Anne Truitt Zelenka

I spent last week in Estes Park, Colorado with my husband, three kids, and a rotating complement of family and friends. We rented a vacation home near the YMCA of the Rockies and experienced the beauty of Rocky Mountain National Park. On Sunday, we took a leisurely half-mile walk around Bear Lake with the whole crew. On Monday, we climbed to Gem Lake in the morning, lunched on seared elk salad and bison nachos at the Stanley, then outran a storm at Bierstadt Lake in the afternoon. The next day we saw Nymph, Dream, and Emerald Lakes. Wednesday took us to Mills Lake, my vote for prettiest mountain lake ever. We rested our knees on Thursday then Friday completed a seven mile loop to Cub Lake and The Pool.

Do you sense a theme? I’m a lake seeker, not a mountain climber. I’m looking for beauty and satisfaction, not prestige and achievement. It’s the same in all aspects of my life, like blogging. I blog for expression, connection, and conversation, not to break into the Technorati Top 100 and not to make money. I don’t look at my hit counts or subscriber numbers, except when I can’t avoid them or when I just can’t help myself. It’s not that I’m not competitive and it’s not that those things aren’t important and useful in some contexts. It’s that I’m temperamentally wired to look for what’s beautiful, peaceful, and comforting in the world. Paying attention to that other stuff makes me unhappy.

With mountain climbing, you’re always looking to the next higher peak. If you climb one that’s 13,000 feet, next thing you know you’ll be dreaming of fourteeners. You won’t want to be limited to what you can get to without equipment, so you’ll learn technical climbing skills. If you’re really dedicated, you’ll someday find yourself climbing past people’s crap on Mount Everest, having paid thousands of dollars for the privilege, and risking death or injury.

The climbing blogger will never be satisfied with current hit counts, because they could always be higher. Whatever links she received in the past will pale compared to links other people are receiving or links she could receive if she just posted more and better. The climbing blogger will censor herself when what she wants to write doesn’t suit her chosen niche.

While we were in Estes Park, we toured the summer camp I attended for five years starting when I was ten. I have hopes my son will experience it next year. It was like walking into a time machine. I remembered how as a girl of ten or twelve or fourteen I would sign up for every lake hike that was scheduled at camp, unless they forced me onto a horseback ride instead. I enthusiastically climbed mountains too. But the rush of summiting a mountain never compared, for me, to crossing a ridge and seeing a new mountain lake for the first time, nestled among trees or surrounded by granite; impossibly large or pondlike in its smallness; covered with lily pads or shiny with sunlight; green or blue or black.

To me, looking for lakes is fundamentally orthogonal to climbing mountains, literally and figuratively. Orthogonality from popular culture is what I seek for myself and my family. I’ve read advice suggesting that the best parents are countercultural but I don’t buy that. I think the best parents and families exist within the culture but rotated relative to it, so that the kids (and parents) fit in and connect but yet live according to their own inner meaning and needs, impervious to sometimes damaging cultural forces like consumerism and corrosive competition.

Coincidentally, Business Week features competition this week as their topic. As a culture, we’re obsessed with getting to the top, with being better than other people, with climbing mountains rather than finding lakes. But I don’t want to compete. Competing takes away from what gives me satisfaction. It stopped me from blogging for most of the summer.

Mary Tsao of Mom Writes summarized my current feelings about blogging perfectly in I’ll See You on the Dark Side of the Blogosphere:

You see, I’ve been feeling kind of twitchy lately about blogging. Not so much about what I’m writing, but about criticism, about the business of blogging, about popularity contests, about stats and the pressure to grow an audience, about success — how we measure it, who cares, and why I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. And about being unliked and about the need to have a thick skin or at least be able to fake it….

So it takes some pluck to stick it out in the blogosphere and a confidence I’m not always sure I have. I need a thick skin to put my thoughts and opinions online and potentially have them trashed by other people. I need a thick skin to be myself and have people dislike me for no other reason than the color of my hair or what kind of shoes I wear. The question is: Is my skin thick enough?…

Unfortunately, when I get too caught up in the Blogosphere’s metrics of success: stats, comments, rankings, it sucks all of the joy out of blogging.

For me, the answer is to focus on the lakes and not the mountains. There are a couple mountains looming in front of me that I feel the urge to climb. But I don’t want to get up at 2 am and drive on a windy mountain road when I’d rather be snug in my bed. I don’t want to rush to get to the summit before a thunderstorm threatens to burn me crispy. I don’t want to feel my heart pound wildly while I teeter on a three-foot-wide ledge.

Here are the metrics for climbing mountains: how high, how fast, how difficult, how many? It’s all about competition. Discovering and experiencing a lake is different. How beautiful was it? How much peace did it bring you? What memories did it recall? What new ideas did it offer?

In the future, as I blog and work and care for my kids, I’m going to keep my mind on the lakes and not on the mountains. Remember that if you read my blog and find me writing about something that doesn’t seem appropriate for a tech blog or a mom blog or a self help blog or whatever you think my blog might be. If I seem to be getting off topic, if I seem to lose focus on getting ahead in technology, it’s likely because I’m questing after another lake. Who knows how beautiful and satisfying it might be.

I have other things to say about this, like how working with so many men in technology and blogging is often for me more like climbing a mountain than seeking a lake, and about Meredith Vieira, who found that in looking for lakes she climbed some huge mountains. But right now, I’m satisfied with realizing that blogging doesn’t always have to be about climbing mountains, not for me.