Alexandersmap

    Month: July 2021

    • Magic is the Moment

      I have a bucket of magic carefully collected from places near and far. I scoop it out by the ladle and mix it together in jumbles of words with a twinkle of the eye and share it in conversations and social media and blog posts. Sometimes my efforts spark imagination and sometimes they fall into the void of indifference. It seems that sometimes I do a really good job of hiding the magic I’m trying to share. And I try to learn from these stumbles and find new ways for it to be seen.

      I’ve looked to refill the magic in Buzzards Bay and next to waterfalls, in quiet conversations, in books and in bits of poetry and lyrics, in experience and growth and learning. And yet I’ve noticed lately that my bucket of magic is running empty. But I’m unable to capture more of it for some reason. Blame it on a month of rain, or the smoky haze from wildfires thousands of miles away covering the northeast yet again, or the bad news on the COVID front about the Delta variant and the impact it’s having on the unvaccinated I care too much about.

      How can you capture magic when you’re so focused on the outrageous acts of the counterfeiters and conmen? How can you quench your own thirst when we encounter so many who drink a different kind of Kool-Aid? How can we possibly fill our buckets with magic when there’s so much misery in the world? When we share magic with people who try to refill our own bucket with judgement and hate and deception?

      Does sharing magic lead to a depletion of your own? We know this to be untrue. Just as loving leads to more love returned to you, so it is that magic magnifies magic.

      And here lies the secret: Magic lives in the place between where we once were and where we are going. You might know it by another name: now. Magic sparks in connection and our realization of the possibility of now. Magic lives in the moment. Magic is the moment.

      Instead of capturing magic and parsing it out by the ladle we would do better forming a bucket brigade to pass it from one person to another to fill the world with hope and wonder. A bucket brigade that might douse the flames of hate and division and selfishness. A steady flow of magic that could fill an ocean. Imagine that.

    • Spending Time With Profile Falls

      If time is the ultimate currency, why do we spend it frivolously? I wondered that as I drove north, breaking away from work on a rainy Monday to chase a waterfall. I knew the drive, and thought that maybe I should have combined it with a hike, or another waterfall, or a meeting with an industry acquaintance. Instead I made the falls their own destination and turned off thoughts of efficiencies.

      Profile Falls is an easy walk from the parking lot in Bristol, New Hampshire. You can’t call it a hike, really. You follow the path on the northern bank right to the edge of the water, and then decide how much you want to risk as you assess high, fast moving water, slippery rocks and poison ivy. My vote? Just enough to get a decent picture. Not enough to lose my phone and dignity to the mocking river gods.

      Profile Falls

      After following the path of least resistance, I returned to the parking lot and decided to try the view from the southern bank. The river turns just after the falls, making a view from this side trickier. I made my way past a picnic area to a wet path along the steep and rocky embankment. This quickly proved to be a dead end of sorts. The closer you got to the falls, the worse the vantage point became. I should think walking right up the river in low water might be the very best option. For me, this was enough.

      The Smith River flows a few miles from just above Tewksbury Pond, gaining tributaries and power, before it gives itself to the Pemigewasset River, which flows into the Merrimack River at Franklin, New Hampshire and then 117 miles to the Atlantic Ocean at Newburyport, Massachusetts. It’s an epic journey, and one of the highlights is surely the 30 foot plunge over Profile Falls.

      For those keeping track, there are a lot of place names there that I have a deep connection to, which should have drawn me out here sooner in my life than this, but it seems I was spending time more frivolously then. I’m making up for lost time in some ways. Chasing waterfalls in the rain and using my currency in ways that work for me.

    • I’ve Loved Them All

      And in the end
      The love you take
      Is equal to the love you make
      – The Beatles, The End

      Which Beatles album is the greatest? The answer is different for most everyone, but it usually comes down to Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s each wrestling for number one, with a couple of votes each for The Beatles (White Album) and Abbey Road. It’s a bit like asking which is your favorite child; you simply love them all as they are.

      The Beatles are always in the background of my life. Always. Born at the height of their popularity, you simply grew up listening to them. For those of us born “too late”, we missed out on the anticipation of a new album being released, for it was all out there when we began listening in earnest. When you’ve heard the later work, your jaw doesn’t drop quite as far to the floor when you listen to Rubber Soul. But you still appreciate the creative leap forward from Help! (a great album itself).

      All these places have their moments
      With lovers and friends I still can recall
      Some are dead and some are living
      In my life I’ve loved them all
      – The Beatles, In My Life

      Which is your favorite Beatle? This tells more about you than you might think. For me it was always George Harrison. The quiet Beatle. And for all the brilliantly prolific work of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, it was George who dropped some of the best songs into the mix of “best Beatles song”, which is close to impossible to determine.

      With every mistake, we must surely be learning
      Still my guitar gently weeps
      – The Beatles, While My Guitar Gently Weeps

      If George has 3-4 songs that ought to be in the mix for the best Beatles song, Lennon and McCartney had even more individually, and collaboratively co-wrote some of the greatest songs ever written on some of the best albums ever released. So how do you choose the best? Look at their solo careers? Here too, the ratio seems about the same.

      We could spend our lifetime debating such things or just agree that it was a brilliant run for the Fab Four. For this business of picking a favorite is nonsense. In the end we love them all.

    • COVID Truth and Consequences

      “It’s often easier to discover the truth if we believe it’s there in the first place.” – Seth Godin

      Speaking with a gentleman I once worked for a dozen years ago, we quickly caught up on life since the last time we saw each other. You do that with old acquaintances, find the common anchoring points, fill the voids, and reset to the present. In filling voids I’d heard about his brother, who recently passed from complications related to COVID. He spoke of the abruptness of it all, and the hole it left in his heart. He then told me he didn’t believe in the vaccination, felt it was too dangerous to take and he was going to Las Vegas for a trade show this coming week. And my head spun.

      We all choose the information we consume. We all get to decide what’s right for us. The problem we have today is there’s more conflicting information available to choose from than at any point in our history. And we’re choking on it. And it’s killing us.

      There’s no time for all of this. If the truth is that the virus is far deadlier than the vaccine, and far deadlier for those who are unvaccinated, then we have no time to debate ad infinitum whether the vetting process was long enough for the vaccinations. The barbarians are at the gate, throw up the damned defenses. Will there be long term health issues for those who opted to vaccinate? Highly unlikely, but possible. Is the Delta variant accelerating through the unvaccinated at alarming rates? Definitely, and highly probable.

      The truth is out there, but seemingly harder to reach consensus on than ever before. And maybe this is our fate, to stall and debate and wait for the world to fall in line with our beliefs. Knowing all along that it doesn’t really work that way.

    • Clever Enough to Be Crows

      “If men had wings and bore black feathers, Few of them would be clever enough to be crows.”
      – Henry Ward Beecher

      I stood at the window and watched three crows walk across the lawn, pausing now and then to pluck some edible creature out of the grass. Each walked with intent, and the three of them orchestrated a reconnaissance mission of the terrain, assessing every morsel and every threat together. The shiny black feathers were striking against the muted green lawn and the relentless fog enveloping everything.

      Crows communicate like no other birds, with a rich and diverse language of their own, and a particular nuance in how they move and gesture to each other that is beyond the understanding of this simple human on the other side of the glass. I had no doubt they were aware of me, and no doubt they recognized the glass for the barrier it was. I thought I was observing them, but you forget in that moment that you too are being observed.

      Standing there, just beyond my gaze, on the far side of the lawn near the relative safety of junipers, was a wild rabbit, young and cautious, also making breakfast at the lawn buffet. The crows and the rabbit were indifferent to each other, aware but knowing the threat level each posed to the other. Each looking outward for the first sign of a fox or coyote or maybe an overzealous neighborhood dog, and with a common purpose, they became allies of the moment. I was the odd one of the bunch, at once a part, and apart, from the action.

      I suppose there’s nothing of travel and philosophy or fitness in this post; no mountains summitted, no waterfalls gazed upon, no international borders crossed, no personal milestones broken. Void of such action, you might think it a frivolous cluster of words. I’ll concede there’s little to glean from these words on travel and fitness, but you might just find a bit of philosophy in the four creatures working the foggy lawn, or the one observer seeking to understand the foggy world on the other side of the glass.

      The crows stayed with me long after they’d taken flight, leaving me with the fog and empty lawn. I’d like to think this observer lingered in their mind well past our moment together. But that would be folly. Crows have better things to ponder than the frivolous life of humans.

    • Along the Way and Back Again

      “Whatever takes you to a place is less important than what you find when you get there.” – Rolf Potts

      Do you feel the pull of certain places? I do, and quite frequently. Local and faraway places call to me, even as I stay busy in the garden and with small projects in the home. It’s the venturing forth to the unknown that I miss in these moments. What have you not been experiencing in your bubble that could be experienced by going there? That’s the draw of travel. Discovering the previously unknown bits of the world and in the process finding something in yourself that you didn’t know was missing.

      Instagram, YouTube and other media bring the unknown to us every day, without leaving your chair. But this is the highlight reel stuff that just scratches the surface on what’s really happening in the world. There’s nothing immersive about a selfie in front of the Eiffel Tower, but it offers a check on a box we all feel compelled to get to one day. The interesting part of that moment is what you do next; rush off to check the next bucket list item or immerse yourself in the nooks and crannies of a place?

      Over the winter I spent many days on snowshoes walking through the conservation land in the town I live in. I felt and saw things that I’d never encountered before in the 25 years I’ve lived in this town. And when walking the narrow streets in town, I’ve experienced something similar walking the opposite route from what I’d normally walk. And I recognize in those moments that you don’t have to go very far to discover what you’ve been missing out on, you just have to change your perspective.

      Perspective can only be changed by altering your viewpoint. Seeing your place in the world in a different way than you’ve always seen it. And that requires something more than checking a box, it requires seeing what you’ve been missing along the way. And understanding what’s changed in you when you’re back again.

    • Thinking How I’ll Feel When I Find…

      I deal in dreamers
      And telephone screamers
      Lately I wonder what I do it for
      If l had my way
      I’d just walk out those doors
      And wander
      Down the Champs Elysees
      Going cafe to cabaret
      Thinking how I’ll feel when I find
      That very good friend of mine
      I was a free man in Paris
      I felt unfettered and alive
      Nobody was calling me up for favors
      No one’s future to decide
      You know I’d go back there tomorrow
      But for the work I’ve taken on
      Stoking the star maker machinery
      Behind the popular song.
      – Joni Mitchell, Free Man In Paris

      I hear a big song like this one a bit differently today than I did as a kid. Then I just heard the bigness of the song, the sonic beauty akin to a wall of sound production. Joni at her highest point in her career with one of the great side ones (back when side one mattered a lot). Now my attention locks onto the freedom of going cafe to cabaret and running into friends along the way, which seems like a grand way to spin about in Paris. And so different from the day-to-day grind of making a living and seeing things through. And maybe that’s why it was so popular, more than the inside look at David Geffen from the perspective of one of his biggest stars and closest friends.

      At its root the song is a longing to break free from that daily grind, whatever ours happens to be, and to live that carefree life in lovely places. And that, friends, is the promised land. And doesn’t require a flight to Paris, as lovely as that might be for each of us. Being unfettered and alive is a state of mind achieved just as easily hiking the spine between bald mountain peaks or walking a quiet beach offseason as it is being part of the cafe and cabaret scene in the City of Lights.

      And the question is, how much is enough? When you’ve earned enough to not be homeless or hungry, what more do you need? The restlessness in this song is the thing that’s so identifiable for anyone who climbs those corporate rungs, thinking about how they’ll feel when they find… whatever it is they think is at that next level of accomplishment. That next status symbol that shows everyone that they’ve really arrived this time.

      Last year Geffen posted a controversial Instagram photo of his stunning yacht Rising Sun in the Grenadines with the sun setting behind as COVID raged and he “self-isolated”. You can see the beauty and smugness in that photo, all at once. As I understand it, that yacht takes 70,000 gallons of fuel and who knows how much in provisions. I wonder if he feels like he’s finally found whatever it was he was looking for?

      How much is enough? Most of us will never have a comparable yacht or a private island or a ticket on a luxurious flight into space with a billionaire. I’m not condemning those who chase for more, but I don’t particularly want that for myself. Because being unfettered and alive isn’t about accumulation or status, it’s about being happy with where you are and what you’re doing in this moment.

      Think how that might feel.

    • Breaking Garden (and Life) Rules

      I regularly break the accepted rules of gardening. Rules like putting the tall plants in the back of the garden. But when something like a balloon flower (Platycodon grandiflorus) or bee balm (Monarda) are shoved way to the back you lose something intimate that you gain when they’re right in your face. So my apologies to the garden rule enforcers. Surely you see my dilemma?

      I was offering advice to a former coworker who wants to quite her job and travel the world with her husband, but she feels stuck in the job, stuck in the life she’s wrapped herself in, and is only looking at the reasons why she can’t just do it instead of finding the reasons to just go for it. I dropped my favorite pair of Latin phrases on her to reflect on: Memento Mori and Carpe Diem (Remember we all must die, and seize the day!).

      Some rules are there for logical reasons; if the tall plants are up front you can’t see the shorter ones behind them. Makes sense. Some rules are there because we’ve all grown up believing stories: you have to get a job and work 50 weeks a year, then skip one of the two weeks of vacation and work on weekends to stay ahead. Who made that rule? Someone who wants to profit on your short productive years before they turn you to dust and plan you out for someone else.

      Make your own rules. Rules like walking out in the middle of a work day and seeing how the flowers are doing, just because you feel like it. Putting yourself out there in the world, to meet it on your terms. And maybe find something of yourself that was hidden when it was shoved to the back by someone else’s rules.

      Balloon Flower

    • Do Uncomfortable Things

      “Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.” – Tim Ferriss

      It’s easier than ever to master distraction. There are so many ways to push aside the importance of a specific task for the urgent du jour that pops up as a notification or to the top of your inbox. What is life but the prioritization of important things over all the rest? And yet we so easily cave to distraction.

      Important things fall by the wayside because they’re often uncomfortable. Or perceived to be. Certainly more uncomfortable than scurrying about in the familiar buzz of tasks and quick minutes. There were days when I’d look up, realize the time and see that I’d gotten none of the meaningful things I’d wanted to do completed. For those of us who want to feel accomplishment at the end of a long day, this can be a moment of painful self-reckoning.

      So why do we succumb over and over to the relative ease of distraction and the unimportant? Because it feels like no big thing at that moment, because we put the important task in a box of “uncomfortable”. Because busywork feels like getting things done, but easier than the task we ought to be doing. Because, because, because…

      “The biggest generator of long term results is learning to do things when you don’t feel like doing them. Discipline is more reliable than motivation.” -Shane Parrish

      Uncomfortable has its own pleasures, just not always in the moment. Making a long term investment in ourselves through discipline seems more difficult in the moment, but deferred important tasks only amplify the longer you defer them. Pay me now or pay me later.

      Ultimately, the answer is to know what’s important for the long term and to have the discipline to stick to the tasks that matter in getting you there. Which requires embracing the suck and doing the uncomfortable important things until you forget that it was ever all that uncomfortable to begin with. And that infers that you have a vision for the future you and a clear map for how you’ll get there. The rest is disciplined action. Simple, right?

    • A Measure of Contentment

      How difficult
      it is to die
      from my
      disbelief
      and kneel
      down
      to the truer
      underlying
      font of happiness
      waiting to
      break
      the enclosing
      surface,
      to believe
      in my body that
      I deserve
      the full spacious
      sense of
      not being
      thirsty anymore,
      of living
      a present
      contentment.
      – David Whyte, Newly Married

      The realization of not being thirsty anymore, of being content with the life you’re living and all that it means; the relationship you’re in, the place you live, the work you do, the mark you’ve made, the places you’ve gone to and returned from, and the fitness level you’ve achieved, this is the promised land of contentment. I look at that list in the previous sentence and know I’m more than halfway there. But the fact that there’s still a list indicates I have a way to go.

      Whyte writes of relationships and having found his thirst-quenching soulmate. When you reach that particular point you recognize immediately that yes, this is more than enough for me in this area of my life. And if you haven’t, well, you’d recognize that too. Contentment isn’t the same as complacency, and each day requires a recommitment to seeing it through. To seeing it continue to tomorrow and the tomorrows to follow.

      Lately I’ve turned my attention back to fitness and nutrition. Eating the right foods, drinking in moderation, exercise and a recommitment to my flexibility and strength that has somehow been missing for too long. I recognize within myself that there’s a thirst, a hunger if you will, to be better than I presently am. This is my current area of discontentment.

      The thing is, things change, and change constantly. If at one point in life I was content with my overall fitness level, I’m not now and work to change it. If I was once content with the number of days I spent traveling and exploring the world, now I’m restless and ready to get back out there. Circumstances change, and we change with circumstances. Contentment is a relative thing, and it’s relatively evasive. We must work for that which we seek in our lives.

      I expect Whyte knows this too. He didn’t say lifetime contentment, but present contentment. We’re dynamic beings coexisting with a dynamic and ever-changing world. Contentment is meant to be evasive. Our purpose is to keep working at this fragile dance, and make of it what we can in the time given to us. To be content with being a work in progress seems the ultimate measure of contentment.