Alexandersmap

    Author: nhcarmichael

    • Echoes in the Kitchen

      This morning I got up quietly while it was still dark, dressed and walked downstairs for the normal habit loop when I paused in the kitchen, hearing echoes. I glanced at the clock, used to it’s mocking, but it stayed on topic this early, offering up 6:20 AM. I looked around, placed my hands on the island countertop, and felt it… Sandwich assembly lines, the loud themed (naturally) playlists designed to inspire the sandwich maker and stir the zombies for the final dash to the bus or, later, to their car(s) for the ride to school. First call usually led to second call and third, and the tactics changed with the runway shrinking for a successful launch. Clapping as I walked up the stairs became the final straw, and they’d finally be up and sort of moving.

      That assembly line of sandwiches, the bin of snacks to dump in the bag with them and the drink all placed in a bag was a luxury for my kids, and they knew it. Some of their friends either made their own lunch or went hungry that day. You learn quickly to make the lunch, but I usually put enough in the bag to share food with those who needed it. There’s always someone a little hungry nearby, if you pay attention.

      Living on a cul de sac meant having a second chance at the bus if you missed it going up the street. That came in handy many times, especially with the second child. But it saved me on many occasions too with curbside trash and recycling. Miss it going up? Drag it across the street and catch them on the way down. Bless you, cul de sac. I’m reminded of the scramble when the bus rolls up the street. No longer my scramble, I glance casually at the streak of yellow flashing from one window to the next, sip my coffee and return to work.

      There’s a tweet being passed around about only having 18 summers with your kids before they’re off doing their own thing. The adrenaline rush of getting the kids to school before you go off to work is an even shorter window. Is it a relief to not have the timed sandwich assembly line game before the weasel pops? Absolutely. Has the habit loop that filled the void made me more productive in other things? No doubt. I don’t miss the mad dash, but the muscle memory is still there. I’m proud to have co-managed the responsibility well enough that the sandwich eaters are productive members of society. Though I still hear the echoes now and then.

    • Something More

      “…I don’t believe

      only to the edge
      of what my eyes actually see
      in the kindness of the morning,
      do you?

      And my life,
      which is my body surely,
      is also something more—
      isn’t yours?”
      – Mary Oliver, from The Pinewoods

      Reading this, I thought of the familiar analogy of a stone dropped in a still pond and the ripples it creates. We aren’t our bodies but a sum of the actions and interactions we have with it over our time in it. The more we learn, the more we offer to the world, the bigger our ripple.  I think of people in my own life who offer a pretty large ripple, and I hope I’m doing the same. Mary Oliver offered an example of a tsunami with her work, and this excerpt from The Pinewoods demonstrates her keen awareness of her own something more.

      I think of living a larger life as well.  Something more involves more, and more meaningful, contribution over time. Acquired skills and knowledge enable a greater contribution.  Something more also means showing up and doing work that matters.  It’s the unseen, uncredited things you do for your family, friends or complete strangers that make a small or sometimes significant difference.  And it’s sacrificing the immediate gratification for the long term vision in daily actions.  What is your contribution?  What are you offering the world in this moment?  And how can you improve today?  I ask myself these questions every day, and sometimes I have the answer readily at hand.  Other days it’s more evasive.  But I do believe being present is a large part of the answer.

      My life, which is my body surely, is also something more – isn’t yours?  I’m watching people I care about age in different ways.  The body aging is a natural, if not always welcome, condition of being alive longer.  Something more when your older seems to be either left in your legacy of previous contributions or in your ongoing contribution.  As long as the mind is sharp, there’s no reason for contribution to stop.  If Stephen Hawking can leave such an incredible wave across the pond for centuries after learning he had a slow moving form of Lou Gehrig’s disease, then why shouldn’t someone who has full speech and much better, if slower than it once was, mobility not contribute as well?  I’m not elderly yet, but I’ll be damned if I just sit in the corner watching Wheel of Fortune when I get there.  I’ll be moving at a modified version of full speed as long as the mind and body allow, and if the body doesn’t allow, then my writing might accelerate even more.

      Don’t believe only to the edge of what your eyes actually see.

    • What Can You Do In 100 Days?

      I was scanning the shelves at a bookstore a couple of weeks ago and saw a book called The 100 Day Goal Journal, subtitled “Accomplish What Matters To You”. And I thought, well, what would I try to accomplish in 100 days anyway? I’m currently powering along habit stacking and generally pleased with the incremental results. But I appreciate the concept of focusing intensely on a specific goal to achieve it over time. It falls in line with the Warren Buffett’s 5/25 Rule in only focusing on the top five and forgetting the rest until you’ve accomplished each of the five.

      I’ve listened to John Lee Dumas’ podcast… It’s not my thing; too cheerleader or drive time radio DJ for me. I’m sure there’s a powerful message in that presentation, I’m just not reaching across the chasm of peppy delivery to embrace it. So buying the book seemed outside my zone. I’m chipping away at plenty of goals already, and really, how do you prioritize one over the others? Which is exactly why I bought it: to focus intensely on the one. And what is the one anyway? Write the novel? Lose weight? Master the French language? All personal goals for sure, but I’m already chipping away at those. I needed something that was currently outside my habit loop but important to me. My career. In this case a work goal of bringing the region to quota by the end of Q2. If you subtracted the weekends 100 work days gets you to June, so it falls in line with an audacious goal. If I fall short the region will be better for the intense focus on it, but why hedge bets?

      I postponed the start of audacious while I beat back influenza. Shift the start line and you shift the finish line, but it’s still well before the end of June. And so it began yesterday as soon as I realized I could stand up for more than two hours without curling into the fetal position coughing and shivering. I’ve been sequestered in the home office while I climb back to normalcy, but a quick check tells me I’m ready. Excuses put aside like warm blankets early in the morning. You’re ready? Lovely. So get going already! Go!

    • Sick Day

      My collection of streaks was disrupted by the flu yesterday. I managed to get the writing in, and the Duolingo French lesson, and the reading too, but the 10,000 steps petered out at the halfway mark, and work goals mostly pushed into today. I’ve lost six pounds in an involuntary fast, and the expectations for today have been modified by how long it took to drag myself out of bed. Such is a bout with the flu. It changes your priorities pretty quickly.

      We take our health for granted. I felt great and accomplished X the last couple of months in a row, so why shouldn’t I expect the same today? I have people reading this who are chuckling that the guy who never gets sick is conceding to the flu. So be it, the virus has asserted itself, now it’s time for my body to push back. I’ll try to check each box today anyway, beginning with this one.

    • The River As Time

      “The river is everywhere at once, at the source and the mouth, at the waterfall, the ferry, the rapids, the sea, and the mountains. It is everywhere at once, and there only the present exists for it—not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future… Nothing was and nothing will be: everything is, and everything is present and has existence… were not all sufferings then time, and were not all self-torments and personal fears time? Weren’t all the difficult and hostile things in the world gone and overcome as soon as one had overcome time, and as soon as time could be thrust out of the mind?” – Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

      This analogy of the river as time/timeless isn’t new, it’s been around as long as humans have looked at rivers (the Stoics would have recognized it). And it’s an important character in the book Siddhartha too, as the central/title character learns about himself from the river at his lowest points in the story. Rivers run central in my own life: transformative as an 18 year old on the Merrimack, restorative as a 27 year old on the Connecticut, enlightening as a new father riding down the Colorado and an old friend ever since. I’ve travelled rivers source-to-sea, and I’m forever drawn to them, forever a disciple. For each river offers the same lesson in its own voice, if you’ll listen.

      Time flows as a river. What’s upstream no longer matters (so don’t spend today living on past glories or regrets), and what’s downstream isn’t guaranteed to us (so don’t drown today focused on reaching for what isn’t yours – tomorrow). We all reach the “ocean” someday, whether our journey is turbulent or tranquil.

      So what of the destination? The ocean becomes a symbol for “Om”, for entirety, the timeless sum of all that ever was and all that ever will be. So the timeless river flowing into entirety is a philosophy I can understand and embrace. Am I on a journey to Eastern Philosophy? I don’t believe so, but neither am I on a journey to Western Philosophy. I’m just on a journey, like you are… and they were, and others someday will be. I just happen to be writing about it as we float along.

    • Walking the Line

      Walking this morning on Cape Cod I saw turkey tracks in the snow. The funny thing about turkey tracks is they look like arrows, pointing this way and that, as if to tell you to Go here! No, go there! Turkey walk in circles looking for food, and their tracks point you, if you tried to follow the “arrows”, towards the same madness. It’s a wonder of confusion and I smiled at the sight of it.

      I’m glad I walked early, because overnight snow didn’t stand a chance on the edge of Buzzards Bay, where the ocean moderates temperatures as easily as it moderates moods. Looking at the temperatures in New Hampshire, there was a 21 degree difference between the hills up north and Cape Cod. 100 miles and 200 feet of elevation make a big difference between order and chaos when you’re talking snow.

      If turkey tracks are scattered madness, the surf line offers a measure of predictability, for even on its own erratic path it still runs roughly parallel. The surf line finds its own path, curving and cutting this way and that based on the push of the swell, the contour of the sand and the strength of the breeze. The funny thing about the surf line is that it looks similar whether you’re up close on a quiet pre-dawn beach on Buzzards Bay or flying 1000 feet above the New Hampshire coast in a Piper Cub. Up close very different. Add the right distance and the mind tricks you.

      We’re incredibly lucky now, with these great leaps across time and space. Anything is possible, really, in our timelines in this time. Yesterday I woke up in Ithaca, New York, watched a college basketball game in Rhode Island, and went to sleep on Cape Cod. This morning I walked on the beach and this afternoon I was shoveling snow back in the hills of New Hampshire. I could easily be in London or California or some other place for breakfast tomorrow morning if time, money and responsibilities allowed. Quick leaps between here and there are possible, which makes the world a magical place.

      I run into a lot of people who march along a pretty straight line in their lives, not straying far from home, going to the same job every day, taking the same vacation to the same place for a week or two every year. I’ve tried that line, and it’s not me. Granted, you don’t want to be a turkey moving about in circles with no rhyme or reason to where you’re going. But what’s the fun in traveling a straight path from here to there? Don’t be a turkey, play along the surf line! Follow your own path as it meanders along, but with an eye towards the destination. You’ll still get from here to there, but the path will be a lot more interesting.

    • Fences on Bridges

      When you live in the north, you don’t even see them most of the time. And why would you? When you’re driving you’ve got other things to worry about, like other cars and large mammals leaping in front of your vehicle. There’s plenty of evidence of how that ends for the mammal dotted along the roadways. So inanimate objects understandably don’t get a lot of attention, especially when the inanimate object is a chain link fence atop a bridge you’re driving under. But I think about those fences, and was reminded why last week.

      There’s only one purpose to fencing edging the sides of bridges; to keep what’s on the bridge from plummeting off the bridge to the ground or road below. This is critical for keeping, say, an avalanche of snow coming off a snowplow from suddenly blinding the vision of an unsuspecting driver when it lands on their windshield. I’ve experienced this, and don’t recommend seeking it out in your winter travels.

      The fencing also serves to keep people from accidentally or deliberately exiting the bridge using the side exits. And I was reminded of this purpose last week as I drove down I-90 last week, looked up and saw the flowers. And the flowers reminded me of the darkest day in a college friend’s life, when he looked over that bridge and saw his daughter lying on the side of the road, feet from where I was driving last week, almost two years since he held her lifeless body in that place. She’d climbed over that fence in the middle of the night, and forever shattered many lives as she ended hers. I’m shattered for them, still.

      And now I look at bridge fences differently, especially that one. I’m grateful for the people the fences keep in to live another day, and mournful for the families of those who didn’t find the necessary impediment to their darkest inclination of the moment. May the fences be taller than the depths of someone else’s darkest moment.

    • Find The Gap

      When you bob around on the Tube in London you’re constantly reminded to “mind the gap”. It’s so frequently stated (at every stop) that it’s become a meme. The gap of course is the space between the train and the platform, which can be hazardous if you aren’t watching where you’re walking, ie: minding the gap. Reading an article in Harvard Business Review earlier this week, I read this twist on that phrase, which struck me as profound:

      “Jon Buchan, the director of London-based Charm Offensive, a creator of innovative cold emailing campaigns, applies [Stef] Curry’s disruptive basketball strategy to business: “Find a gap,” Buchan writes. “A chink in the armor. What is nobody else doing? Why is nobody else doing it? Would it be beneficial to get good at it? If so, try it.” … Figuring out what no one else is doing, and then doing it well, offers the greatest possibility of success, rapid acceleration, and hyper-growth.” – Whitney Johnson, “Reinvigorate Your Career by Taking the Right Kind of Risk”, Harvard Business Review

      Finding the gap, what nobody else is doing, certainly applies in business, and every progressive, forward-looking company continually pokes and prods their market looking for the gaps. Find a need, fill it and differentiate from the crowd. This is blue ocean versus red ocean territory, where a little elbow room offers room to grow something special. It lets you leverage your company’s strengths without getting nipped at by the sharks.

      Finding the gap, I believe, is about being aware, focused, open-minded, decisive, courageous and determined. Developing better writing skills (combined with the consistency of effort in doing it every day), reading with purpose, seeing more customers, listening and observing with focus and earnestly working for a higher purpose, I believe, give you the necessary gap radar skills. Combined it seems to adds up to a formula for both figuring out what no one else is doing, and then doing it well. Because doing it well… that’s the real trick, isn’t it? Don’t just find the gap, fill it with value.

    • Fresh Snow

      “Let us hope

      it will always be like this,
      each of us going on
      in our inexplicable ways
      building the universe.”

      – Mary Oliver, Song of the Builders

      After warm temperatures melted most of the snow left over from 2019 and the beginning of this month, we’re being dusted with fresh snow this morning. It’s a reset on winter after unseasonably warm weather, which seems appropriate for me as I do my own pivot in strategy after meetings in New Jersey. We’ve finally, blessedly, put 2019 behind us, and look ahead to what needs to happen now.

      People focus on New Year’s Day as a natural pivot point, but really it’s just a change to a new calendar. Pivoting is a mental game – you know when you’re ready to make changes. For me the pivot happens when I’ve digested all available information, processed strategy and set a course for myself. All of the peaks and valleys of last year fade into institutional memory, or maybe muscle memory, and the new climb begins in earnest.  The question recently has been what am I building?, and the last few days have clarified that for me.  I can look back on 2019 proud of what I accomplished, but frustrated with what I didn’t.  Or I can shove it aside and focus on what I’m doing today and what needs to happen next.  The choice seems obvious.

      This morning, now, it’s time to put aside the appreciation for the symbolic change the snow brings. It serves another purpose in reminding me of the urgency of the task at hand.  It’s time to stop reflecting and thinking and planning.  Time to pull on the boots and gloves and go clear the driveway.  My version of the cricket moving grains of sand and admittedly a small first step in the long journey ahead.  But you’ve got to start somewhere, and this is as good a place as any.  The snow isn’t going to move itself.

    • Dancing on the Line

      I travel a lot, and stay in many hotel rooms along the way.  My primary request when staying anywhere is to get a quiet room.  That means rooms that aren’t next to the elevators, the ice machine or in high traffic areas.  Ideally I won’t have a door that connects to another room.  So it’s disappointing when I get a neighbor who shouts profanities and talks to himself insanely in the room next to mine.  Last night was one of those nights, which meant I was considering wearing earplugs to sleep.  If I’ve learned anything from years of travel, it’s to be prepared for just about anything.  Insane people who talk to themselves are one of those life experiences I try to avoid, but sometimes you find yourself with just two thin doors between you and the crazy train. Luckily he quieted down and I slept peacefully (after confirming the door was bolted anyway).

      This morning I’m walking the loop around the hotel with three days of information and thousands of calories to digest. Morning walks help with both, and information transforms into checklists of things to do, areas to improve upon, people to meet with, things to learn more about and timelines to do it all. I normally follow the GTD process of writing things down to get them out of your head, but not having a notepad on the walk the jumble of thoughts become keywords to trigger memories instead. I’ll write it down later… knowing I need to do it before those words become a puzzle of my own mind. It reminded me of the wild rambling profanity of the guy next door. Maybe he just needed to get things out of his own head too. He does it his way, I do it mine. Just a thin door separating two approaches to sorting life’s complexities.

      One of the themes of my week has been walking the thin line between order and chaos. Exemplified by the yin and yang symbol, it’s the curving line between the black and white symbols that make up the whole. We all dip into both sides, but aim to dance along that line if possible. My hotel neighbor seemed to be a bit too far into chaos last night, while I was dancing the line pretty well this morning after my walk. We all trip now and then. Just get up, brush yourself off, get back on the line and keep dancing.