Alexandersmap

    Author: nhcarmichael

    • Gone From My Sight

      I am standing upon the seashore.
      A ship at my side spreads her white
      sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean.

      She is an object of beauty and strength.
      I stand and watch her until at length
      she hangs like a speck of white cloud
      just where the sea and sky come
      to mingle with each other.

      Then, someone at my side says;
      “There, she is gone!”

      “Gone where?”
      Gone from my sight. That is all.
      She is just as large in mast and hull
      and spar as she was when she left my side
      and she is just as able to bear her
      load of living freight to her destined port.
      Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

      And just at the moment when someone
      at my side says, “There, she is gone!”
      There are other eyes watching her coming,
      and other voices ready to take up the glad shout;
      “Here she comes!”
      And that is dying.
      — Henry Van Dyke, I Am Standing Upon The Seashore

      When we lose someone, what do we miss the most? Their physical presence? Or their fresh perspective? They may always be with us, even without these things, but these things matter too. They matter deeply.

      When we lose someone we lose the essence of that person in our lives. Yet we still feel them with us. It’s not our time to sail off over that horizon. But we wonder at just what’s over it just the same.

      In time…

    • Something Mighty and Sublime

      Rest not!
      Life is sweeping by
      go and dare before you die.
      Something mighty and sublime,
      leave behind to conquer time.
      — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

      Goethe once wrestled with the desire to accomplish great things while enjoying the comforts of a bourgeois lifestyle. By all accounts he succeeded in transcending the ordinary with his writing. And what of us? Are we so comfortable in our domestic lifestyle that we fail to seize the moment? Are we doomed to be the forgotten masses or will we create something mighty and sublime in our time?

      These are grandiose expectations for a lifetime. Who are we to rock the boat when there’s such good sailing? We ask of life what we will, it hands back harsh unfairness and tempting distractions and entertaining beguilements that quickly rob us of the one thing that matters most: time. What of it? Plenty of people have transcended all of these things and more. The only thing we can control is our focus and consistent effort towards the achievement of our hopes and dreams.

      “Do or do not. There is no try.” — Yoda

      There’s no judgement in these words, just the facts. We have our time and then it will be gone, intentions be damned. We must ask ourselves, in the quiet moments of truth, what is it we wish to do before it all ends? Rest not! Get to it already.

    • Roots and the Road

      “Be good and you’ll be lonesome.” — Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

      I’ve had this quote in my mind for a decade or two, floating about in the back of my brain. It sneaks back to the front now and then, mostly as a taunt to be more adventurous. Some may say I don’t need a prompt like that.

      A healthy dose of mischief leads us into all sorts of adventure. A healthy sense of place leads us to a life of meaning. There’s a happy medium somewhere in between. We ought to be a bit adventurous, but ought to have something that grounds us too. How we weigh that out is different for each of us. We’re never really lonesome when we’re running towards something.

      Last weekend Twain’s words drifted back front and center as I walked through a local greenhouse. It comes down to whether to plant tomatoes. If I plant them this year it signals I’m locked in to this place for at least another season. If I forgo the tomatoes, you might say I’m free to roam.

      Life is more complicated than that. We aren’t locked into a life by the crops we plant. But it sure feels like you’re rooting yourself to that plot of land while you’re planting them. That chicken manure sure smells a lot like commitment when you’ve caught the adventure bug.

      Still, I do love a good tomato.

    • Time for a Friendly Visit

      When a friend calls to me from the road
      And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
      I don’t stand still and look around
      On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
      And shout from where I am, What is it?
      No, not as there is a time to talk.
      I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
      Blade-end up and five feet tall,
      And plod: I go up to the stone wall
      For a friendly visit.
      — Robert Frost, A Time to Talk

      Imagine the audacity of pressing deadlines and the urgency of the moment pulling us away from what is most important. And we willingly do it, thinking there will be another time when we’re less busy and feeling less obliged to do what clearly must get done. Where do we best spend our time, if not for furthering relationships with our fellow time-travelers?

      We hear about rampant depression and a longing for something tangible. There’s nothing tangible in the comments section of those popular social media platforms. We must meet each other face-to-face and sort out the world together, or together we’ll spiral deeper into chaos. To do this requires nothing more than meeting halfway. Doesn’t that idea feel as antiquated as the horse in Frost’s poem? Yet it remains the obvious answer to the problems of the world: diplomacy, compromise, mutual respect and understanding. These aren’t signs of weakness, in fact just the opposite: they betray inner character and a measure of emotional development.

      We are the diplomats, you and me. We walk across the minefield of distrust and find common ground. Seeking first to understand, and then to be understood. There’s nothing easy about this in a world that rewards mic drops and jaw-dropping tweets, but the world has always been divided between those who make all the noise and those who quietly keep things from falling apart.

      Imagine if we all simply stopped shouting and began to listen instead?

    • Knowing the Songs

      I can see, it took so long just to realize
      I’m much too strong not to compromise
      Now I see what I am is holding me down
      I’ll turn it around
      Oh, yes, I will
      — Boston, Don’t Look Back

      When you go to a concert to see a band play, are you looking for new or familiar? Go to an Eagles or Paul McCartney concert and it’s a greatest hits collection where you know every song and everyone around you does too. It becomes a sing-along festival. Tasty, but not exactly pushing your boundaries.

      Think about the last time you went to see an up and coming band with all the buzz and you didn’t know any of their songs at all, but want to see what all the fuss is about. That was a voyage of discovery, one that carried you to places exciting and new. You knew you were going to know those songs soon enough when that band broke like a wave over the airwaves.

      That band that you’ve known for years knows the score. They want to play you the new stuff, because that’s what excites them the most. But they know people pay to see the songs they love performed live. So they layer in the new with the old, hoping the ratio is just right to keep the crowd from going flat.

      We humans play our own greatest hits in our head. We tell ourselves we’re going to change but stick with the same soundtrack we had on yesterday and the day before. Maybe we have a circle of fans around us that only want to hear our greatest hits and feel uncomfortable when we start to change. It’s easy to get trapped in that old soundtrack.

      The trick to turning things around is to layer in the new songs. Change a small habit, then another. Learn something new today and stretch even further tomorrow. Pretty soon you’ll find that you don’t look back so much anymore because you’re so busy becoming what you want to be next. We might even find that our best fans enthusiastically go along for the ride, changing with us.

    • Forever Intertwined

      “Tell your friend that in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you also go. He will not be alone.” ― Jiddu Krishnamurti

      We often talk of those we’ve lost as if a part of them is still here with us. I can still hear the laughter of a few people I held in high regard, still see the twinkle in their eyes. They aren’t truly gone if we still feel their presence within us, are they?

      Krishnamurti turns this around, reminding us that those who slip away from this world take a piece of us with them too. Our lives are forever intertwined, even if we aren’t physically in the same place anymore. We feel their loss as a tangible part of us forever missing. There’s comfort in knowing that’s the part of us that’s keeping them company now and forever more.

      We say goodbye, but we never really part from one another.

    • Reallocated Time, With Purple Blossoms

      If time is precious, how would you react when you take a left turn instead of a right and see your estimated time of arrival immediately jump up 30 minutes? That happened when I turned onto a stretch of Route 76 near Philadelphia with heavy traffic in both directions and nowhere to turn around for miles. Under the circumstances, you could either curse at yourself for making a split-second error in judgement or turn up the music and accept the gift that the universe presented to you.

      The deeper you dive into philosophy, the more minutes you dole out in exchange for experience, the more you see how much doesn’t matter that once seemed so important. We are all marching down the same path, the same path every other human in existence has marched down. We all make a wrong turn now and then.

      The thing is, if we live to be 80 or we live to be 100, that’s between 42 and 52 million minutes. How we use those minutes is the difference between an enjoyable life and a life less enjoyable. 52 million minutes seems like a lot until you realize how many you’ve burned through already on your march down the path. Is 30 minutes out of 52 million a big deal?

      A wrong turn can be viewed as either wasted or reallocated time. The only time that’s wasted is the time we give away to distraction. Confusion may have pulled me onto the wrong road, but making it a distraction would have wasted the opportunity to turn those minutes from their expected use into something less ordinary.

      I turned up the music and enjoyed the abundant purple blossoms of the (invasive) Paulownia Trees as I crawled down the highway. It was a view I’d never have seen had I taken the “right” turn. It was the universe offering me a bouquet of flowers and some time to reset my expectations for the day. Maybe it wasn’t a wrong turn after all?

    • To Live, To Think

      The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think. — C. G. Jung, The Red Book

      Life is a brief flash and soon gone. Live while we may, make the most of this time, for soon we fade away. Life reminds us of this now and then. Today, again. We must make good use of our brief time.

      Live.

    • The Very Best Day of All

      “Let us therefore set out whole-heartedly, leaving aside our many distractions and exert ourselves in this single purpose, before we realize too late the swift and unstoppable flight of time and are left behind. 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, Moral Letters to Lucilius

      It must be Spring, for I return again to Seneca’s urgent call: “Seize what flees”. And so it is our quest to live this day as if it were our very last. To meet this, our moment at hand, and do something with it.

      That’s a heavy ask. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to perform with statements like that. We all want to seize the day, but what if we’ve got bills to pay and a car that doesn’t drive itself to work quite yet? Who’s going to clean the dishes while we’re off seizing the day?

      Seneca had his own daily obligations and understood the recklessness of grabbing the moment. Does it carry more weight when you think of him as mere dust mixed in the timeless sands of Rome? He knew the stakes, but also knew we all have things to do. Just don’t make it your life’s purpose to fulfill the dreams of others. Make a stand for your own dreams today too.

      Welcome today as the very best day of all. It’s all we have, really. What would make it particularly remarkable given the chorus of requests for our time? Let’s carve out a little of our brief time to seize that. Deal?

    • Divided Attention

      “Divide the fire and you will sooner put it out.” — Publilius Syrus

      We become what we focus on. For everything else? We never fully realize the potential of what might have been.

      What is the fire? Where is our passion? If we know why do we divide it so? We split our focus into micro-bursts, smothering the creative fire within us. To give life to dreams requires fuel and room to breath.

      Better to stoke the fire than to watch it die out.

      It gives such a lovely glow.