Alexandersmap

    Month: August 2024

    • Wild, Valorous, Amazing

      “Don’t we all, a few summers, stand here, and face the sea and, with whatever physical and intellectual deftness we can muster, improve our state—and then, silently, fall back into the grass, death’s green cloud? What is cute or charming as it rises, as it swoons? Life is Niagara, or nothing. I would not be the overlord of a single blade of grass, that I might be its sister. I put my face close to the lily, where it stands just above the grass, and give it a good greeting from the stem of my heart. We live, I am sure of this, in the same country, in the same household, and our burning comes from the same lamp. We are all wild, valorous, amazing. We are, none of us, cute.” — Mary Oliver, A Few Words

      There are no doubt days where we don’t feel inclined to do much of anything at all. To bear witness to the passing of time seems quite enough some days. Yet we do ourselves a disservice in the absence of personal valor. We mustn’t be timid. Life is far too short for timidity. Tempus fugit! We must be bold.

      How many sunrises are we to witness in a lifetime? how many sunsets before we see our last? We cannot abstain from living our best day in this one. Planning for the future is responsible, respectable and admittedly quite necessary, but capturing memories and experiences is our essential mission in the now.

      How many ways have we heard the message from those who have faded away beyond the horizon? We must feel the urgency of this moment, and fill each with our full attention. Life is Niagara, or nothing. Carpe diem!

    • Slaying Dragons and Devils

      “My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.” — Carl Jung, The Red Book

      It’s amazing what a few days off will do for the body and soul. Removing oneself from the daily grind mitigates the possibility that we might be ground to dust. The old Cherokee expression about the wolf you feed comes to mind. We either succumb to the darkness within or climb to the light.

      I know deep down that I write to feed the soul and slay the dragons. The daily blog is merely evidence that the journey continues for at least another day. I might have climbed mountain summits or run after a 5K t-shirt collection instead, but no, it’s the writing that got a hold of me. That doesn’t make me a one trick pony, just curiously focused on publishing a few paragraphs each day.

      There’s nothing wrong with trying a diverse range of pursuits to see where they may take us. There’s nothing wrong with work for that matter. The soul knows when we’re on the right path and when we’ve gone astray. But we must ask ourselves regularly, what occupies us? If it’s not nourishing us, we must change our diet. Sip enough poison and you begin to love the taste, and worse, begin to serve it to others.

      The thing is, the pursuit we choose is merely our way of reaching closer towards our own truth. And the truth is, we’re all running against both the clock and our worst inclinations. We must ignore the roar of the dragon and listen for the whisper of the soul, increasing its volume through regular practice until our purpose is loud and clear.

    • What We Make Of It

      “A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

      I walked out to catch the sunrise this morning. If I looked overhead or behind me it was all dark, foreboding clouds, but looking east at the new day arising there was a break in the clouds and a bit of sunrise color lighting up the sky. as I walked down to the waterline it began to rain, a reminder from the angry clouds above that I ought not turn my back on them. We can’t ignore darkness but we can seek something better for ourselves. I lingered with the whispering sunrise and turned back to the shelter of the house. Sitting with my coffee, this Goethe quote greeted me. Who says we don’t manifest what we most want to see in this world?

      Manifest Destiny once drove American expansion westward. The term is thus forever linked to that part of our collective history in the United States, but we may borrow the phrase as we contemplate our own beliefs about the world and our place in it. We may see beauty where others only see darkness. We may find our own path towards a brighter future still. Life is often nothing more than what we make of it.

    • Beyond Intentions

      “Live less out of habit and more out of intent.” — Amy Rubin Flett

      “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” — James Clear, Atomic Habits

      Going with the flow is nice until we get flushed down the wrong stream. Winging it is nothing but guesswork on the fly. We must have some clear sense of direction to set a general course, that we may navigate to in a confused sea. Otherwise what are we but rubber ducks set adrift in the current of time?

      There’s nothing wrong with adaptability. It offers resiliency in a chaotic and unpredictable world. But pivoting must have some intention to it for it to lead us anywhere. A Simone Biles floor routine would be fraught with danger if she had no sense of where she was going to land. Bouncing around can get us points or detract from our entire routine.

      We need both strong intention and great routines to carry us from here to there. We aim for a higher plane and develop a practice that transports us there. I’m no Olympic gymnast but I try to know where I’m heading in this and for the rest of my years, and build a lifestyle that helps me arrive there.

    • An Education of the Heart

      “A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.” ― Susan Sontag

      Reading a great book is a lot like getting into the zone during a meaningful project or in a great workout. Time flies by as you literally devour the moment. And in each case we arrive on the other end transformed.

      As usual, I’m balancing multiple books at the same time. Page-turners I blow through, compelling history, philosophy, and so on. But some books are just a heavier read than others. For better or worse I buy a lot of these, jump right in, and find myself having to put them aside now and then for a breath of fresh air. But I usually come back (finish what you started and all that). That old expression about life being too short to read a bad book? I often finish those too.

      Each volume in our physical or virtual library becomes a part of us. It’s not our full story, for we must write our own odyssey, but each volume offers a picked up piece that contributes to our puzzle. The more pieces, the more complex and interesting the final picture.

    • The Way

      “The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life. Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves...
      Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul? You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that? There is only one way and that is your way.” — Carl Jung, The Red Book

      There is no book that will show us our way, books merely serve as an example of how those before us navigated the world. But we are the sum of all who came before us, no matter how beautiful or ugly that human history is, and knowing how to navigate a similar river of time they traversed might help us avoid hitting the rocks they hit in their time. There are lessons in the swirling waters of history that may be learned and relied upon for insight. Still, this is our way.

      We all have our compass heading to our true north. The conditions are what they are, the navigational hazards life throws at us may impede a direct route to that which calls to us, but we may still find the course through life that works for us. We simply have to avoid being foundered on the rocks before we get there. Simple… sure. Human history is full of people who couldn’t clear the rocks of their time, yet we exist in our time because it’s equally full of those who found a way.

      There’s no staying put, for stasis is decay. Knowing we must go forward, what sets our compass? We are surrounded by forces that influence our direction but ultimately it’s up to us to set it and go. Examples show us what is possible (and what is not), and fate will surely play its hand, but our own voice is telling us where our actions will take us next.

    • On Rest and Recovery

      “Human beings used to have this kind of wisdom. But we have lost touch with it. We don’t know how to rest anymore. We don’t allow the body to rest, to release the tension, and heal. We rely almost entirely on medication to deal with sickness and pain.” — Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus

      After a steady accumulation of miles cycling, I finished my goal last weekend and took a day off to rest and recover. That turned into four full days before I was back on the bike last night, more than I’d expected. But a funny thing happened—my body responded well for having rested. I rode more efficiently, with a higher average speed on the same roads I diligently traversed all summer.

      I agree with Thich Nhat Hanh’s statement wholeheartedly. We don’t know how to rest. And we consume more medication than we ought to instead of letting the body heal naturally. By we I most definitely mean me, but maybe it sounds familiar to you too? Pop a few ibuprofen and get back to the grind, anyone? Watching the Olympics the last couple of weeks, how much tape did we see stretched across athletic bodies? Sure, they’re elite, but my favorite runner has some of that tape across her knee even as I write this. We need more rest, more often, to recovery properly that we may perform at a higher level.

      The thing is, we aren’t getting any younger either. Maybe those Olympic athletes are young and in peak fitness, timed perfectly to perform optimally on the world stage, but that’s not the hand I’ve been dealt at this time in my life. Rest is essential to performance, especially when we add a few trips around the sun to our resume. We forget this because we always could do what we’re trying to do now. But it’s not then anymore, is it?

      If I could do it all over again, I’d build a life with natural sabbaticals built into the year. Teachers have this. So do landscapers and fishermen and ski instructors. We choose careers with a high earning potential instead of high lifestyle potential, and we pay the price over time. We know when we’re in balance and strive to get there when we’re off. Rest and recovery are far more essential to a productive and happy life than simply having the right job title is. Certainly better than popping another pill.

    • Echoes

      “What we do now echoes in eternity.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

      I worry less about productivity than I might project in this blog. Each day I do what I can, provoke something meaningful out of myself and celebrate having carried the torch one more time. The chaos of the world was not mine, my contribution was steadiness and reason. If I’m blessed with another day, I’ll try tomorrow to do it better.

      We must remember that we have a chance to do something meaningful with our time. Our actions influence others, rippling across our connections to people we’ll never meet. This blog post may get a few likes, be viewed a few dozen times and fade into bits and bytes in some data center somewhere on the Internet until the power finally goes out some day in eternity. We may accept the frailty of our voice for what it is and still be inclined to add our verse.

      The doing is the thing. We must do what we can with today before it’s gone forever, like all the rest. For this is our time, friends. If not now, when? The thing about an echo is that it must begin somewhere before it can reverberate through space and time.

    • Trying to Be Good

      “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
      ― Ira Glass

      Over the weekend I replaced a door that had been bothering me for some time. As with everything, it began with a small project (add a deadbolt!) that became a big project when I made a mistake that couldn’t be fixed (measure twice, drill once). No instructions or template and an educated guess proven terminally (for the old door) incorrect. That accelerated the need for a new door, which led to a few more mistakes along the way that needed to be fixed before the door was finally, blessedly, installed. A one hour project became a six hour project. That’s what happens when skills don’t meet the standard we set for ourselves.

      It takes time to close the gap between where our standards are set and the quality of the work we produce at present. I know intuitively that I’m a better writer than I was five years ago, and remain hopeful that the writer I might be in five more years is even better. The daily blog is penance paid to the craft. Without daily effort, our skills atrophy.

      The thing is, there’s nothing wrong with having a high standard. We must aspire to greatness in our lives, that we may grow. The trick is to stay patient with ourselves during the process of becoming. Mistakes are inevitable and often expensive, for there’s an opportunity cost in everything we do. We must remind ourselves that the price paid today is an investment in our future self and simply work through it.

    • Someone Great

      “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” — Maya Angelou

      I had the opportunity to attend a 40th anniversary party this weekend. I married into the family well after they got married so I wasn’t around for that beginning, but I’ve seen them grow into their relationship, raise children into adulthood and seek out lifetime adventures together. They’re living a life together one should aspire to—present in each other’s lives, adventurous and fun, travelers who arrive in the lives of others when it matters most.

      I’m not the sharpest tack in the drawer, but I know a good thing when I find it. Being someone great in the life of one other life is a great starting point for building a long term relationship. Being great in the lives of your children builds a strong foundation from which they may grow into personal excellence themselves. Being a great friend to someone who is great leads to reciprocal growth for both parties.

      We may dilute ourselves only so much before there’s nothing great left of us. We feel when we’ve entered a vacuum devoid of reciprocity. We must be a friend to the world while understanding that the world will not always be our best friend. The way to stay filled is to find people who return the love and energy we give back to us. Life energy is finite, but infinitely available when we wade into the right stream.

      The trick to any great partnership is sustained momentum built on being present, engaged and equally invested in a hopeful future. For every stumble, there’s a hand lent to getting back up again, for every step forward there’s a hand to lift the other forward with us. Hand-in-hand we may thus move forward through this life together.