Alexandersmap

    Month: October 2021

    • A Sprinkling of Alive Time

      “Is life too short to be taking this shit, or is life too short to be minding it?” – Violet Weingarten

      I spent part of the morning walking in the woods, seeking out the quiet reflections on an inky black pond nearby. October makes those reflections particularly brilliant and I wondered at my solitude with the water and foliage. Tourists drive so far to see the colors of fall, when it might be hiding in plain sight just through the woods.

      October brings a gift to those who wander outside in New England. To stay inside seems unforgivable for those of us who seek the truth in the palette. Life isn’t meant to be lived in shades of grey, so why must we limit perspective on the world? Yet I found myself inside for most of the afternoon yesterday, in a room with a grey color palette, tackling projects that a family member fighting cancer is unable to tackle.

      I was happy to do it. To contribute in whatever way I could. I’ve seen too much of this lately. The C word. The stealer of dreams. What are we to do with it but decide how to live with the options it leaves you? My gift for the patient was my time and a bit of applied skill to fix some lingering problems in the house. Were I able to fix everything.

      Sundays in October offer another gift, the gift of sports. The pursuit of athletic excellence in your chosen sport. In New England we have many choices in October: The Head-of-the-Charles regatta, college sports, pre-season Bruins and Celtics, the second month of football with the Patriots, the postseason with the Red Sox, and unique for 2021, the Boston Marathon run in October instead of April. That’s a lot to choose from if you enjoy sports. In my family we enjoy sports.

      So I didn’t mind watching the Patriots game out of the corner of my eye while working under the kitchen sink. I didn’t even mind the two trips to the local box store for supplies, because the radio play-by-play guys were better than the national television play-by-play guys. Professional sports are a very nice distraction from the cold reality of managing cancer instead of eliminating it. And the Patriots and Red Sox served up a couple of nice wins when the family needed them. They collectively watched the ebb and flow of the games, focused on something besides the elephant in the room.

      Memento Mori. We all must die. But accepting that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t fight like hell for our alive time while we have it. To sparkle in brilliant vibrancy in the face of the long truth. On a sparkling day of foliage and athletic performance, we celebrated our alive time for the gift that it is.

    • The Changes You Take Yourself Through

      Everybody needs a change
      A chance to check out the new
      But you’re the only one to see
      The changes you take yourself through
      – Stevie Wonder, Don’t You Worry About A Thing

      In New England, October is the time of tangible, visible change. The world transforms around you in such strikingly obvious ways that even the most inward-facing among us look up and see it. The days get shorter and darker, the air crisp and demanding of attention, and of course the leaves paint the landscape in an explosion of color. No wonder this is the time of year most people who live here point to as their favorite.

      It seems a good time to celebrate change. The incremental changes we see around us are also happening within us. We grow incrementally better or worse, depending on our focus and applied effort. And because we’re humans you might make tangible progress in one area while you slide a bit sideways in another. Such is life.

      When you write and publish every single day you force yourself to become a keen observer. And you become more efficient in putting thought to paper (or onto the screen and whatever database in the Cloud they take up residence in). Sometimes you’re the only one to see the changes you take yourself through, and sometimes a percentage of the world takes notice. The only part that’s important is that you take yourself through it to see where you go next.

      Change. We get so caught up in getting there that we forget to celebrate here. Dance in the moment that you recognize that life is this short wonderful eruption of thought and emotion and transformation. Maybe turn the volume up a bit more today. For there’s urgency in the air. Celebrate where you are. You’ve come so far already.

    • Moments and Answers

      Aren’t there moments that are better than knowing something, and sweeter?

      At 4:30 in the morning, I realized I was unable to sleep any longer as I became increasingly aware of the fan tap-tap-tapping me to alertness. This wake-up hour is becoming a disturbing trend, and I fought it as long as I felt reasonable until I surrendered to the noise and got up well before the sun and read Mary Oliver’s poem Snowy Night, thinking it might draw me back to sleep.

      Just the opposite, it turned out. So I decided to make the most of the unexpected time awake and drove to the sea to catch the rising sun meet the falling tide. The hope was to let the waves sweep away this bout of restlessness.

      I love this world, but not for its answers.

      I don’t understand the draw of inland places. Sure, they’re nice to visit for awhile, but I couldn’t live there. I’ve come to rely on salt water too much to be that far away from it. It draws something out of you. If not always answers, well, maybe moments.

      This post may not have all the answers (does any?), but I’ve hung on to it all day. I’ll take this moment to click publish. Cheers.

    • To Squander the Day

      We are reconciled, I think,
      to too much.
      Better to be a bird, like this one-
      An ornament of the eternal.
      As he came down once, to the nest of the grass,
      “Squander the day, but save the soul,”
      I heard him say.
      – Mary Oliver, The Lark

      We become especially adept at committing ourselves to activities with the least return on our time invested. What is an unproductive meeting but an agreement between two parties to squander time? As if we had the time to spend.

      This challenge by Mary Oliver, declaring that we reconcile to too much in our days, pokes deeply at that inner doubt we might have about how we’re spending our time. That (now) she’s challenging us from the grave amplifies the message. Jealously guard your time for that which is most important. Squander the day, if you must, but save your soul!

      We take stock of our calendars and see a growing trend back to the office, back to travel and meetings and getting things done. Some excites us, and some is a reconciliation to the mission at hand. This is the life of a professional, we do what we must to get where we want to be in our careers.

      But what if we saved our soul instead?

    • There All Along

      For the last few weeks Orion has greeted me in the dark beginnings of the day, reminding me that he’s been waiting all along for me to see him again. Like an old friend, mostly, who has entered the scene after some time away. Or maybe we are the ones re-entering the scene.

      So much of our lives is there waiting in the wings for the moment when we turn our attention back to it. Old books sitting on a shelf, old friends you haven’t spoken with in years, old neighborhoods that framed so much of the way you look at the world, old lines from movies or lyrics from songs that remind you of a moment long ago when things seemed simple. Sometimes these things come back into our lives, but often they’ve been there all along.

      Orion reminded me to look for what I often miss. I see Orion and look for Taurus, and then smile at memories of long walks with a curious dog who saw things in the night that I could only guess at. That dog is no longer here, but his memory is still with me, waiting to draw a smile or a grimace… or sometimes both. You can miss someone that’s long gone, and you can miss them when they’re right in front of you.

      My father suffers from dementia, and I wonder if my memories will fade the way his have. Will I still remember the names of my children, or will they be lost the way my name is to him? It’s hard to imagine an existence where I don’t, yet see it happen over and over with the generations before ours. Will I remember to look up at the sky and know Orion? The future is never guaranteed, and our memories are fragile things. And so, it seems, are we.

      Sometimes we can’t control anything at all, but we can reach out and let them know we’ve been here all along. I suppose that’s about all we can do in the end. Look up and say “hello, it’s nice to see you again”. And make the most of that time together while we have it.

    • Trusting Dawn

      The brain burrows in its earth
      and sleeps,
      trusting dawn, though the sun’s
      light is a light without precedent, never
      proved ahead of its coming, waited for
      by the law that hope has made it.
      – Wendell Berry, The Design of a House

      We all trust in dawn, and the fresh beginning it offers us. And now that it’s here, why are we so audacious as to expect another tomorrow? There are no guarantees in life, we all know this. Yet we assume the dawn.

      What would we do if we knew this was the last day? The last time you’ll turn thoughts into words? The last time you’ll speak to someone? The last opportunity to say what must be said, what must be done, or what must be undone?

      Living every moment as if it were your last sounds like a nice motivational poster, but let’s face it, it can be exhausting. To function we have to place a bit of faith in a future that’s mostly like the one we have today, if maybe incrementally better (whatever that means in our heads). To thrive we must believe in exponential improvement and a world that embraces what we gingerly place on the table before it. We trust in our beliefs either way.

      Maybe it’s best to hedge our bets. To boldly advance towards our dreams but linger in a hug a beat longer. To plan the big trip but celebrate the quiet walk in the local woods as the leaves remind you of the season at hand. To trust in the dawn but verify the moment. Here, it seems, is where hope meets happiness.

    • Born Before Apollo

      I surf the wave of time with a group of Gen X people born before Apollo landed on the moon. That might make me old, or still young, depending on the reader. But age labels are nothing but stories people tell themselves. In my mind I’m still a kid in pajamas and no helmet on, riding my bike barefoot as fast as possible down the steepest hills available to me. I celebrate the recklessness of my youth and smile at the scars as they remind me of the highlights. Another tetanus booster shot? No problem.

      The Beatles and The Rolling Stones might have been Baby Boomers, but we had a steady diet of each, swept into the diverse wave of music that crashed over us from birth until college. Rock to singer-songwriter to disco to reggae to punk. We swam in it all. No, they weren’t our generation, but they were our soundtrack and we made them our own. Until Nirvana and Pearl Jam kicked them aside and declared that it was our time to break through.

      Consumerism, good god the consumerism! Plastic and white bread and designed obsolescence, all positioned to feed the worst junk to the masses in a recurring revenue scheme to keep the shareholders happy. All this junk loaded onto shelves at Kmart and Toys R Us and a hundred other stores that lived and died with their consumers. And who pays for it but the environment and our bodies? The C-suite that grew ultra-rich in this trickle down economics scam will casually gesture to the crew to move their yachts to a better view.

      We saw, and we still see, that it’s all bullshit. All the positioning and titles and tail wagging the dog political maneuvering? BS. It’s all stories and power-brokering and wealth accumulation, and you either play their game or you move aside on their climb to the gates of hell. Hell must be somewhere at the top because that’s where some of the worst in humanity are ascending to. And boy do they spoil the view.

      Apollo was the space mission that fueled our dreams. To launch into space and land humans on the moon! It seemed anything was possible, and that we’d all be space rangers. And then Atari and Star Wars came out, grabbed all that pent-up space fascination and channeled it towards fantasy. Bigger movies, more immersive video games, faster and stronger computers. Yeah, more consumerism. See what they did there?

      The thing is, I’m not jaded, none of us born in Gen X can be. We’ve seen all the stories and positioning all our lives. We were born skeptical of the generations around us. And why wouldn’t we be? Collectively we’re all messing things up, aren’t we? And we all see it, even if some choose to immerse themselves in the distraction of Squid Game or the latest superhero franchise movie. Fantasy soothes the sharpest doubts and fears.

      Of course, we already knew that. Cue Captain Kirk for a real space flight, brought to you by a billionaire working to hold your attention from the toxic workplace accusations his employees are screaming about. Yeah, that’ll hold their attention for a few minutes. But doesn’t it feel like we’ve seen this one before?

    • Beauty as a Gateway

      “I will not of a certainty believe that there is nothing in the sunset, where our forefathers imagined the dead following their shepherd the sun, or nothing but some vague presence as little moving as nothing. If beauty is not a gateway out of the net we were taken in at our birth, it will not long be beauty, and we will find it better to sit at home by the fire and fatten a lazy body or to run hither and thither in some foolish sport than to look at the finest show that light and shadow ever made among green leaves.” – W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

      We, born as we are with a shelf life, chase the divine. In big ways and small, putting yourself in the way of beauty is a gateway to the divine within our mortal existence. It’s why we stumble through muddy paths to find hidden waterfalls, wake in the deepest part of the night to make our way to sunrise vistas, and brave the sounds of the forest to dwarf our egos amongst the giants. In nature we encounter the divine, and in doing so coruscate an otherwise dim life with grace and wonder.

      Admittedly, some of us are schemers, carving out time in our lives for glimpses of the otherworldly. On a recent flight north I glimpsed a spectacular sunset above the clouds and cursed myself for not getting a window seat on the western side of the plane for that particular trip. We must be deliberate even with the mundane if we are to enter the gateway to the divine. That particular world of magic and light was meant for others to witness.

      It’s no surprise that Yeats was a fellow seeker. You can’t be a poet without first being a collector of moments of dazzling infinity. If there’s an afterlife, the westernmost reaches must get crowded with poets and philosophers lined up to see the green flash of another epic sunset. And if there isn’t an afterlife, shouldn’t we catch as many while we’re here as our time allows? Who’s to know until we get to whatever come next? But why risk missing out on the divine in our daily lives? Seek it now.

      It’s all around us, waiting for you to notice.

    • After the Owls

      If there’s a joy in shorter days, it’s greeting the dawn at a more civilized time. We all have an idea of what that word civilized means to us. I celebrate the late evenings when I’m able to stay awake long enough to enjoy them, but generally call it a night well before last call so that I might have the early morning solitude. Life is full of trade-offs, and we must choose which edge of the day to hug closely. The alternative is to sacrifice sleep. But sleep should be non-negotiable.

      In the darkness of early morning October, I sat in the dark with a family of Barred Owls overhead, gossiping in their most hauntingly unique language, an eavesdropper whom they were no doubt aware of but with whom they could easily talk circles around. All the while the sky brightened and the waning crescent moon cut in and out of the inky black clouds. Eventually they tired of toying with me and took their conversation elsewhere. And there I was, in the sudden stillness at the edge of the woods, alone with my thoughts.

      What do you do with the waning darkness after the owls have moved on? You might think about the game of life and sort out how to play it better. You might conspire with hot coffee and the slow appearance of the world. You might replay the highlights of the previous day; what went well and the what might-have-beens. Or you might just listen to the world around you as if waiting for more instruction.

      When you wake up to the loud conversation of owls the rest of your day has a tough time measuring up. But isn’t it fun to give it a go to see if you can? In that time, after the owls, I decided to leap. And, having decided, the real work begins.

    • The Dew of the Morn

      Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill
      For there the mystical brotherhood
      Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
      And river and stream work out their will;

      And God stands winding His lonely horn,
      And time and the 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.
      – W.B. Yeats, Into The Twilight

      When you read Yeats you feel the old Druid blood stir within. We know this world, where the sun and moon whisper, and the wood and river and stream work their will upon us. We’re never quite right when we’re too far away.

      We all run calculations in our heads, figuring out our time and where we want to place ourselves next. We run the numbers, and they tell us to get back to what’s important as quickly as possible. The world piles atop you, scorning your hopes and dreams, reminding you of responsibilities and your time earned. Save such folly for another day, the voices say.

      The blood of the ancients beats in our hearts, you and me, and it has a different rhythm than this world at large. It grows restless and impatient with our stories of later and soon enough. What is hope but a deferred dream?

      Time and the world are ever in flight. There’s no catching either, is there? Our hope is in the dawn, when we walk out into the freshness of a new day and seek what’s been calling us all along. But the dew of the morn is drying with the rising sun, and soon our footprints will fade. Seize the moment.