Doom With a View

The title made me laugh before it made me think.

A Room with a View holds old memories of discovering there were other ways to live. Sometimes all it takes is a different window. Sometimes you have to leave the whole damned room.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with rooms built by other people. They tend to come furnished with expectations, respectability, and someone else’s idea of a proper life. I learned long ago that the view gets better the farther you walk from the floor plan.

Maybe that’s why Doom With a View amused me.

It names something I’ve come to recognize in myself.

Every morning, reality arrives carrying war, corruption, cruelty, ecological decline, and enough outrage to fill every room in the house. It invites me to believe that despair is the only rational response.

Some days, I almost agree.

Then I step outside.

The wind has no interest in the news cycle. Swallows still carve impossible arcs through the sky. The sunrise burns without asking who deserves it. At night, the Milky Way stretches across the darkness with the quiet confidence of something that has outlived every empire.

The world is wounded.

The view reminds me it is also breathtaking.

Those truths are not enemies. They simply refuse to cancel each other out.

I’ve spent enough of my life walking away—from expectations, from certainty, from rooms that demanded I shrink to fit them—to know that perspective is an act of freedom. Sometimes changing your life begins by changing where you stand.

The truth is, Doom With a View belongs to me.

It’s the private conversation I have with the world. The wrestling match between grief and beauty. Between despair and wonder. Between wanting to turn away and choosing, instead, to keep looking.

I don’t expect anyone else to carry that.

In fact, I hope they never have to.

Perhaps that’s why I built Sky View Ridge.

Not to escape the world.

Not to persuade anyone to see it as I do.

Simply to create a place where the horizon is wide enough to interrupt the noise. Where silence isn’t empty but restorative. Where people can wake to birdsong, watch the light move across the hills, follow the stars after dark, and remember—if only for a weekend—that they belong to something older and larger than their inbox, their timeline, or the latest crisis.

Guests don’t need my questions.

They only get the view.

And for me, that’s enough.

Alternative plans

I spent years looking

for someone

who could make my heart

skip a beat.

Life, apparently,

has an odd sense of humor.

It had other plans 

for my heart. 

Who benefits when we believe consistency is a virtue?

We’re taught that changing our minds is weakness.

Changing careers is failure.

Changing politics is betrayal.

Changing lovers is instability.

Changing beliefs is hypocrisy.

Maybe.

Or maybe the opposite is true.

Maybe refusing to change is the greater lie.

The oak tree doesn’t become a prairie because someone tells it to. But neither does it keep producing acorns after lightning hollows out its trunk. Life adapts or it dies.

People are the only creatures expected to become monuments to their younger selves.

That strikes me as bizarre.

The twenty-five-year-old who chose medicine didn’t know what the sixty-five-year-old would know.

The woman who married at twenty-two couldn’t possibly promise what the woman at fifty would want.

The activist.

The executive.

The mother.

The monk.

Each of them was real.

None of them was permanent.

I don’t admire people who never change.

I admire people who notice they’ve changed and have the courage to rearrange their lives accordingly.

Starting over isn’t courage because it’s adventurous.

It’s courage because it requires disappointing everyone who preferred the previous version of you.

That’s the real cost.

Not uncertainty.

Disappointing the audience.

Perhaps that’s why beginning again feels so liberating.

You’re no longer trying to keep a promise your younger self made to strangers.

You’re simply trying to tell the truth about who is standing here now.

The Places We Become

I have left several lives behind.

Not just houses.

Not just businesses.

Not just relationships.

Lives.

Entire versions of myself.

For a long time, I thought this reflected some character flaw. An inability to settle down. A tendency toward reinvention. Restlessness disguised as courage.

At seventy-five, I am beginning to suspect something else.

I think I leave when I can no longer recognize myself.

That sounds dramatic, but the process is surprisingly mundane.

Nobody wakes up one morning and says, “Good Lord, I’ve become a smaller human.”

It happens gradually.

You stop laughing as easily.

You stop taking risks.

You stop imagining futures.

You stop extending generosity because you are spending all your energy defending yourself from something.

A place.

A culture.

A relationship.

A family system.

A community.

Sometimes all of them at once.

The change is so incremental that you mistake it for maturity.

You call it acceptance.

You call it realism.

You call it learning how the world works.

Years later, you discover you have been living on emotional rations.

What fascinates me is how little attention we pay to environments as active forces.

We discuss personality endlessly.

We discuss trauma endlessly.

We discuss genetics endlessly.

But environments?

Not so much.

As if human beings are somehow sealed containers carrying themselves through the world unaffected by the ecosystems in which they live.

Nonsense.

Put a generous person in an environment saturated with suspicion and watch what happens.

Put a curious person in an environment hostile to curiosity.

Put a joyful person in an environment devoted to grievance.

Put a resilient person in an environment that punishes independence.

Wait long enough.

The environment usually wins.

At least for a while.

This is not a condemnation of anyone.

One of the saddest lessons of my life is that many of the people I loved were adapting to the same environment I was.

They weren’t villains.

They were surviving.

So was I.

The difference is that eventually I left.

And once I left, something strange happened.

I began recovering qualities I thought age had stolen.

My health improved.

My curiosity returned.

My writing returned.

My sense of possibility returned.

Most surprising of all, my kindness returned.

That one hurt.

Because I had spent years believing I was becoming a harder person.

A sharper person.

A less patient person.

I wasn’t.

I was becoming a depleted person.

There is a difference.

The realization filled me with relief and grief in equal measure.

Relief because I wasn’t lost.

Grief because I started wondering about the people who remained.

I still wonder.

I wonder how many people are walking around believing they have become cynical when they are merely exhausted.

How many believe they have become selfish when they are simply depleted.

How many believe they have become old when they have actually become confined.

And I wonder how many doors we spend years trying to drag other people through.

That may be the hardest lesson of all.

You can describe the view from the other side.

You can point toward the opening.

You can hold the door open with both hands until your arms ache.

But every human being must eventually decide whether they wish to walk through it.

For themselves.

Looking back, I realize I spent much of my life paying attention to where I was going.

The next town.

The next business.

The next adventure.

The next love.

What I rarely considered was the cost of staying.

Not the financial cost.

The human cost.

The cost of remaining in environments that slowly diminished curiosity, resilience, generosity, courage, and joy.

The cost of becoming accustomed to becoming smaller.

As for me, I find myself on a ridge in Wisconsin, planting trees and building cabins at an age when sensible people are downsizing.

It is possible I have learned nothing.

But I suspect I have finally learned one lesson worth sharing:

Be aware of where you’re going.

But be even more aware of where you stay.

Because destinations shape our lives.

Environments shape who we become.