Your parents, loved ones, childhood friends may or may not completely understand your skiing lifestyle or your decision to move to a small resort town for that matter, but once you surrender and release to that fact, you may find their acceptance gradually starts to improve.
The first few years you may hear, “When are you coming home?” quite a bit. Heading towards about year five, it may shift towards more of a half question, half exclamation, “So you really like it there?!” and a couple more years down the line, some variation of “You’re really happy there” will start to become more of the norm. Your dream and theirs won’t always necessarily mesh, but at some point in time they will (hopefully) start to peacefully coexist.
My mom, in a moment of candor, will tell you my “career” path cost me countless Pulitzers and a shot at writing for The New York Times (she was unimpressed when my byline finally graced the pages of the Old Gray Lady during the Kobe Bryant debacle), but I submit that such things were not meant to be. Thank God.
This was a line from a great article I came across, For love or for money? Rewards of the ski world far outweigh the risks of working in the real world written by Vail Valley local, ski journalist David O. Williams.
The article talks about what motivates the modern ski bum, living a skiing lifestyle with input from other ski town locals from Park City, Alaska, Squaw Valley and Mammoth. Their stories are not without husbands or wives, children, jobs or bills to pay, quite the contrary actually, they are just about how they have found a way to build their lives around their passion for skiing.
Heli-guide, former ski patroller, designer/draftsman, carpenter T.J. gives an interesting perspective,
“I can’t tell you how many times I rode a lift with a guy who says, ‘God, so you’re here all season; you ski every day? Oh, I wish I could do what you do.’ And I say, ‘Well, why don’t you?’ And he says, ‘Oh, I’ve got the job and the family and the two houses and the kids.’
“But those families come to a big resort and spend more in a week than I probably make in a season, and yet I live right there and I ski every day,” Ware says.
Good point with no exaggeration! The truth is though, that when it comes right down to it, they don’t really wish they could do what you do, it is your dream, not theirs, and the one or two week ski vacation for them is perfectly fine. Such is the challenge and the reward of finding your own reality, not someone else’s, moving along your own unique path and creating a fulfilling life best suited for you.
And spoken by a true ski town local who loves his skiing lifestyle,
”Perhaps it’s the blurring of the lines between the ski world and the real world in recent years – lawyers who coach racing and realtors who race mountain bikes – that makes the perks of a straight-up ski-town lifestyle stand in such stark contrast to the hum-drum existence found in flatter, more muted settings.”
Definitely check out the complete article in Vail’s online journal, posted in the Real Lives section of RealVail.