Alexandersmap

    Author: nhcarmichael

    • But for Now

      Some fine day when we go walking
      We’ll take time for idle talking
      Sharing every feeling as we watch each other smile
      I’ll hold your hand you’ll hold my hand
      We’ll say things we never had planned
      Then we’ll get to know each other in a little while
      But for now let me say I love you
      Later on there’ll be time for so much more
      But for now meaning now and forever
      Let me kiss you my darling then once more
      — Jamie Cullum/Bob Dorough, But for Now

      The bird feeders were irresponsibly empty yesterday, distracted by life as I’d been, what with elections and wars and billionaires behaving badly (another reason to not win the lottery). I’d simply let them run empty. When such things happen the birds move on to the neighbor’s feeders, or pick through the fallen leaves for leftovers. Birds deal in the reality of the moment—there’s either food or there isn’t, and act accordingly. “Since it is what it is, what will we do with it?“, they stoically chirped and got on with their collective now. When the feeders were full they returned in earnest, and the cycle repeated once again. I suppose we can learn a thing or two from birds.

      There’s something about November that demands intense focus on immediacy. Lyrical phrases like “these are the days”, “this magic moment”, and “but for now” drift into my head and prompt reflection. Reflection is lovely, but the feeders and fallen leaves remind me that there’s work to be done. This blog might be to blame for making me so very attentive to the business at hand, but then again, it’s just a way to share what was whispering in my ear all along. Is it itself a distraction, or a way to sort through the progress of becoming something more?

      Perhaps, the birds suggest, we think too much and do too little. We shouldn’t relinquish our magic moment but get straight to the point and say and do what must be done. Later, maybe when we actually become what we’re becoming, there’ll be time for so much more. Life isn’t about its little distractions but a sum of what we produce in our days. For we aren’t just feeding birds here, are we?

    • On Veterans Day

      “I am the harvest of man’s stupidity. I am the fruit of the holocaust. I prayed like you to survive, but look at me now. It is over for us who are dead, but you must struggle, and will carry the memories all your life. People back home will wonder why you can’t forget.” — E.B. Sledge, With the Old Breed

      “So it came to pass that as he trudged from the place of blood and wrath his soul changed.”
      — Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

      I’m not a veteran of war. I chose a path that took me far from the battlefields of modern armies. I wonder at the courage of those who charged towards an almost certain death, thinking that perhaps they had something in them that is beyond my capacity to endure and fight another day. I suppose all of us blessed to have never fought in war are also given the curse of wondering just what we might have done under the same circumstances. May we and those we love never find out. May the world rise above the conflicts of mankind and bow to love instead. We have a long way to go.

      We learned to honor our veterans growing up. They fought in the big wars we learned about in history class. They were my uncles coming home again, not really speaking much about what they experienced. We read about war in books like All Quiet on the Western Front and think we understand what a veteran will never say. There’s a chasm there that humanity should never cross, and those who have been there and survived bring it back with them. Who are we to ask what it was like for them?

      If Memorial Day honors those who paid the ultimate price, Veterans Day honors those who came home again. On Veterans Day I think of the people in my life who served. Some were wounded, and some lived a lifetime shortened by Agent Orange or other demons hard to define. All carry something of themselves from that time in their lives that we can’t really understand not having been there with them.

      We are the sum of our experiences. Veterans have experienced a sum of things most of us will never understand. To wear a remembrance poppy or to thank someone for their service seems a small gesture, but when done with sincerity and grace, it’s noticed by those who sacrificed so much in their time. No, I’m not a veteran, but I will remember, honor and support those who were. Thank you.

    • Savoring Moderate Consumption

      “Thrift isn’t stinginess. It’s a cure for overconsumption.” — Stanley Tucci

      We are spiraling headfirst into the consumption holidays. In many ways it’s already begun with Halloween, didn’t it? Purchase one bag of candy more than we really need to, and suddenly the pants are a bit snugger than they were a few weeks ago. Autumn days are days to eat, drink and be merry. It’s a time to celebrate the harvest. Many of us take this a step too far—one “bite-sized” candy bar after another, washed down with a pumpkin spiced latte and the abandonment of all reason.

      Watching Stanley Tucci’s magnificent Searching for Italy, the episode that struck me most profoundly was Episode 8: Liguria in which he savors traditional Genoese pesto recipes and walks the barren cliffside olive plantations. This is not a place where you are burdened with such things as too many Thanksgiving pies to choose from, this is a place where you savor the ingredients you can muster up from the land and sea.

      There’s no magic in a drive-thru, only convenience. And we may appreciate convenience, but do we savor it? Distracted eating serves our busy lifestyles, but is there any nuance in consumption when it’s lost in the moment of defensive driving or determined scrolling? There can be no savoring when multitasking. When we deliberately focus on the food we suddenly we realize just what we’re shoveling into our mouths. This moment may delight or horrify us.

      Savoring is the key to an extraordinary life. If overconsumption and gluttony are the antithesis of savoring, then it stands to reason that to live an exceptional life we ought to be more thrifty in our consumption. To savor life means to slow down and appreciate what the world offers to us in the moment. This is celebratory, but not overindulgent. It is a dance with life, one small and delightful bite at a time.

    • Memories Are Made of This

      Stir carefully through the days
      See how the flavor stays
      These are the dreams you will savor
      — Dean Martin, Memories Are Made Of This

      Life is never perfect, but we may build a lovely dream when we have the right recipe. It starts with good health, a sound mind, and the environment we find ourselves in. When you’re surrounded by people who lift you up with their buoyancy, it’s hard to sink too far beneath the surface. When you’re surrounded by sharks, well, life is a game of survival. When we have the agency to choose, we must swim away from the sharks.

      If this sounds overly optimistic, well, let’s be realistic for a moment. Life hands us both lemons and hand grenades now and then, and we can’t always control the outcome of any situation we find ourselves living in. But too often we use this as an excuse to throw our hands up and blame fate on our circumstances. We have more of a say in the quality of our lives than we admit.

      We vote for our identity in our daily actions. We may build our own dream, stirred carefully with bits of joy and love, honed with determination and agency, and maintained with fitness and love. These are the dreams we will savor in our lifetime.

    • The Attractiveness of Adventure

      “The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” — Christopher McCandless

      Watching the eclipse of the moon this morning, I thought about how beautiful it was, but also about who was actually seeing it with me. The adventurous are always attracted to others with the same gumption to do outrageous things. Those who seek to wring the most out of life are appealing to those who aspire to add vibrancy and sparkle to their days.

      Right on cue my bride stepped outside, groggy and unsteady, but willing to give it a go with the moon and binoculars. It’s not the first micro adventure I’ve coaxed her towards, and I appreciate her willingness to subtract sleep for experience. Box checked, she was back to her appointment with her pillow.

      Lingering with the moon a bit longer, I thought about the attractiveness of adventure. We seek adventure to feel most alive, and naturally feel the energy emanating from similar spirits. This is true in youth, but equally true as we age. Some of the most vibrant people I’ve known are most attractive because they live a full life. They live outside the norms of society, breaking the established “rules” for living a typical life in favor of adventure. You simply can’t live your own full life inside the box someone else built for you.

      A sustained, vibrant life builds upon itself, it doesn’t subtract years from our lives through poor choices. Aliveness and vitality are the opposite of self-destructiveness and living on borrowed time. Bad habits will choke the life right out of us, so we ought to choose wisely in our quest for adventure. By all means, listen to your mother and wear sunscreen, but don’t hide behind the shades your whole life.

      We never know what we’ll attract into our life until we step out of the cage. Joyful experience is indeed attractive, and we become more attractive in our aliveness. The living are most attracted to those who live a full, adventurous life. A richer life experience, engagement with others living on a higher plane, and deeper realization of our full potential await us when we live our lives with an adventurous spirit.

      I’ll see you out there.

    • A Fight for Democracy in an Autocratic World

      “Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.” ― Robert A Heinlein

      “Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.” ― Robert A. Heinlein

      If you’d asked me ten years ago if I could imagine the end of democracy in the United States, I would have laughed at the very idea. We weren’t a perfect union, something the Founding Fathers envisioned when drafting the U.S. Constitution, but we were at the very least unified in our belief that we were making progress towards a better democracy. Or so I thought.

      A decade of sipping increasingly toxic poison on extreme media sites has created an undercurrent of madness in the United States and other countries. The vast majority of people want the crazies to shut up and crawl back in their hole of misery, but they have a platform and momentum that is hard to deny. The only way to shut up a crazy person in power is to vote. The appropriate way to shut up a crazy person spewing divisive rhetoric or conspiracy theories is to leverage the legal system. There have been encouraging examples of each this year, but discouraging examples of crazies getting away with things too. Who’s to say what will happen next?

      Well, we can. In the United States of America we have a mid-term election to choose who represents we the people in Congress and in the individual states. This is an opportunity to do the right thing and slam the door on the worst tendencies of humanity, or surrender to the whims of madmen and conspiracists. What a choice.

      When you see a country like Ukraine, with everything they hold dear at stake, fighting for their freedom against an oppressive autocratic state, shouldn’t that serve as a reminder of what we ourselves fight for in our own country? It ought to be. And when we see a rise in violent acts applied against the political or cultural opposition, we ought to view that with horror and decisive corrective action too. We become what we amplify, and we become what we allow on our watch. We forget sometimes that we are the adults in the room.

      This week we get to live history in the United States of America. We either repudiate the rising antithesis of democratic union, or we surrender to the turbulent winds of outrage and conspiracy. It doesn’t seem like a tough choice, really. But here we are. Could the adults in the room kindly control the children?

    • Keep Thy State

      “To wish to escape from solitude is cowardice.” — Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

      “At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,—’Come out unto us.’ But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

      Being an advocate for solitude doesn’t mean one is antisocial, it means embracing the potential of the moment. We ought to embrace our time alone, and stop reaching for distraction at any sign of discomfort with the practice. Solitude isn’t the same thing as loneliness, they’re quite the opposite of one another. We can be alone and be productive with the circumstance, or retreat into the comfortable friction of others. We aren’t bait fish, friends, there may be anonymity in numbers, but that isn’t safety, merely avoidance.

      Writing requires solitude—there’s no getting around it. We must wrestle with our thoughts without interruption if we hope to mine anything of consequence from ourselves. Most of us don’t have the luxury of a cabin in the woods in which to dream and scheme. We seek the edges of the day and make them ours. Some of us thrive early in the morning, others late at night. The time is inconsequential, it’s the willingness to tap into the moment that matters most.

      Solitude is a productive state of being in a world intent on drawing you back to the pack. Solitude isn’t retreating into our selves, it’s a deep conversation with an old friend, the one who knows all our traits and sticks with us anyway. We only have so many such moments in a day or in a lifetime, and ought to explore them fully. The best thing about writing is sharing a wee bit of that with a few interested collaborators. In that respect, we transcend aloneness completely.

    • Personal Summits and the Pursuit of Vibrancy

      “There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.” — Jack London, Call of the Wild

      Usain Bolt is 36 years old as I write this. He’s a young man, nowhere near his peak in life, but well past his peak as the fastest man alive during a string of unforgettable Olympic performances. Some people, like gymnasts and figure skaters, reach their physical peak even sooner than sprinters. Are they all past their moment of ecstasy? I should think not. They’ve descended from that summit and begun their climb up another.

      There are naturally many peaks and valleys in a lifetime, but two obvious benchmarks are physical fitness and mental fitness. When do we reach our peak with each? Physically it’s likely when we’re younger, relative to a lifetime. Mentally, well, who’s to say we can’t reach our summit towards the very end of life? The combination of the two equals a level of vibrancy worthy of the pursuit, for in pursuing vibrancy for our entire lifetime we’re extending the potential of ecstatic living well beyond the norm.

      In my mind, there are few sins so egregious as extending life without health. This is important. It does not matter if we can extend lifespans if we cannot extend healthspans to an equal extent. And so if we’re going to do the former, we have an absolute moral obligation to do the latter.
      David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To

      If there’s a call to arms in Jack London’s Call of the Wild quote, it’s to remember that we’re alive for a very brief time, and we ought to work to extend our functional vitality for as long into our senior years as possible. And as Sinclair says, there’s an obligation to improve health for the long haul, not just the healthcare industry’s obligation, but ours. That begins with fitness and nutrition, exploration and stretching our perceived limits, and of course moderation and omission. We weren’t put here to live in a bubble and eat nothing but kale, that’s not ecstasy, instead we ought to seek activity that enriches us, gaze upward and climb towards higher summits than we might have otherwise. And in the process, use the climb to look around and appreciate just how far we’ve come.

      Slàinte Mhath!

    • Home, and Away

      “Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.” – Isabelle Eberhardt

      Well past dark, I completed the relocation process for thousands of fallen red oak leaves that had blanketed the front lawn with the muted satisfaction that comes with not seeing your finished project and knowing it will likely be covered again soon enough. This is fall, but it’s also folly to believe you’re ever done with yard work. The trees giveth in abundance, and on their own timetable.

      The thing is, I like the chores of home ownership even as I contemplate my next move on the bucket list. Restless spirits are always moving, whether at home or in travel. I’ve never sat still very well. Meditation for me requires movement, and there is already an abundance of travel booked or in the works. Schemes and dreams of places near and far haunt me, it isn’t something that can be flushed out of your system like too much drink. Travel perpetuates, as reading does. It’s a positive addiction, trading mundane routine for more worldly experience. Many of us have nomadic tendencies running through our blood.

      And yet we can’t imagine nomads raking the leaves and putting away patio furniture. Having a home base isn’t such a bad thing when it doesn’t dominate the conversation. One can happily manage home chores and segue immediately into the next adventure if one structures a life properly. We can have our cake and eat it too. As with all things, balance is the key.

      Go
      And beat your crazy head against the sky
      Try
      And see beyond the houses and your eyes
      It’s okay to shoot the moon
      — John Sebastian, Darling Be Home Soon

      Like sharks, I suppose, restless spirits must move to live. Being fully alive isn’t passive: energy doesn’t rest. So we too should rest less. But fear not, for we’ll be home soon.

    • Something More Than Hope

      “You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time, have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” — Jim Collins

      At a mass of remembrance recently, a Catholic priest, speaking on faith in the face of loss, said that there are two sides of the coin with regard to hopelessness: despair and practicality. His point was that, not surprisingly, we lose hope when we reside in despair, but we also do when we succumb to logic and believe that there is nothing that can be done about the matter. There’s a place for hope in this world, he suggested, and it requires the antonyms of despair and practicality: faith, confidence and maybe even a small but healthy dose of idealism.

      His words triggered a memory of the “Stockdale Paradox”, which Jim Collins explains quite effectively in the quote above. Faith and hope are great, but we have to be practical too. There are sometimes things out of our control that must be dealt with. When we balance those two sides of the coin, we might realize the optimal outcome given the circumstances. Or we might not, but we gave it a good fight. Life isn’t fair: We must reconcile ourselves to that fact and do with it what we can to stay afloat. The alternative is to sink.

      Surely, there are things we have no business hoping for. Sometimes the brutal facts make hope a frivolous distraction. Then again, sometimes we get so caught up in things like despair and practicality that we give up on hope too soon. The world is full of stories of epic comebacks fueled by faith in the outcome and decisive action despite ridiculously bad odds. Being from New England, I can quickly think of two favorites:

      “Don’t Let Us Win Tonight!” — Kevin Millar, Boston Red Sox, before the game 4 comeback against the New York Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series. The Red Sox were down 3 games to none and came back to win the series.

      “Let’s go, baby. It’s going to be one hell of a story.” — Julian Edelman, New England Patriots wide receiver, prior to the Super Bowl comeback from a 28-3 deficit against the Atlanta Falcons to win the Super Bowl.

      In both situations, the logical thing to do would be to sink. But each team flipped the script and did whatever they had to do to win in the end. Granted, sports aren’t life, but they represent the dynamic nature of living in a contentious, competitive world that doesn’t care about our feelings, only the results.

      Brutal facts are indeed often brutal, and mandate clear thinking and deliberate action. There’s no going through the motions in such moments. Unwavering faith may fuel you, but surviving and thriving require heightened awareness and strategic execution. And even then things don’t always go our way. But then again, sometimes—sometimes, they do.