Time Capsules and Change

Over the years, I have done my share of renovating houses or commercial buildings that I’ve owned. I developed the tradition of creating a time capsule and inserting it somewhere in the structure — behind a wall, under a floor — so that 100 years later somebody would uncover it. I love to imagine them finding it and seeing a snapshot from the past tied to something dear to them, and me.

One renovation was a building built in the 1890s. My partners and I planned to convert it into an office building to work in and lease out. It needed a lot of work. Our hopes were super high and we were feeling really positive about this business concept, so the renovation was a labor of love (and a lot of our money). 

At last the renovation was done, and the last thing I did was plant a time capsule under a floorboard I had just installed. It had the usual name and date and headline of the times with an extra, "why are you having to tear up my beautiful floors?"

Three years later the area was hit hard by hurricane Irene — and our building had flooded with six feet of water on the main floor! A thousand year flood. Massive, catastrophic damage we needed to repair — only a few years after the major renovation. It was devastating.

Working away in the house one day, gloomily ripping out the floors for a second time, to my astonishment my own time capsule surfaced (which of course I’d forgotten about)! I had figured the building would go on for another 100 years, and here was a reminder — like a slap in the face — of what can suddenly hit us and wipe out our best-laid plans.

Lessons learned

You know where I’m going with this ... On some level we all have been hit with something that has blown up our daily lives, plans, expectations, and hopes for the future. Some of the “labors of love” that we’ve spent years building are getting wiped out like a flood sweeping through a building.

How do you recover from something like that?

Well, back then we knew that if we kept dwelling on the damage and the cost and failure of it all, we wouldn’t move on. If we didn’t move on, we would drag the whole team down with us, and the business wouldn’t survive.

After that initial shock of disappointment in discovering the time capsule, I began to realize something: Maybe I was the future person who was supposed to find it and be impacted by it. That even though I put everything I had into that building, things just don’t always turn out as expected. But it didn’t mean I shouldn’t continue to try or look to a positive future. Or that I should stop working toward the benefit of that future person in 100 years I’ll never meet but will have influenced in some positive way. 

My mediation and conflict advisory work is about building strong leaders and teams. The foundation of it all is Trust— not just in business but for each of us as individuals. 

We have to trust ourselves, trust each other, and trust that things may not turn out the way we expect them to. But we still move on, maybe to something even better. 

Here is a second lesson I learned from that darn discovery under the floorboard: Future Thinking. We can dwell on what’s happened in the past or we can use this time to pause and look at the bigger picture. 

We can ask ourselves and our teams this: What are we doing now that will put us on the path to the future — not just post-crisis but with a wider perspective in ways we can’t even pin down right now? What doors have opened for us? How will we step through?

P.S. I am in the end stages of renovating my lovely mid-century modern home in Reno, NV. Under the sill of a window in my office is planted a time capsule. 

Always looking to the future…!