Alexandersmap

    Month: May 2024

    • About Time

      ‘In headaches and in worry
      Vaguely life leaks away,
      And Time will have his fancy
      To-morrow or to-day.
      — W. H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening

      I tend to track time differently than I once did. Now I measure time by the length of my hair or fingernails (weeks versus days since my last trim). I don’t generally look at the clock before calling it a night, for what does time have to do with how tired we feel? Nor do I set an alarm to awaken, I simply wake up. In many ways, I woke up years ago to the folly of time, even if I still follow the rules and show up early (as any civilized adult ought to aspire to). In this way, you might say my relationship with time is complicated.

      When we see time for what it is, something inside us shifts. We become collectors of experiences and embracers of moments rather than maximizers of minutes on the schedule. For all my focus on productivity, at the end of the day I only care that I’ve done the essential few things that move the chains forward for me in the direction I wish to go. The rest float away like all the other past initiatives.

      Writing every day forced me to become an efficient writer. There’s no time to waste on things like writer’s block when you must ship the work and get on to other things. Similarly, other things I do every day become automatic for me, that I may check the box and move on to other things. If that sounds transactional, well, so be it, but it doesn’t mean it’s not the most important thing for me in those moments doing it. When we give something our complete attention for the time necessary to complete it, we may surprise ourselves at just how quickly we can do the work.

      One of the people who works for me was stuck on a presentation he had to deliver to the team, simply overwhelmed by how to structure a slide deck and what to talk about. After being his sounding board for all the built-up stress and despair over the unfairness of having to do this in the first place, I made the deck for him in 30 minutes and quietly sent it to him to personalize in his own way, that he might focus on more important things than a peer presentation. When we get wrapped around the pole on the details of things that aren’t all that important in the end, we waste our time. If experience has taught me anything, it’s to quickly create solutions to problems that I may go back to spending time on more important things. Spending time on my employee wasn’t a waste of my own time, it was an investment in his. I’ll take that trade-off.

      The thing is, I recognize the place that he’s in now in his life. Ten years younger than me, with family obligations that can overwhelm you when you’re just trying to get through the day—I’ve been there, done that. My doing his homework for him wasn’t meant to take him off the hook so much as to show him a clearer future. My priority is to develop an employee who can assess the nature of a commitment and allocate the appropriate amount of focus on it, that he may move on to more essential things. Looking back, I’m sure someone did the same for me once upon a time.

      Life always comes back to our operating system. When we ground ourselves in stoicism, we know that time flies (tempus fugit) and we must therefore seize the day (carpe diem). There’s no time to waste on how we feel about the matter. In the end, the quality of our life is measured in how effective we are at navigating the small things that we may accomplish the big things. What’s bigger for us than using our brief time on this earth on things that matter most?

    • Finding So Good

      “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” — Steve Martin

      We’re into graduation season once again, so Steve Martin’s advice seems to come up more frequently now than at other times of the year. It’s great advice: get exceptionally good at anything and people will naturally be drawn to you to do the thing you’re really good at. Be average and swim in the pool of mediocrity hoping to stay afloat. The choice seems obvious!

      The trick is to get really good at something that enough people want. If you make the world’s best grilled cheese sandwich, people will line up to try it and post pictures to prove they were there to savor it. If you’re the best in the world at selling wooden pencils, you may scrape out a modest living but every day is a struggle to make the pencil relevant again to people who long ago moved on to typing and signing with a pen. We must surf the edge of relevancy in our choice for so good.

      I post this on a Monday—how many of us are excited about that thing we’re really good at? Does it move the chains forward in a world that is increasingly bickering about what the rules are? When we one day retire from the career we’ve built for ourselves, will our peers say there will never be another quite like us, or will the next person up quietly slip into our role and adjust our old chair to fit? Seen in that light, have we chosen the right thing to be so good at?

      The thing is, there’s still today to be exceptional and to try a different path. We may choose to be an exceptional parent or soccer coach or gardener or blogger first. We may choose to write our own rules about what so good means to us and those most important to us in our lives. That may not make us famous for our grilled cheese sandwiches, but perhaps locally famous within the circle of souls who complete our world. Fame and money can’t buy you the love of your family and friends, only transactional attention. Transactions are the opposite of engagement. Who get’s ignored in this world when the transaction is complete? Our aim ought to be more staying power than a family photo for the Christmas card.

      We are average at most things we do in life, and if we choose wisely and invest enough skill and attention to it, really good at a very short number of things. A guy like Steve Martin chose to be really good at comedy, acting, playing the banjo and writing. I’d bet that he’s got a great family life too. That requires a lot of focused energy on one thing at a time, but he’s done it. We can look at people in history with a similar track—Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo de Vinci both come to mind—who pull this off. These are exceptional lives that rise above the average.

      So what of us? We may not be graduating this month and posting pictures with proud parents, but we are beginning again in whatever path we’ve chosen. We ought to listen to the call to greatness and choose what will define this next stage of our own lives. To ignore it would be a waste.

    • The Splendid and Meaningful

      “This is a brief life, but in its brevity it offers us some splendid moments, some meaningful adventures.” — Rudyard Kipling, Kim

      “As each day arises, welcome it as the very best day of all, and make it your own possession. We must seize what flees.” — Seneca

      Lately I’ve had a good run of splendid days. Not every day, mind you, but surely enough to make the year memorable when you reflect upon the sum. These are days we’ll remember—and so we must remember to live with this in mind. Be bold while we have the currency of health, wealth or time to do something about it. Most of us will never have all three at the same time, but chances are we’ll have one or two in abundance at any singular moment in our lives. We must use this currency wisely.

      I’ve been known to post a lot of pictures of whatever adventure I happen to be on on my social media timeline. Perhaps there’s too much of a good thing, but for me it’s about capturing the essence of the moment at hand in the best way available to me at the time. Images and words are the best way for me. If I overshare I do it with two people in mind: the one who can’t do the adventure I’m doing for lack of available currency (again, not always financial) and the one who chooses not to spend the currency they have in the moment. For the former I’m bringing them along on the adventure, but for the latter I’m hoping to shake them loose from their frugality before their currency is gone forever.

      I’ve had the opportunity to travel with people who have lost the currency of health and it always makes an impression on me. Did they simply wait too long or are they giving it their best shot with the currency they have left? The answer means a great deal to the outcome. We must know our limitations but be unafraid to stretch beyond our comfort zone. The people I shake my head in disbelief at are those who defer their lives beyond the limits of their available currency. Do it now! There is no tomorrow when the well runs dry.

      The last couple of days I’ve been sequestered with a book, my bride and our dog for a soggy weekend. The currency being spent is time, and I’ve delighted in the long walks and chapters of reading completed simply because I had the time available to do them. Splendid moments don’t have to be expensive or exclusive, but they ought to be meaningful to be worthy of the currency spent on them. We must remember to seize what flees.

      Just another sunset, or blessed with another sunset? Attitude is everything.

    • Tell About It

      Instructions for living a life:
      Pay attention.
      Be astonished.
      Tell about it.
      — Mary Oliver, Sometimes

      “If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. This forces you to look, to be aware, to replenish.” — Paul Arden

      Writing is simply a practice for tracking and amplifying progress in this bold act of becoming what’s next. There are no advertisements or subscription fees or hints to go buy whatever it is I’m selling that day. There’s simply a trail of breadcrumbs in the form of a daily blog for those inclined to follow along to see what this fool is up to now.

      More than that, it serves as a vehicle for sharing my attention and awareness and growth when it would be easier perhaps to just consume my share and leave the words for others. Who really has time to follow yet another blogger in this crazy world anyway? Viewed as a daily ritual leading to self-improvement and a greater awareness of my place in this world gets me closer to why. But it’s more than that, for wouldn’t a journal serve the same purpose? No, there’s something in the act of sharing everything that opens up the mind to receive more.

      To live and then to tell about what we’ve encountered along the way is to expand our lives beyond ourselves—beyond our time and place and circle of trust, and connect with some soul who may never know you but for these words. Like the tide ebbing and then flowing again, we are refreshed, alive and connected with the rest of the universe as soon as we click publish. We owe it to ourselves to have something to say in that moment. That each post may just be our last implores us to do our best with it. Living with urgency brings vibrancy to the otherwise mundane possibility of another today (sort of like yesterday). Fully aware and ready to share what we see with others forces our senses open. To find something new to be astonished about today seems a lovely way to move through a life, don’t you think?

    • Haven’t Found Right Yet

      “Being right is based upon knowledge and experience and is often provable. Knowledge comes from the past, so it’s safe. It is also out of date. It’s the opposite of originality… Experience is the opposite of being creative. If you can prove you’re right you’re set in concrete. You cannot move with the times or with other people. Being right is also boring. Your mind is closed. You are not open to new ideas. You are rooted in your own rightness, which is arrogant… it’s wrong to be right, because people who are right are rooted in the past, rigid-minded, dull and smug. There’s no talking to them.” — Paul Arden, It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be

      It takes an advertising person to call it like it is, and Arden is certainly that. I read all sorts of books just to get a different perspective than my own. Arden sold me on his book with the subtitle: “The world’s best-selling book by Paul Arden”, which is pretty clever (for who can argue the point?) and likely sold a few extra copies to people like me who appreciate a good spin of words. It’s not a heavy lift by any means, but there are a few insights like the one above that make it worth the quick read.

      The takeaway here is that holding on to our rightness is suffocating our potential to become something more than who we are now. If we aren’t currently masters of our craft, whatever that is, then we likely haven’t found right just yet (believing we have is simply keeping us from ever reaching it). Looking at the crafts we desire to master with a clear eye, which have we come closest to reaching mastery in? Put another way, if good is the enemy of great, what have we simply settled into good enough at? We owe it to ourselves to stop posturing right all the time and make more mistakes. Good enough is a trap.

      The truth of the matter is, we never quite master anything in our lifetimes, even as we aspire to excellence (Arete). Good enough is often all most people want for themselves, me included. But arete whispers in the quiet moments, challenging the status quo. We must stop dwelling on how right we believe we are to have arrived here and dare to make mistakes more often. Otherwise, we’ll remain in a rut that feels attractive for its familiarity but is simply a destination with no end. We’ll never find excellence in a rut, we must climb up to reach it.

      Carpe diem already.

    • To Love Many Things

      “But I cannot help thinking that the best way of knowing God is to love many things. Love this friend, this person, this thing, whatever you like, and you will be on the right road to understanding Him better, that is what I keep telling myself. But you must love with a sublime, genuine, profound sympathy, with devotion, with intelligence, and you must try all the time to understand Him more, better and yet more. That will lead to God, that will lead to an unshakeable faith.” — Vincent van Gogh, Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh

      There are miracles dancing just outside the door in the morning drizzle. I know this to be true because I encountered them when I walked outside to reassure the pup that it was indeed okay to go out for relief wherever she saw fit, surely burning some spot in the once-immaculate lawn. While you’re at it (I suggested), scratch a new hole somewhere, just to see what’s under the surface. She knows I’ll fill it in behind her. Miracles aren’t simply the Aurora Borealis dancing above my head just last week, miracles are in the everyday act of living. We must love it all, for our time with it is short. And we too are miracles—one day dancing with the sky like the northern lights, the next a memory. So do dance friend.

      I often shake my head at the desperate resolve to know such things as God. The answer isn’t in the ritual, the answer is felt within when we connect ourselves with the universe around us. It’s the crab apple laying a carpet of blossoms at her feet in the rain. It’s the bee’s frenzied roll in the flowers that it may carry its load back to the hive. And yes, it’s in an adolescent pup expressing her boundless energy with muddy paws. We must love many things to know the eternal.

      I’m beginning to understand eternity. It’s folly to believe we’ll ever truly know in our brief dance, but the clues are all around us, hiding in plain sight. The very word universe is derived from the Latin, universus: “combined into one”. Eternity is found in this fragile moment: as a carpet of blossoms or in the mind of a rambling writer figuring things out day-by-day. We may write a verse, as Walt Whitman once suggested. Yes, it’s been right there all along, waiting for us to make the most of the time.

    • Beauty in Focus

      You’re feeling that ice-cold
      Forgetting the good things
      Caught up in the problems
      Please stop complaining
      Tell me something beautiful
      Lovelier than usual
      Hope is the closest
      Haven’t you noticed
      There’s beauty in focus
      It’s dwelling in the depths of you
      A desperate longing to break through
      — half•alive, Ice Cold

      Over the last month I was focused on an upcoming trip. That proved a distraction from other things (for that’s how it goes), but now that the trip is behind me, focus is developing once again on other essential things. In a world full of distractions, a little focus goes a long way. What we focus on determines the quality of our production, in whatever form that takes—art, writing, work, attention to the needs of others. Focus is beautiful.

      Knowing this, we get to choose what to focus on. We may scroll through our social media feed, or on the ugly political climate, or on how the referees are calling the games, but to what end? None of it matters more than our most important things. We can’t go frittering away our opportunity to do great things, here and now.

      We become what we focus on. For that is the direction in which we inevitably move. We ought to choose something beautiful to move towards. Something calling from within, eager to be released. Feel the urgency of that for a beat. Imagine what we might do next when our heart, mind and eye are locked in on the same thing.

    • Could’s and Should’s

      “The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think.” — Carl Jung, The Red Book

      New Hampshire in mid-May is a strange place of transformation. The trees and shrubs are leafing out and flowering, perennials are bursting out of the ground in eager anticipation for the warm days ahead, but it’s still two weeks too soon to plant annuals here for the danger of a killing frost. We must be patient with the garden, even as we wish to get on with it already. But everything has its time. The gardener knows the season.

      There are magical days ahead for you and me. There are dark days too—we know this to be true. The trick is to savor today with a measure of faith in our tomorrows. These are days we’ll remember fondly then, just as our yesterdays are for us today. We must therefore dwell in this moment with an eye towards the future and the footing of our past. We may delight in this if we choose to.

      “Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.” ― Kurt Vonnegut

      The afterglow of amazing experiences can be disorienting. It’s like trying to take a picture through a pane of glass with the light reflecting back on your camera, obscuring the clarity of what’s on the other side. We can’t forever dwell in past experiences, but what is the shelf life on memories? This is who we are now. The could’s and should’s of our future self are ours to consider before taking the next leap. Still, we may savor today. Still, we may take the steps for a worthwhile and transformative tomorrow. We simply must know the season we’re in.

    • The Right Thing

      “The expedient thing and the right thing are seldom the same thing.”

      The quote above came from a fortune cookie, but I’ve seen it attributed to Charles Hendrickson Brower elsewhere too. Whatever, the source isn’t as essential as the insight. We often rush through things just to check the box, even as we know that the right things require more from us than to simply crank them out.

      This blog has been an odyssey for me. I’m considering its future, as the process of writing it every day obviously requires a level of commitment and thought energy I might apply to something else instead. There’s no doubt that writing, and finding something interesting enough to write about, has greatly improved my life along with the quality and efficiency of my writing. Instead of meandering around some topic, I’ve learned to dive right into it. And isn’t that a skillset that carries to every form of communication? We all ought to get to the point already.

      My point here is, writing isn’t some habit like brushing my teeth that just has to be checked off that I may sleep better at night. Writing—great writing anyway—feels right because we know intuitively that it’s touched something essential and vital within us. Who are we to slog along checking boxes? And so I’m unsure whether to simply quietly walk away from the blog to focus on more long-form writing or to double down on making it magical. The question I’m asking myself is, is this the right place for magic?

      Of course, I know the answer even as I type the question. We ought to put the very best of ourselves into every endeavor, for everything we create touches someone. Don’t we owe it to the reader to offer something worthy of their time? Don’t we owe it to ourselves to put our very best into everything that we know deep down matters a great deal to us? Writing is building a bridge between our previous self and whomever that future person will become. Similarly, the writer is building a bridge to a reader he may never see, who may not even exist for generations after the writer’s last day. Seen in that context, perhaps tearing down the bridge right in the middle isn’t for the best. Perhaps the answer is to build a bridge that endures.

    • To Go Beyond

      “Firstly you need to aim beyond what you are capable of. You must develop a complete disregard for where your abilities end. Try to do things you’re incapable of.” — Paul Arden

      “The human spirit lives on creativity and dies in conformity and routine.” ― Vilayat Inayat Khan

      When you walk up to Michelangelo’s David at the Accademia Gallery in Florence, some of his other sculptures in an unfinished state line the aisle on either side of you. Spending some time with each instead of just rushing past to see David is the best way to see how he released the masterpiece from the marble, as he described it. You can almost see them fighting to break free from the block, just awaiting the help of Michelangelo’s chisel. And so it is when you arrive at David, you understand where he came from—released perfection from a famously imperfect block of marble.

      The interesting thing about that block of marble was that two other artists had begun work on it, gave up on it and it sat partially chiseled and ignored by other artists who couldn’t see the masterpiece within. It wasn’t until Michelangelo saw David within that it became his project. And we are left with the brilliant result, forgetting sometimes the imperfect marble it started as.

      Lately I’ve been wrestling with the imperfect block myself, deciding whether there’s a masterpiece in there or not. To commit and begin chiseling away at something beyond what we are capable of in the moment is the only way to release something exceptional from the average. But why wait? There are no perfect blocks, only something trying to break free from what we have now. So begin with whatever it is we’ve been given and find what calls from within. In those unfinished sculptures is the pain of a masterpiece that never broke free for want of more time.

      The journey to David takes you past unfinished would-be masterpieces
      Michelangelo’s unfinished self-portrait forever trying to break free from the block