vibe, but two desperate women approached me.
“We need help,” one woman said. “We’ve found a motherless bird. It’s probably injured. It can’t fly. We can’t see a nest anywhere. Somebody needs to take the bird home tonight and turn it in tomorrow.” I could tell by somebody they meant me.
Read MoreA lot has happened in the Orton home in the last month. Emily and I went sailing in French Polynesia for a week with some good friends. Our agent started sending our book proposal to publishers. And Karina has moved to Europe for the summer. Turns out she was in Manchester when the bomb went off in Manchester Arena. She was a mile down the road. She was fine.
Read MoreErik and I just finished a book proposal for our literary agent. I use the word ‘finished’ tentatively. Her feedback will likely require major revisions. We’ve spent the past six weeks crafting and then chucking this drastically abridged summary of our story. Our workspace is littered with index cards and sharpie markers tracking the arc and reversals. But for now, it’s done. Our oldest is home for 72 hours and we’re taking a break.
Taking a break is generally good advice, like taking a deep breath and relaxing those shoulders. Doesn’t that feel better? When you’re leveling up or trying something new, taking frequent breaks is critical to maintaining stamina. Lily taught me this.
Read MoreI have a habit of rereading books I like. But I don’t reread the whole book. I like to skim through while I’m eating my bowl of cereal in the morning, only reading the bits I’ve underlined or highlighted. I get reminded of all my favorite ideas and it stokes my fire for the day. Here’s a selection I bracketed in Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek. As I re-read it, I found myself nodding my head in agreement, realizing how reading these kinds of books were a big part of what helped us get ourselves off the dock. Several years later, I literally hear myself saying the exact same things I underlined.
Read MoreI recently went toe to toe with a newly minted productivity guru. “I totally disagree!” I said a little too loudly. Okay. So maybe he was a podcast voice in my ear buds while I was hula hooping in my entry way.
I bristled as the expert neatly separated the time we spend working on maintenance like laundry, meal prep and trimming toenails, from Life. He blithely recommended strategies for minimizing those menial tasks so we could get back to Life. He spoke as if Life was somehow separate from living. My sister was working on her master's degree in social work when she taught me this truth:
Whatever the task, the relationship is the goal.
Read Moreby ERIK ORTON
The longer we live, the faster time moves. We can all feel that. When we’re kids, summer vacations stretch on forever. Not anymore. A semester used to be an eternity. Not anymore. But why? Christian Yates, at the University of Bath talks about logarithmic time, “The idea is that we perceive a period of time as the proportion of time we have already lived through." I love how this first video explains the math and the psychology of logarithmic time. It all makes perfect sense.
But then there’s the heart and the spirit; how we actually experience things. This second video covers that beautifully.
I know the second half of my life will only be a fraction of the first. I know that if I don’t do the things that matter most now, I simply won’t do them. Time is spiraling faster and faster. But I’ve also learned how to slow it down.
Time slows down when I experience something new. When I travel to a new country, learn a new skill or make a new friend, time slows down. Preparing a new recipe, driving to a new place, speaking a new language all slow down time. The more unfamiliar, the slower time moves. We pay attention to everything. We have to. We become children again, because everything is new.
Settling back into the familiar, time speeds up again. Our minds and hearts relax. We don’t need to pay as close attention. We don’t need to exert ourselves as much. Comfortable can be good. We need rest. There’s a reason children, especially babies, sleep a lot. Their minds and bodies are exploding with growth. The familiar gives us a chance to rest.
If my everyday is filled with vapid activities and hollow relationships, I am wasting my life. If it is filled with new explorations and meaningful slowness, I feel like it is time well spent.
Familiar and unknown. Rest and Growth. Fast and slow.
If you think this may encourage someone, please consider sharing.
Erik often says, “Love is the answer.” It almost doesn’t matter what the question is. This week Lily was using one of Erik’s old journals in her pretend office. I saved the journal from scribbles, but found this written on the page she had opened.
"The ingredient in our hearts that makes us love is work. If we don’t love somebody then we haven’t worked hard enough. The opposite of love isn’t hate but laziness. Without serving others we will never love. We’ve made quitting easy. Our happiness has become more important than the happiness of others." Erik Orton, 1993 (age 19)
Read MoreMy birthday is next week. I’m turning 43. Emily is always very thoughtful and goes out of her way to make birthdays special in our family. She has the birthday boy or girl pick their favorite breakfast cereal, there’s a cake and the birthday “fairy” comes and decorates their bed while they’re sleeping. And sometimes we throw a party with friends. Emily asked me what I wanted to do for my “big day”; for the big four-three. My big ideas were read a book or watch a movie. In the end, I told her I didn’t really want to do anything.
There’s absolutely nothing special about turning forty-three. 50, 40, 25, 21, 20, 18, 16, 10 those are each landmark birthdays in their own way. But 43, not so much. It’s just kind of out there in birthday no-man’s land. And besides birthdays don’t mean as much as you get older, right? But should it be that way? Do I want it to be that way? I realized how lame I was being.
Read MoreWe’ve been home from our sailing trip for two and a half years and people still want to know, "What's your next adventure?" In my head I think, "You mean besides spinning through space on this fragile planet at 1,000 mph with 7 billion other people?" If I’m stretching beyond my current capacity, it’s an adventure. If I’m risking failure or embarrassment, it’s an adventure. If I don’t know what the outcome will be, it’s an adventure. There is a lot of adventure in my life.
Read More"When people find out we went sailing for a year with our kids, they often want to know how we paid for it. It’s a fair question. After all, we had a statistically average income for the state of New York. In talking with my friend Warren, here’s how he described the general curiosity: “Erik, if you were a hedge fund manager or stock broker, it’d make sense: you probably had a good year, you decided to take some time off, so you just paid for it all. But you’re not that guy. You didn’t just sell your business. You didn’t get an inheritance. You have a regular job, you have five kids—one with special needs—and you didn’t get some kind of windfall that made it possible.” Most people are a little shy to ask, but what they want to know is, “How did you quit your job, go sailing for almost a year through the Caribbean and come out of it solvent on the other side?' There are a lot of factors, but here’s the money part."
Read MoreWe live in NYC. We have five kids. We bought a sail boat. We called it Fezywig.
Visit our new website
Powered by Squarespace
