Alexandersmap

    Month: February 2026

    • Bringing Ourselves to Life

      It’s hard not to notice the connection between habits and momentum. Do something once and nothing much happens. Do something every day and it gradually manifests into identity. We simply become what we do over and over.

      Every time I think I’m going to shelve this daily blog to focus on something else, I think about the streak that I would break. Sure, missing one day of thousands isn’t the end of the world (and let’s face it, it will happen one day), but it’s the end of a streak. And with it some incremental bit of identity would go with it. So it is with the things we do. They become us, and we become them.

      This year is almost two months old, and already there are trends. Forget about politics or the weather, I’m referring to the things that we can control. How many books will we read this year? How much money will we make, or invest? Where is our momentum carrying our fitness and health? Are we seeing intellectual growth or decline though the actions we take today and each day? Habits are the compound interest of identity.

      I write this knowing there’s work to be done on my own habits, even as I celebrate the fruits of some habits that manifest themselves in what appears to be good fortune. Sometimes we are lucky, no doubt, but mostly we move in the direction determined by our daily actions. So do something positive today, and then repeat it tomorrow. And then try to keep the streak alive.

      Simple, right? Life has a way of blowing up our greatest plans. But we can’t worry about all that life will bring to us, all we can do is act today to bring ourselves to life. Momentum will never develop without a start. We’re all writing our story, one day to the next. Take interest in what compounds, for it becomes our story in the end.

    • Snow and Boots and Paws

      The snow began in afternoon this time around. Each storm is unique and memorable, if we observe the weather for what it is—alive and vital in its day. We get so busy complaining about the weather that we forget to simply coexist with it. The weather simply is, as we ourselves are. We share this day together and nevermore.

      We walked together, the pup and me. On snowy streets quietly tracked with tires and footprints of those who had ventured out before us. This winter the plows wait a while before facing their task. Why bother? The snow will just keep coming. The price they will pay is the heaviness of their burden. Our price is a slow shuffle through the clinging accumulation. The snow clings to boots and paws, and we feel ourselves rise higher with each step. The pup uses her teeth to pluck the clumps off her paws. I’m not that dexterous and simply kick off the clumpiness.

      All of this makes for a slow go in the snow. But our nightly walk is our ritual, no matter the weather. A hush falls over the street, but for the soft tread of boots and paws, moving through time as the layers accumulate. Each step is heard. Each step is felt. Flake-by-flake and step-by-step, we mark time with progress. Snow and boots and paws. Tomorrow will tell its own tale. Tonight belongs to the three of us.

    • Keep a Light On

      “When little men cast long shadows, it is a sign that the sun is setting.” — Walter Savage Landor

      The world is full of little men casting long shadows. Outlast them. Everything will shift back to reason one day. Perhaps we’ll even be alive to see it. Perhaps the environment, libraries, global economic stability and our national psyche will survive to see it (sure, the list could have been a lot longer). The trick is to survive to thrive again one day as the society we aspired to be.

      When the sun feels like it’s setting, be a beacon in the darkness. Sanity begins at home. Nurture an environment that enables resilience through structure and stability and growth. For there will come a day when it doesn’t feel so dark all the time. All it takes is enough beacons to light the way. Cockroaches scurry away in the light. So it follows that when the shadows grow long, bring more light.

      There will always be humans behaving badly for as long as there are humans. Never fall for the us versus them logic, for it’s an easy trap. We’ve all got a bit of each within us. We’ve seen that some have a bit more than others. It never was nor ever will be about good versus evil. It’s simply about keeping the lights on so humanity can find its way home again.

    • Places to Go, Places to Be

      “Don’t you know that we must always have a place where we never go but where we think we’d be happy if we did?” — Nicolas de Chamfort

      “He who travels much has this advantage over others – that the things he remembers soon become remote, so that in a short time they acquire the vague and poetical quality which is only given to other things by time. He who has not traveled at all has this disadvantage – that all his memories are of things present somewhere, since the places with which all his memories are concerned are present.” — Giacomo Leopardi

      A conversation just yesterday reminded me of the places I used to go and the person I used to be. I was that character in Up in the Air, collecting air miles and hotel points, skipping the regular line for the high roller service. In Ottawa one day, Miami the next. I actually had a TSA Agent so familiar with me that he’d ask where I was going this time as I made my way through the screening process. Those were the days.

      I don’t miss them. Sure, I miss the air miles and finding interesting places. This blog started because of those interesting places I’d stumble across in my travels. I could sniff out a waterfall or an historical monument with the best of them. And I do miss that part of my travels. I just don’t miss the gap between home and away. Instead of the rhythm of business travel, I’m immersed in the rhythm of home life. And with it, a sense of place redevelops. I’ve been here before, but my perspective has changed.

      There is still travel. There will be more waterfalls soon enough. The passport will likely fill with stamps again. Not as frequently, but filled just the same. New borders to cross, new languages to attempt, new people to remember one day when we reminisce. That is the beauty of venturing. But we can’t forget the beauty of returning back to the place we ventured from. A home port has its own appeal, should we linger long enough to remember.

      The thing is, we have places we want to go in this lifetime. Some of us wear our heart on our sleeve about such places. But we’ve also got places to be. And being is the whole point of living. To be present with where we are now, and to be in this moment fully alive and aware, is to capture something of it that we will one day remember. So stop hustling about, dreaming of the next. Be here now, and have a look around. For it will all change one day just as we ourselves will.

    • Fortune Favors

      “Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.” — Nicolas de Chamfort

      There may be time
      for contemplation
      one day soon
      enough.

      Stop thinking so much
      and go
      live your life,
      cajoled.

      This day is for doing,
      as fortune
      favors, they say.
      Boldly.

    • Somebody Spoke

      Woke up, fell out of bed
      Dragged a comb across my head
      Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
      And looking up I noticed I was late
      Found my coat and grabbed my hat
      Made the bus in seconds flat
      Found my way upstairs and had a smoke
      And somebody spoke and I went into a dream
      — The Beatles, A Day in the Life

      They say that when we win the morning, we win the day. I say winning the morning is easy—it becomes hard as soon as the rest of the world wakes up and begins to have a say in how our day goes. That’s when the day gets away from us. That’s when our best intentions meet reality. Ever notice that everything was groovy for Sir Paul singing his song until someone interrupted his flow? Boom! Back to reality. Oh boy.

      If discipline equals freedom, then we can wrestle control back in our days with a structured schedule and focus on a daily routine. Easier said than done, but we are the ones who set the borders on what we will and will not do. That’s a cute line, isn’t it? Tell that to someone taking care of their young children or aging parents, or rushing home to let the dog out before she pees on the rug.

      The consequences of a full life are that we no longer control every decision in our days. Some choices are made for us by the choices we made in the past. It’s the price of fullness. So own it and work around the edges. Nobody said livin’ the dream would be easy. But who said easy was what we ever really wanted anyway?

    • All That Is Not Us

      “No one thing shows the greatness and power of the human intellect or the loftiness and nobility of man more than his ability to know and to understand fully and feel strongly his own smallness. When, in considering the multiplicity of worlds, he feels himself to be an infinitesimal part of a globe which itself is a negligible part of one of the infinite number of systems that go to make up the world, and in considering this is astonished by his own smallness, and in feeling it deeply and regarding it intently, virtually blends into nothing, and it is as if he loses himself in the immensity of things, and finds himself as though lost in the incomprehensible vastness of existence, with this single act of thought he gives the greatest possible proof of the nobility and immense capability of his own mind, which, enclosed in such a small and negligible being, has nonetheless managed to know and understand things so superior to his own nature, and to embrace and contain this same intensity of existence and things in his thought.” — Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone di pensieri

      The encapsulation of the vastness of the universe within our minds indicates connection to something larger than ourselves. That awareness is spiritual in its own right, and one may build upon that with belief. Discovery is our path. Instead of telling ourselves stories we may seek a deeper understanding. We are connected to the universe, perhaps only in thought or recycled billion-year-old carbon, but perhaps in far greater ways that we haven’t yet grasped. Life is a span of figuring it all out, knowing we won’t reach the end with all the answers.

      This year I’m discovering Giacomo Leopardi. You might ask, what’s taken me so long? Or you might ask, who the heck is Giacomo Leopardi? Friedrich Nietzsche called Leopardi one of the four or five masters of prose in the century he was alive, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walter Savage Landor, Prosper Mérimée and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. That’s heady praise from a notable deep thinker, and a homework assignment for the avid readers amongst us. Surely if this blog continues for the foreseeable future there will be more quotes from each of these characters.

      The mind may shrink or grow depending our willingness to exercise it. We may simply believe what others tell us or go find out the answers ourselves. Awareness leads us to discovery, which draws us out into the vastness of all that is and ever will be. The universe is calling—it’s been trying to reach us our entire lives. It we aspire for anything in a lifetime, it ought to be to reach beyond ourselves to seek greater connection with all that is not us.

    • Extending the Joyride

      “Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.” — Giacomo Leopardi, Pensieri (Thoughts)

      Leopardi wrote this in his latter years, with understanding of the sufferings of old age. As his work goes, Pensieri was published unfinished. We all leave something unfinished when we leave this life. If our legacy is what we leave behind us, our unfulfilled potential is all that we never got around to. Thoreau’s “quiet desperation” is knowing the gap exists between the two.

      I’m one of those people who say to the world that I will live to be 100. I know the statement is foolhardy, brash and unrealistic. It’s said tongue-in-cheek, like many things I say. We simply don’t know when our expiration date is. Given the rate of decline in our latter years that I’ve observed in the generations ahead of mine, I aspire only for good health and sound mind for as long as possible, that I may kick the sufferings of old age down the curb right to the end of this joyride.

      Each day we wrestle with fear and desire. The trick to aging gracefully is to focus on filling those gaps in our potential with applied experience. We produce and share and move on to the next stage of our lives to the end of our days. If our health span allows, we may expand our legacy. So above all else, it seems, focus on increasing that health span. Fitness and mental acuity are far better desires than simply growing old.

    • Governed by Illusions

      “Reason is the enemy of all greatness: reason is the enemy of nature: nature is great, reason is small. I mean that it will be more or less difficult for a man to be great the more he is governed by reason, that few can be great (and in art and poetry perhaps no one) unless they are governed by illusions.” — Giacomo Leopardi

      “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
      ― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

      How many of us are perfectly reasonable in our lives? We are taught to be so. Reasonable is predictable, manageable, reliable. When we aspire to be good, we are subscribing to a routine of reasonable. And of course there’s nothing wrong with reasonable, there’s just nothing particularly profound to be realized when we stay in that box. We simply cannot put a dent in the universe with reason. Dents require the velocity of audacity.

      Few can be great unless they are governed by illusions. Illusions of grandeur. Illusions of what might be far beyond what is. To dream and then chase that dream as if our very lives depended on it(doesn’t it?). To step outside of what is expected of us and write our own script beyond the imagination of the perfectly reasonable people in our lives. That is where illusions may lead.

      Of course, illusions may also lead us off the cliff to our doom. It’s reasonable to have a safety net, to wear a seatbelt, and to put on sunscreen. We can structure our lives around reason and still chase the dream. We just can’t put all our eggs in one basket—reasonable or illusion, and expect them to survive when we inevitably stumble. But let’s face it, that kind of logic is entirely too reasonable.

      It comes down to risk and reward. Those of us who are risk-averse aren’t likely to adapt the world to ourselves because we’re too busy adapting to it. The trick is to know our tendencies and learn to stretch beyond our comfort level. When we habituate discomfort as a normal state we adapt and grow and become. Change becomes something we are accustomed to, and more, something that we initiate.

      This entire blog post is reason in action. I might simply have said “just do it” and headed out the door to realize some grand illusion. Something less unreasonable would be to simply click publish and stretch my comfort zone after I’ve had a good breakfast. But those are the words of someone governed by reason. Just who is the boss here anyway?

    • Get Out and Happen

      “It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.” — Leonardo da Vinci

      I had a conversation with someone this week who observed that Americans believe they can be anything they want to be if they work hard enough towards a goal. The inference was that this isn’t the case in some other countries. Perhaps that’s true, perhaps not. As an American it’s not for me to say what someone from another country believes. I would point towards the Winter Olympics happening right now in Milan as one counter to that argument, and read the worlds of the prominent Italian quoted above as another. I think the real point is that Americans always wear their aspirations on their sleeve. We lead with who we aspire to be.

      This blog surely doesn’t refute that statement. Decide what to be and go be it is one of the most commonly quoted lines you’ll find here (with a nod to The Avett Brothers). At this point in the blog, AI and you, dear reader, have figured out a lot about this writer. The trick in this evolving world is to never show all your cards. That ought to go for aspirations too. Don’t tell us what you’re going to do, show us with the results of your actions. This is the only truth—the rest is just talk.

      The thing is, we know that time is flying by so very quickly. The deck is stacked against any of us really doing anything significant to put a dent in the universe in the time we have available to us. The only answer to this riddle is to be audacious. If fortune favors the bold, stop being timid about what needs to happen today. Get out and happen.