22 Aug President’s Message
If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.—Maya Angelou
Once again Fate, with a sly grin, is sending us new challenges. Just when we thought we had glimpsed the end of the pandemic, Fate tossed in a variant. We cannot always share the sense of humor, but we put on a grim grin and adapt.
We got together and allowed strangers to stick needles in our arms. As if in a dance with Fate, we put masks on, took them off, then put them on again. We would meet and work distantly using something called Zoom, and somehow things got done. Our village is still expanding, and homes are being bought and sold. There seem to be more people anxious to live here than there have ever been.
Most of us do miss being with people face-to-face, or at least mask-to-mask. I get more done on projects meeting with people in person. For example, it was very satisfying and productive to have a short meeting in person with three others on the FHA board in my home. There we were comfortable without masks. We may have to work with remote meetings for larger groups for a while, and we will find signs saying “mask required” on doorways, but we adapt, and keep on doing what we have to do, innovating when necessary.
An example of that innovation and adapting was the recent event at The Gathering Place for National Night Out. Rain and drizzle forced us to move much of the event indoors, but we had a good turnout nevertheless, and people enjoyed themselves even while wearing masks—though some found eating through them difficult and let their masks down a bit. Warren Ort, Director of Health, Safety and Security, worked diligently with our management company to make the event a success. I met old friends and made new ones who had recently moved into the village—though I doubt I would recognize the new friends without their masks.
FHA keeps working because it is always a challenge to keep life in this village the way we all want it. Sometimes the challenges are broad ones, like the future of Beechmast Pond or managing our budget. At other times they are local, perhaps trying to resolve disputes among neighbors concerning covenants.
Maybe these are small examples, but they typify how we meet challenges and either change things or adapt. I just call it “resilience.”
Success is not final; failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts. —Winston Churchill
—Carl Angel, president@fhaboard.org