Alexandersmap

    Author: nhcarmichael

    • Things That Got Away

      “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.” — James Joyce, Ulysses

      Back in 2018, when this blog was a young pup and its writer was blessedly naive about all that would happen in the next seven years, we stepped into the every day. We can all agree that a lot can happen in seven years. Good Lord, can a lot happen. We’ve all been on this ride together, in so many ways. Yet each of us rides through life in their own way. Some with eyes wide open, some with blinders on, and so many simply staring at a screen for an entirely different user experience. The only thing we all may agree on is that time flies. Tempus fugit.

      I happened upon a blog post I’d written back then about the ten books I meant to read that year. I read eight of those books, and one of them, Meditations, I’ve read three times since. But one in particular still eludes me. Ulysses. I’ve begun it many times over the years, and many times I’ve moved on to other books. Perhaps I’ll tackle the yellowing pages of this classic next, or perhaps it will forever be the one that got away. Time will tell, as it always does.

      If I’ve learned anything in these last seven years, let alone all that preceded them, I’ve learned to talk less about what I’m going to do and more about what I’ve done. We are either dreamers or doers in this world. Less talk and more action, thank you. If that inspires a laugh when I refer to reading a book, well, I shrug in your general direction. I may believe myself to be well-read, while noting how incomplete it feels when some notables evade me for years. When I think about all the YouTube videos or tweets I’ve read in the last seven years, not having read a classic novel feels wasteful of the opportunity.

      We all must choose what we say yes to in this brief go at living. Where do we want to go? Who do we want to be? Just what is that verse we’re writing going to say anyway? We all have agency over what we do in the now. As the future plunges into the past, how will we take stock of the time spent? Some part of us will feel incomplete for having used that time elsewhere. What matters most now? Choose accordingly. We may celebrate all that we’ve done while acknowledging the things that got away from us.

    • Unbroken Links

      “That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.” ― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

      I meant to call a few people in my life this week, to wish them a Happy Thanksgiving, to check in on them, to get their perspective on the world and our place in it. I’m someone who calls other people. Not text people or drop them an email or write them a letter—worthy as those may be—but call. The written word may last forever (our version of forever anyway), but to actually speak with someone is a gift of presence.

      How will we be remembered? I suspect I’ll be remembered for being proactively present. Or reliably present. Or perhaps annoyingly so. Maybe there will be relief one day when the calls stop coming in, just for the peace and quiet. Who knows? The only thing I’m certain of is that links corrode and break for lack of attention. Looking back, we tend to have far more people with whom we lose touch with than those we continue to reach out to or hear from. Conversation is a two-way street, or we’d call it a lecture.

      What binds us together? When did this long chain of connection begin? How does it continue, even after all this time? Forming a link is immediate, but maintaining it requires consistent action. Now seems as good a time to touch base as any, whatever the method. We may be a beacon in the darkness, heard from at just the right time.

    • Thanksgiving: Our Day of Days

      “You sanctify whatever you are grateful for.” — Anthony de Mello

      Last night, amidst the clamor and turmoil of Thanksgiving preparations, I took the pup for her evening walk. It’s been bitingly cold this week, but a warm front had moved in, making the evening mild enough that I took off my wool hat to cool off. On our return down the street, the pup noticed something I’d seen on our walk up the street and started growling—the neighbors had placed their collection of plastic reindeer out on the lawn, ready to flip a switch and begin the Christmas season.

      The growl was for the appearance of stoic creatures standing the high ground. The pup doesn’t like changes on the street, and her protective concern was reflected in turning back and growling again and again as we completed our walk back to the house. I may accept the efficiency of the act while noting that my favorite holiday of the American year is forever pushed aside in the rush for Christmas. With respect to retailers everywhere, don’t you dare discount Thanksgiving. Nobody puts Baby in the corner.

      The thing is, we don’t all have families to gather with. Or with whom we wish to gather with. We are the average of the people we surround ourselves with, and for some that average isn’t all that worthy of gratitude. They would just as soon skip over it and focus on the lights and music and gifts of that season that follows Thanksgiving. I would suggest that forever looking ahead for some salvation in the future makes for an unfulfilling present. What makes today worthy of lingering with? That’s where gratitude will be.

      If Thanksgiving were mythically created to celebrate the abundant harvest, or pulled together Native Americans with the settlers who would eventually displace them at one table, then it would be just another conditional holiday dependent on buying in to the story. What makes Thanksgiving special is the tradition of putting aside work and political beliefs and the desperate search for meaning in an indifferent world and gathering in appreciation of that which binds us. For we are here once again this sacred day, together, despite all that would pull us apart. So many have left us already. So few are the days when we may gather as one. Be grateful for this day of days when we may acknowledge that which brings us together. Happy Thanksgiving.

    • Blame It On the Poets

      Man with wooden leg escapes prison. He’s caught.
      They take his wooden leg away from him. Each day
      he must cross a large hill and swim a wide river
      to get to the field where he must work all day on
      one leg. This goes on for a year. At the Christmas
      Party they give him back his leg. Now he doesn’t
      want it. His escape is all planned. It requires
      only one leg.
      — James Tate, Man with Wooden Leg Escapes Prison

      I hope you laughed when you read that poem. I know I did. It reads like a standup routine, like many James Tate poems, I suppose. Maybe that’s why I’ve strayed into his work a little, just because a smile is better than a frown, and certainly better than a scowl. We all scowl too much nowadays.

      I was reading the news just this morning. I make a point of not reading the news before I write (because of that scowl thing), but I found myself awake thinking about to-do list items. Instead of getting up to do these things, instead of rolling over and reaching for some REM, instead of doing a workout or brushing my teeth or attempting to steal the covers back from my bride—instead of anything really, I opened up the BBC app to see what was happening in the world. And of course I scowled.

      When one starts one’s day in such a way, one ought to quickly find a way out of it. Social media is nothing but random clickbait video clips now. I surely could have gone there for hours of screen time. But I sought out the council of a poet to set me straight. And that road less travelled has made all the difference.

      This ritual of writing before any other thing continues to serve me well. The world can go to hell in a mindless spiral of dancing stars, home renovation transformations and fantasy football trades, but I may ignore it all and simply write what comes to me. This clunky, impossible to navigate blog, my running collection of deep thoughts and discoveries, goes on for at least one more day. Blame it on the poets if you like. More likely it was me all along.

    • Acutely Aware

      “Remember, remember,
      this is now,
      and now,
      and now.
      Live it, feel it, cling to it.
      I want to become
      acutely aware
      of all I’ve taken
      for granted.”
      ― Sylvia Plath

      The urgency of now is amplified by the awareness of time going by. We ought to do the things we believe we ought to do now, while time is ripe and dreams are unfaded by the rapid flow of the days to follow. Tempus fugit, friend: Time flies.

      Plath died young, taking her own life after putting her children to bed. Knowing that, read the poem again and feel how it changes. There is more desperation, more immediacy to the words when life hangs in the balance. A few more minutes, a few more years—it’s all the same. Memento mori.

      Now that we’ve got that out of the way, we ought to go out and live with this bonus time we’ve been given. Seneca reminded us to seize what flees. Carpe diem. Why would we dare to waste our time so carelessly? Accept the fragility of the moment and do something with it.

      A cold water plunge shocks the body into immediacy (I wonder sometimes why nobody follows me in). The body is jolted into sudden awareness of the moment. There is no distraction in cold water, it’s sink or swim. So what will do for your soul? But enough of intellectual discourse; what will jolt us into awareness that this is it? That there is only now? Live it, feel it, cling to it.

    • We Are Stirred

      I don’t want to be demure or respectable.
      I was that way for years.
      That way, you forget too many important things.
      How the little stones, even if you can’t hear them,
      are singing.
      How the river can’t wait to get to the ocean and
      the sky, it’s been there before.
      What traveling is that!
      It is a joy to imagine such distances.
      — Mary Oliver, I Don’t Want to be Demure or Respectable

      When this blogger is finally done (perhaps when he begins to refer regularly to himself in the third person), it may be when the collection of Mary Oliver poems have all been quoted. It could just as easily have been Henry David Thoreau or Marcus Aurelius. Truly, I don’t mean to keep returning to each of them here, but then I re-read a poem like this one, in just the kind of mood I find myself in now, and well, here we are.

      We know when we’re ready for the next. To imagine such distances. Oh, the audacity to try to reach them! We all get tired of being demure and respectable. Don’t we? No, maybe not all of us. But some of us. The kindred fire is easy to feel when encountered. We are fellow schemers, some of us. We dream our dreams and chase some of them. We aren’t satiated by travel or poetry or encounters in the wild—we are stirred. Forever wanting just a bit more than this, please and thank you.

      To be demure is to concede that now is not entirely for us. Now is a time to be present and honorable and a sacrificer of time and energy and that special fire within that longs for oxygen and fuel. To do the right thing is honorable. Honor has its price, but truly, it also offers its beautiful dividend that cannot be ignored. A sense of place and connection keeps us alive and thriving too—just look at those Blue Zone folks for affirmation.

      As a friend recently phrased it, we have competing opportunities in our lives. The only wrong answer is to be a slave to someone else’s dream that robs us of our vitality. In time, we learn what is an empty pursuit and what feeds the flame. Having felt the heat within, how will we now feed it, so it doesn’t peter out like the vitality in so many others who have come before? It’s a joy to imagine such distances we may travel as we grow into our possibilities. Go! Do something with it while there is time.

    • Not for Ourselves Alone

      “Non nobis solum nati sumus ortusque nostri partem patria vindicat, partem amici,”
      (Not for us alone are we born; our country, our friends, have a share in us.) — Marcus Tullius Cicero

      We are alone, and yet a part of something far beyond ourselves. To strive to be an individual is to reach for our potential. But what is all that potential for if not for the greater good? We can thus focus on the self and not be selfish or self-centered. The more we grow, the more we can offer. And this in turn offers us more opportunity still.

      The world is full of selfless people, and has far too many selfish people too. We learn as we get burned. But let’s face it; we have our moments of selfishness too. We must learn to look after ourselves if we are to survive in this world, but our nature is to look after others too. We learn whom to trust deeply, whom to steer clear of, and those who are somewhere in between with whom to form strategic alliances for mutual benefit. Every transaction is a lesson in human tendencies. Trust, but verify.

      The world lately is more complicated by the fractious nature of social media and the erosion of trusted sources of information and leadership. We can acknowledge this and still live by a higher standard of personal excellence. To keep growing into the person we aspire to be, that we may be an anchor for those who might founder in the turbulent, selfish sea that this place and time represents for some.

      Remember that it has always been this way, only the method and scale of communication changes. Community is an investment in the future viability of all that we believe to be sacred and true. Seek out connection and engagement with those with whom we may learn and grow. Not for us alone are we born.

    • Begin Something

      “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.” ― Willie Nelson

      As an early bird, it should be easy to get a head start on the day. But the day floods in anyway. Even as I awaken, work to-do minutia floods my brain—a clear sign that I didn’t write it all down to release its hold on me before my day was done. The bullet journal method only works if you keep up with it. Lately, I haven’t kept up with it.

      If we are truly on a quest for personal excellence, why do we clutter up our days with minutia at all? Mastery requires singular focus, if we indeed wish to reach closer to it. Just who do we want to be on this one go at things anyway? The work that matters ought to get done, the rest ought to slip away and not impact our sleep score.

      I used to glory in the hustle of outworking the competition. I have other priorities now. When I wake up, my attention doesn’t go right to work, it goes right to attending to the needs of the pets, and then to writing this blog. Does writing deserve a place of honor ahead of income-generating activity? Doesn’t the answer depend on where we want to go today? The answer has always been there, waiting for us to listen and act upon it.

      Why get up early at all, but to heed the call to begin something? To rise and chase the dreams of others for profit is nothing but a trap from which we will never escape. We must always prioritize ourselves first, and then address the needs of others. They tell us this on every flight. It’s on us to pay attention to the flight attendants as we hustle through life.

      To make something of this day seems a modest objective. Why go through the motions or succumb to distraction? Create something of consequence today and see what might build from it. Joie de vivre is derived from doing something meaningful with our days, not from hustling through it. So what is that something?

    • A Day at The Met

      The first thing you learn when you spend a day at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is that a day is comically not nearly enough time to see everything. A year at The Met might do. And be sure to capitalize that T in “The” because the official name is what it is and details matter. In matters of affectionate familiarity, it’s perfectly fine to simply call it The Met.

      Comic or not, I had one random Thursday for a Met marathon. The only thing to do is to get to it—to meander through the maze of exhibits, to see, to linger on art that whispers for you to be with it for a moment, to eavesdrop on tour guides as they drop insight on what seemed randomness a moment before, to gawk at the famous and smile at the packs of teenagers giggling about the lack of fig leaves, and to move relentlessly through as much of the collection as time and mental capacity allows. As with all things, we hope to return again one day and pick up where we left off. Like that expression about the river, we will have changed in the interim, and everything we see will seem different with that new perspective.

      Claude Monet, "Bouquet of Sunflowers", 1881
      Claude Monet, “Bouquet of Sunflowers”, 1881
      Marie Denise Villers, Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d'Ognes (1786-1868), 1801
      Marie Denise Villers, Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes (1786-1868), 1801
      Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Why Born Enslaved!
      Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Why Born Enslaved!
      Claude Monet, "Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies", 1899
      Claude Monet, “Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies”, 1899
      August Rodin, "Beside the Sea", 1907
      August Rodin, “Beside the Sea”, 1907
      William Bouguereau, "Breton Brother and Sister", 1871
      William Bouguereau, “Breton Brother and Sister”, 1871
      Vincent van Gogh, "Wheat Field with Cypresses", 1889
      Vincent van Gogh, “Wheat Field with Cypresses”, 1889
      Bronze statuette of a satyr with a torch and wineskin
      Bronze statuette of a satyr with a torch and wineskin
      Foreground: Finial for a ceremonial house, Sawos artist; Kaimbiam village, Middle Sepik River, Papua New Guinea Background: Finials from Ambrym Island artists; Fanla village, Vanuatu
      Foreground: Finial for a ceremonial house, Sawos artist; Kaimbiam village, Middle Sepik River, Papua New Guinea
      Background: Finials from Ambrym Island artists; Fanla village, Vanuatu
      Drum Possibly Babungo/Vengo people Cameroon, ca. 1940
      Drum
      Possibly Babungo/Vengo people
      Cameroon, ca. 1940
      Arms and Armor Room from above
      Arms and Armor Room from above
      Frans Hals, "The Smoker", ca. 1623-1625
      Frans Hals, “The Smoker”, ca. 1623-1625
      Pablo Picasso, "The Blind Man's Meal", 1903
      Pablo Picasso, “The Blind Man’s Meal”, 1903
      Death German, mid-17th century Lindenwood with traces of pigment, spruce base
      Death
      German, mid-17th century
      Lindenwood with traces of pigment, spruce base
      Auguste Rodin, "The Burghers of Calais"
      Auguste Rodin, “The Burghers of Calais”
      Jean Antoine Houdon, "Winter", 1787
      Jean Antoine Houdon, “Winter”, 1787
      Fireplace Surround Attributed to Désiré Muller, ca. 1900
      Fireplace Surround
      Attributed to Désiré Muller, ca. 1900
      Harriet Whitney Frishmuth, "The Vine", 1921 (this cast 1924)
      Harriet Whitney Frishmuth, “The Vine”, 1921 (this cast 1924)
      Antonio Canova, "Perseus with the Head of Medusa", 1804-6
      Antonio Canova, “Perseus with the Head of Medusa”, 1804-6
      Camillo Pistrucci, "Mary Shelley", 1843
      Camillo Pistrucci, “Mary Shelley”, 1843
      Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, "Herakles the Archer", 1909
      Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, “Herakles the Archer”, 1909
      Body Mask Asmat artist; Ambisu, Ajip River, Casuarina Coast, West Papua
      Body Mask
      Asmat artist; Ambisu, Ajip River, Casuarina Coast, West Papua
      Bronze helmet of the Illyrian type Greek, late 6th-early 5th century, B.C.
      Bronze helmet of the Illyrian type
      Greek, late 6th-early 5th century, B.C.
      Mechanical Table Workshop of David Roentgen, ca. 1780-90
      Mechanical Table
      Workshop of David Roentgen, ca. 1780-90
      Jean-Basptiste Carpeaux, "Ugolino and His Sons", 1865-67
      Jean-Basptiste Carpeaux, “Ugolino and His Sons”, 1865-67
      Augustus Saint-Gaudens, "Hiawatha", 1874
      Augustus Saint-Gaudens, “Hiawatha”, 1874
      Asmat artist, Yamas village, West Papua Wuramon (spirit canoe)
      Asmat artist, Yamas village, West Papua
      Wuramon (spirit canoe)
      Bronze ornament from a chariot pole Head of Medusa Roman, 1st-2nd century A.D.
      Bronze ornament from a chariot pole
      Head of Medusa
      Roman, 1st-2nd century A.D.

    • Curious and Interested

      “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” ― Marcus Aurelius

      I took a cab across Manhattan and found myself in a fascinating conversation with the driver. He was 70, clearly fit and handsome and very bright. He’s locally famous (showed me the newspaper articles) for offering stock market advice to his passengers. He’s done everything from real estate investing to being a Chippendales dancer to owner of two cabs. He reminded me of that most interesting man in the world character, and indeed he was as interesting to speak with as you might imagine.

      I’d spent the previous day running into people I’ve known for years at a trade show. We’d each built a life, formed relationships and grown as people. Tenure is a way to form long-standing professional relationships. Being honest and forthright and genuinely interested in the lives of others is an accelerant to forming deeper bonds that last a lifetime. If there was a lesson in my encounters with old friends, it’s that friendship transcends any single job or project.

      “Be curious, not judgmental.” — Walt Whitman

      Just how are we moving through our years? Surely we’ll have moments of boredom and drudgery along the way. But we ought to sprinkle in more things that fascinate us. When we are curious and interested, people in turn are more curious and interested in us. At least that’s my way of thinking about the matter.