Alexandersmap

    Month: August 2024

    • Forever and Always Now

      Reflecting on the moment

      You said time makes the wheels spin
      And the years roll out and thе doubt rolls in
      In the truck stops, in the parking lots
      And the chеap motels
      When will we become ourselves?
      — Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Hashtag

      The other day I was talking with a coworker at a hotel bar in Washington, DC. He’s a few years closer to retirement than I am, doesn’t travel all that much anymore in his current role and isn’t the picture of health (probably related to too much time in hotel bars). He mentioned that he’d never visited the Lincoln or Washington Memorials before, let alone the war memorials on the National Mall. He wasn’t sure if he would have the time on this particular trip either. I looked at him, said “why are we sitting here now?!” and summoned an Uber. For the next couple of hours we visited memorials to those who exemplified greatness in the United States. I took a few pictures of and with him and shared them with him afterwards. Memories must be built, not stumbled upon.

      I’ve reached a point in my life where, when I compare the former me to the current version, I usually forgive that former guy for not being better at the art of living than he was. We must figure things out along the way, or be lucky enough to have a guide to show us the ropes. We become ourselves through deliberate acts more than stumbling along through life. When we do stumble, we figure out a way to get back on track again. Being human is full of opportunities to learn and grow.

      The thing is, we must keep challenging ourselves to step out of the box we’ve grown into. It may be bigger than the one we were in before, but it’s still a damned box. The answer to “when will we become ourselves?” must forever and always be, now.

    • Someone New

      The new world is as yet
      behind the veil of destiny
      In my eyes, however
      its dawn has been unveiled
      ― Allama Iqbal

      I’m reading a comprehensive history of the European theater of World War II at the moment, which describes in unblinking clarity the horrific reality that millions of people had imposed upon them. When we know history, we understand that luck plays a big part in the quality of our lives. If you’re reading this you likely hit the same birth lottery I did of living in a place and time where we may control much of our lives. To know how lucky we are and not take full advantage of the opportunity seems disrespectful.

      We know that we actualize our destiny through action, but it all begins with a dream. We’re molding the future version of us as we navigate the developing current version. Character is layered upon us by the universe and how we react to it. The path we choose to navigate towards shapes our future self. Our new world awaits our arrival.

      Some days the changes roll through us at a dizzying pace. Other days it feels like we’re never going to do anything but daydream about a better tomorrow. Try to be patient, I tell myself, for this character will get to that place one day. Everything will change again and again, as it must, and we grow into someone new with every turn. The trick is to be grateful for the opportunity and make the most of our days on our journey to becoming.

    • Trade Value

      “I do not believe making money in order to consume goods is mankind’s sole purpose on this planet.” —Bill Hicks

      A proper career should be built on helping as many people solve problems, in the most efficient way, as possible. Making money is simply keeping score of the life we’re trading for others. When we add high value, we should make more money…. in theory. Alas, the system is gamed towards the wealth accumulators. I believe philosophers, teachers and healthcare workers ought to make more than stockbrokers, but I don’t get to set the rules.

      To then take all that life traded for money and exchange it for frivolous stuff is the biggest waste of our time. What is arguably more valuable is an exchange of greater experiences in a lifetime for that money earned helping others. It’s the best of both worlds when you think about it.

      The game of consumerism is often fatal to a great life. Life is measured in time, but also how in how we spend that time. Magical moments sprinkled throughout a lifetime, or better, spilling over from abundance, add to a life well-lived. That’s what I call a great trade.

    • The Choices We Make

      “In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt

      We who live in free societies have agency. Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way as the world works to impose its will on us, but we can make choices and take action that will take us towards our desired outcome. No matter how crazy life gets at times, we must remind ourselves that we choose how to react to circumstances. The choices others make may impact our own, but the choices we make are still, and always, the choices we make.

      Some never stop blaming others and fate for the hand they’ve been dealt, without seeing the choices all around them. Without accepting and even embracing fate (amor fati). We must learn to own our choices. It’s part of growing into adulthood. The process of becoming never ends until we do. Knowing this, we ought to always be asking of ourselves, what next? For the process, for now, continues.

    • Illusions of Someday

      First thing we’d climb a tree
      And maybe then we’d talk
      Or sit silently
      And listen to our thoughts
      With illusions of someday
      Cast in a golden light
      No dress rehearsal
      This is our life
      — The Tragically Hip, Ahead by a Century

      It’s no secret that we ought to stop deferring the living of our lives for the illusion of someday. We see the changes in each other and it makes us both feel strange, as Bonnie Raitt put it so beautifully. And seeing the changes around and within us, the urgency to make the most of now burns hotly in our souls.

      I write this in an airport, awaiting my flight, after sending off my daughter on her own flight an hour before mine. That we’re both flying out of the same airport with an hour of each other is serendipitous, that we’re flying to different destinations unfortunate. Such is life: I bought her a sandwich for the flight and hugged an until next time.

      We may look at life flying along and try our best to hold on for dear life. Alternatively, we might simply enjoy the blessing of each moment together and position ourselves well for another day, someday, when we may pick up where we left off. Today will slide into the past just as surely as all the rest. What will we remember of it?

    • Left Turn Salvation

      I found myself in a bit of a traffic jamb last night in a stadium parking lot. I pulled up to the car ahead and noticed that they had already put their car in park. I followed their example and sat for a few minutes that turned into 45 awaiting some measure of forward progress. It wasn’t forthcoming.

      Upon further review, it was clear that the lot I was in was going deeper into the morass of gridlock (by going I don’t mean actually moving) while an adjacent lot on my left had a slow crawl of cars somehow making it out of the lot to the relative freedom of the road. There was a single lane access point to that lot available to those of us who were far enough back in the line. That made the decision to take a left turn onto the side lot a no-brainer, and soon I was free. Patience, and a strategic pause at a port-a-potty, saved the evening for us by placing us just far enough in the back of the line that we bypassed the misery others were experiencing for something better.

      It occurred to me that if I’d made just a little more progress on the original route I would have been stuck with that option for the duration. Sometimes being ahead of the crowd gets you more stuck than when you lag behind a bit more. Opportunities are often disguised as setbacks, and when we position ourselves well we simply have to see beyond the obstacles to find the better path.

    • Sinking In

      “The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things. Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.” ― Franz Kafka

      “The meaning of life is that it stops. Only the moment counts. It determines life.” — Franz Kafka

      The truth is, I’m way overbooked this weekend. Life stacks up its moments some days, and leave you wanting for more others. Ours is not to reason why, as Tennyson put it, ours is just to do or die (three quotes dropped and I’ve barely started writing—imagine where this post is going). The point is, we ought not question the crazy moments any more than the quiet moments, but savor them all just the same.

      I celebrate and savor and seek to capture the things I’d forget one day, that I might remember. I’m not gifted with a photographic memory, but I’m blessed with an inclination to document the moment with a picture or a note in the journal that will jog it all back one day. I think the truly blessed are those who recognize the fragility of it all and wrap themselves in the blanket of now. I’m not declaring I have it all figured out, merely that I’m aware of the time passing by. Here and now are all that matters. We ought to let that sink in before it all flies away.

      We are all collecting experiences, big and small, and building a lifetime of memories to store them. Knowing we’re the sum of our parts, I mourn the things I’ll say no to in my days just as much as I relish the things that are heck yeahs. We must never defer what we may do now, unless we’re embracing something else just as profoundly interesting for us. And that’s the underlying truth in this jumble of words and thoughts coming to a blessed conclusion: we must relentlessly sink deep into that which interests us most profoundly. And not someday, but now.

    • Learning to Fly

      “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
      — Kurt Vonnegut

      A soul in tension that’s learning to fly
      Condition grounded but determined to try
      Can’t keep my eyes from the circling skies
      Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
      — Pink Floyd, Learning to Fly

      Any self-respecting rock n’ roll fan knows that there are a few songs with the title Learning to Fly, and I love them all. We can argue about which gets your heart rate racing more, or any such thing like that, but for my money Pink Floyd’s song is the best of the bunch lyrically. Foo Fighters fans and Tom Petty aficionados might quibble, and the shear number of covers of Petty’s song indicate popular opinion on the matter, but there: I’ve said it. And yes, I digress.

      To master anything in this life we must at some point leap into the unknown and find out how we fare. Mostly we fall on our face in those early days. We either quit and play another game or we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and get to it again. Even writing that I felt the overpowering cliche of familiar metaphor wash over me (sorry). But if the metaphor fits, use it.

      The whole point of this game is discovery. Try everything, learn which things work well for us and lean into them with gusto. With enough leaps we become adept at adaptation. Sure, some people have more talent than us, but persistence matters too. Skills may be learned. The rest is just breaking through the mind games of categorization and imposter syndrome. The fact is, some people will always put us in a certain bucket (people like that don’t do things like this), but mostly we do it to ourselves first. Just go do it and be ready for the stumble (see metaphor above).

      I write this knowing that there’s some new cliff I’ll need to jump off sooner or later, that I may learn to fly yet again. Life is a succession of such cliffs, and we may grow a pair or live with being ground-based creatures. We all feel like earth-bound misfits in the beginning of anything new. There’s only one way to soar though, and so we must toe up to the edge and lean into the next. It’s the only way we’ll ever fly.

    • The Present Hour

      “I follow you whoever you are from the present hour.” — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

      As small as we are in the vastness of the universe, we each nonetheless leave our mark on history. Every interaction stays with us, every poem read, every sideways glance, every hint of fragrance in the air are a sum of our whole. We may make a big splash or a minor ripple, but we all have our verse to contribute. The magic in writing is carrying that verse across time.

      We are a collection of hours arranged as a lifetime. We whittle them away as if they were unlimited. We learn as we grow older that each had value, but some shine brighter than others. Applying this realization to the next becomes ever more essential. Whoever we are in this moment, whatever we make of it in the now, will indeed follow us for the rest of our days. Our ripple, through those we encounter, is carried further still. What will we lay upon the shoulders of those who will carry us with them from this moment on?

      Autumn is in the air. Harvest time is well underway already. The seasons signal that time is flying along, with us in tow, ready or not. What will we remember of this time in our lives? What will people we encounter remember of us? May we smile recalling the gift we gave in this present hour.

    • The Summer Rail Trail Ride

      The beauty of rail trails is that it mostly removes the automobile from your list of concerns. There are the occasional road crossings where vehicular traffic must be assessed, and a maintenance truck sometimes makes an appearance, but that’s about it. Living in a town featuring roads with no shoulders for such luxuries as a cyclist or pedestrian sharing the way with a passing automobile (let alone two crossing at the exact same place as said cyclist or pedestrian), I appreciate a great rail trail. And a summer ride on a rail trail is one of the great experiences one can have on two wheels.

      Cape Cod has a few great trails and bikeways, including the Cape Cod Canal Bikeway, the Shining Sea Bikeway and the Cape Cod Rail Trail. Each offers beautiful views, automobile-free running room and great options for stopping for a break along the way. It’s a beautiful way to see corners of Cape Cod you’d otherwise never get to. And so the trails become very popular, especially in the height of summer. This is a blessing (utilization equates to more attention on maintaining and building more rail trails) and a curse (a rail trail crowded with joggers and walkers, kids on bicycles, skateboarders, e-bikes and cyclists looking for a brisk ride present ample opportunity for accidents). Rules of the road ought to be observed by all users of the trails, but inevitably there are plenty who just ignore all others and act like they’re all that matter in this world.

      As with everything, timing is everything. The best time to ride the trail for a brisk workout is early in the morning before the tourists and families arrive. The best time to take a leisurely ride with a stop for an ice cream or lunch is in the afternoon. And the best time to have the entire trail to yourself is on a cold, wet morning in the offseason when nobody in their right mind but a jogger, walker or cyclist would be out on a rail trail. In short, there’s a time and season for everyone on a rail trail, and you’ve just got to learn to find the one that works best for you.

      I’ve managed to go through another summer with only limited hiking and no paddling or sailing. I mourn the lost opportunity but when I reflect on that summer fitness and recreation time being filled with cycling, it doesn’t feel like a loss but an acceptable tradeoff. There’s always autumn for mountains and water sports. A summer of cycling has been a memorable and rewarding pursuit.