Alexandersmap

    Month: January 2022

    • Dancing with the Gloriously Possible

      “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible—the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.” — Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

      Every now and then you read a book that becomes an instant frame of reference for how you see the world and your place in it for the rest of your days. Walden, Awareness, Meditations, and Atomic Habits are some of the books that changed me profoundly. I can comfortably place Four Thousand Weeks on that short list. This is a mesmerizingly insightful look at the fragile dance we’re all in the middle of, and how we think and react to our realization that life is impossibly short. It reinforces many of the things I’ve written about in this blog, and turned a few working theories upside down and dumped them on the scrapheap. It’s a book I’ll be processing for awhile.

      “Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life... what we think of as “distractions” aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.“

      Confronting our limitation, and how we process that by either living in the moment or distracting ourselves with ritual, busyness, by deferring to the future (all the way to “afterlife”) or skimming along in the shallow pond of the unimportant are all very human reactions to figuring out what the hell to do with this short time before we rejoin infinity. Heady stuff, stuff that demands contemplation. But it can be overwhelming to think about such things. Who wants to be the Debbie Downer in their own life party?

      Burkeman points to the possibility of accepting life for the brief dance it is so you can focus on what you can and cannot achieve. Decide what you’ll focus on, and importantly, what you’ll let fall away. We can’t excel in everything, so why burden ourselves with those things on our to-do list? We know what’s most important already. Be honest with yourself about what is going to fall off and celebrate the unburdening of releasing it for our essential contribution.

      All those books listed above, in one way or another all come down to the idea of making the most of our short time. Since we all know the ship is sinking from the moment we reach awareness, shouldn’t we be conscious about how we react to it? Isn’t it liberating, in a way, to release the burden of the shortness of time and seize this moment? Think about the Titanic in her last moments —would you rather be in the band playing tunes to the end or the fool who jumps into the icy water screaming in denial to the last? Even the people who made it to the life boats gained but a short time more. I’d like to think they used it well.

      And so should we! Since we all meet our fate in the end, shouldn’t we make the most of our brief lives? What will you do with this focused time?

    • Living Like Sidney Poitier

      I had no way of knowing that there was madness in what I was trying to do.” — Sidney Poitier

      That quote was from an interview that Sidney Poitier did with Lesley Stahl in 2013 that was broadcast a day or so after his passing last week. He reveals the bold, you might say reckless, leap into acting for a man with a strong Bahamian accent who couldn’t read at the time. It would telegraph the boldness and courage with which he would live his life and manage his career.

      I didn’t want to let too much time pass between the passing of Sidney Poitier and my writing about him. He was a favorite actor, not because I’ve seen every movie that he’s done (I’ve only seen three) or because I was star struck by his screen presence, but because of the elegant, dignified way that he lived his life. There’s a lesson there for all of us.

      “I did not go into the film business to be symbolized as someone else’s vision of me. If the screen does not make room for me in the structure of their screenplay, I’d step back. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it… I live by a certain code. I have to have a certain amount of decency in my behavior or pattern. I have to have that.”

      At the end of the interview, Lesley Stahl was asking Poitier about a book he’d just written. His words were equally revealing about how he identified himself. As someone who chips away at this writing thing, I found his words compelling and relatable:

      Poitier: “I was not intending to make an impression. I was finding release for myself within myself. I was looking for who I am at this point in my life.”
      Stahl: “Did you find out?”
      Poitier: “Somewhat, yeah.”
      Stahl: “Who are you?“
      Poitier: “I’m a good person”

      During this interview he reminded me, in his quietly elegant way, of my favorite Navy pilot, my step-father who passed away last year. Maybe that’s why I found him such a compelling guy. I think it was more a passing similarity based on the interview. More to the point, it came down to his decision to live his life by a code of honor, similar to what a Navy pilot might have, and the way that he exemplified it to the end.

      Shouldn’t we all aspire to live our lives in this way?

    • January is Waiting

      “I wonder how long it would take you to notice the regular recurrence of the seasons if you were the first man on earth. What would it be like to live in open-ended time broken only by days and nights? You could say, “it’s cold again; it was cold before,” but you couldn’t make the key connection and say, “it was cold this time last year,” because the notion of “year” is precisely the one you lack. Assuming that you hadn’t yet noticed any orderly progression of heavenly bodies, how long would you have to live on earth before you could feel with any assurance that any one particular long period of cold would, in fact, end?” — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

      Lately I’ve been watching some Lonewolf 902 YouTube videos of winter camping with a hot tent. I’ve done a bit of winter camping in my time, with an old sleeping bag sprinkled with ember burns to prove it, but not recently. I don’t see myself hauling a titanium stove through the woods of New Hampshire and cutting up dead standing timber for firewood anytime soon. But his adventures northeast of me in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island are stirring the imagination once again. It’s time to get back out there.

      You might feel the cold, and might even experience the snow when you stay put in your nest. But you just don’t become a part of the season without being immersed in it. January, by all rites, offers cold, short days. I’ve noticed that I don’t notice as much when I don’t get out in it. Without a dog to walk in the cold night, I don’t watch the celestial dance across the sky. Without gathering my hiking gear and heading north, I don’t feel the sting of winter or the snow blindness of brilliant sun on frigid snow. What fun is January if you aren’t out in it?

      “Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. ” — John Ruskin

      January is the month when you begin to go stir crazy if you aren’t active enough. The best remedy is right in front of us—bundle up and get your ass out there. The magic of snow and ice and crisp air won’t last for long. You must go to it, prepared, if you want to experience the exhilaration of winter. Melancholy is for those who would shelter indefinitely. Nothing breaks the hold of the winter blues faster than embracing winter. So get out and experience all winter offers! How many more do you expect to have? Appreciate the gift that this season represents.

      January is waiting… but it’s slipping away.

    • By Where We Have Been

      Dove that ventured outside, flying far from the dovecote:
      housed and protected again, one with the day, the night,
      knows what serenity is, for she has felt her wings
      pass through all distance and fear in the course of her wanderings.

      The doves that remained at home, never exposed to loss,
      innocent and secure, cannot know tenderness;
      only the won-back heart can ever be satisfied: free,
      through all it has given up, to rejoice in its mastery.

      Being arches itself over the vast abyss.
      Ah the ball that we dared, that we hurled into infinite space,
      doesn’t it fill our hands differently with its return:
      heavier by the weight of where it has been.
      —Rainder Maria Rilke, Dove that ventured outside

      We wanderers are all chafing to break free. To arc across the abyss once again, and land in places foreign and mysterious, and return again changed by where we have been. We feel the firmness of the ground beneath our feet and celebrate the stability of place. But our blessing and our curse is our longing to fly once again.

      Life changes us all, whether in love or travel or rolling the dice on a career path. Our lives are the arches we build between where we launch from and where we land. But landing someplace doesn’t mean you can’t launch yourself somewhere else, again and again, to see what kind of cathedral you can build for yourself. Who said we are only allowed to fly once?

      “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      Arches don’t just float in mid-air. You’ve got to build that foundation to properly launch yourself into the abyss if you want to land on solid ground on the other side (let alone return again). It goes without saying that proper financial and logistical planning are necessary if your arch is to cross a big chasm. But small arches are beautiful too, and don’t require more than a bit of courage to fly.

      Assuming we live to be 80, we’ve all burned 2 1/2% of our lives with COVID. How have we spent that time? Hopefully not locked in fear in our homes, but instead getting vaccinated and finding adventure where we may, while we can. If not then, why not now? How far will your next arch span? Where will you land? If you dare?

    • Our Sum of Moments

      “We are the sum of all the moments in our lives – all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape it or conceal it.” — Thomas Wolfe

      The interesting thing about seeing is that you can’t go back to being oblivious to the world around you. More to the point, you learn to see yourself as you are. And then you spend the rest of your days figuring out what to do about it.

      Figuring out how we got the way we are is a different story, and there are plenty of people who make it their profession to steer you down the path towards enlightenment on this particular question. Personally, I like to leave the past where it lies and focus on the bits I can control now. But there’s no getting around the fact that the sum of our lives brought us to this point. How that fuels the fire in our heart and soul determines where we go from here.

      I went to the wake of a kind soul yesterday, a man who always smiled when I saw him, and built a collection of family and friends who honored him at his passing. I reviewed the obligatory poster boards and digital display on the monitors full of his life memories. This wasn’t the sum of his life, but it was a good sample pack of the highlights. His hopes and dreams passed with him, but the momentum of his life was on display for all to see.

      Seeing ourselves as the sum of our moments, we recognize we’re still collecting. Still changing the story of our lives one memory at a time. Like stamps in a passport that shows where we’ve been, pictures and stories flesh out our past. Each face looking back at you is a part of the whole, and part of your whole, whether the ripple was large or barely perceptible. Each reminds us to move through this life with elegance and intent. To collect our own sum in our time. And share it with the world.

    • Meet Me on Common Ground

      Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
      and rightdoing there is a field.
      I’ll meet you there.

      When the soul lies down in that grass
      the world is too full to talk about.
      — Rumi

      There’s no secret that the world feels more divisive, more aligned against the perceived slights, threats or opinions of another group. But then you read a Rumi poem and see that none of this is new. The divisions are merely perceptions, a game of king of the hill gone wrong.

      It’s so much harder to meet halfway when the stakes feel so high. To find the things that we have in common, the things that unite us in this fragile dance with infinity. We’re all in this together, whether we like it or not.

      Compromise is perceived as weakness by some people on the edges. Their strength, if you want to call it that, comes from the extreme. What do you do with such people? It’s easy to say we’ll meet halfway, but what do you do when you get there and they haven’t budged? Do you cross that halfway line and step to the other side? I think you have to agree to disagree on the point of contention and find another place to meet. We must find common ground. For it’s always there if you look for it.

      The real power lies in numbers. At the heart of it, we’re all humans, dancing alone on the edge of the abyss. Connection is all we have to hold this all together. Step away from the edge, meet me halfway. Maybe not on everything, but the most important thing. Our shared humanity.

    • Dancing to Your Own Beat

      “What and how much had I lost by trying to do what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?” – Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

      You know the kind of dancing I avoid the most? The kind where everyone gets up and does the same thing in a coordinated way. The Hussle, the Electric Slide, the Macarena… you get the idea. And it’s not because I’m especially magnificent doing my own dance moves. I’m a Clydesdale dancing amongst Fillies out there. But I find the group participation dances to be a great time to get another drink.

      We dance with the shortness of life, conforming as we must because we’re social beings and dependent on one another to survive and thrive. But why should we fall in line when we can follow our own path? Why do what’s expected of us in this brief spark of independence before we rejoin infinity?

      The more I recognize the chafing between expectations and personal direction, the more I encourage others to break free and dance to their own beat themselves. Not a celebration of reckless behavior (you can’t be swinging around like a wild man on the dance floor), but a nod to find your own rhythm and way of expressing it. We’ve all lost so much time already, haven’t we? Get out there and dance already. But do it in your own way.

    • Relegating Social Media to the Shelf

      I’ve been actively using a strategy of keeping the things that draw my attention the most just out of reach. I first started doing this with Facebook, or Meta, or whatever they fancy themselves as now. I deleted the app off my phone and only have it on an old iPad that sits quietly amongst some old notebooks on a shelf. I don’t take it with me anywhere, it just sits there like a book on the shelf that I refer to now and then. And two months later I find I don’t think about that platform very often at all.

      Surely I’m missing some posts, some clever banter and the addictive content they recommend to you to keep you on their platform as long as possible. But I don’t have a fear of missing out. Instead I have a quiet mind that can focus on other things. When I do think about it, I’ll pop on, wish people a belated happy birthday, like a few posts and get out of Dodge as quickly as possible. Living with social media in such a way seems to work well.

      It’s worked so well, in fact, that I’ve just done it with Twitter as well. Now, this one was tougher for me. I use Twitter as a news feed, as a source of information I find valuable, and to pick up quotes and poems I might not have seen otherwise from great minds who collect such things. But I found it all too easy to just pick up my phone and scroll. When you find yourself in such a time suck death spiral, your only choice is to pull yourself out or crash to the ground. So Twitter is now relegated to the shelf with Facemeta.

      I know the pushback — these platforms connect us to the world, they bring us joy, they inform… and I’ve bought into each just as quickly as I buy into the belief that having a dram of scotch is okay after a long day of business travel. Life is hard enough as it is, why subtract some harmless joy?

      The answer is that I’m not subtracting it, I’m putting it in it’s place. On the shelf, in a place of honor amongst the books and notebooks I refer to on occasion. Here, it remains valuable as a source of entertainment, information and connection. But it’s not in my hand as I stand in line for a coffee or at the market. Instead I use that boredom time to look around at everyone else staring at their phones, or noticing the people who choose not to succumb to it. People like me.

      Since nature abhors a void, that scrolling time gets filled with other things. More deep reading, more thinking, but mostly more observation and listening to the world around me. Like a plane flying through cloud cover into the brilliant sky above, you don’t know what you’re missing until you break free. And all that other stuff? It’ll be there on the shelf waiting for you when you return.

    • Silent Companions in the Wind

      Look at the flowers, so faithful to what is earthly,
      to whom we lend fate from the very border of fate.
      And if they are sad about how they must wither and die,
      perhaps it is our vocation to be their regret.

      All Things want to fly. Only we are weighed down by desire,
      caught in ourselves and enthralled with our heaviness.
      Oh what consuming, negative teachers we are
      for them, while eternal childhood fills them with grace.

      If someone were to fall into intimate slumber, and slept
      deeply with Things—: how easily he would come
      to a different day, out of the mutual depth.

      Or perhaps he would stay there; and they would blossom and
      praise
      their newest convert, who now is like one of them,
      all those silent companions in the wind of the meadows.
      — Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 14

      I caught glimpses of the sunrise, spectacular and flamboyant, dancing with clouds and still water, on the train from Boston to New York. I lamented the missed opportunity for an Instagram-worthy photo while stifling the urge to pull out my camera phone to give it an attempt. No picture from an iPhone through dirty chatter-proof glass flying across the landscape at 50 miles per hour was going to capture the magic of the moment. So I let it pass, like so many moments, into memory.

      I don’t come often enough to Rilke, who spun his own magic a century ago. I may visit with him more often this year, hopefully not with the overindulgence I’ve displayed with Mary Oliver poems, but… enough. This is a year for magic and becoming reacquainted with the world. For venturing forth and rekindling our eternal childhood.

      We all want to fly. What holds us back but fear and heaviness? Shouldn’t we reach for the sky and dance with our silent companions in the wind? Fragility doesn’t stop nature, though everything has its time. Knowing this, but choosing not to be paralyzed by it, shouldn’t we all climb out of this mutual depth and make these different days?

    • The Forest Knows

      Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
      Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
      And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
      Must ask permission to know it and be known.
      The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
      I have made this place around you.
      If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
      No two trees are the same to Raven.
      No two branches are the same to Wren.
      If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
      You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
      Where you are. You must let it find you.
      — David Wagoner, Lost

      Walk out into the woods in silence, listening to the trees around you, and you’ll know the truth. Climb up high into the mountains, well above the trees, and hear the whisper in the wind. You’ll hear it up there too. Sail out beyond the sight of land, out where the swells make you feel small and inadequate. Hear the swish of water under the hull, the waves curl and splash away in salty celebration as you see your place in this world. The answers are out there, waiting for you to listen.

      We surround ourselves with the buzz of distraction, the white noise of modern life, to avoid hearing the silent call that urges us to follow. It’s a tempting mistress, this Siren, and drives so many to the rocks of conformity. Fall in line! Do your job! Stay on point! Bide your time!

      Time is irrelevant in the universe. Trees and mountains and the sea don’t mark time, they dance with infinity. Don’t you think, should we be so bold, that we should too?