Living a good life can be enough

By LEE KUCERA

A stopover during the holidays in the small town of Ashland, Oregon reminded me that the entire world is not geared to life in fast-forward the way we are here in Silicon Valley. Nestled at the foot of the Siskiyou Mountains just north of the Oregon-California border, Ashland is well-known to more than 400,000 visitors each year--many of them from Silicon Valley--who travel there to enjoy the small-town charm of a place that combines a turn-of-the-century main street and plaza, a lushly pastoral park and creek meandering through the heart of town, dozens of inns converted from fine old Craftsman and Victorian homes, perfect summer weather, and performances by a Tony Award-winning repertory theatre company.

It isn't until we take a break from Silicon Valley that we realize how extreme life here is. If you're a fish, I suppose, there's nothing odd about breathing underwater. But in most places outside Silicon Valley, people who sleep on futons in a corner of their offices and live with cell phones glued to their ears would be regarded as material for a Saturday Night Live skit. It seems hypocritical to bash the place where my husband and I have lived and prospered and raised our family among good friends and neighbors for the past two decades. But I have to admit I am increasingly weary of the pressure cooker it has become--its clogged freeways, restaurants and movies houses that are so crowded they aren't worth the hassle on weekends, monster homes that blight ordinary suburban neighborhoods, headlines touting instant IPO millionaires, insufficient parking almost everywhere, a work ethic that has crossed the line from commitment to mania, the relegation of all human communication to e-mail and cell phones, the cutthroat academic competition in our high schools--and a perpetual need to hurry, hurry, hurry.

The driving force behind all this activity, of course, has been an exploding population drawn by the lure of lucrative jobs in the high-tech industry since the mid-seventies. The phenomenal economic growth and opportunity in this Valley are unprecedented. But I think we pay a high price for it. The sad by-product of prosperity is the loss of the concept of "enough."

There's no such thing as rich enough, successful enough, thin enough, content enough, report card grades that are good enough, staying at work long enough and then going home to our real life. My own observation is that there can be a lot of pain behind the six-figure income jobs in Silicon Valley, and unhappiness in many of the million-dollar homes. We're so busy working that we've lost sight of the obvious: What good is professional success to a person who's on his third divorce? What's the point of a monster home if the people living in it are lost and alienated from one another? Of what value is a million-dollar stock portfolio to someone who doesn't have his or her health?

Maybe a good resolution for the millennium (whenever it is) would be to ask ourselves whose values we are living, and why. The innkeeper during our recent visit in Ashland--a gracious and laid-back refugee from Big Sur--expressed the opinion that the more technological our society becomes, the more there will be a backlash against technology, and the more people will return to things that are "real." I think by that he meant the things that fill his own life: wonderful home-cooked food, hand-crafted furnishings and decorative art, the immediacy and timelessness of classic theatre, genuine fires in genuine fireplaces, the character and solidity of old architecture, days that have space in them for reflection and leisure. I told him that he had found a wonderful way to live, and meant it. And during our two-day visit there, I didn't see a single cell-phone being used.

Sheriff's Report

It's hard to export what America has become

Sports Briefs

Tidal Waves win Cup tournament

Roth wins, sets AAU bench press record