Working at the Beach

It’s true: There is a strange tribe of people, myself included, who can and sometimes even do work at the beach. It’s mostly writers, true, but freelance professionals of many stripes can make it work. It helps to have a good smart phone… a sand-resistant laptop with a bright screen… and access to a flat space to set up shop. One of the beaches near my house has these great concrete picnic tables and a small burger cafe nearby that keeps me supplied with french fries and coffee.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek just ran an article about people like me:

While you’re Dilberting away in your cubicle, there are people taking conference calls in board shorts and flip-flops. While you’re saving your two weeks of vacation to hit the sand, they’re getting paid to be there. There are people—even respectable people—who have somehow turned a folding chair into a place of work.

Aided by technology, pioneers are now converting the beach into a fully functional office. People who work from the beach in non-hotel, non-burger-stand, non-pot-dealer capacities are still rare enough that no agency tracks the phenomenon. Brooks Brothers does not yet make a three-piece bathing suit; Herman Miller doesn’t sell an Aeron chaise.

It’s not like these beach workers are slackers; they just don’t like being controlled. It’s the same reason why we TiVo shows or e-mail and text more than call. When you can work from wherever you want to be—especially if it’s the place where everyone wants to be—work isn’t so bad.

Now, just to be completely honest about this, the beach is not really an optimal place to work. Truth be told, the WiFi reception can suck… monitor brightness can be a real issue… and sand really isn’t great for electronic technology. Plus, there are many distractions… bikinis or no.

Still, for the right type of work… certain kinds of mindless or repetitive tasks… working at the beach can be perfect. I was inspired by a story that human potential guru Tony Robbins once told. He came back from a business trip and was exhausted. He was greeted with an enormous pile of phone messages — and answering phone messages was the last thing he wanted to do. As a result, he decided to turn lemons into lemonade. He got into his hot tub and proceeded to answer all of his phone messages that way. Sitting in his hot tub overlooking the Pacific, he turned an act of work drudgery into a kind of celebration. With every returned call he made, he said, he felt how incredibly lucky he was to be able to live that way.

I like to do the same thing. I actually write far less on the beach than I do other administrative tasks, especially phone calls. When I was promoting a recent book of mine, I insisted on doing all of my radio interviews via cell phone — and usually at the beach. I get a little nervous doing radio interviews and I found that sitting at my favorite spot on the beach, talking to a talk show host in New York City or Chicago or some other place, really relaxed me. After all, how horrible can it be? Here I am, sitting on the sand and watching the waves, sitting my cafe latte, and talking to radio listeners a continent away.

In any event, I heartily recommend a similar strategy for all freelance professionals, especially writers. Working from the beach isn’t something you can do all the time… but it definitely helps you keep work in perspective and can turn some less pleasant work tasks into real celebrations.

The Eternal City

I took my whole family to Rome this year for Easter… and, as usual, it was an invigorating, life-affirming, faith-building experience for everyone. Rome has a way of doing that to people. I’ve been to many of the great cities of the world – from New York, London and Paris to Berlin, Athens, Cairo and Jerusalem – and none has the mystical quality to it as Rome does.

My wife agrees. Paris is beautiful… Berlin is majestic… but Rome is truly magical. Perhaps it’s the warm, spring weather, the bright blue sky that lights up the white travertine of the Colosseum. More probably, it’s the way that all of western civilization… all of our political, historical, philosophical, religious understanding… is somehow condensed, like a diamond, in the 2,000-year-old buildings that still dot the Roman landscape. You can almost hear voices from the past as you walk through the old Roman neighborhoods of Trastevere and through the city center. Even jaded, bored teenagers gawk in astonishment as they walk through the portals of Rome’s great temples, from St. Peter’s Basilica to the Pantheon. When you combine that with the intoxicating energy that flows through the Eternal City like a live wire – the youthful exuberance of a hundred different nationalities – it’s easy to see how Rome can totally change your outlook on life. I feel more alive in Rome, a lot freer. God still speaks to people in Rome. Sometimes they even hear him.

The thing is, in Rome Christianity is not a religion. It’s not even a way of life. It’s history. Family history. The good, the bad and the ugly. And all of it happened, as far as Romans are concerned, only yesterday.

Why Blogging is the Perfect Business

There aren’t too many businesses you can run while sitting at the beach… but a successful blogging-based business is one of them! Of course, what people don’t tell you is that before you can sit on the sand and update your blog from anywhere in the world… you probably spent 60 hours a week in a windowless room getting your blog to do the things you want it to.

But the truth is, blogging is an entirely Internet-based business. That means that it is geographically independent. You can run your blogging business from anywhere in the world that has wireless Internet access. You don’t have to work in an office. You probably won’t want to actually blog from a beach, of course, because the glare from the sun… not to mention the distractions of beach life… may it difficult to read a laptop screen.

Robert Hutchinson: Author and Essayist

Veteran travel writer, author and award-winning essayist Robert Hutchinson enjoys exploring how ideas intersect with real life.  His latest book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible (Regnery, $19.95), grew out of his world travels where he came into first-hand experience with, and developed great respect for, the world’s great religions.

His first paid article, he adds, written for an alternative newspaper in the late 1970s, was about the children of the Hare Krishnas. Hutchinson, 51, went on to write numerous articles about such diverse religious groups as Tibetan Buddhists, Zen, Zoroastrianism, Bahais, the Sikhs, Orthodox Jews, and the myriad branches of Christianity.

“I have the opposite view from the new crop of atheist polemicists, who display a kind of Cartesian solipicism,” Hutchinson says. “They seem to think that the only truth worth investigating is what you can discover on your own. While I see the attraction in that stance, I think in practice you miss out on the accumulated wisdom of mankind, passed on over the generations in the world’s great religions.”

He adds that atheist writers such as Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, in their insistence that all belief is illegitimate, in practice would dismiss “virtually all human knowledge” which is built up through a series of accumulated insights.

Hutchinson says his ecumenical orientation is reflected in his education. He studied philosophy as an undergraduate at a Roman Catholic university, moved to Israel to study Modern Hebrew in a series of ulpanim – intensive six-month language courses for new Israeli immigrants – and then completed an M.A. degree at the evangelical Protestant Fuller Theological Seminary.  He also lived in Hawaii for several years where he studied Tibetan Buddhism and interviewed a number of high Tibetan lamas, such as the late Kalu Rinpoche, for magazines.

“What studying other religions taught me first hand is that all religions don’t teach the same thing,” he says. “I learned that very dramatically while living in Israel and visiting Arab countries like Morocco and Egypt. What I tried to do with The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible is to show just how unique the Bible really is. The ideas that permeate the Biblical stories and teachings differ in profound ways from what almost all other religions believe, and they shaped, in a unique way, the way western civilization developed.”

One of the central claims in Hutchinson’s book is that the philosophical and moral ideas found in the Bible gave birth to many of the “social realities” most cherished in the modern world, including experimental science, the abolition of slavery, the recognition of universal human rights, and a belief in limited government.

Hutchinson insists that his book is not a work of biblical apologetics as such – although he does defend the Bible against attacks that it is unhistorical – but an attempt to demonstrate how the Bible “shaped the world we live in.”

Hutchinson, who has won nearly a dozen journalism and writing awards, is the former managing editor of Hawaii Magazine and Hawaii Bureau Chief for The Hollywood Reporter. He is also the author of When in Rome: A Journal of Life in Vatican City, a travelogue about his family’s adventures in Rome while he wrote about the Vatican; and The Book of Vices: A Collection of Classic Immoral Tales, a light-hearted parody of William Bennett’s classic The Book of Virtues.

A long-time student of the Japanese martial art of Aikido, Hutchinson lives with his wife and five children in a small town on the ocean.