The Transition

The first thought that came to my mind after hearing about the opportunity to relocate to Silicon Valley was “wow, a new beginning”.  I found my life in Los Angeles to be quite satisfying, but I was in the process of piecing myself back together after my marriage had crumbled.  I was attending weekly therapy sessions, undergoing a lot of self-reflection, and trying to learn as much about myself as possible so I could make the most of my self-improvement.  Additionally, this opportunity presented a change that I had been seeking at work for quite some time; I would be working under new management in a similar role that would evolve over time as the company evolved, which was happening at a rapid rate.  Because of these factors, I was excited for this upcoming move.  I felt inspired and optimistic about what this next chapter of my life had to offer.  But in real life, just like during an ultramarathon, things can change in an instant.  Life changing events often take time for me to process emotionally.  When big changes occur, the realization of what is happening doesn’t “hit” me right away.  But while I was driving around on a Sunday morning in early December, the enormity of this change suddenly came over me.  I was going to be leaving Los Angeles and living somewhere else.  Not Ventura County or the San Gabriel Valley, but somewhere five hours away.  Fear began to set in.  Fear that I was going to miss Los Angeles and the life I had created there.  It wasn’t until that moment that despite living in Los Angeles for nearly seven years, I felt like I had just moved there.  In a way, I was still getting to know this city and now I was going to leave.  Why would I want to do that?  Los Angeles was the city that I worked so hard to move to for so long.  I woke up every morning feeling happy that I was living where I wanted to live.  And what about all my friends?  What about all the places in the wilderness I loved to visit? Why would I want to leave and move somewhere else just for the sake of a new beginning when I could get that here?  I left Michigan for Chicago in May of 2009, and Chicago for Los Angeles in March of 2012.  I was no stranger to moving to new cities, but this time it felt different.  Despite the mixed feelings I had about the situation, I had to remind myself of one of the rules I live by; Don’t fight change.  Embrace it and welcome it.  Change is good.  Change is moving forward.  I’ve been through a lot of things in my life, and I was used to things changing, especially over the last two years.  This was simply another change that would help me move forward and make me stronger.  There was no way I was going to let this opportunity slip away.   

I decided to spend the week before Christmas working in the Mountain View office and staying at a hotel to help acclimate myself to my soon to be new home.  Prior to my knowledge of this move, I had only known that Silicon Valley was near San Francisco and that a lot of tech companies were headquartered there.  But over the course of several weeks, my interest in the region grew and I began doing research in various forms.  I looked up the area on google maps and familiarized myself with the geographical layout.  There was Mountain View, the city where the office was based, bordered by Sunnyvale, Cupertino, and Palo Alto, with the Santa Cruz Mountains and several state parks to south.  I had been a fan of several bands from the San Francisco Bay Area for a long time but soon, I discovered the musical genius of a legendary band from Palo Alto; The Grateful Dead.  Up until then, I knew almost nothing about them, except for the fact that Jerry Garcia was their lead singer and guitar player.  My parents had talked about them, but I had always written them off as a “hippie band”.  One day during my Silicon Valley “research”, I decided to give their second record “Anthem of the Sun” a listen.  I was instantly hooked.  It’s not the kind of music I would listen to while running, but due to its unique and experimental sound, it has become a record that I relish greatly, and in some ways, one of my “soundtracks” to living in Silicon Valley.  Another component that fueled my inspiration was the thriving tech industry.  Silicon Valley is widely known as a significant high technology region in the United States.  Several major tech companies were founded here and continue to maintain a strong presence.  Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, LinkedIn, Apple, all were established in the cities of Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto and Cupertino, and their headquarters remain there to this day.  On that first morning of my visit as I was walking to work, I stood at a crosswalk and took a minute to just look around and think.  I thought of all the entrepreneurial history that occurred on the very corner on which I was standing.  The very first Apple computer had been created in a garage just a few neighborhoods away.  Every time I google something (“google” has now become a verb, which speaks volumes of the company’s impact), turn on my iPod when I go running, or log into Facebook or Instagram; the foundation for all of that took place right where I was standing.  It was a very similar feeling to those that I experience in the wilderness; The feeling where I say to myself “take a minute and think about where you are”. 

It was a rainy Sunday morning when I arrived in the Mountain View area for my first visit.  I had some time to kill before checking into my hotel, so given the fact that I surfed the internet for trails even before apartments, I decided to take this opportunity to drive down to Big Basin Redwoods State Park for a trail run.  Nestled within the Santa Cruz Mountains about forty-five minutes south of Mountain View, Big Basin Redwoods State Park is somewhat of a hidden gem in the Bay Area.  The rain fell steadily as I cruised down the narrow, winding road that led to the park headquarters.  Tall redwood trees lined the roadside and created a green tunnel of thick foliage.  Thanks to some help from a friendly park ranger, I was able to find a six-mile trail loop that was only moderate in difficulty.  The run itself was rejuvenating and the scenery was pleasantly vibrant, but as I progressed, conditions gradually deteriorated.  The rainfall was growing heavier by the minute, flooding the trail and turning it into a giant mud puddle.  I was soaked, but there wasn’t much I could do to remedy the situation at this point, so I just kept moving forward, eager to finish and get back to my warm, dry car.  As I ran down the twisting trail on the return trip, I felt the urge to relieve myself.  When I finished, I was about to continue running for cover but instead, I paused.  I stood there for a good minute, mesmerized by the sound of the rain falling in the wilderness.  There was no one else around, no small animals, no other sounds to be heard.  I had never heard anything so peaceful and serene.  My concern about getting too wet melted away and I had one of those powerful moments when I felt like I was truly living in the present.  Up until that moment I had been running cautiously, avoiding the puddles on the trail by hopping over or running around them to avoid submerging my feet in the cold, muddy water.  As I resumed forward progress, I remembered the feeling I experienced listening to the sounds of the rain fall.  It didn’t matter what happened to me in the past or what the future held.  Now was all that mattered.  For the remainder of the run, I ran right through the mud puddles, allowing my feet to splash and sink into the cold mud.

   

The more time I spent in Mountain View, the more it began to feel like home.  My extended stay hotel was located about a mile and a half from the office, and I began to settle into a routine of waking up, running, having hotel breakfast and coffee, taking a shower, getting dressed, and walking to work.  The walk gave me time to plan out my day and occasionally, I’d stop at Red Rock Coffee on the way, a local coffee joint that was popular with the Wag crowd.  There was something exciting and motivating about working up in Mountain View.  There were about forty of us in the office, and not one person had an office; everyone worked in a cubicle, including our CEO.  The office presented a friendly vibe, and we were able to converse with each other freely on the open floor.  I was working slightly longer hours than when I worked in the West Hollywood office, but I didn’t mind.  It may have been the excitement of working in a new environment or the inspiring entrepreneurial tech history of Silicon Valley, but whatever the case, I could come home from working an eleven or twelve-hour day and I wouldn’t feel drained.  Instead, I felt accomplished.  As the weeks carried on, I found myself trying local restaurants in the Mountain View area after work as a way of getting acquainted with the neighborhood.  Silicon Valley offers a wide variety of authentic cuisines including Thai, Indian, Mexican, Vietnamese, and Mediterranean, the most latter being my favorite, owing to the fact that I grew up with a Croatian-American dad and worked in a Greek restaurant for several years in high school.  On a random Thursday night, I left work and walked over to an Irish Pub down the street that I discovered a couple of nights prior.  My mother, who was Irish-American, loved going to pubs and introduced me to them when I was a young kid.  All Irish pubs are essentially the same; dim lights, beer plaques, lots of carpentry, and a slightly run down (or very run down, depending on the location) interior.  Walking into Molly Magee’s, I immediately thought of my Mom, as I do every time I walk into an Irish pub.  She passed away when I was a teenager, but I knew that if she were still alive, Molly Magee’s would have been the first place I would have brought her to when she came to visit me.  As I sat towards the end of the bar sipping my Guinness, I pictured my mom sitting next to me in the empty seat.  I sure hope no one else in the bar was watching me because I’m sure I looked pretty silly sitting there, looking at an empty seat, smiling. 

As I settled into my new home, I kept up with my running, and began exploring.  I loved running in Big Basin State Park, I ran at St. Joseph’s Hill in the Sierra Azul Open Space Reserve, and, most recently, I drove out the mountains in the Stanislaus National Forest near Lake Tahoe to log some miles in the mountain wilderness.  I opted for road running on this adventure since the recent storm had blanketed the trails with several inches of fresh snow.  As I ran down the side of the road in my water-resistant jacket, with a beanie and hood covering my head, the snow fell steadily.  Despite the less than ideal conditions, I was in awe of the majestic setting; tall redwood and pine trees lined the road on both sides, covered in a layer of fresh snow.  The late morning road was fairly quiet, with only the occasional car passing by.  Every so often, I would also see people pulled off to the side of the road unloading sleds and saucers to use on the slope that descended from the road further into the wilderness.  Nearing the end of the run, although I was enjoying myself, I breathed a great sigh of relief as I rounded a bend in the road and my parked car came into view in the distance.  By the time I arrived, the snow was falling so heavily, I could barely see twenty feet in front of me.  I flung open the door, threw myself into the seat, started the car, and cranked up the heat to its highest setting.  As I sat there waiting for my car to warm up, I felt incredibly alive, similar to how I felt in Big Basin on the first day of my initial visit two months prior.  I was drenched, freezing, and I couldn’t feel my hands, but things just seemed perfect in that particular moment.  Every runner knows the more suffering that is involved, the greater the sense of accomplishment.  My move from Los Angeles to Sunnyvale had its hard moments, but I had endured through them, and things were starting to fall into place in my new chapter.  The falling snow shook me from my thoughts, and I decided I had better get going before the roads became dangerous.  Driving down that mountain road through the snow in my soaking wet running gear, slowly getting my feeling back in my hands, I began to feel like myself again.