While I was Out & About this week, I decided to take a walk along the beachfront. I was thinking about things and before I knew it, the walk had become a very long stroll. Unfortunately, I forget to notice that the tide was coming in.
The return trek involved thigh-deep water, a couple of hip deep sand sinkholes, and lots of lurking algae and sharp edged rocks. I was happy I had on my Tevas - at least the large crabs were slightly detoured from removing a toe or two. If only the no-see-'ems had something to slow them down! I've spent the remainder of the week feeling somewhat like an old hound dog with fleas, as I scratched at the million little bites they took from my flesh.
And all because I didn't notice the turn of the tide.
The tide turns out to be a pretty apt metaphor for the return of a conversation I first reported on several months ago. That was the conversation that revolved around the nature of change.
The Cape is in a period of change - of generational change, of structural change, of attitudinal change - and suggestions of this rose and fell in nearly every conversation around me this week.
Our peninsula is shaped by constant change. The geography reconfigures itself with every storm, with very season, with every tide even. Breaches open. Cliffs erode. Sandbars form. A marsh is born. A marsh dissolves. We are not a static strip of land.
Human habits have not been unlike the geography. The Nausets fished here. They made camps. Mayflower settlers moved from Plymouth back to the first strip of land they saw and began another wave of change. A glass industry grew up and burned itself out. The religious revived their spirits. Fishing returned, with different fishing folks. A railway opened the Cape to tourism. It rose in and out and in of popular favor.
We like to imagine a perfect "ye olde Cape Cod" - except that there really isn't one. There's just a peninsula that continually adapted and changed.
The tide rises. The tide falls.
Right now, we appear into be in an active state of flux. A few years ago, when I first made a commitment to this region, hints of the turn of tide were there. But now, that shift isn't just a glimmer. It is a work in progress.
It seems that every time I turned around this week, someone was finding excitement (or frustration) in the way a new wave of business owners or returning college students or newly arrived residents wanted to work. Depending on the speaker it was either "great energy" or "too fast, they expect too much."
Surveying the state of the Cape digs up a sense of shifting sands at every turn. There's a heard-on-the-street murmur that the trendsetters are changing, the the same old cliques are outdated, that new ideas are forcing themselves in as inevitably as the moon draws the tide.
And that means we have some exciting opportunities. When change is rapidly afoot, each and every one of us has a chance to affect the outcome. We can decide what we want and we can work proactively to make it so. Or, we can ignore the tide end up like like I did earlier this week, slogging through creepy dark water with unknown objects around our ankles and lots of invisible predators chewing us up.
Look around you. Almost everyone reading this newsletter is playing some role in this phase of change. Everything you do has the capacity to define who and what we become.
Just a year ago, some 100 or so people from across the region met at the OpenCape summit, to talk about how to respond to a rapidly growing need for communication infrastructure. This month, the first link in the OpenCape broadband data transport network went into testing. It connects WHOI to UMass Dartmouth across the water. Connections across the Upper Cape to the Community College are soon to follow, with engineering studies in progress to chart out deployment from Provincetown to Plymouth.
OpenCape didn't happen in a vacuum and it didn't happen because of one single person or entity. No, OpenCape is an example of many acts together proactively shaping our world. It was the outcome of hundreds of conscious tiny steps by hundreds of individuals, each making a difference.
And that is just one example. The time is now. If you are impatient with the Cape around you, look at what single steps you can take to move it forward. If you think we're moving too fast, stop looking in the rearview mirror and bring your wisdom and caution into shaping the forward steps instead.
And, if you don't think that the tides have changed, consider this. I'm writing this text on my laptop computer from my car while parked overlooking one of my favorite scenic spots on the Cape, Fort Hill in Eastham. Below me are strips of green marsh and indigo water, layers of rippling brown grasses mixed with deep magenta flowering milkweed, all topped off with a strip of cream beach sand, dark ocean blue and pale sky marking the horizon. To the far left is an area that contains a giant boulder once used by native people to sharpen tools. Seabirds glide over small motor boats.
The tide rises. The tide falls.
As I typed the opening paragraph, a silver SUV pulled in next to me. A nice 50ish aged couple got out of the vehicle. They saw me typing and make a beeline to me and asked "Is there wireless here?"
Change is our one constant. But the shape of the change is in our hands. What an extraordinary time! What an extraordinary gift to us all.
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