Can I run my world from Ludlow, Vermont?

At age 22, I started my first job out of college with General Electric Medical Systems. A short time later they posted a job opening in Vermont, and it instantly became a dream of mine to one day live there. For this Queens-New York City boy, it was another part of the world, a place back then that most city slickers would never see. Maybe.

Fast forward 13 years, having now been running LMS for 8 years, I venture North to go skiing, and within days purchase a home up near the not so famous Okemo Mountain. It is 1987 and there is no Internet. In fact we don t even have TV, and my small family at the time (6 kids) is in shock and wants out! The years pass, the Internet comes to the world but the house on the mountain is still shut out. We finally add TV, and yes, we have a phone and heat (and North Face down jackets, just like the pioneers had), but no Internet. My time up there becomes a torturous mix of relaxation and a forced disconnect from the day to day activities of life that we need to sometimes run from.

The useless Blackberry on my hip begins to show the first signs of life one day, maybe 4 years ago, when on some local mountain it “steals “a signal and the familiar tone of emails coming in “hits . The animals that heard my yell scattered as I looked to see the little screen fill with typical day to day trauma, it looked like I just won the largest lottery ever. This begins my secret journeys to the far side of town, hoping the weather, and luck would just get me enough signal to receive my email. The local police in Ludlow could not determine if the weird guy at the corner was holding a grenade, pretending to be the statute of liberty or just reaching out to god for deliverance. It worked, at least occasionally, and it meant some day I could hope to spend my days on vacation with as much interruption as I do down here, thus saving me the dreaded return from vacation that shocks most of us.

Absurd? Not really, since our life was eventually to become 100% connected and the solution was not to break away, but rather to learn to handle this new form of living.

Well, it finally came. About a year ago the wonders of technology finally delivered a DSL line to my home, which is located about quarter mile up our road from another main road in Ludlow that would not get classified as a driveway on Long Island. It took our everyday existence at our home and turned it upside down. The wireless laptop came, a desktop installed, and within days our first meltdown (my meltdown). Never did anything change our now 20 year experience at our home there like this. To bring that level of connection to us so fast was like diving into a bucket of ice. Our bodies and minds revolted. The ugliest side of all of us came out as our day to day schedules were now formed by constant searching of activities, weather, timetables, world news, and of course links to the hundreds of others we normally “connect  to. It was not pleasant, but it would be the new Vermont world for us.

It is now about a year later and our recovery has been slow, as most are. There are good days and bad ones, and the good begin to overshadow the ugly ones. We have learned how to live with the “noise  and accept it at a different level, then when we are at home in New York in our regular lives. We use our Vermont connectivity wisely, like drinking in moderation. Our change in how we interpret our connected world up there is the most interesting aspect since it has shown me what the future will look like. Our evolution will be such that constant touch and the failure to disconnect will be tolerated by our own reaction to the never ending noise, not by escaping from it. There is great hope that we will learn how to enjoy our lives despite non-stop “touch,  no different then the wind beating up your face while sailing. You just tune it out, and enjoy it when you want.

Ludlow, Vermont is now the center of my universe. Connected, I can run my life and my world, any day, any time. The world has been delivered to North Hill, with pinpoint precision. Everything that needs to be known is there, when and how I want to deal with it. My old ham radio antenna has come down and the days I used to type out Morse code messages to the other side of world has been replaced with rich Internet content. I can sit on the porch on a cool summer night and watch real time video of skiing taking place at an indoor facility on the other side of the world on my notebook.

Embracing the connectivity and molding it into your life is the big payoff. Enjoy it and let it make your days brighter. There is a Ludlow in all of our lives. You are now free to move there.