Six things changing around town that nobody announced

A note from Mattias Clymer · Team Lead

Hey there,

Anyone who knows me well knows that I tend to live in the future.

I’ve taken more personality assessments than I can count, and most recently I took the Cultural Index. Apparently, just about every category confirms what I already knew: I’m always thinking about what’s next.

But this past month has had me looking backward a little more than usual.

I turned 39, and my 20-year high school reunion is coming up. I’ve caught myself wondering what I should do with the final year of my 30s. I’ve always liked audacious goals, so naturally my brain went to, “What could I do this year that would be momentous?”

I haven’t come up with anything yet.

But I have noticed something else. Without really planning it, I’ve been picking back up a lot of the things I loved 20 years ago.

Snowboarding was a huge part of my life growing up. I learned to ski with my Swiss relatives in the Alps, but sometime in middle school I decided one plank was cooler than two and became a pretty religious snowboarder through high school.

Nobody else in my family has really taken to it, but I’ve been trying to get at least one trip in each year. That has led to some pretty great memories, including taking my friend and coworker Ronald Flores to Snowshoe for his first real experience with it, and more recently organizing a bachelor trip to Keystone, Colorado, for one of my best friends.

Then there’s music.

Music was a huge part of my childhood. I sang in the Shenandoah Valley Children’s Choir and later in touring and chamber choirs at EMHS. I got to tour Europe and even perform in Switzerland in front of my Swiss family, which is no small audience when you have more than 30 first cousins.

In high school shop class, I also built a guitar.

It never played particularly well until years later, when Erica secretly took it to a local guitar shop and had it properly set up as a Christmas present. Twenty years after building that guitar, I’m now playing it on stage with Street Spirit, our Radiohead tribute band. We’ve played two shows so far, which is a sentence high-school Mattias probably would have thought was pretty cool.

There’s another strange full-circle moment in all of this. In college, I had the chance to open for Trent Wagler and The Steel Wheels at an EMHS event. Years later, the Valley Homes Team has become a longtime sponsor of Red Wing Roots Music Festival, the festival The Steel Wheels created.

And now music seems to be spreading through our house. Azra and Isla are exploring piano and voice lessons, and Sawyer is currently belting songs from The Greatest Showman at the top of his lungs every time we’re in the car. He also has largely unrestricted access to our Alexas, so we don’t have much say in the matter.

There’s a lot of music in the Clymer household right now.

In a strange way, I think the same thing is happening in my business.

After 12 years of doing so much of this myself, I’m thinking more about what I can build that lasts beyond me. I’m focused on growing the Valley Homes Team into something bigger than just my own real estate career, a place where great agents can build careers of their own and where our clients get an even better experience because of it.

Maybe that’s what 39 is about for me.

Maybe I don’t need to invent some brand-new, audacious challenge for the last year of my 30s. Maybe it’s about maxing out who I already am, building on the things I’ve always cared about instead of constantly looking for the next thing.

I was a bit of a punk in high school, in more ways than one. I don’t know that 18-year-old me pictured a professional career, running a business, raising three kids, or any of the rest of this.

But I think he’d be pretty proud that I married an amazing person, built a beautiful family, created a career and team I’m proud of, and somehow didn’t lose sight of the other things I loved along the way.

And apparently, I still get to play that guitar.

That being said, I do have a whole year until 40. So if you have a good audacious goal for me, I’m always open to a new challenge.

Mattias