Alexandersmap

    Month: November 2022

    • Imagining What’s Next

      “Life is a blank canvas, and you need to throw all the paint on it you can.” ― Danny Kaye

      We’ve all seen enough musicians creating songs out of thin air to know there’s something to the process of fiddling around. We’ve seen cooking shows where a jumble of random ingredients are turned into an incredible plate. We’ve all seen improvisation where the cast builds from whatever cue they were left with and creates magic with it. This figuring it out with what we’ve got as we do it is part of the creative process, yet we don’t always give ourselves the same license to do just that. We simply never begin.

      Some days you look at the blank canvas and go blank yourself. Some days you can throw everything you’ve got in yourself at it. The trick is to just begin. and be open enough to let what’s next flow out of you. We shouldn’t get so caught up in the imaging what’s next part. We ought to just start, awkwardly perhaps, but still a start. And do it with gusto. We forget we can paint over mistakes. We can delete entire scenes. We can move on and start anew. Life demands only the start. The next can change as we do.

      Beginning with the finished work in mind may seem the logical starting point, like setting your destination into the GPS. But a creative life doesn’t always work that way. When we face the blank canvas in art and writing and building a new life a step away from our old life, sometimes simply working with whatever ingredients we have in our personal pantry and figuring it out as we go along is our way past blank. Do the work enough and we may just realize that blankness is nothing but a point of progression towards what’s next.

    • See the Signs and Know Their Meaning

      “Two students had studied for many years with a wise old master. One day the master said to them, “Students, the time has come for you to go out into the world. Your life there will be felicitous if you find in it all things shining.” The students left the master with a mixture of sadness and excitement, and each of them went a separate way. Many years later they met up by chance. They were happy to see one another again, and each was excited to learn how the other’s life had gone. Said the first to the second, glumly, “I have learned to see many shining things in the world, but alas I remain unhappy. For I also find many sad and disappointing things, and I feel I have failed to heed the master’s advice. Perhaps I will never be filled with happiness and joy, because I am simply unable to find all things shining.” Said the second to the first, radiant with happiness, “All things are not shining, but all the shining things are.” — Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age

      All Things Shining, linked above, is a heavy lift in places. When you wade deeply into western literature with a heavy emphasis on Homer, Dante, Jesus and Melville’s Moby Dick, you’re going for a deep dive. Nobody said delving into nihilism, polytheism, and monotheism would be a page turner. I’m the better for having read it, but earned the finish that I’ve just given you freely. For it ended with this delightful epilogue, casting a glow that lingers.

      We may live a life full of routine and tedium, nastiness and fear of the unknown. We may also live a full life overflowing with ritual and wonder, generosity and openness. The lens we view the world through matters greatly in determining how full this brief dance really is. Some of my closest acquaintances choose to complain about everything in their life. They aren’t leaving a trail of joy behind them. Other acquaintances are relentlessly optimistic about the world and their place in it. They lift the room with their presence. Surely, not everything is wonderful, but many things are. What do we focus on?

      These are the days you might fill with laughter until you break
      These days you might feel a shaft of light
      Make its way across your face
      And when you do you’ll know how it was meant to be
      See the signs and know their meaning
      It’s true
      You’ll know how it was meant to be
      Hear the signs and know they’re speaking to you, to you
      — 10,000 Maniacs, These Are Days

      These are days we’ll remember. Focusing on the joyful bits isn’t an escape from the harshness of the world, it’s an acknowledgement that there’s two sides to the coin in life. This isn’t putting our head in the sand, for joy coexists with sad and disappointing in this world. We can fixate on unrelenting misery and darkness, or flip the coin and give our attention to all the shining things in this lifetime. The choice has always been ours.

    • Avoiding Casual Disbelievers

      “Always remember this: whenever you have thought long and hard about a new idea or plan of action, working out lots of details and preparing for all sorts of contingencies, and you first tell someone else about it, they are hearing it for the first time. It will be nearly impossible for any newly informed person to be as enthusiastic or as confident as you are. And it’s natural for your own confidence level, like water running downhill, to settle at the lowest point nearby. That’s why it is so important to be very careful about how you share your plans with others, and limit your exposure to the negative thinking and negative comments casual disbelievers can produce.” ― Tom Morris, True Success: A New Philosophy of Excellence

      As we become more aware of the world and the influence those around us have on our life, we learn to stop saying what we’re going to do and start showing what we’ve done. It’s far better to simply begin working towards our goal than to have our hopes and dreams questioned by well-meaning but casual disbelievers. The thing is, plans aren’t reckless when they’re well thought out. They may present risks, but the risk of not doing something is also present. Which is more corrosive to our lives long term? What might have been, of course. So take the leap while there’s still time. Just be selective about when we tell someone we’re leaping.

      We are the average of the five people we spend the most time with, Jim Rohn once said, and we ought to be very selective about who those five people are. In turn, to become part of the five people someone we aspire to be more like associates with the most, we’ve got to earn that place at their table. So does everyone else. In this way we all grow.

      The alternative of growth is to settle. There’s no magic in settling in life, it’s where dreams go to die a slow death, strangled by excuses and inaction. That’s not us, friends. We must take one small step today towards our plan of action, and then another. Incremental growth is still growth. What seems insignificant is extraordinary over time, for momentum comes through small habits consistently done.

      “All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.” ― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

      I have a friend, currently sailing around the world, who frequently teases me in the comments section of this blog about focusing on productivity instead of breaking free from my career and doing what he’s doing. Ironically, he’s one of the most productive people I know, and is sailing at this very moment precisely because his productivity led him to this moment, and carries him in subsequent moments. We are where we are because the sum of our actions demonstrated that our individual plan, conceived not so very long ago as bold and reckless, brought us here. Knowing that, how do we not conceive even bolder plans for our future?

      Be bold today. Just be selective in who you tell about it. Let’s make it our secret and just show them later what we’ve quietly, relentlessly, done with our time.

    • The Beautiful Changes

      One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
      The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
      On water; it glides
      So from the walker, it turns
      Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
      Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

      The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
      By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;
      As a mantis, arranged
      On a green leaf, grows
      Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
      Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

      Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
      They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
      In such kind ways,
      Wishing ever to sunder
      Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
      For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
      — Richard Wilbur, The Beautiful Changes

      Emotionally, logically even, I’ve come back to my home recently. I never left, really, but it feels more like home as we’ve spruced up the place during the pandemic. We strayed in our minds a few times, seeking more adventurous living, yet we always return to this place. That blanket of familiar is comforting, even as it acts as a foundation for more adventurous acts. Blankets might feel suffocating at times, if we feel that our whole life is encumbered beneath. But isn’t that blanket simply our identity? We are what we surround ourselves with. That in turn and time either feels right or it doesn’t. The choice was ours all along. And so it will be.

      We each enter into long relationships that evolve over time. Live with someone for a few decades and you join the club of understanding. The same can be said for the very place we live as well. The landscape changes as the community changes. The very homes we live in change too, as things and people and pets come and go from our lives, and as we ourselves grow older. Life is change. Change can be untenable or wonderful, sometimes at the very same time.

      We each write our stories, choosing what to add or edit out of that hero’s journey. Characters come and go, the scenes change, so too does the author. Everything changes over time, and we live with these changes or reject them. To think we can control anything but our reaction to change is folly. But we can wrap ourselves in our identity, and let this be our guide as we face whatever comes next. Sometimes that next is beautiful.

    • Raising Wonderful

      “Seems to me it ain’t the world that’s so bad but what we’re doing to it, and all I’m saying is: see what a wonderful world it would be if only we’d give it a chance. Love, baby – love. That’s the secret.” — Louis Armstrong

      I hear babies cry
      I watch them grow
      They’ll learn much more
      Than I’ll ever know
      And I think to myself
      What a wonderful world
      — Louis Armstrong, What a Wonderful World (Lyrics: Bob Thiele, George Douglas, George Weiss)

      This morning I dropped my daughter off at the airport. She’s back to California to build her dream out there. My son headed back even sooner, working the day after Thanksgiving and doing what must be done to make the most of his career. That’s what you do with dreams: you reach for them wherever they are and with all you have.

      And what of those who watch them go? We know the drill. This is what you do when you’re a parent. We raise them, love them and teach them about the world, and then let ’em fly on their own. Now and then they fly back for a few days and you see how much they’ve grown. With both of my children, I see young adults with the acumen do so much more with their chosen paths than I have with mine, and that pleases me.

      I have one ace up my sleeve, of course. I was half of the team that raised two great kids. That may not seem like a lot in this complicated world, but when we reach the end of the line and we consider the best things we’ve done in our lives, shouldn’t we lead with love? The question we ought to ask ourselves daily is, am I raising hell or raising wonderful? Raising hell may sound like fun, but it leaves a big mess that someone has to clean up. Raising wonderful pays love forward. If there’s one thing this world could use more of, it’s love, don’t you think?

    • The Point of Intersection

      “When two or more lines meet at a common point, they are known as intersecting lines. The point at which they cross each other is known as the point of intersection.” — Cuemath

      Do you believe in coincidence? Last week while driving north from New York I saw a billboard for Heaven’s Door American whiskey, which was co-created by Bob Dylan. Literally the next song on the radio was Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, which was either algorithm trickery applied to SiriusXM for the benefit of the few drivers listening to that exact channel in that exact spot at that exact time, or more likely, coincidence. It was a notable (to me) moment on an otherwise normal drive.

      A few weeks back, while hiking in the White Mountains, I happened to look up at the exact moment the two sons of a close friend were descending from Mount Monroe. I recall seeing them out of the corner of my eye on the summit, but didn’t register that these were two people I knew quite well until I lingered a beat long enough chatting with another hiker to see them at that moment. This was our point of intersection on our individual trips around the sun.

      We all have these crossing points in our lives, running into someone we haven’t seen in years at a seemingly random place. We also have the just-misses, where we realize later that we were at the same place as someone else but never saw each other. Do we apply special meaning to one event, and another to the non-event? What do we make of coincidence when we bump into it?

      One way we might see it is to look at a trail map. Each trail eventually intersects with several others as it meanders on its way. Perhaps the individual trails bring you to entirely different places, but for that brief moment they’re the very same place on their point of intersection. Another step on either trail and that point is behind you, but if particularly notable we can still recall it for the rest of our hike. Meaning is derived not from the intersection but in what we feel about it in the moment.

      Each of us is charting our course through our individual lives, with a definite starting point and an uncertain end point. Our paths intersect at frequent or infrequent moments entirely based on fate. I once knew a married couple who met by chance as the future husband was moving a mattress and rested a beat longer than he might have on the sidewalk. The future wife made a comment and that point of intersection turned into the same path for the two of them. For them, that point of intersection became a starting point. I met that couple exactly once in my lifetime, and I don’t recall their names, only the story and one other thing: They were big Bob Dylan fans and even used one of his songs as their wedding song. I wonder what ever happened to them, but I bet I know what their favorite whiskey is.

    • Gratitude and Love

      “Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.“ — Ralph Waldo Emerson

      We often forget how blessed we are. Counting blessings ought to be a daily activity. I suppose it is for some of us, while the rest of us are too busy juggling to linger with gratitude. Experts on such things as happiness suggest writing down what you’re grateful for at the end of each day. I’n not so bold as to call myself an expert on living happily, I just try to do it. It does seem logical that if we are what we focus on, focusing our attention on gratitude and the blessings in our lives surely seems more delightful than focusing on what’s missing. Acknowledge both; dwell in joy.

      Americans have this holiday of holidays: Thanksgiving. Some people aren’t really focused on thanks and gratitude on Thanksgiving, they’re just trying to pull of the logistics of the day. But this is the very best holiday of them all for many of us—not because of the day drinking and heaping plates of everything, but because we come together with the people we love the most. What’s lost on some Americans as we celebrate this coming together as family business is that much of the world does this gratitude and love thing every day of the year.

      Gratitude and love fill a void otherwise open to darker forces. Happy doesn’t need Thanksgiving, but giving thanks seems to lead towards happy. It’s a funny twist on words, I suppose, but also a more fulfilling way of living in this complicated and tragic world. A recipe for happiness, if you will. So whether you celebrate this particular holiday or not, we’re sending a nice helping of love, from our table to yours.

    • The Payoff

      “The Muse does not count hours. She counts commitment. It is possible to be one hundred percent committed ten percent of the time. The goddess understands.” — Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

      Every morning I write for an hour or two, publish this blog, store a few collected bits for another day, and mentally flip the switch back to active participant in the rest of my life. That blog, Alexandersmap.com, is admittedly clunky, heavy on WordPress coding that I don’t really want to understand, and probably the opposite of cool. It’s the equivalent of a DIY project at home, that professionals politely nod and smile at when you invite them over. I can only hope for retro vibes if I hold out long enough.

      I’ve been slowly slogging through three books of philosophy. They’re heavy because they aren’t page turners, not really, though each is filling in the blanks for me in a life mostly focused on not wrestling with philosophical questions. We get busy, don’t we? But some things are worth our time and effort. I read a few pages of each book each morning, and attempt the same at night. I’m locally famous for my night reading, and acknowledge that it’s not my most effective time to wrestle with heavy books. Still, I persist.

      The thing is, we know the small habits that make up our lives pay off in the end, but there are days when we wonder if it’s worth the effort at all. Incremental progress is hard to get excited about. We all want the big payoff when we do something important to us, but forget sometimes that the payoff is who we are gradually becoming in the process of doing the work.

    • Attention is Vitality

      “Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.” ― Susan Sontag

      Please take a moment and re-read the quote above, but in the voice of a close friend or loved one who’s a bit exacerbated with you for not doing this the last time they reminded you to be more vigorous with this business of living. Vigorous in a “lust for life” way. Vigorous in a “decide what to be and go be it” way. What we pay attention to matters. We must choose to rise above mundane.

      Each of us is wrestling with something, likely amplified by the madness in the world these last several years. What drowns out that voice in the back of our head more than action? We all know the fable of the frog and boiling water (Put a frog in a pot of boiling water and it will leap out. Put that frog in cold water gradually heated and it will boil to death). The moral of the story seems obvious, but what are we currently boiling in ourselves?

      We must shake ourselves loose from the belief that we’re unable to change our circumstances. We must pay attention and get to the living part of our story. Get out of the damned pot! Be clenched! Be curious! Be eager!

    • Stepping onto the Mastodon Path

      Admittedly, social media can be a dark place, pretending to be about community and connection, but really just an echo chamber of accusation, antagonism and positioning. It’s not a quiet conversation with friends sharing stories and pictures, yet that’s what we all signed up for. Or, if we’re being honest, was it to become an influencer? Being a voice of moderation doesn’t earn you followers, you must shout louder than the rest to get attention. And herein lies the problem.

      Alternatively, we might step away. Find a place that makes more sense. Wade into the waters of something new and see how it feels. To be fully alive means to experience change and make the most of it. Change isn’t so bad, it’s how we react to the possibility of change that scares people. We each ought to decide what to be and go be it.

      This blog is now linked to a Mastodon account. You can still find it on Twitter if you want to, at least until that platform implodes and sinks. That’s unlikely though, isn’t it? Too many people rely on doing the same easy thing every day. But diversifying the distribution of this blog seems logical to this writer. If nothing else, I’m calling my own bluff and embracing the unknown. And it was surely unfamiliar territory. At first glance, Mastodon was confusing. Blogging once felt confusing too. Going to a new job once felt confusing. There are plenty of blogs and YouTube videos to help make sense of it all.

      After lingering with it a few days, it seems a lonely place, comparatively, to Twitter or Facebook. Loneliness is also good for us, sometimes. It means we’re building something new, and eventually, together. Consider it an adventure. Isn’t it so? Like starting something new. That loneliness is a sign that we’ve stepped off the old block and are entering the wilderness. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of elbow room while we sort things out. The pioneers get all the streets named after them.

      Follow me on Mastodon, if you’d like. Currently @nhcarmichael@universeodon.com unless another server or instance tempts me. See what I mean? Different. But who wants the same thing all the time anyway? Let’s jump in, shall we?