Alexandersmap

    Author: nhcarmichael

    • In The Here

      “Stress is caused by being “here” but wanting to be “there,” or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It’s a split that tears you apart inside.” – Eckhart Tolle

      If there’s a cause for frustration, resentment and dissatisfaction in life, it’s this battle between here and there. The have’s versus the have-nots. There’s a lot to be said for aspiring for more. After all, if we don’t have a vision of where we want to go, how do we find the most efficient path to get there? But when you focus too much on “there” it just makes you miserable inside. And who wants to be a miserable snot?

      No, the better approach is to practice gratitude for what you have now, in the here. Several people I follow advocate for writing down what you’re grateful for every day, to reinforce that spirit of gratitude and appreciation for what you have. And most of us have a lot. We’re truly wealthy, yet focus on what we don’t have. What a waste. Give me gratitude, and a focus on what I have today, even as I steer a course for tomorrow.

    • The Pilgrims and Pokanoket

      As you walk into the Mayflower Pub in London there’s a poster mounted high on the wall that shows the silhouettes of all the pilgrims and servants who sailed on the Mayflower to settle in America. The poster is divided in two, with the upper half showing the Pilgrims as they sailed from Europe. The lower half has the same image, but depicts those who perished before that first winter was over in gray. There’s a lot of gray… but by all rights it should have been all of them.

      The Pilgrims sailed for America too late in the season, without enough food, and sailed for the wrong place. Their charter had them settling at the mouth of the Hudson River, and instead they found themselves at the fist of Cape Cod. Turning south they almost wrecked on the treacherous shoals that have claimed thousands of ships since then. Turning back northward, the Captain of the Mayflower considered present-day Provincetown but eventually worked their way to the area that would become Plymouth., Massachusetts. Pilgrims were starting to die as freezing temperatures, tough living conditions aboard and malnutrition conspired against them. The Native American tribes were well aware of their presence and had already skirmished with them on Cape Cod at First Encounter Beach. A more sustained attack could easily have wiped them out.

      But the Pilgrims also had some lucky breaks that kept enough of them alive to establish a foothold in the region. They arrived at a place where just a few years earlier thousands of Native Americans lived. Contact with Europeans, most likely fishermen fishing the Gulf of Maine, triggered a plaque that killed thousands of people in the few years right before the Pilgrims arrived. So the native population was decimated and in no position to shove the Pilgrims back into the ocean they’d arrived on. They settled in an area with cleared fields and few adversaries. Truly fortunate to be there instead of landing in a place with a thriving and hostile Native American population.

      The other lucky break the Pilgrims caught was landing at a place where the local Sachem, Massasoit, saw strategic advantage in an alliance with the Pilgrims. The Pokanoket tribe Massasoit was Sachem of had been hit hard by the plaque that hit the tribes along the Gulf of Maine, and he was feeling pressure from the Narraganset tribe. An alliance with the Pilgrims gave him some strength in numbers that proved mutually beneficial for the short term. Ultimately this alliance would give the Pilgrims the momentum to survive and grow, but would destroy the Pokanoket in the next generation. An accident of geography brought the Pilgrims and Pokanoket together, time would drive them apart. But in the winter of 1620-1621, it would prove the difference in keeping more Pilgrims from turning into gray silhouettes on a poster 400 years later.

    • People Watching at the Airport

      Arriving early at the airport for my flight home, I knocked off a few thousand steps walking around the terminal. I’m stuck by the commitment to drinking at 7 AM as I passed bar after bar of people nursing adult beverages. I’m no prude, and you never know what time zone someone in an airport is from, but still, it was noteworthy. Then again, I’m on business travel, others are starting vacations, going to the Super Bowl, or calming pre-flight jitters. I don’t get jitters, I’m not going to the Super Bowl, and work beckons. But first those steps.

      I have emails dropping in my in-box and a business plan to write. I have follow-up to do after a week on the road. There’s no time for people-watching, but my eyes are drawn upward to the steady stream of people walking by on their long walk to faraway gates. Well, most are walking, while a few are sprinting at full speed, rolling luggage precariously skimming along beside them. Others are taking the courtesy carts, which hum on by, beeping warnings to drowsy zig-zaggers.

      I check email, draft a few bullet points for the business plan, stretch and look around again. More people streaming by. And more masks than normal as coronavirus makes the news-readers voices pitch upward in alarm and people who take precautions. The world isn’t a healthy place at the moment, with people and the planet exhibiting symptoms of larger problems. I have an equally-low tolerance for climate deniers and conspiracy theorists and party-first politicians alike. I know I don’t know everything, but I’ll be the first to admit that. Zealots who announce they have it all figured out if you’ll just trust their what they say (but not what they do) have no place in my world, thank you. But as you watch the stream of people walking by, you see that we’re all just people making our way from here to there. We’re all on the same journey, even the charlatans.

      I used to think I didn’t like Kobe Bryant or Alex Rodrigues, not because they’re bad people, but because they weren’t on the teams I was rooting for. Bryant passing away highlighted what a great person he was: by all accounts a great dad who was using his money and influence to make the world a better place. I noticed a change in myself about these characters you build up in your mind, opinions formed about someone based on a uniform or a political affiliation. I’m getting better at not passing judgement on people, and travel helps with that. We’re all pretty much the same, with a few outliers muddying up the waters. As I watch people walk by I’m not thinking about MAGA hat-wearers or liberal “woke” activists or which team someone cheers for in the Super Bowl. Maybe I need to stop judging zealots and charlatans too? You don’t have to follow someone just because they’re going in a direction you aren’t going in.

      If Kobe Bryant’s sudden death did anything, it was unite very different people in celebration of a life and mourning for it ending too soon. We’re all just marching down the terminal of life, expecting a certain destination we aren’t guaranteed. Given the tenuous nature of our time here, doesn’t it make sense to support each other on the journey? I think so anyway. And now you’ll have to excuse me, I have a plane to catch.

    • It’s Only Rock & Roll (But I Like It)

      The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is located in Cleveland, Ohio. As a music fan I’ve wanted to check this out for years, but I was rarely in Cleveland and when I was the HOF was inconveniently closed. It seems the HOF keeps banker’s hours, which is ironic given the lifestyles of the inductees. But there was hope: Wednesday’s they stay open until 9 PM, making it possible to visit for people who have day jobs!

      I stayed in a hotel downtown and walked down to the HOF. Cold wind off the lake reminded me of where I was and I zipped the last inch of collar up. As you walk closer rock music is playing on stacks of speakers that serve as sculpture while doubling as a magnet for something more. As you get closer the glass pyramid of the HOF rises up before you out of a sea of concrete. Big, bold red letters beg, Long Live Rock and I know I’ve arrived.

      Inside, you’re met by greeters who direct you down to the lowest level, the base of the pyramid, to purchase a ticket and dive right in. And suddenly you’re in it. The base is the foundation, and you see the blues and country artists who built rock & roll, but also the cities that played such a huge part in its spread and growth. Motown, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Liverpool… and yes, Cleveland. The museum is immersive, and you can spend a lot of time in each section or breeze through it. The experience is there for you if you want it.

      If you’ve been to a Hard Rock Café you’ve experienced a bit of the HOF’s vibe. Music plays as you look at a guitar that John Lennon played, or Eric Clapton played… or Jimi Hendrix played. There are plenty of musical instruments on display and I found them interesting, but the magic was in the outfits they wore, and the videos of the artists explaining how they created a song or rif while you’re looking at the instrument they created it on right in front of you. If most artists were smaller than you’d expect, Jimi Hendrix was a big dude. His outfits indicate his size, and you know he must have been even more powerful live onstage than the old videos show.

      As you climb the pyramid there are places to play instruments, places to reflect on the names of the inductees, and hidden surprises as you work your way up the pyramid. So what’s at the top? More rock & roll, more instruments and a surprising amount of elbow room. Sure, it was a Wednesday night in January, not a time you’d expect throngs of Rock & roll fans to pour into the Hall of Fame, but a lot more room to wander than I expected.

      One thing that didn’t surprise me; the exit leads you right through the gift shop. But what a gift shop! It was sprawling, featuring the usual assortment of clothing, collectibles and shot glasses, and something more, an actual record store where you could buy vinyl records or compact disks. And that’s where it all began for me back as a kid, sifting through records, looking at the covers and wondering what magic was inside. That’s the rock and roll experience that started it for me, and the experience that capped off my visit to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

    • Flight Path

      The roar starts around 5:30 and continues on for as long as the wind direction dictates.  There’s no mistaking when you’re staying in the flight path of a major airport, as the roar continues every couple of minutes until the rush of morning flights slows.  This is the world we live in; connected to all corners by dotted rhumb lines 30,000 feet in the air.  That connectedness is most apparent when your hotel is directly under the flight path of planes taking off.

      My room preferences follow me around the world.  Whenever I stay in a Hilton or Marriott property, there’s a note in the system reminding the person checking me in to stick this guy in a room at the end of the hall, away from the ice machine and elevators.  In most ways I’m not particularly fussy, but when it comes to sleep I’m not a fan of the late night hallway conversations and beer cooler fill-ups.  You do you, I’ll do me, we’ll both find a way to coexist.  As long as I don’t have to listen to you at 2 AM anyway.

      So with this kind of preference for quiet, why would I book a hotel in the flight path of a major airport?  Convenience, that’s why.  I’m an early riser and don’t care about the roar at 5:30 AM the way I’d care about it at midnight.  If I’m working on a laptop I probably have noise cancelling headphones on anyway, listening to music that they don’t perform on the Grammy’s anymore.  Funny how old you feel when the music industry passes you by…  but then again I’ve never been at the epicenter of pop music anyway.

      Today I pack up my bags and leave the flight path for the highway – Another source of the background roar of life on this planet.  Stand near a major highway and listen to the constant roar of cars and trucks flying by.  It’s not the same volume of roar as jets taking off but it’s more relentless.  I take full advantage of the infrastructure of rapid travel and convenience, but I don’t embrace it.  Like the hotel room, I prefer the quiet corners of the world, away from the very noise that I’m adding to in my business travel.  The irony isn’t lost on me, but as long as I’m participating in the world economy I need to dance with the roar.  Until I can cancel it out again anyway.

    • Dining at the Complimentary Buffet

      One of the curiosities of travel is the complimentary buffet at the hotel.  If I have a travel rule, it’s to stay in places that offer at minimum a decent breakfast.  This is becoming increasingly common in most mid-priced hotel chains, probably because people like me turn our nose up at continental breakfasts of toast and mini muffins in favor of hot breakfast options.  Lump the $5 you lay out to feed me into my hotel bill, but don’t expect me to dance in the lobby for white bread and grape jelly. Microwave eggs? That’s not hot breakfast where I come from.

      But I can look the other way on a few things with breakfast. Robust coffee cures a lot of affronts to the senses. Dinner is a different animal.  Candidly I try to go out for dinner whenever I travel, but sometimes you’re stuck at the hotel making the most of what they offer you.  A full kitchen in these circumstances is highly desirable, but for value there’s something to be said for the complimentary dinner buffet too.  Some days it’s not bad at all, with Italian or Szechuan food that seems anything but “free”, it’s actually “good”! But for every delightful international spin at the buffet table, you’re subjected to the uninspired cheapest option they can serve you that they can get away with. Like last night’s lukewarm ham and bean soup and wilted salad. After experiencing that combo I promptly walked down the street for a fast food chain’s chicken sandwich. It takes a lot for me to make that kind of leap.

      I found myself in this fine dining hotel for two nights in a row, and tonight featured two kinds of pasta and a salad bar. It wasn’t all that bad, with the Alfredo option full of fresh (to me) vegetables and a light cheese sauce that didn’t overpower the dish. Two nights, same kitchen, two very different experiences. Hit or miss, to be sure, but what do you want for nothing? I don’t make a habit of grazing at the complimentary buffet, but now and then you hit it just right.

    • Measuring Out Life in Coffee Spoons

      “Do I dare
      Disturb the universe?
      In a minute there is time
      For decisions and revisions which a
      minute will reverse.

      For I have known them all already,
      known them all:—
      Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
      I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
      I know the voices dying with a dying fall
      Beneath the music from a farther room.
      So how should I presume?” – T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

      I wonder if I would have enjoyed the company of T.S. Eliot.  I’m fairly sure I’d have hit it off with Mary Oliver, and with Robert Frost, but I don’t always click with old T.S.  But this poem, one of his most famous, offers that bold question; Do I dare disturb the universe?  and I smile, for I too feel like I’ve measured out my life with coffee spoons. Maybe there’s more to T.S. than I originally thought. The better question would be whether he’d enjoy my company? That has to be earned too: Want to be in the conversation? Have something to say.

      To write publicly is to answer the call.  Whether the universe chooses to pay attention or not is another story, but in chipping away at it one small measure at a time, we see more, and put more out there to be seen, we get better. Roosevelt’s man in the arena comes to mind. Be on the field doing it. Nothing else matters. Is there futility in the work? Perhaps, but the work offers its own path in the universe. I write knowing there’s so much more to it than this. This is showing up, it’s not poking the bear and disturbing the universe. Provocation requires more skin in the game. Blood and sweat mixing in the dirt. There’s more to do.

    • Fading Tracks Across Time

      Yesterday morning I stood outside, barefoot, on the deck scanning the woods.  A dozen deer were moving silently through, silhouetted by the sun reflecting off the rapidly melting snow.  Unusually warm weather has created this opportunity to stand barefoot for me, and given the deer access to acorns and other edibles that should be locked into a frozen vault for a couple more months.  The deer don’t worry about climate change, only food and safety, and they graze uninterrupted as I walked back inside.

      Late morning we met friends for a walk on the Windham Rail Trail.  The trail changes every day, and today brought slush mixed with large bare spots.  We discussed using micro-spikes, but they would’ve been overkill on most of the trail, with just one section of about 100 meters testing our decision to leave them in the car.  No, this was a day for water-resistant footwear, good socks and focus on where you stepped next.    The week ahead brings more mild temperatures, and it’s likely this trail will be all pavement by next weekend.

      As usual on this trail, there were many animal tracks crossing this way and that.  Wildlife has their own trail system, but crossing paths with human roads and trails is inevitable.  Deer tracks mixed with turkey, squirrels and the other regulars.  But one set of tracks stood out from the rest; like a small child doing handstands across the snow, beaver tracks punctuated the softening snow.  Their front paws are very defined and human-life.  The back paws are more like a ducks.  The combination convinced me it wasn’t a racoon’s tracks we were looking at.  Beaver don’t hibernate, but they usually aren’t moving about that much this time of year.  Looking around there was no apparent evidence of tree damage from beaver, but we were right next to a pond.  Beaver store their winter food underwater near their nest.  Nest building isn’t a winter activity.  So I wondered what the beaver was traveling through here for.  Visiting friends?  Booty call? Or like me earlier just stepping outside to see what was new in the world?

      Yesterday was a big news day with the death of Kobe Bryant.  Social media and traditional media alike erupted in a flurry of reaction.  It’s a jolt when someone so young and vibrant is killed so abruptly.  Stoicism points out that it could happen to any of us at any moment, so live this moment fully.  So many forget that until a famous person or a loved one shocks the system with a reminder.  Living this moment starts with awareness of everything around you, feeling the changes in the air, seeing the deer moving through the woods, seeing the tracks in the snow, and having an extended conversation with people you care about while you navigate a slushy trail.  Life is now, today, whether it’s a Monday morning or a Friday night.  Bryant, and the other people on that helicopter were taken unexpectedly, tragically, but they were living a full life.  If you aren’t fully alive in this moment, fully aware of the magic around you, are you really living?

      As we left the trail yesterday, our own tracks marched along for 3 1/2 miles in one direction  and back again, covering seven full miles of conversation, observation, exercise and being alive.  Many of those tracks were turning to slushy mush even as we took them, and disappeared with the thousands of other tracks that have walked this path over the years.  Our time here is limited, the memories are made now, so what shall we do with this day before it too disappears?

       

    • Excellence Is The Next Five Minutes

      “Excellence is the next five minutes or nothing at all. It’s the quality of your next five-minute conversation. It’s the quality of, yes, your next email. Forget the long term. Make the next five minutes rock!” – Tom Peters

      “It is a simple two-step process: Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins.” – James Clear

      “The work is quite feasible, and is the only thing in our power. . . . Let go of the past. We must only begin. Believe me and you will see.” – Epictetus

      It’s easy to get bogged down in strategy and planning. It’s a form of busywork that makes you feel productive even when you aren’t really moving forward. I’ve struggled with this over the years, and it’s fair to say I still haven’t mastered time. Then again, who ever does? But focusing on the action needed right now, with an eye towards maintaining our overall course, makes a lot of sense.

      Excellence is the next five minutes or nothing at all. The point isn’t to master time, just to win the next five minutes. What we do now matters more than what we do tomorrow. Setting a course is important; we all need to know where the we’re going or what’s the point? But right behind that is meaningful action. The Tom Peters quote is a favorite call to action because it reminds us of the urgency of now. Peters’ quote pairs well with James Clear’s work, and both quotes would be very familiar to stoics like Epictetus. Ultimately we all build off the legacy of those who came before, and hope to leave something meaningful for those who come after.

      I’m posting late today, watching the sun dropping in the west while I write instead of feeling it rise behind me as the morning progresses. I wanted to sit on this post awhile, feeling there’s more to say. There’s always more you can say, and always more to improve upon, isn’t there? But you also need to ship when it’s time to ship, a necessary call to action that keeps us from sitting on our work. And so it is that I’ve checked a few boxes today knowing I could’ve done more but generally happy with what I’ve done with the time I’ve been given today. Let’s call that a small win (and, always, work to go a step further if I’m blessed with the gift of tomorrow).

    • Seeing the World for the First (?) Time

      “Our awareness has been stretched wider than ever in history, but often at the cost of taking away a lifetime of experiences.” – Seth Godin

      “We were the first humans who would never see something for the first time.” – Gillian Flynn

      Both of these appeared in my feed within minutes of each other this morning, in turn each pointing out the world we live in being smaller than ever before, and casting a neon glow on a topic I should explore before the muse carries it on to the next writer. Candidly I’m itching to return to writing more local history, but it’ll have to wait a bit longer. I’d be a fool to turn a cold shoulder on the muse, wouldn’t I?

      Godin laments the cost of awareness in our world of YouTube, Instagram, streaming media and, yes, travel blogging. We tend to know about things just by casually dipping our ladle into the stream of information flying past us in all directions. But sipping from the ladle isn’t immersive exploration of new places and ideas. It’s the Cliff Notes, not War and Peace. As Godin writes, there’s no excuse for being uninformed, but there’s also no good reason for being inexperienced.

      Flynn laments that media often offers a better picture of the world than going there and seeing it does. I’d say she’s partially right in that we cheat ourselves of the wonder of the new having seen it before we get there. But I disagree that the experience is better through media or that we don’t experience something substantively better being there versus seeing it on a screen. I can look out the window and see snow, or I can walk outside and understand snow.

      The crew of Fayaway are in Saba at the moment. It was nothing for me to pull up a video of people hiking up the mountain they hiked up, see the massive leaves they saw and the same view out to St. Kitts that they sent me in a text message. But a YouTube video is a very small sample of the experience they had of talking to locals, feeling the heat, getting out of breath climbing to the summit, and the exhilaration of reaching the summit and catching a first glimpse of the panoramic vista. That is their experience of a lifetime, while I’m simply aware of what it generally looked like for them after watching a YouTube video.

      The world is smaller than ever, and we’re blessed to experience the wonders of it without the cost of earning it in money, risk, sweat equity and sacrifice. But experience on a screen isn’t experiencing life, it just eliminates the surprise of knowing what’s around the corner when you can Google street view so much of this world. Surprise can be good, and surprise can be very bad. Maybe the answer is to use all this technology to mitigate the impact of the bad while minimizing the reduction of the other.

      Maybe VR will bring us closer than we’d ever imagine in the next few years. There’s enormous value in practicing on the flight simulator to get it right before you fly the Boeing 777 overseas, but you still need to get experience on the real thing after that before they load passengers on with you. Likewise, seeing what the Google street view was prior to pulling out of Edinburgh in a rental car made me more comfortable when I did it. It didn’t simulate the tactile oddness of the left hand shift instead of the right or the adrenaline rush of the first roundabout going the opposite way, but it eliminated sensory overload having seen a bit of it already.

      Humans are meant to move, and to interact and react to the world around them. Media is getting exponentially better at recreating this experience, but that doesn’t make it experience. The answer is to get out and be a part of the world, not just watch it through someone else’s lens.