Alexandersmap

    Author: nhcarmichael

    • The House and the Road

      “My house says to me, “Do not leave me, for here dwells your past.”
      And the road says to me, “Come and follow me, for I am your future.”
      And I say to both my house and the road, “I have no past, nor have I a future. If I stay here, there is a going in my staying; and if I go there is a staying in my going. Only love and death will change all things.”
      – Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam

      Lately I’ve been thinking of the house I’ve lived in as an anchor.  An anchor can have both a positive and negative connotation of course, but I thought of it in the positive way.   I’ve been putting a lot of time in at the old anchor lately, quarantined in a pandemic and working from home.  And the completed projects have stacked up into something tangible.  I could almost stay here forever.

      Lately I’ve also been thinking about the road.  Getting out there and seeing the world again, almost like things were normal.  The list of places to go grows quietly urgent, for time is fleeting and the world changes but so do you.  I imagine a scene akin to the running of the bulls in Pamplona as would-be travelers run the streets, hoping they aren’t run over by time as they make up for 2020.

      I look at the trees when I sit in the backyard, thinking they’re beginning to encroach a bit in their search for light.  This won’t do, not if we stay.  Limb up the trees now added to the list.  The list that grows and nags.  It only takes the right ratio of time and money to make a house work out for you.  You either put in more time or more money, but one way or the other the house demands a mix of both from you.

      I scrolled through a list of the most beautiful place to visit in each state that Conde Nast Traveller put out a couple of years ago.  I’ve been to ten of the places listed.  Ten out of fifty.  For all my travel I’ve only been to 33 of 50 states, if you exclude layovers in random airports.  Using the same criteria, my results are much worse on global travel, where I’ve spent meaningful time in only 12 of 195 countries.  The road mocks me even as it calls.

      There is a season for everything, and the last twenty-two years have been the season of parenting and being present as a father, layered with epic travel blessings.  I travel more than many do in their lifetimes, and I’ve managed to do it while being present for my children in their own lives as they’ve grown into adults.  I see the people traveling the world with their children and I’m awed by the life these families are living, but I wanted my own kids to grow up in a neighborhood, playing sports and riding bicycles up and down the street and building lifetime memories.  I suppose I could have added another dozen countries to the list, maybe even 50 more.  But here in this house dwells my past, and it’s not such a bad past at that.

      “Come and follow me, for I am your future”

      And now?  Now I plot and scheme and decide what to prioritize. I have at least 47 reasons to stay in New Hampshire for the foreseeable future as I quietly chip away at the 4000 footers.  There’s a net benefit in hiking in better fitness as well.  Resuming global travel will have to wait a bit longer.  Same with a few of those places I haven’t seen in the United States.  And I don’t mind waiting, for the house is not just the past, but the future as well.  At least for a little while.  It’s good to have a solid anchor at the ready.  Today, Father’s Day in America, I realize I’ve been an anchor myself.  Paid in full through time and effort and love.  With one eye on the house and the other on the road, but always present when it counts.

    • Beginning With Waumbek

      “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.” – John Muir

      The workout today was pretty straightforward: hike a total of 7 miles round trip up one of New Hampshire’s forty-eight 4000 footers. I’ve hiked at least a dozen of them before , some multiple times, but I didn’t track it officially. So I’m simply starting over again. I’m not imposing a deadline on myself and I’m not in a race. I don’t go to the mountains to set distance records. I go to the mountains because I love the mountains. And I love who I become when I spend more time in the mountains. And so today was, officially, one. And some good tidings.

      I chose Mount Waumbek in Jefferson, considered a good beginner 4000 footer. I’m not a beginner, but I’m beginning again. Waumbek was as good a place to start as any. At 4006 feet, its one of the shorter 48, but it counts just the same as Mount Washington on the list. And so I announced to the family that I was going and got one taker; my daughter committed to getting up at 4:30 and joining me. You know someone is serious when they commit to 4:30 AM, and sure enough she was ready to go by 5 AM.

      Mount Waumbek is an interesting name. The White Mountains themselves were once called Waumbekket Methna, which either means “mountains with snowy foreheads” or “white rocks” in the dialect of the Abenaki. Or maybe some settler came up with that story after enough time passed. What I’m fairly certain of is that Mount Waumbek was once slated to be yet another ski area, but thankfully it fell through and was preserved. I imagine it would’ve still counted as a 4000 footer, as Cannon Mountain does, but it wouldn’t feel much like hiking then. I’ll take the New Hampshire rock and root tour, thank you.

      I like to start hikes early, especially in hot weather. It’s generally less crowded, making simple things like parking a car less of a process. And early makes a big difference on hot, muggy days. Get it done before the crowds, before the heat, and before the inevitable thunderstorms that roll through the mountains on such days. We began our first steps at 7:45, a bit later than desired, and with a bit more company, but thankfully no raindrops. Instead we ran into swarms of ravenous gnats, flies and a few odd mosquitos. None of them cared much for social distancing. None of them got the memo that we wore generous applications of bug juice, or that according to the small printed label, they’re supposed to hate this stuff. No, they actually seemed to view it the way I view olive oil.

      The only solution was to keep moving. Summit Starr King Mountain (now THAT is a name for a mountain), glance at the view, snap a picture, move. Summit Waumbek, sip some water and nibble on a snack (carefully brushing off the carnivores who made a reservation to dine on you), re-apply bug juice and get moving again. There was no getting around it, I chose the height of bug season to begin again. But a day of hiking, even with the swarm, is better than most workouts I can think of. 19,000 steps today, and I’ll surely feel it tomorrow.

      And so it was, we checked off the first of the 4000 footers, I’ll carefully note it on the tracking sheet, and I’ll move on to the next on the list. Maybe it’ll be a we? After all, I’m not the only one who checked a box today.

    • Is It Yourself You Seek?

      It is yourself you seek
      In a long rage,
      Scanning through light and darkness
      Mirrors, the page,

      Where should reflected be
      Those eyes and that thick hair,
      That passionate look, that laughter.
      You should appear

      Within the book, or doubled,
      Freed, in the silvered glass;
      Into all other bodies
      Yourself should pass.

      The glass does not dissolve;
      Like walls the mirrors stand;
      The printed page gives back
      Words by another hand.

      And your infatuate eye
      Meets not itself below;
      Strangers lie in your arms
      As I lie now.
      – Louise Bogan, Man Alone

      I seek myself in early morning quiet, listening for the whisper.
      I seek myself on long walks in rough terrain, one step at a time with an eye on the footing and the other at the way forward.
      I seek myself in the long drives to faraway places, with nothing playing but the soundtrack of the tires on pavement.
      I seek myself in pictures, vainly attempting to capture the light and never quite reaching perfection but smiling at the moment anyway.
      I seek myself in the dusty soil, that traps under fingernails and turns into beauty with water and time we hope we have.
      I seek myself in deep plunges into water, thoughts rising with the bubbles as we break the surface, clearer than before.
      I seek myself in lyrics captured from songs in the air, hearing words for the first time and desperately grabbing at Shazam to find the source before it disappears forever.
      I seek myself in habits made and promises to myself broken, with hopes of trying again tomorrow.
      I seek myself in reaching out in service to others, to rejoice in the moment of connection ever fleeting.
      I seek myself in old battlefields and graveyards and monuments to ghosts who only wish to be remembered once more.
      I seek myself in freshly chopped vegetables, sautéing in snaps and pops that betray my anticipation.
      I seek myself in the words that dance on the page, my own or those of strangers in my arms.
      I seek myself in skimming across water, skipping like a stone on the pull of an oar or the puff of the wind and wanting only to fly a little bit longer.
      Tell me, where do you seek yourself?

    • Grilling Pizza

      One silver lining of quarantining is that my cooking game is getting more diverse and adventurous.  More Indian food, more vegetarian options, and now, … grilling pizza.  I know: grilling a pizza isn’t exactly adventurous, people have been doing it forever!  But in this house, homemade pizza was always slipped gently into the oven.  When you spent time and effort making something as lovely as a pizza, why risk it on the variability of a charcoal grill?

      Flavor of course.  Flavor is the reason you grill anything on a charcoal grill.  Not a propane grill – that’s just an outdoor extension of the stove.  Charcoal grilling on a ceramic grill that heats up beyond oven temperatures when closed and the coals are bright orange and alive.  That’s ancient cooking right there –  none of this propane-fueled regulated blandness, thank you.  And that’s what I brought my homemade pizzas out to.  That’s right: pizzas.  Plural.  If you’re going to use charcoal, make the most of the resource.

      The first attempt was a traditional cheese pizza with dough spread thinly across a large, perforated pan that I’ve had since college.  This baby has seen everything in it’s time…  everything but a charcoal grill anyway.  Simple and classic cheese pizza recipe, thin crust, thin layer of sauce, generous layer of cheese, done.  My concern with this first pizza was the grill temperature.  I waited until it dropped below 500 degrees Fahrenheit before putting the pizza on the grill, and watched it carefully to make sure it didn’t just erupt into flames.  Using a grill spatula, I’d gently lift up an edge, inspect and spin it and try again.  Can’t be too careful with that first pizza.  And it turned out to be an excellent first attempt.  Congrats!  We won’t be ordering pizza to replace a burnt offering!

      The second pizza was slightly more daring: A thicker crust on a stone instead of a perforated pan.  This one had thinly sliced green peppers and chicken sausage spread on top.  And generally the results were pretty good.  Thicker crust on a stone meant risking an uneven, doughy crust in some places.  That proved to be the case in one particularly thick spot.  If it were a restaurant I might have sent it back, but in my backyard it was close enough.  Two large pizzas and leftovers for lunch.  And no sacrificial lambs.  Not a bad first effort!

      2020, for all the suffering and frustration, has offered opportunities to see the world in a different way.  Maybe grilling a pizza isn’t exactly tackling social justice, but it’s a step away from the norm.  And now I’m thinking about what else I can grill.  So grilling pizza became one very small measure of audacity that worked out.  I might not ever have tried it in a normal year when getting dinner done after a long day away from home was a task.  But 2020 replaced what is fast and easy? with what is going to be really interesting to try?  And that’s not such a bad thing at all. A moment of fun experimentation with relatively low stakes.  We can all use more fun this year.  

    • Capturing the Light

      There is a scene in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty where Walter Mitty looks at a picture of Sean O’Connell.  Walter is the daydreaming, play life straight ahead guy, Sean is the bold, adventurous photographer who masterfully dances on the edge between chaos and order.  Walter looks at the picture of Sean looking back at him and sees Sean waving to him “Come on, already!” as Wake Up by Arcade Fire begins to play.  I find it impossible to not be stirred up by this scene, no matter how many times I’ve watched it.  Because that’s all of us who play life straight ahead, looking at the bold and adventurous and wanting someone in that world to look us in the eye and tell us, “Come on, already!”  Mostly we forget that we can say it to ourselves.

      I took my typical plunge into deep water this morning and watched the sun beams streaming through the forest, lighting up each leaf it landed on in thousands of fluttering florescent green glowing congregation of the faithful.  Those who remained in shadow seemed to gaze longingly at the brilliant dancers, and I understood the look as my own.  I confess I’m awestruck at moments like that, and floated in the water watching the light probe deeper into the forest and continue the dance beyond my line of sight.  Light and shadow and me treading on the surface, floating in wonder.   It occurred to me at that moment that writing is capturing the light, and having the audacity to try.  There was better poetry in that moment, and I don’t quite have the words to reveal it to the world.  But I recognized it nonetheless and work to serve the muse who patiently awaits my contribution.

      I’ve been pondering the word audacity since I woke up this morning, but I don’t feel like it’s a word I can own.  After all, I’m not living an audacious life.  I fancy myself bold and audacious, but really I’m rather conservative in every day living.  I do audacious things on occasion – little exclamation points on a moment as I’ve written about previously.  But upon further review I’m more Walter than Sean.  I suppose most of us are, and that’s the appeal of a Walter Mitty moment.

      Whenever the fog of life clogs my line of sight I put on those noise cancelling headphones and watch Arcade Fire perform Wake Up at the Reading Festival and I’m jolted to clarity.  I suppose that’s what plunging into water does for me too.  An immediate state change.  An opportunity to reset.  But ultimately I come back to the reality that I’m still in the Walter skin.  And I choose to stay in it.  Secret conspiracies for audacious living remain, but Sean hasn’t waved vigorously enough to shake the inertia just yet.  Come on, already!  Absolutely, but could you wait for tomorrow?  I’ve got to finish this project I’m working on.  That wouldn’t be a very good movie at all, would it?

      Audacity has a negative connotation, but I’m rather fond of the positive connotation.  It derives from Latin, audacia  and means daring, boldness, and courage.  Three traits we’d all like to think we have in abundance.  Like most people, I’m chafing at the bit, restless at the quarantine and the impact on travel and getting out there.  It’s hard to live audaciously when you aren’t allowed to cross borders.  But then again, maybe it’s just waiting for you to wake up and get to it already.  Audaciousness is capturing the light within ourselves and showing it to the world.  Highlighting our spirit within for the world to see.  It seems you don’t have to cross borders to be audacious.  You just have to get to it.  Cue the music.

       

    • On Setbacks and Moving Ahead

      “Show me that the good life doesn’t consist in its length, but in its use, and that it is possible—no, entirely too common—for a person who has had a long life to have lived too little.” Seneca, Moral Letters

      Preparing to sauté a holy trinity of onions, celery and peppers last night, I found the counter loaded with dishes and grocery items that hadn’t been put away.  So I set about putting them away and in the process of pushing a bag of coffee into a cabinet a glass mason jar was pushed out and plummeted to the floor, where it transformed into hundreds of shards of glass.    Which transformed my evening of cooking into an evening of cleaning every bit of glass off the floor before I could get back to the original mission.  Life is full of setbacks.

      I have big plans – I always have.  Sometimes they play out but many times they peter out. So it goes.  Lately I’ve been planning big again, as documented yesterday in this blog, and planning big requires a healthy dose of optimism about tomorrow and the tomorrows after that.  But like the mason jar I know they’ll be setbacks along the way.  Ultimately plans are just a direction we decide to go in, and action is what we do to move in that direction today.  For there’s only today, as Seneca reminds us from his dusty grave.

      “I don’t complain about the lack of time . . . what little I have will go far enough. Today—this day—will achieve what no tomorrow will fail to speak about. I will lay siege to the gods and shake up the world.” – Seneca, Medea

      Bold statement to be sure, but there’s boldness in action, and boldness in the immediate. So why not be bold today?  Do something outside the ordinary.  And this is where we might book a trip to someplace new or dart off the some other adventure.  Since “darting off” options are limited for most of us, what can we do that strikes of bold?  What shall today’s one line entry in the journal be?  Rolled the trash bin back up from the street?  Or maybe something more?  We’ve got roughly 16 hours of useful time in a day.  What little time we have will go far enough if we would only get moving now.

      “The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.” – Seneca

      Every morning I wake up and get moving right away.  There’s always urgency in my mornings.  Urgency to write and read and think a bit about things before the rest of the world wakes up and imposes itself on my grand plans.  I value the mornings most of all for this reason.  We don’t know what mason jars are lurking about to mess up the plans we have, but worrying about lurking setbacks isn’t going to build momentum in this moment.  Focus on the actions you can take now to build resilience and momentum to handle the setbacks then.  When the setback happens, give it the attention it needs for the time it requires, and then find some small step forward.  And another step after that.  That’s life, one moment and one setback at a time.  Whether a shattered mason jar or a pandemic, it’s only a setback (and not a finale) if we work through it and put it behind us.  Stop signs are really only pauses before we get moving again.  Having looked both ways, I believe it’s time to get moving again.  Seneca is right there with us, prodding us along through our inertia: “Now”.

    • The Second Best Time is Now

      “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese Proverb

      Today is June 15th, which is the halfway point of the month that concludes the halfway point of the year.  The first half of 2020 felt like a decade with the massive shifts happening in the world.  I won’t subject you to a retelling of the tale now as you’re quite familiar with the journey we’ve been on.  If there’s a silver lining during this first half of the year, it’s the re-focusing on what’s important.  It’s the time with family and friends and looking at the simple things we’ve taken for granted, like going out for dinner or to a concert.

      I’m grateful for the opportunity to spend more time with immediate family, regret the opportunities lost, and look forward to getting back to it when there’s less risk to others.  Risk to others is always the calculus, not risk to myself.  I wear a mask in crowded places and wonder at the growing crowd of people who aren’t wearing one.  We aren’t there just yet folks, as much as we want to be.

      I’ve completed a long list of home improvement tasks and find that the list doesn’t get shorter.  Still, I walk around and I’m less inclined to say to myself I need to get to that someday when I look at a wall or ceiling or some other nook and cranny of this place I spend so much time in now.  Better weather has opened up an entirely new canvas for improvement.  It’s all a work in progress, and will continue until the pandemic releases its hold on us.

      I’ve taken to rowing 5000 meters at lunchtime every workday.  Weekends are reserved for other activity with the nicer weather.  Rowing replaced walking at lunchtime because it’s more efficient and there’s a timeless feeling I get when I’m on the rowing ergometer.  It could be 2020, or it could be 1990, the only thing that changes are the splits and the soreness afterwards.

      I’m ever so slowly learning French, and I’ve added Portuguese as well.  I have an eye on the world and will return to travel again someday, and speaking one language is simply not enough.  There are place to visit far from the tourist traps, where people expect some measure of knowledge of their language.  Je dois les rencontrer à mi-chemin – I’ve got to meet them halfway.  France is to be expected, but I also feel the pull of Portugal and Brazil.  And so I’ve added a third language, even before I’ve mastered the second.  Aprendi a seguir uma paixão e ver aonde ela leva – I’ve learned to follow a passion and see where it leads you.

      I’ve checked a few important boxes in my job that I’m pleased with and see all that might have been if only the world were normal. But it’s not normal and time flies relentlessly by anyway.  Some of the biggest project I was tracking have stalled in the quicksand of social isolation.  Even as things ramp up they may be a long way from where they should have been.  I’m grateful to work for a company that views the world through a long lens and measures its value by the people who work for it.

      And so we approach the second half of 2020, and more epochal moments are surely in store for us all.  There’s an election coming up in America.  Professional sports are tentatively starting up again.  People are dipping a toe back in the waters to see just how cold it really is.  And I find myself thinking about the trees I haven’t planted:

      When I was 18 I was a certified SCUBA diver.  And then I went to college and discovered rowing and girls and I gently tucked away the mask and fins and never went back to it again.  I’m told that the sport of diving is suffering a decline as people find other ways to spend time and disposable income.  I recognize the pull away from the water that’s held me away since I was a teenager, but also hear the siren call of the deep dive.  I’m going back to the deep water again, and depending on restrictions around COVID-19 I’ll do it in the second half of 2020.

      There’s another siren that’s been calling me for years, and it’s hiking.  I’ve long talked of hiking the Appalachian Trail and hold that out as my 60th birthday present to myself, when I get there.  But in the meantime I’m not hiking any other trail most days.  This won’t do at all.  I’m going back to the mountains in 2020, but not chasing others around.  I’m going to return to the 48 4000 footers in New Hampshire at my own pace, and check this box that’s been nagging me since I was a kid.

      So there you go: My own small version of Navy SEAL training.  Top of the mountains to the bottom of the sea.  Self-paced and documented.  Multilingual, multidimensional and adventurous in spirit.  Beats painting another room.  As my son would say, let’s go!

       

    • Knowing Your Place

      “Even on the most exalted throne in the world we are only sitting on our own bottom.” – Michel de Montaigne

      There’s a tiny house wren that acts like it owns the place, and carries on about it when I have the audacity to linger near her nest. I understand and concede the space. There will be a time soon enough when the space won’t be as important to her and her young and I can linger there again. We all have our place in this world. Here and now, this is hers.

      Coexisting with others offers humility.  I’m tolerant of the wren and the cardinal who nests in the shrub out front that’s in need of a trim.  Far less tolerant of the chipmunks who tunnel under the hard won ground I’ve toiled with, or the hornets who wish to reside in the grill or the weep holes for the windows.  But all of them are telling me that we’re just bit players in the game, just like they are.  Eventually we’ll move on one way or the other, just as they do.  So how do you behave while we’re all sitting here in the same place?

      From the beginning Americans have acted like we own the place, moving in and sweeping aside those we wouldn’t coexist with.  I heard a great analogy for this on Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast, where we might get a little freaked out about a spider that may or may not be dangerous.  If we know for sure it’s not going to harm us we might gently sweep it outside.  But if there’s any doubt about it’s venomous nature we’d kill it in a second.  Such was the fate for the Native Americans as Europeans settled North and South America.  In the early stages of King Philip’s War peaceful “Indians” were rounded up and shipped to islands in Boston Harbor, just in case.  Eventually those same people would be used to help end that war.  Look at any war and you’ll see a similar level of suspicion of who might be peaceful and who might be venomous.  Russians rounding up people of German descent and sending them to Siberia, Americans rounding up people of Japanese descent and sticking them in internment camps in the west, the English rounding up the Scots and Irish and kicking them out of first one place, then another.  When in doubt, evict or destroy.

      The beautiful thing about America is that we’re a country designed under the rule of law, not the rule of a king or tyrant.  Checks and balances exist to ensure that those in power don’t abuse their power.  That’s being tested like never before in American history, ironically by a guy sitting on his own bottom tapping away unchecked on Twitter.  For all the abuse and fixing of the system going on by those in “leadership” positions, nature has a way of balancing things out.  First, that pesky rule of law provided delay tactics to slow the spread of tyrannical tendencies.  Then a swing of the House of Representatives as Americans reacted to the wave of indignities perpetrated on the country.  And then the tsunami of a pandemic with the associated economic gut punch and a massive reaction to social injustice reared up to test the leader, who is showing he’s not up to the task.  But many Americans are showing that they’ll coexist with a big scary spider only until they feel that it represents a danger to all of us.  Time will tell, but I’m generally optimistic about humanity and my fellow voters.  They might not have been paying enough attention four years ago, but surely they are now.

      Ultimately, we all need to get our own houses in order so we can focus on the more pressing global concerns like climate change.  Mother Nature is peacefully coexisting with us for the moment, but she’s showing her irritation.  We might think we’re perched at the top of the food chain on our exalted throne, but we’re just bit players in the timeless cycle of history.  It would be good to show a little more humility.  We’re all in this place in time together, maybe for a reason, and ought to embrace our role and get to work.

       

    • The Dreaded Screen Time Audit

      I watched a housefly bouncing about on a pane of glass, attracted to the light but unable to find a way through. We aren’t very different in this respect, are we? So focused on the bright light that we don’t see the opportunities around us. Noses pressed to screens of all shapes and sizes, and what have we to show for it?

      The fly got me thinking about my own tendency to bounce against a pane of glass. I scanned my screen time usage to see what the real story was. I don’t believe I stare at my phone all day (in fact I practice active avoidance whenever possible), but still I’m averaging five hours per day staring at my phone. Say what? But its true: 5h 10m per day. Ugh. Doesn’t seem possible! But let’s dive deeper, where was the time used?

      WordPress, Duolingo, Waze, Mail, Kindle and Podcasts are generally productive uses of my screen time. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Safari and YouTube are generally not productive uses of my screen time. I tend to write in short bursts on the iPhone, and longer writing is done on the Mac, so there’s productivity time missing from the equation. Likewise, I tend to read more on an old iPad instead of the phone, so there’s time missing there too. Podcasts, Music, Waze are all multitasking apps and generally aren’t “counted” as nose pressed to the screen apps. But there’s clearly a trend towards more social media happening right now, and that needs to be sharply reduced.

      Like the housefly, I’m bouncing against the bright glass surface and not finding another way out. Who wants to live like a housefly anyway? Not me, thank you. So I need to wean myself off again. The biggest culprit is Twitter, which has become my default news feed. There are valid reasons to be on social media in this time we live in. But what am I really getting out of it? Validation of viewpoints I already have? On my deathbed I won’t say I wish I’d spent more time on Twitter, but I might regret not spending more time outside, face-to-face with the world and the people in it. At least the ones who aren’t pressing their own noses into a screen. What does your screen time look like? If it’s more than you’d like meet me outside – we’ll take a walk and talk. No phones required.

    • Masters of the Art of Life

      Dive deep with me on this quote, there’s a lot to it:

      “In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister [“Only the master shows himself in the limitation,”] says Goethe. Mâle résignation, this also is the motto of those who are masters of the art of life; “manly,” that is to say, courageous, active, resolute, persevering, “resignation,” that is to say, self-sacrifice, renunciation, limitation. Energy in resignation, there lies the wisdom of the sons of earth, the only serenity possible in this life of struggle and of combat. In it is the peace of martyrdom, in it too the promise of triumph. – Henri Frédéric Amiel, Amiel’s Journal

      “Manly resignation” seems counterintuitive, contradictory and weak to some. But dig deeper here into the words used to describe resignation: self-sacrifice, renunciation and limitation. These are anything but weakness, they’re honorable traits. It takes courage to stand up and voice a counter argument, to say this isn’t right, this will not stand. It takes courage to face ridicule and violence. The weak are the blind followers.  What shall you be?

      Only the master shows himself in the limitation… visually I leap to Obi Wan Kenobi raising his light saber in concession to Darth Vader in Star Wars. But who really won in the end? In real life, it means finding common ground, conceding a point, compromise for the greater good. The art of diplomacy.  The REAL art of the deal, not the con man version.  All very adult traits that Congress might wish to return to. Traits any good leader has. Any good parent. Any good spouse. The United States is not currently being led by someone who shows himself in the limitation. But the country recoils and will spit out this poison pill eventually. I hope in a few months.

      “Masters in the art of life” suggests the easy path on its face. But life isn’t easy, and the art of life is making it look easy while you press ahead doing the work that matters.  Any fool can set aside responsibilities and chase after pots of gold on the other side of the rainbow. Decide what to be and go be it, but remember the truly great people, the masters in the art of life, are the people who sacrifice of themselves for the greater good.  Not frivolously, but for the things that matter.  Who are the masters in the art of life?  I think of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Winston Churchill, John Muir, George Washington, Clara Barton, and dozens more.  All of them very human, with flaws some were/are eager to point out as if to elevate their own standing.  But all rose above the common man or woman, showing themselves in resignation, not of the fight, but of the easier path.

      Maybe we all can’t be the answer on some future Jeopardy trivia question, but we can be an anchor in our family, in our community, in our careers.  We can be linchpins, as Seth Godin would put it, that hold things together even in the most trying of times.  And maybe that’s enough. To throw another couple of movie characters at you, it’s so much harder to be George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life or Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, but don’t we have to try?  Looking around at the moment, it seems plenty want to try.  That’s the recoil in action.  The pendulum swinging back to center.  This is not who we ought to be.  This will not be who we will be from now on.  We can be better than this.  Decide what to be and go be it.

      In a bit of trivia perhaps interesting only to me and the parents who conceived me, Amiel wrote that entry in his journal 114 years to the day before I was born. He was 31 at the time. He was wise beyond his years. If there’s a joy in reading, its in mining gold from the ages. Tapping into the Great Conversation is available to all of us, so why don’t more people seize the opportunity?  To master the art of life, it helps to learn from those who have been here before.  I’m a work in progress myself, but try to learn a bit more every day, and apply some of that wisdom in my own life.  I may not be Obi Wan Kenobi, but I can try to be George Bailey.