Rivers are swollen, leaves green; country roads are garlanded with overgrown grass, while hills rowed with beans rise like waves to mountains lush with treetops thick as broccoli heads. Although we’re several weeks into the season, it’s something I just can’t let go of: the phenomenon of spring. Indeed, like so many elements of Creation, the seasons – and perhaps this one especially – present themselves as a kind of riddle … even an unsolvable one.
Nevertheless, we try.
Or, at least, we should try.
My father has been retired for nearly a year now, and I’ve been running the business. In some ways, taking it over is a longed-for endeavor. Who wouldn’t think this? In a fashion similar to how we look forward to an idealized spring, we picture ourselves in a dreamy tableau – some hoped-for position, say – operating with the triumph of a monarch … making decisions, executing plans.
But once we arrive, it isn’t like this.
Rather, the beneficent scenario above is replaced by a mundanity that can be a little confusing.
There are doctor’s visits that Dad has to attend, for instance, too many to count. This, in turn, conflicts with a business, too long neglected, that needs my time. It creates an existential conundrum, perhaps best described by the old expression: needing to be two places at one time.
Likely the most difficult phenomenon has nothing to do with the business or Dad, but rather exists at a more personal, even psychological level. That is the schizophrenia of needing to be both hot and cold, mean and nice, happy and hard … all at once.
What do I mean?
From a sales standpoint, the order of the day – at least in management books as well as my own experience – is a positive, forward-looking, winsome attitude. This makes sense. From this vantage, one can’t expect to sign up lumber buyers with a glum, negative, harsh and downcast attitude.
But this isn’t at all what’s required from an operational standpoint. Here, in fact, it’s the opposite.
In 1958, Chinua Achebe wrote a novel called “Things Fall Apart.” I’ve not read the novel, but I’m very familiar with “The Second Coming,” the poem by W. B. Yeats from which the novel’s title is taken.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold..
This is essentially true of a business operation, with one notable exception. Things fall apart, it’s true. However, the center can hold; although this outcome, at least in my experience so far, is done only with much time, effort and input by the owner; and this requires the toughness mentioned above.
Thus, the psychological impossibility. If you want to sell, you must be nice; if you want to operate, then tough.
My father had an outlet for these difficulties: he walked the mountain.
More specifically, there’s a trail on some nearby family land, worn flat and smooth from years of his footsteps; he would climb to the top, only to return after prayer and meditation, sweaty and winded and relieved.
Perhaps it was the irresistibility of spring that drew me, or maybe the stress, but I walked the mountain yesterday. It had been a while, and somehow I lost my bearings. This isn’t so surprising. With the overstory so lush and green, forward visibility was more limited than it was when I was last there, back in the winter. In fact, I got so turned around that I thought I was almost at the top, only to reach the next ridge and see that there was much more mountain to climb.
In this season of my life, this, to me, is the riddle of spring. It’s a longed-for event, full of the energy of new opportunities; but in the same way that spring was anticipated in the previous season, so, too, is winter in this one. Thus, it’s a time of celebration, but also difficulty.
I looked at the mountaintop, rising in its forbidding and eternal cluster. It was much more distant than I’d hoped.
I stepped forward, wondering how long it would take to get there.
Along with his father, Allen Keller runs a lumber business in Stevenson, Alabama. He has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MBA from University of Virginia. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
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