Alexandersmap

    Month: March 2021

    • The Heart of the Bay

      Nobody owns the sky or the trees.
      Nobody owns the hearts of birds.
      Still, being human and partial therefore to my own
      successes—
      though not resentful of others fashioning theirs—
      I’ll come tomorrow, I believe, quite early.
      – Mary Oliver, Winter and the Nuthatch

      Oliver writes of building trust with a nuthatch that eventually learns to eat out of her hand. One morning she arrives later than other mornings only to find her nuthatch friend eating from another person’s hand. And thus she resolves to arrive earlier the next morning. I’ve felt this myself, not with birds in the hand so much as places of solitude.

      Early Spring is still a time of hard frosts and temperature swings. Maple syrup weather – when the sap flows and gathers in buckets around Maple trees throughout the region. But not here. Cape Cod is more temperate, not subject to the extremes that draw the sap out. And then there’s the trees themselves, which seem to prefer the other side of the bridges. No, here we have a different sap drawn out in the early mornings. And I’m drawn to the light and the chorus.

      Buzzards Bay, well before the dawn, is awash in deep blues and burnt orange and the calls of thousands of Eider Ducks off in the distance. They have a lot to say to each other. It must be breeding season for these migratory birds. They didn’t pay much attention to the stranger on land, and I let them alone in their banter and flirting. The chorus felt altogether different from the bay in warmer months, when outboard engines of fishermen roaring off to favorite holes pierce the silence. Eiders quickly become white noise as I refocus on the task at hand.

      I crunched across a deep frost, leaving footprints in the grass on my walk to the shoreline. Low tide drew me out further into the bay, right to the waters edge quietly lapping in quiet surges like a heart beat. The bay is alive in this way. Alive in its vibrant, nutrient-rich, welcoming way. It pulls at me as it pulls at the Eider ducks, down from northern regions for their version of Spring Break. I suppose I am as well, looking for a change of scenery from New Hampshire to Buzzards Bay. For a return to salt water reflections and big skies.

      The chorus of Eiders ends with the sun breaking the horizon. Mating time gives way to feeding time. I leave the shoreline myself, for I’m not adorned in the down of a duck and the morning chills me in lingering too long. Hot coffee and inadequate words await me, with the glow of the morning alive in my mind.

      Buzzards Bay

    • The Familiar and the Habitual

      “The familiar and the habitual are so falsely reassuring, and most of us make our homes there permanently.” – Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

      We all find comfort in the familiar, whether a favorite chair to sit in or your morning coffee routine, the people we hang our with or the way we greet them. We embrace it and make it our own, and rarely deviate from it. This is the nature of the familiar and the habitual.

      How many of us stick with things just because it’s the way we’ve always done them? Familiar is strangely comforting, even if it doesn’t benefit us. This is the way we’ve always done it. Humans evolved by mitigating risk by sticking to tried, true and trusted. Those who were foolhardy didn’t survive to dilute the gene pool. When the risk is deeply programmed into your identity, it doesn’t matter if it’s bad for you or not – it’s falsely reassuring and part of you. We all know smoking and overeating are bad for you, but how many do it subconsciously, risk and viable alternatives ignored?

      With everyone’s routine disrupted over the last year, it’s interesting to see how people react to going back to the way things used to be. Do you want to commute to a cubicle farm chipping away at your tasks, all while trying to ignore the screams inside you again? Return to the same old ways, or pivot to something new? How resilient were some of those routines and rituals in the face of a pandemic?

      It’s easy to embrace anchors in our lives – homes, relationships, jobs, and routines, and hard to question that which we’ve always known to be true. But ultimately the only true anchor is our self. None of this is permanent. Forget anchors: embrace sails. Embrace change. For change happens around us whether we want it to or not.

    • A Focused Place

      “Finding a very focused place to do your work rewards you many times over.”-Seth Godin

      “The opposite of ‘distraction’ is ‘traction.’ Traction is any action that moves us towards what we really want. Tractions are actions done with intent. Any action, such as working on a big project, getting enough sleep or physical exercise, eating healthy food, taking time to meditate or pray, or spending time with loved ones, are all forms of traction if they are done intentionally. Traction is doing what you say you will do.” – Nir Eyal

      Perhaps it was a week of chaos and distraction that made Eyal’s statement grab me by the shoulders and focus my mind on the truth of the matter. Distraction is diluting my moments of clarity, and this simply won’t do. It isn’t just the noise from mobile devices and televisions or the crush of emails and requests from people near and far. It’s also that noise within that shakes you from sleep or makes you not hear what was just said on that Zoom call you participated in.

      If our best moments are when we’re fully alive, what does fully alive mean anyway? I believe it to mean being fully engaged in the moment, aware of the world around you, and embracing your part in it. Keeping promises to yourself to do what you intended to do. This isn’t just habit formation, it’s traction formation. Honoring intention with intentional focus.

      Eyal takes aim at one of my go-to habits for getting things done: the to-do list. His issue with to-do lists is that things just continue to get added to the list. There’s no intention to is until you block off time in your calendar and honor the time commitment to work on it. Even if you don’t finish you’ve done what you said you’d do, which establishes trust in yourself. As Eyal puts it, you can’t be distracted from something if you didn’t have an intended action (traction) that it was pulling you from.

      Today happens to be the last day of a very busy work week. I thought about that to-do list and the things that aren’t completed yet and felt the tension raise up inside me. But then I thought about the work that was completed this week, the actions done with intent, and felt the tension melt away a bit. However you measure it, the pile of done should be especially satisfying. And the pile of undone shouldn’t be a cruel demon whispering in your ear. The path to removing that demon is in knowing what your intentions are, and honoring them as best you can in the time you’ve allotted.

      That focused place to do the work isn’t a place; not really. It’s a block of time and a commitment to yourself to do what you said you were going to do. Promises kept, one block at a time.

    • Charming Gardeners

      “Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” – Marcel Proust

      Spring in New England is a tricky thing. We pivot from beautiful warm days to snow squalls and bitter wind, often within a few minutes of each other. But the days grow longer and we quietly grow more confident about putting the lawn furniture back out and maybe planting some seeds in starter soil. Basil, cilantro and parsley are each growing in sunny windowsills as I write this, and I’m considering getting the dahlia bulbs going soon. Such is the mind of a gardener.

      Proust writes of a different kind of gardener, of course, but they’re generally one and the same. The people who light us up in social interaction are quiet observers of humanity, readers of eyes and solicitors of smiles. In this particular time when social interaction has been elusive, we haven’t had as much interaction like this, and we’ve never needed it more.

      Spring brings hope to the gardener, and vaccines bring hope for time with those people who make us happy. I’m as ready for a gathering of celebration with friends and family as I am for the smell of fresh cut grass and tomato vines. Confident hugs and hand squeezes and shoulder leans are just around the corner.

      Imagine the days ahead, as a gardener imagines them – life blossoming anew, hope in the air, warm sun on our backs. Breathe in the fresh warm air, turn towards friends old and new, and smile. They could use it – and so could you.

    • A Year Like No Other

      “Man, like a bridge, was designed to carry the load of the moment , not the combined weight of a year all at once.” – William A. Ward

      I’m not going to run a postscript on what happened over the last year – plenty of people have already written about that. A year ago we were quietly celebrating St. Patrick’s Day in an empty bar owned by a friend bearing what we optimistically thought would be a temporary shutdown to flatten that curve. That friend has managed to stay in business despite the severe restrictions on their business, open a second location in the middle of a pandemic, and is in the middle of a second battle front with cancer. Who am I to complain about working from home for a year?

      Some of us have lost much more than others, but we’ve all lost something. Loved ones and graduations, sports seasons and jobs, trips of a lifetime and gathering with friends in busy places. We all have that Rolodex of losses we can pull out to share with the world. The profound losses mix with the simple. But something has to balance the losses out. The world doesn’t just tilt on its side without counterbalancing with something else. If we’re all walking that line between order and chaos, what have we gained?

      We know instinctively what has balanced the losses, if not completely at least enough to stay afloat. More time with immediate family, perhaps a little too much now and then but time we’ll reflect on fondly. More creative use of technology to find a smile in the darkness. More alive time with gardening and cooking and reading the books you were meaning to get to… and more time alone to think. Deep reflection on what is really important.

      There are heroes among us that did so much more than the average. We celebrate the essential workers who kept this thing going, but we should also give ourselves a small pat on the back. We may not be medical staff or law enforcement or supply chain workers, but we’re all collectively doing our part to bridge the madness of the last year, one day at a time.

      Of course, this bridge is still being built, still extending to some place in the future where it might set in the firmness of normal. And some are restless – we watch some tentatively gain footing on what they believe to be firm ground, celebrating together and shouting for the rest of us to join the party. But some of them are dancing in quicksand.

      No, we’re closer now, but like the soldiers in the last months of World War II, we know this isn’t the time to let up our guard. Don’t go frivolously burning that mask just yet folks, we’ve still got today to face, and tomorrow too. We’ve carried on this far, just hold on a bit longer. Almost there.

    • Effort and Flow

      “Fatigue can teach us where effort is being misplaced.”- John Jerome, The Elements of Effort

      “The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else.”
      ― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

      Becoming immediately overwhelmed with the list of things that must be done is no way to start a Monday. When it bleeds over into Monday night and Tuesday morning, well, you find yourself confronting misplaced effort. We all have those weeks that start off way tougher than a week ought to start out, but the irony of it happening when I’d teed up the Jerome quote above isn’t lost on me. When things seem overwhelming, find your way towards back to the center.

      You don’t reach mastery and flow without slogging through the tough days. You don’t grow without challenge. If you’re feeling challenged, that’s a good thing. If you’re feeling overwhelmed and exhausted, well, that’s something else entirely. Fatigue is a teacher, pointing us towards a better way that we might not see in the moment.

      Effort and flow each inform. There’s a balance between the two that we intuitively understand. Yin and Yang. Surfing the edge between order and chaos. Flow requires effort, and yet it seems effortless. This is the desired state for the meaningful work we seek out.

      Momentarily forgetting everything else in the pursuit of something of importance is where flow happens. You can reach this state when you focus to such a degree on the task at hand that you literally forget time is slipping by. We’ve all had those moments where everything is clicking, we are in our element, and things flow. It’s a desired state on the path to mastery, where skills and passion and focus are channeled into the task at hand.

      When things seem overwhelming, take a deep breath, reset, and look for another path towards the goal. Place your effort in a place that brings you where you need to be instead of fighting forces that bring you nowhere. Gain strength from adversity, and apply it to insight and direction. This too shall pass. What will we create in the interim?

    • The Intersection of Passion and Talent

      “Our visions are the world we imagine, the tangible results of what the world would look like if we spent every day in pursuit of our why.” – Simon Sinek, Start With Why

      Sinek’s talk is one of the most watched YouTube videos of all time, largely focused on business’s asking this critical question, “Why are we in business?” My own company is focused on this very question at the moment, prompting me to finally read Sinek’s book a few weeks ago. But you can’t ask why of your work without asking the same question of yourself. What is our purpose in our work, and in our lives? Why are you doing this? Think carefully, for it means more than a paycheck and a Netflix subscription when you get home.

      Every now and then we find ourselves stumbling upon a place where ideas converge, and where the path ahead divides into any number of directions. Which way do we go? If we all agree that life is shorter than most of us want it to be, doesn’t it make sense take the path that offers the greatest opportunity to fulfill that personal mission? Defining that mission is the tricky part. A mission that requires deep thinking.

      “What are you chasing? Why? Is the chase aligned with your deepest values and Ultimate Mission?” – Dr. Jim Loehr, The Personal Credo Journal

      We all have talents. But we can be pretty good at something and not be all that passionate about it. And you never really master something that you’re subconsciously going through the motions with. Whether career, art, relationships or athletic pursuits, if it doesn’t whisper to our soul we simply aren’t going to thrive in it.

      “Ikigai (pronounced “eye-ka-guy”) is, above all else, a lifestyle that strives to balance the spiritual with the practical. This balance is found at the intersection where your passions and talents converge with the things that the world needs and is willing to pay for.” – Chris Myers, Forbes, ‘How To Find Your Ikigai And Transform Your Outlook On Life And Business’

      Call it your “Ultimate Mission”, your “Why”, “Ikigai” or simply purpose. What you call it doesn’t matter so much as what it is, and what you do with it. These are powerful questions that demand deep thought. Determine where your passions and talents converge. Envision the world as you’d like it and set about making it. Align your chase with your deepest values. And perhaps the deepest question of all, determine what exactly you’re living for and do something about it.

      “It’s not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something.” – Dr. Leo Buscaglia

      I’ve re-written this particular blog post seven or eight times. Work is piling up in the in-box while I re-read it once again. Do I publish or just keep editing this indefinitely? Who really cares? Well, I do, and that’s as good a sign of where my passions meet my talents as anything. Who else would obsess over a bunch of words on a random Monday post? Maybe this is my something after all. At least a good chunk of it anyway.

      The things we do for love…

    • Good Soreness and Paying Dues

      This morning I stepped to the floor awash in good soreness after re-introducing kettle bell swings into my workouts. The workout started with a 5000 meter row, three sets of alternating two and one arm kettle bell swings, dead lifts and some dynamic stretching. Then a long, brisk walk on soft beach sand to really emphasize the legs workout.

      You know when your body needs a break, or at least you should know if you’re listening to it. Living with pain is a good indicator, signaling a need for adjustment to either your body or your routine. Pain is generally bad. But what do we make of sore? Exercise-induced soreness is the good kind of sore. It signals your body is adapting to change, flushing out lactic acid and repairing muscle fibers. And it signals dues paid towards a more vibrant tomorrow.

      Changing up exercise is a great way to keep the body guessing. Adding good stress to your body flushes out the bad stress, keeping that stack of organs and muscle you walk around with healthy. We intuitively know this, but most of us sit around too much anyway. If we know that sitting around too much is bad for the brain and the body, then we ought to get up and get moving more often, right? I tell this to myself all the time, but don’t always listen enough. I’ll present a convincing (if misguided) argument that I’ll get to it later. But later is just deferring our well-being. The body doesn’t care about your next meeting, it needs to move more often.

      “The more you move yourself by your own muscle power, no matter what form that movement takes, the surer you will be of the result.” – John Jerome, The Elements of Effort

      Jerome points towards the confidence that builds up inside of us when we do the work to build our better selves. Sports and nutrition guru Chris Carmichael calls people who are fit and vibrant as they age the defiant minority. We all know where we’re heading, but why not be fully alive when we get there? Adding a rigorous program of weight lifting or kettle bell swings to surprise the body offers day-after soreness but for-a-lifetime benefits. So embrace the soreness.

      “People who lead a physically active life have a lower risk of cognitive decline, and research is now emerging to show that greater fitness is correlated with maintaining better processing skills in aging brains.” – Sanjay Gupta, MD, Keep Sharp

      As I was finishing my workout yesterday I thought about the similarity between the kettle bell swing and a rock scramble in the White Mountains. The strength, endurance and mental toughness built through a workout like kettle bell swings translates well to other activities like hiking, offering yet another reason to add them to your routine. That soreness you feel the morning after a workout will translate well towards doing more, with less soreness, in those other activities you’ll do later. Pay me now or pay me later.

      And that pay me now or pay me later rule is really the point, isn’t it? If we continually defer our health and fitness through undisciplined exercise and nutrition choices now, we’ll pay for it with a shorter window of cognitive and physical well-being later. We’ll accomplish less in the time we have than we would if we’d simply invested in ourselves with exercise and disciplined consumption today.

      That soreness is yesterday’s glow of accomplishment. But today is a new day, requiring its own payment of dues. Keep the streak alive, pay today’s dues. Tomorrow will thank you.

    • Gratuitous Exercise

      “Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.” – William James

      “All weakness is a weakness of will.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

      There’s no getting around it, I’ve been getting weaker – lacking the willpower to get on the erg or pick up the weights. This correlates exactly with work getting busier: more responsibility, more follow-up, and more sitting in front of a computer. That, friends, is no way to live a long and vibrant life. The science supports us: we must move to have a healthy mind and body.

      Don’t get me wrong, I’m hiking and snowshoeing and generally trying to be active on the edges of the day. But you know when you’re working hard and when you’re hardly working. A walk in the woods does the mind and body good, but you’ve got to supplement it with threshold-testing workouts. Through focused effort and honoring commitments to ourselves through exercise.

      I’ve been here before, of course. Burpees were kicking my ass until I started having serious shoulder pain. Rowing on an erg kicked my ass so much in college and CRASH-B’s that I have PTSD and have a hard time doing anything but steady-state on the thing. So what do you do when your worst enemy is yourself? You simplify and establish lifetime habits that brush aside the resistance with routine. It simply must be so.

      And so I’m returning to a workout program that doesn’t require spotters and doesn’t tolerate excuses. I’m returning to the kettle bell and dynamic stretching, and rowing on the erg to round out the challenge. You can take a kettle bell with you when you travel, you can break away from your computer for a simple workout that kicks your ass in minutes. And you can eliminate the excuse of time: Those optimistic long steady-state workouts written on the calendar that fall aside in the crush of work days. Habits build on themselves over time. Simply showing up starts the ball rolling.

      “No matter how strong you are, there will always be someone stronger than you. Using only a number as the litmus test of whether you are strong or not is self-defeating. You will get older. You will not be able to continue to set personal all-time bests forever. But you can continue to get stronger mentally. You can adjust to whatever the environment is and challenge yourself to push past wherever you are at the moment, in any way you can, and feel good knowing you just made yourself a better man or woman.” – Pavel Tsatsouline, Kettlebell Simple & Sinister

      Fitness is the ultimate objective, of course, but the why is to get stronger mentally. To build up your brain and push through excuses. To thrive on the faculty of effort and make yourself a better person. And this translates into everything else you do. If you’re making excuses on something as essential as your fitness, what else are you making excuses about? Mastery doesn’t happen overnight. But it begins with showing up and doing the work.

      “To master your mind is to master your life. There is no more worthwhile pursuit.” – Sir John Hargrave, Mind Hacking

      Gratuitous exercise implies frivolous or unnecessary. But there’s another definition for gratuitous, and that’s doing something free of charge. To exercise free from the burden of feeling like you have to do something and instead to exercise simply because it’s a part of who you are. Something you want to do. To simply do for the love of where it takes you.

    • Shared Beliefs

      “Everything that is not a law of nature is just a shared belief.” – Shane Parrish, The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts

      Shared beliefs. Have they ever been as contentious as they are today? People believing the election was rigged, storming the Capital, having their kids burn masks for the optics. Other people thinking those people are delusional and irresponsible. Anger and accusation on both sides. I betray my own beliefs just writing this paragraph. But I know people lash out in strange ways when they perceive a threat to their livelihood.

      For all the madness and anger, there are laws of nature that unite us in this world. Scientific principles are pillars of truth in which society anchors itself. Gravity isn’t a shared belief, it’s a proven law any time you drop something or jump in a pool. Gravity is easy to prove because we live with it every day. The tricky part is in what we believe to be true.

      The last year has been a year of turning beliefs upside down. Beliefs about the role that certain countries play in the relative stability of the world. About mask-wearing and social gatherings. Personal responsibility and accountability. Equality and fairness. Level playing fields and stacked decks. When beliefs are challenged that friction can erupt into fiery rhetoric. We’ve seen plenty of that, haven’t we?

      Shared beliefs can be beneficial if they’re anchored well. We have the responsibility to question that anchorage from time-to-time. Seeking common ground is the stated goal of President Biden, and common ground is the turf of fairness, equality, social responsibility and the laws of nature. The world is slowly tackling the pandemic, inching towards equality, and incrementally embracing the shared values that unite us as fellow humans on a fragile planet. We still have time to get it right.

      In writing this blog post I deleted far more words than I kept. I’m hoping to create something more substantial than my own beliefs. Maybe one small step away from the noise. And back to nature.