My favorite part of snowboarding is the lift. That time spent on the chair, heading up a mountain. It can start off chaotically: Skiers and riders shuffling through a long line, the chair whipping around the corner and scooping you up. And then off you go.

It gets really quiet. Eventually, just the sound of the cable running over each tower, boards and skis scraping snow down below. I don’t meditate (and really should) but this works just as well.

It can also be transformative. Clear, calm and warm at the base can slowly turn into a white-out, high-wind, freezing maelstrom at the summit. Maelstrom. There’s a word I need to utilize more [Ed: Maelstrom actually means a large, swirling body of water. So, poor choice here.] Anyway, that near-instant change in environment is downright magical. It can shift drastically between runs. And that’s okay—exciting, even.

I grew up in Vermont and never skied. Which is a bit like growing up in Hawaii and never surfing. Or growing up in Antarctica and never ice fishing. Has anyone ever grown up in Antartica? I picture it more of a place one can only visit. Anyway, hockey took up most of my time during the long winters of my childhood, so all of this is new to me. Having just started snowboarding a little over a year ago, I’m proof that it’s never too late to get out there.

Even if for the chair ride up alone.

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I am not big on resolutions, but like many of you, I’d sure like to write more this year. Writing was the single biggest factor in helping my career, and it’s led me to start new projects, find new interests, helped solved problems, etc. I’m a horrible note-taker, and far too many thoughts and ideas permenantly live in my mind. Which doesn’t scale—especially for someone at my age.

So I’m writing this now. I’m writing it in a plain ol’ text editor using Markdown. I’ll save this file and with a quick command line, it’ll sync with my code on GitHub and be published to my webserver as a static HTML file. I’m going back to basics. Hypertext.

“Getting back to basics feels good … Just me and as many blank text files as I can fill up.”

And getting back to basics feels good. Less to get in the way. I no longer care if I’m doing things the best possible way, I just care about writing and publishing. Over the last few years I’ve been busy building a business and rebuilding a life. I’d love to share more of that here.

Thanks for reading, whomever you are. There are no comments here. No accounts, no stats. Just me and as many blank text files as I can fill up. We’ll see how it goes this time around. If you’re looking for old stuff (1999–2014), links to that archived content should still work. They’ll just forward to vault.simplebits.com.

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