Alexandersmap

    Month: March 2023

    • The Mind of the Restless Spirit

      “Do not be deceived! The busiest people harbor the greatest weariness, their restlessness is weakness—they no longer have the capacity for waiting and idleness.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

      I think about being idle, but rarely find myself able to contain my restlessness. If busy is a weakness then I confess to being weak. For me, being active in my days is the only way to survive. Like a shark, I suppose, I need forward motion.

      Naturally, I don’t believe that forward motion is weakness; merely the bold act of being alive. Sitting still and thinking may feel like idleness, but to me it feels like a lost opportunity. Doesn’t that time belong to reading or writing, or maybe weeding the garden? Idleness feels like active avoidance to me. There’s so very much to do in this brief lifetime! So yes, call me weak.

      Writing this blog fills idle time. Time I might use for other things like sitting still and meditating. Maybe quietly sipping a cup of tea and contemplating existentialism. To be fair to Nietzsche, busy isn’t the intent, for busy for the sake of busy truly is folly. Productive is really the point. Give me an hour and I’ll do my best to dance with it. Productive makes the world go ’round, I believe.

      Someday we all find idle. But what will we do with now? Such is the mind of the restless spirit.

    • When I Reach It

      “I want to risk hitting my head on the ceiling of my talent. I want to really test it out and say, ‘Okay, you’re not that good. You just reached the level here.’ I don’t ever want to fail, but I want to risk failure every time out of the gate.” — Quentin Tarantino

      As we climb towards our potential, it often feels as if we’re meeting our limitations head-on. The choice in these moments is to either fight through them or retreat towards something less than our best. We’ve all done both, remembering moments of truth where we rose to meet it and moments when we feel we fell short. Each offers a lesson, don’t you think?

      The past being the past, the only thing we can do with it is to learn how to meet the next moment. Will we lean into it or stumble backwards? Developing a bias towards action only occurs through action. Sometimes that action is a baby step, sometimes it’s a leap. The trick is to seek consistent improvement and find our limits.

      I’m no Tarantino, but I’ve seen progress in my own life through confronting my limitations and pushing on anyway. Perhaps someday I’ll reach excellence and mastery, but more likely than not I’ll just be better than I was yesterday. And maybe that will be enough for that day. I’ll let you know when I reach it.

    • Active Influence

      “You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.” — Jim Rohn

      If we operate with a high level of agency, we are active influencers in our days. When we operate with low agency, conversely, we feel we have no control over what happens to us. Extraordinary events aside, we each have more control than we might believe. We each have a say in how our lives go. But it always begins with reflection and a clear idea of who we want to be. Decide what to be and go be it, as the song goes. This is a high agency attitude, and must be followed with an action chaser. For if not now, then when?

      We must choose to be active participants. We must choose high agency. To relinquish control of our lives to others would be an individual tragedy. The world doesn’t need another person with no direction, no purpose, no zest for life. The world needs active influencers building positive outcomes.

    • Playing the Right Game

      “The person who gets 1 shot needs everything to go right.
      The person who gets 1000 shots is going to score at some point.
      Find a way to play the game that ensures you get a lot of shots.”
      — @JamesClear

      “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” — Wayne Gretzky

      Too many of us won’t take the shot. We settle for the pass instead. There’s nothing wrong with a pass now and then, for sometimes it’s just not the right shot to take in the moment. But action and inaction are both habits. We must learn to act boldly when we see our shot.

      It’s easy to talk of action, but tougher to summon up the courage to act. At least in the beginning, until we become accustomed to boldness. The trick is to put ourselves in the right game, with the right players, where action is both accepted and expected. When we look around at the players around us, in the game we’re currently playing, we ought to ask ourselves, is this the right game for me?

      The answer to that question is a prompt for action. Be bold in that moment. Take the shot. Or find another game. There is no overtime.

    • The Call of the Wild

      “Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.”
      ― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

      Finishing my first cup of coffee, I heard the distinctive honk of a skein of geese. Quickly removing myself from the comfort of the moment, I caught the geese circling back around the woods and turn towards a local pond. The rising sun caught them in flight, illuminating their bodies in the red light of dawn. They soon disappeared behind the roofline and the honks faded away as I walked back into the warmth of the nest.

      We know deep down whether we were meant to be wild things or creatures of comfort. The world wants very much for us to seek comfort, to leave those crazy dreams well enough alone and celebrate the nest—to turn back towards the fire. Maybe a little part of us feels this too. So why are we so drawn to wild things? What is it that we seek?

      I believe it’s vitality. Vitality bursts out of us, it isn’t buried in the mundane. It is not another cup of coffee to get through the hour, or a nightcap to wash away the day. To be fully alive we must step out of ourselves and be uncomfortable. Test limits and stretch to new places. To do otherwise is to avoid a full and vibrant life.

      “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” — Virginia Woolf

      Will we be drawn to the Siren’s call to the rocks or to the call of the wild? One calls us to accept what always was until our end, the other calls us to fly. We ought to ask ourselves, is inertia comfort in disguise, and vitality masked by the judgement of imprudence? We are, each of us, on a hero’s journey, listening for our calling. What call will we turn towards?

    • A Snowball Walk in the Woods

      There are winters when it seem to snow, relentlessly, mercilessly, every day. The types of winters that wiped out half of the pilgrims on the Mayflower. “Hungry? Eat more snow!” kind of winters. This was not that kind of winter in New England. And now that we’re well into March, when the sun is higher and the snow melts quickly, it seems clear that opportunities to celebrate winter are drawing to a close.

      Blame it on seasonal variability or jet streams run askew or climate change, whatever the reason, the opportunities to fly across snow on skis or snowshoes wasn’t quite available locally. None of that quick lunch hour snowshoe hiking presented itself this year in southern New Hampshire. And truthfully, I missed it. When friends invited me to hike up north after a heavy snowfall on Saturday, I leaned in towards it but pivoted back to home. I wanted to savor the local trails instead. It turned out to be a sound decision.

      Driving over to a local town forest, I expected the parking lot to be jammed full of fellow snow lovers. Instead, I found it relatively quiet. Tracks indicated others had set off on snowshoes, while a few chose to post-hole their way through the snow, wrecking the pristine trail. This would prove a problem on the wooded trails, but in the fields I simply flew off on my snowshoes to break my own trail. After all, this was what I missed most this winter—flying atop unbroken snow.

      It proved to be as delightful as I’d hoped it would be, but already the sun was up and working on the snow pack. The trees began dropping snowballs, often with small branches, which dampened my enthusiasm for the wooded trails. The fields were better, and I thumped my way around in earnest, seeking that flying feeling until I was breathless. Stopping for a rest, I looked around and listened. Nothing but snowballs falling in the woods. Not a single human voice, or dog barking, or even a car far off in the distance. Just a clydesdale in snow, appreciating the briefness of the moment. We never know if we might have another opportunity to do something. A winter like this one teaches you to make the most of the moment before it melts away.

      A rare opportunity to fly over snow

    • The Book Stack

      “A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

      “The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity…” — A. Edward Newton

      I wrestle with books. I love reading, and stack more books than I ought to into my life. Settling down with a great book is one of my favorite activities, so why do I pile on more than I can possibly get to? The stack of books taunt me. Even as I write this I can see them in the periphery, mocking my use of time when it doesn’t involve them.

      We live in a time where we’re blessed with abundance in everything around us, and cursed with the same scarcity of time. We must be prudent in what we add to the pile, and what we edit out. Reading is just another experience in a brief life that contributes to its richness and meaning. The rules of good nutrition apply. Beyond the required reading of a formal education, we get to choose our information diet. But we also then live with the consequences. When we use our reading time wisely we enhance living substantially.

      Imagine my delight when my Twitter feed offered up the two quotes above within a few days of one another to perfectly summarize my… situation. We live an impossibly short life for the sheer number of books available for us to read, and then pile on the distractions of life (like Twitter), and how are we ever to get to everything we want to read? The very act of writing this blog is stealing time from reading, even as writing fuels my hunger to read more. Which experience is more valuable in the moment? Isn’t life a quest to find balance between what we do and what we consume?

      And therein lies the answer; reading is just another form of collecting experiences that build a life. As with other experiences, we are what we prioritize. We can’t do everything, but we can certainly do the most important things. So it is with reading. It’s not just a stack of books and an infinite jumble of words, it’s the building blocks carrying us higher and higher towards a richer perspective and broader potential. It’s ours to realize, or to leave on the shelf.

    • Bury Regret

      “I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.” — D. H. Lawrence

      D. H. Lawrence, his hand forced by a society that wasn’t quite ready for what he had to say, was a traveler. One could safely say he had an adventurous spirit. That his ashes were eventually scattered in the sea to freely roam the world seems poetic in the end.

      Recently I’ve opted out of two adventures that didn’t seem prudent at the time. I wonder, even now, what the return shall be on my investment in practicality? A stack of still more practical days thereafter? I should think a collection of passport stamps, photographs and memories would be the more sound investment.

      D.H. died at 44, a young man still, not so very full of an old man’s regrets. The lesson, from he and all who came before us, remains starkly clear. The graveyard is full of unresolved regret. We the living, must clear our minds of all that we might regret later by living a full life today. Never nihilism, for meaning and purpose are our pursuit, but surely embracing richer experience. We regret that which remains unfulfilled. Bury regret in favor of a full life today.

    • Everywhere

      “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” ― Susan Sontag

      What’s next? Where to? These are things the earnest world traveller considers in between days. Just back from one country, scheming the next, what meets the strict budget of time and money? The world is calling, and life is so very short. Yet we simply can’t be everywhere.

      What of here? Don’t we give place short shrift when we look to the world with wanderlust? Life is presence. Life is right here, wherever we find ourselves, not everywhere all at once. We are what we pay attention to.

      The thing is, we each reconcile the possible with the probable. We see the time flying by, see people around us passing away or saddled with restrictive illness, and we wonder why we aren’t out there meeting the universe while there’s time. What are we to do?

      Distraction is merely comparison run amuck. It’s what the Buddhists call the monkey mind. We live in a noisy world, full of distraction and the temptation of what might be next. We fixate on what we don’t have instead of celebrating what we are blessed with. Our lives are right here, right now. It’s the universe offering us the moment. We dishonor the gift when we reject it for the next one.

      Celebrate here and now. Plan for there and then. Everywhere may arrive in time, in its time. Here is where it’s at, for now.

    • Stories in Time

      Now through the white orchard my little dog
      romps, breaking the new snow
      with wild feet.
      Running here running there, excited,
      hardly able to, stop, he leaps, he spins
      until the white snow is written upon
      in large, exuberant letters,
      a long sentence, expressing
      the pleasures of the body in this world.
      Oh, I could not have said it better
      myself.
      — Mary Oliver, The Storm

      A rafter of wild turkey hens took up residence in the woods prior to the last snowfall. Likely anticipating the snow better than this human could, they opted for the scattered certainty of fallen birdseed from the feeders over the starkness of scratching out a next meal from the deep blanket of fresh snow. Who can blame them? Without a dog for longer than I care to think about, a turkey might find the backyard a relative paradise. This turkey nurtured the land to be just so, for children who have long since migrated. The tracks across the snow break up the blanket as children and Bodhi once did, and I quietly celebrate the contribution to my own tracks.

      Perhaps it’s time to welcome another dog to write its own story in time. Life goes one. We bring to it what we choose.