September 07, 2018

30 Years to Finland

September 07, 2018/ Erik Orton

by ERIK ORTON

It’s been 30 years since I’ve been to Finland. My mother is Finnish. She moved to NYC at age seventeen to be a nanny. A few years later she met my dad and they got married. I’m half Finnish. I used to spend summers in Finland as a kid. My last summer there I was fourteen. My mom worried I would be bored spending all day in my grandmothers two-bedroom/one bath apartment, so she signed me up for a cycling race. I was big into cycling at the time.

July 17, 2018

Meet Our Mentors

July 17, 2018/ Emily Orton

by EMILY ORTON

A few weeks ago I wrote about drinking the Kool-Aid and how we can leverage our natural inclination to conform by deliberately choosing who we want to follow and then giving them lots of space in our brains. That’s what we did with Totem.

In early 2014 our family of seven moved out of our small Manhattan apartment into an even smaller boat where we lived for most of that year. We did lots of two-steps forward one-step back preparations. We’ll tell more in our upcoming memoir available March 2019. Nothing beats just starting, but one of the most important steps for facing our fears was finding mentors.

May 24, 2018

Wendy and the Surface

May 24, 2018/ Erik Orton

by ERIK ORTON

My favorite part of the class was to lay on the ocean floor and stare up at the surface. The light shimmered across it, the same way the water sparkled from above, but with a muted, quiet kind of beauty. I was taking a scuba certification class and I was swimming along thirty feet below the ocean’s surface for the first time in my life. My body drifted with the surge in unison with the school of yellow fish. I looked a sea turtle in the eye as it swam toward me. We stayed below for the better part of an hour. I was in another world.