Alexandersmap

    Month: October 2021

    • A Coastal Walk in San Francisco

      San Francisco is known for many things, but the Golden Gate Bridge has to be near the top of that list we make in our heads. Without being a tourist checking boxes, shouldn’t you try to see the sites that make a place unique? But seeing doesn’t have to mean doing what everybody else does.

      So how do you see something as famous as the Golden Gate Bridge in a different way? You let it come to you gradually. The perfect way to do that is with a walk from Lands End to the bridge. This walk takes you along a diverse landscape of rocky cliffs, spectacular beaches with crashing surf, high end neighborhoods, past defensive fortifications dating from the world wars and finally to the bridge itself.

      You can Google the route and map it out neatly, but maps only offer a one-dimensional view. Even Street View, for all its delights, can’t convey everything. You don’t experience the clumpy clay in the sand after a light rain, or the shear cliffs that claim the lives of the careless adventurers looking for that perfect vantage point, or the spa-like aromas emanating from the wet flora, or the cheap plastic Halloween decorations adorning multi-million dollar homes. No, you’ve got to walk it to experience these things.

      The walk itself is a good workout, with a lot of climbing and long stretches on soft sand, but it’s not the Appalachian Trail, you can get by with a moderate fitness level and good walking shoes. The bridge and the roar of crashing waves will be your constant companion. Were it not for the bridge you might think you were in another place.

      The bridge comes at you from different vantage points. One of those vantage points is mental. We can all visualize the Golden Gate Bridge in our minds. So it can be invigorating when you see the real thing. It was thought impossible to build by many, but 84 years after opening she looks as good as you imagine she would.

    • The Nature of Modern Travel

      I watched the guy in front of me as the attendant informed him that he’d missed his flight because they hadn’t arrived at least 40 minutes before the door closed. The truth hit him squarely and sadness washed over his eyes. His wife pressed close to him to hear, as three young children pulled her in three directions. And I wished nothing more in this world than for a do-over to his day. It was apparent why he was late, but rules are rules and I wondered what happened to that family and who was waiting for them on the other side of that missed flight as I rushed off to my own flight.

      And this is the new travel in coach. Not at all like business travel, this is a hundred things on your mind and a nagging fear of what you forgot travel. And it’s brutally unforgiving. Those who say the journey is half the experience wipe the worst moments from the memory bank. But hey, maybe we’ll all laugh about it someday? I hope so for those parents.

      When you finally sit down in your seat, and (if you’re lucky) with your baggage stowed safely in overhead, relief washes over you like that sadness in the father’s eyes. You’ve cleared yet another hurdle in a race above the clouds. There will be more, there are always more, but one less than before. Travel is one step at a time across a minefield, but we do live it, even if it doesn’t always love us back.

      But hey, at least we have Wi-Fi?

    • A Sparkplug for the Brain in Five Songs

      If someday my mind succumbs to the debilitating fog of dementia that robs my father and so many others of their familiarity and wit, put noise-cancelling headphones over my ears, turn up the volume and play the electric guitar anthems of my youth. I don’t know nearly enough about reversing the downward slide of dementia, but I do know that music seems to help. My Dad might not remember my name, but he knows the words to his favorite country music. There’s magic in music, and it seems to remain a gift for us to the end of our days.

      I don’t know what my own future will bring, but I eat my blueberries and leafy greens and stay hydrated in hopes of keeping the pipes clean. They say a heart-healthy diet and a brain-healthy diet are the same, which seems to offer a clear path for proactive nutrition. But we never know, do we?

      I do know that nothing drew me out of my awkward teenage shell like the guitar work of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s rock music. And, just maybe, that might work again should I someday need a sparkplug for the brain. May it never be needed but as a nice throwback jolt of energy and a reminder of a time when my dad knew my name and would yell it to have me turn down the music:

      Surrender – Cheap Trick
      I can still remember listening to this song in a friend’s basement, along with, funny enough, his Kiss records.

      Unchained – Van Halen
      This performance is big, brash Van Halen at their raunchiest, and rocking the house.

      Rock You Like a Hurricane – The Scorpions
      German rock and roll that must be turned up extra loud.

      Roll With The Changes – REO Speedwagon
      One of those songs you can’t help but turn up and speed up to.

      Gloria – U2
      The band, and the performance, that stirred my Celtic soul and changed my perspective on music forever. U2 became and remains to this day my virtual house band.

    • Look at That Sky, Life’s Begun

      Don’t let me hear you say life’s taking you nowhere
      Angel
      Come get up, my baby
      Look at that sky, life’s begun
      Nights are warm and the days are young
      Come get up, my baby
      — David Bowie, Golden Years

      Attitude is everything in life, and at some point you’ve got to shake yourself loose from whatever holds you back and get going already. Even during the pandemic, a dark time for modern humanity, we hear of plenty of people who got out in the world and did something amazing. So why not now?

      If you believe the stories, David Bowie wrote Golden Years for Elvis to sing. Admittedly, that would have been a fascinating take on the song. There’s an element of sadness in the lyrics, and I can see Bowie having someone like Elvis in mind when he wrote it. I think about the Elvis of 1975, only a couple of years before he died. He felt like old news and a bit used up in the world, but he was only 42 when he died. He was dragged down by drugs and distraction, not by age.

      There’s a lesson there. Don’t get bogged down in the muck life throws at you. Focus intensely on the things you want to do in your life. For all the celebration of those who rise up, this world would rather have you consume than produce. Consumption will be the death of us all. Instead, get up and produce something of consequence.

      Lean into your dreams. Look up at that sky. Life’s just begun, Angel.

    • Sympathy With Intelligence

      “A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with—he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all? My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walking

      We arrive at a deeper understanding and empathy with the world by getting out into it. If there’s been a curse to the pandemic, it’s the distinct lack of getting out there to encounter a different perspective on things than you might have sheltered in place with your favorite sound bites and tweets.

      If the last 6-7 years were defined by anything, it’s this growing assurance that your side is right and any other is wrong. The world seemingly spiraled down into an antagonistic cesspool of us versus them. What’s missing is empathy: the putting ourselves in their shoes part. Seek first to understand and then to be understood, as Stephen Covey would have put it. He’d be shaking his head at the world we find ourselves in today.

      Getting out to meet the world is the solution to this problem. Seeing things the way they look from the other side offers perspective unavailable to those who don’t venture past the mailbox. The idea of getting out to see the world seems to be the most logical thing in the world to many of us, but fills others with dread. Would you live your life forever in a shell or break out of your limited view of the universe and see what’s really out there?

      This week I’m getting back out in the world, not for work, but for pleasure. To see things from a different vantage point, to seek the truth about how things are in a place other than here. To bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet and return with a new perspective on this world. And then, boldly, to do it again.

    • Have Your Day

      Time drops in decay,
      Like a candle burnt out,
      And the mountains and woods
      Have their day, have their day;
      What one in the rout
      Of the fire-born moods
      Has fallen away?
      – WB Yeats, The Moods

      The Moods, as I understand it, are the messengers from God (God, in turn, is fire). Whatever your beliefs, there’s truth in the core message: time slips away drop by drop, and we all must pass. Whether a poet or philosopher or the woods or even the mountains themselves, all must “have their day”.

      Let us turn to old friend Henry and consider the phrase differently:

      “The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it. Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry—determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream?” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      We get so caught up in life’s minor distractions that we lose track of the days slipping by. Shouldn’t we channel that inner fire and spend our lives in conceiving while we have this time? But wait! If even the mountains themselves eventually erode to sand, how can we be so bold as to expect a measure of immortality?

      This is why the concept of God and eternity hold so much meaning in our brief lives, we seek to understand the meaning of it all. Poets and philosophers and amateur bloggers each confront the brutal fact that we all must pass, and we don’t really have an answer for what lies beyond.

      So be it. But knowing that the track is indeed laid before us, shouldn’t we reach for our own measure of immortality, as fragile as it might be, and make a day of it? That, friends, seems to be the point all along. Have your day.

    • I Will Show Another Me

      When illusion spin her net
      I’m never where I want to be
      And liberty she pirouette
      When I think that I am free
      Watched by empty silhouettes
      Who close their eyes but still can see
      No one taught them etiquette
      I will show another me
      Today I don’t need a replacement
      I’ll tell them what the smile on my face meant
      My heart going boom boom boom
      “Hey” I said “You can keep my things,
      They’ve come to take me home.”
      – Peter Gabriel, Solisbury Hill

      Where were you when you really heard this song for the first time? Not tapping your fingers on the steering wheel while you drive hearing it, but listening to the lyrics and absorbing the weight of what Peter Gabriel was saying to the world? We all confront tough choices, and the toughest choice of all is when everything is going well and we follow the call to change anyway.

      This decision, I will show another me, is the root of change. It’s what Henry David Thoreau was saying in Walden:

      Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate… The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

      I think a person ought to read Walden every year, to gauge the changes happening within themselves. You might say the same about Solisbury Hill; you hear it differently depending on where you are in your life. Closing in on two years since the beginning of the pandemic, I hear it differently than I did a few years ago. Maybe you do too.

      The theme mirrors Bob Seger’s Roll Me Away, right down to the bird of prey weighing in on the decision the protagonist is about to make. But Solisbury Hill sneaks up on you differently. Maybe it’s the English versus the American take on life-changing moments. Roll Me Away was always a driving song, pulling you relentlessly to the freedom of the road. Solisbury Hill is about a very distinct moment in Peter Gabriel’s career, when he decided to leave Genesis and begin a solo career. And in writing it he blazed a trail for everyone following him in making their own choices in life.

      Should you listen to that voice, trust imagination, and take the leap.

    • In the Dew of the Morn

      Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
      Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
      Laugh, heart, again in the gray twilight;
      Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.
      Thy mother Eire is always young,
      Dew ever shining and twilight gray,
      Though hope fall from thee or love decay
      Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.
      Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill,
      For there the mystical brotherhood
      Of hollow wood and the hilly wood
      And the changing moon work out their will.
      And God stands winding his lonely horn;
      And Time and World are ever in flight,
      And love is less kind than the gray twilight,
      And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.
      — WB Yeats, Into the Twilight

      The dew of the morn must be reckoned with. It dampens everything, especially your bottom if you should sit down without wiping the surface dry before you land. But I love it for all that it reminds me of; early morning rows, waking up in a tent in some remote place, the first, wet cleats soccer games of the day for the kids when they were cherubs. That damp start is a new beginning, a hope you can cling to until it dries with the rising sun.

      My heart belongs to the morning. For all the grief I get about going to bed early, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I listen to the sounds of the woods as the world wakes up around me and honor Sirius as the last holdout stubbornly fading in a brightening sky. I know we all must fade in our time but why not try for brilliance until the end?

      My heart also seeks faraway places, if only to see what’s there when I arrive. Yeats has recurring themes of time and mysticism in his work. Mother Eire is alive with faeries and magic, and he stirs a dormant but not distant longing to visit Ireland soon. Come heart, where hill is heaped upon hill… don’t worry, I’m already there!

      Wanderlust is nothing new for me, and I often celebrate it here, but you’ll never be happy in this world chasing your dreams elsewhere. Life is right here, where you are. In the dew of the morn, with the world stirring and a cuppa too soon gone. So dry yourself off and get after it. For there’s magic in the air.

    • The Upward Spiral

      “One of the major problems that arises when people work to become more effective in life is that they don’t think broadly enough. They lose the sense of proportion, the balance, the natural ecology necessary to effective living.” — Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (all subsequent quotes are also Covey’s)

      I’m not a marathon runner, but I’ve walked the length of a marathon for a fundraiser, and in walking you experience the same feeling around the 20 mile mark that a runner feels. You’ve hit a wall, you’re mentally and physically done, and you just want the whole thing to end already. This feeling of hitting a wall is similar to the feeling I get when my life is out of balance. Not enough vacation time, not enough exercise, not enough applied efforts towards a work goal… unbalanced.

      When that happens, you feel like you enter a downward spiral. You lose your rhythm and things that came easily seem more difficult. You succumb to distractions like social media or binge-watching shows. You take shortcuts: one indicator for me that I’m out of sorts is when I start using K-cups instead of making coffee with the AeroPress. It may seem trivial, but the extra minute or two to make a better cup of coffee all seems too much in the moment.

      It’s right about then that I begin to take corrective action. Vacation time, of course, helps a lot. Weekends of meaningful, deep restoration instead of tasks and catch-up work. Hiking and other exercise. Deep, distraction-free reading. Meditation, prayer… whatever draws you outside of yourself and into a more balanced place. When you’re in a downward spiral the first thing to do is arrest — a rest — your descent. Give yourself a break already!

      “Renewal is the principle — and the process — that empowers us to move on an upward spiral of growth and change, of continuous improvement. To make meaningful and consistent progress along that spiral, we need to consider one other aspect of renewal as it applies to the unique human endowment that directs this upward movement — our conscience…. Conscience is the endowment that senses our congruence or disparity with correct principles and lifts us toward them.”

      Reversing that downward spiral, that just survive to fight another day feeling, changes your mindset. Re-energized and restored, you might be so bold as to think about climbing again. To put yourself on an upward spiral towards a higher place in your life. To prioritize the things that bring you positive energy and push aside the bad habits accumulated on your downward spiral and refocus on the essential few things that matter most for you. Things that bring you energy and vitality. In short, remap your life and put yourself back on course.

      “The law of the harvest governs; we will always reap what we sow — no more, no less. The law of justice is immutable, and the closer we align ourselves with correct principles, the better our judgement will be about how the world operates and the more accurate our paradigms — our maps of the territory — will be.”

      “Moving along the upward spiral requires us to learn, commit, and do on increasingly higher planes. We deceive ourselves if we think any one of these is sufficient. To keep progressing, we must learn, commit, and do—learn, commit, and do—and learn, commit, and do again.”

      To reach a higher plane demands a lifetime of consistent learning, commitment and action. But when the saw is dull you won’t make progress. That old expression, “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”? There’s truth in that. Take a rest, evaluate your course and correct as necessary. And only then can you get back on that upward spiral.

    • Making it Interesting

      “If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” – Ray Bradbury

      I’ve read this Bradbury quote before, and it made me smile but didn’t resonate at the time. Now it reads differently. Now I’m deep in it and looking at the wrestling match with the Creative Muse with both dread and delight. Now I’m scheming where I might insert travel and more writing into my days. Now I look at dusty books that have long occupied space on my shelves mocking me for not getting to them, and knowing they hold secrets I’ll never know until I earn them.

      I happen to be slogging through a couple of books that bore me to tears, but now and then drop a wisdom nugget into my shaking hands. Why read two dull books at once? When I grow frustrated with one I turn back to the other, then back again, until some moment when I finish both. My reward will be reading some page-turner fiction that I may finish on one cross-country flight.

      The mission is to make your own writing interesting. To not create one of those dull slogs you get through before you reward yourself with the page-turner. If you live with the naive (even reckless) goal of earning a place at the table with the great writers you must do (and publish!) the work, but you must also create something compelling.

      And that’s the wrestling match, isn’t it? Anyone can throw up a bunch of words, the trick is to make them swing together to the music in your soul. While there’s time.