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different ways of dealing with obstacles

A few months back I went on a short walk to see Terrace Falls in the Blue Mountains. I wanted to try some different tracks in the area, a wish which led me to a track which was little better than a kangaroo pad along a steep hillside. Maybe it was once a good track and has slowly been going back to nature. Then there were all the fallen trees in my way. After scrambling over the third or fourth such obstacle in the space of fifteen minutes, I started thinking about we deal with obstacles on the path - and in work and life.

These are just six responses, I'm sure there are more ways than this, but this is all that came to me at the time. In no particular order:

- Climb over the obstacle or go under it. There are some problems which can be fixed if  enough people dedicate sufficient time and effort to solving the solution. This seems like climbing over the obstacle. There are other obstacles which appear imposing at first, but when analyzed calmly, it's easy enough to find a good and non-disruptive workaround, which could be liked to squeezing under the obstacle.

- Leave the track and go around the obstacle. Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is to take an unorthodox approach that is not in the procedures book. The danger is when you have to depart too far from the track. If you're not careful about returning to the track as soon as possible, you may get lost. Last year I helped somebody who had been lost in Sassafras Gully for seven hours, because he had wandered from the track in dense and confusing terrain, got lost and panicked. Sometimes the danger is not so much the possibility of getting lost, but dealing with hazardous terrain, as depicted in the photo.

- Go through the obstacle. Imagine your obstacle is a deep muddy bog. There have been times I've been able to pick a way through the bog without sinking in. This approach calls for extremely good observation of what you can get away with. Walking on mud without sinking in also demands particular delicacy, but if the obstacle is a mass of leaves and branches from a fallen tree, brute force and tenacity help. This approach can be risky, and it's advisable to have a Plan B. What happens if you do sink into the mud? Sometimes I've tried this approach with office politics, wanting to stay above it - sometimes being successful, sometimes not.

- Remove the obstacle. This can be the heroic option. Not only are you dealing with the obstacle, but you're making sure that nobody else has to. It's easy to do with little obstacles, but larger obstacles require something extra, be it strength or a chainsaw. There are sometimes unforeseen consequences to this. You might remove the obstacle from your path and it throw into somebody else's path or cause some environmental damage. Last week I was walking in Dante's Glen near Lawson and came across some track maintenance workers clearing fallen trees from the path. I was grateful for what they were doing, but I happened to be there when they rolled a huge trunk section off the track. It crushed several small trees and ferns on its way down the gully. I can't help but wonder if there had been a better way.

- Turn back and choose a different path. In the Blue Mountains there are plenty of tracks which look promising in the beginning but then deteriorate into animal pads leading nowhere. Some people turn back too soon, because the ideas of facing any obstacles is too scary. Other people are very reluctant to turn around ever. It seems like admitting defeat, that the initial decision to take this path was wrong. But after facing a huge and seemingly insurmountable obstacle or a depressing series of smaller annoying obstacles, it's worth asking the question if this path is still the right one. This could be the situation when somebody decides to leave a relationship or a job. Once you know that you are on the wrong path, it's better to cut your losses and turn around immediately. This can be quite disheartening, but hopefully the lessons learned from this wrong turn will be helpful in the future

Any of the above five approaches are fundamentally valid, they could be the best approach depending on the person or the circumstances. There's one other response I'd like to mention. This is how it goes: If you reach the obstacle, close your eyes. Close your eyes and try not to think about whatever the obstacle is. After a while - seconds, minutes, or even years later - open your eyes again, hoping that the obstacle has disappeared. If that didn't happen, just repeat and try again until the obstacle does disappear. The hope is that if you try hard enough at ignoring the obstacle, the better the chances of it going away. No, it's not a very effective method, but I'm mentioning it because it's very popular with libraries who don't like how their users have changed lately.

winter pause

Winter has finally come to the Blue Mountains and I'm glad for it. After almost of a week of rain, Sassafras Gully should be closer to the temperate rain forest that it is meant to be. I am looking forward to seeing its waterfalls cascading at more than a sad trickle.

I have a new blog-related project which I'm working on and is consuming most of my creative energy at this point. I've decided to give it the attention that it needs, even if it means putting this blog on a hiatus for a little while. Not that the explodedlibrary will be totally neglected. In the next month or so, I will be playing with aspects of the blog's design.

Currently playing in iTunes: Common People by William Shatner

short trip to Maria Island

We have a long weekend in Tasmania - Monday is a holiday for the Queen's Birthday. No, it's not the Queen's real birthday, just when Tasmanians celebrate it. Every state has a different day. Don't ask me why and don't ask me to make sense of this.

It is very nice to have a paid holiday again!

I am unexpectedly going to be visiting one of my favourite places in the whole world over the three day weekend - Maria Island (pronounced Mariah).

The whole place is a national park. There are no cars - you have to travel in a small boat for aboat an hour. I'm going to be sleeping in some well-preserved convict buildings - the old penetentiary from the early 1800s. There are beautiful and deserted beaches on one side of the island and amazing cliffs on the other side. There are lots of wallabies, a few kangaroos and emus and other interesting Australian animals. The island is very undeveloped. I'll hopefully post a few photos of my trip when I get back.

barkfall - why are there four seasons?

Depending on how you look at it, Tasmania may have the typical four distinct seasons. At least this description is less artificial when applied to Tasmania than to other places in Australia. For example, the leaves of the European deciduous trees which have been planted on the island do turn gold or red before starting to fall. The leaves of deciduous trees in Sydney just seemed to suddenly turn brown and then drop onto ground, all at once. The further north you go, the less sense that four seasons seem to make in Australia – until you get to the tropical areas which only have the two seasons – wet and dry.

On the other hand, I’ve talked to people from the Northern Hemisphere who are convinced that Tasmania doesn’t have four seasons, but only one – which is spring, because it never gets too hot or too cold over here. It’s true that the seasons here are more subtle. The leaves on almost all of the native plants look the same whether it’s summer or winter. There can be snow and freezing weather on the mountains in summer. Yes, summer is usually warmer than spring which is warmer than winter, but the degrees of temperature difference between the seasons are minute when compared with a continental climate like Minnesota.

It never ceased to amaze me how place that gets so cold in the winter as Minnesota, could be so hot and humid in the summer. It would dismay me how short (although delightful) spring and autumn could be there. One day in October it might be 65F and then only a few days later it would be 30F.

As I’ve been pondering whether the four seasons template works everywhere, I’ve been thinking that Minnesota really has five seasons, because it gets a second helping of winter. I’m talking about the dreary time of year when the snowbanks start to melt, the days are a bit longer, but any day there might be a nasty snowstorm and the flowers and greenery of spring seem a long way off. I’m basically talking about mid-February through to mid-April.

Of course, the extreme weather keeps away the bad people. Why didn’t anybody mention that to Arlon Lindner? Well if thinking such things helps Minnesotans get through the month of March, I won’t be so cruel as to argue with them.

I remember hearing something on ABC radio about how most places in Australia can’t really fit into four seasons. In some places there might be six seasons, admittedly fairly subtle.

Although eucalyptus leaves don’t fall at once, I have noticed that eucalyptus trees in Tasmania begin to shed their bark in late February. It’s very pretty actually, the ground is littered with the freshly fallen bark, often colourful on the underside. The new bark on the tree trunks and branches looks light, soft and clean – it hasn’t yet been sunburnt or weathered the many fierce storms in store for it.

Could this be a subtle sign-post for the start of a new season? I wonder that other ones there might be.