Alexandersmap

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    • The Chill Lane

      “Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes angry.” — Euripides

      Commuting was never my thing, but sometimes you’ve just gotta do what you’ve gotta do. When I was not very much younger, I used to grow angry at the neat rows of brake lights in front of me. Likewise, a red light when there was nobody else at the intersection would drive me crazy. My bride rolls her eyes when I detour a different way to avoid some particular egregious traffic lights. I still have a deeply engrained habit of active avoidance of traffic lights, and have stated I’ll move out of the town I live in the moment they install them. I may just be posturing, but still, there’s a grain of truth in every jest.

      Really, it’s a control thing. Traffic and traffic lights are mostly out of my control, which hints at the deeper truth that most of life is out of our control. So what’s the solution? Amor fati — Love of fate. Simply put, focus on the things that you can control, accept the rest, and stay in the chill lane.

      Anger is weakness, displayed. It will be our undoing if we let it be. So don’t let it be. As we learn and grow we come to see the world differently, and see the folly of the angry life. To reach our potential in this life we must remain clear on our purpose and avoid the petty distractions some bad commute or bad civil engineering might stir up. It’s all relative, of course, and none of this matters when we look at the bigger picture. Amor fati, friend.

    • Where Love and Need Are One

      My object in living is to unite
      My avocation and my vocation
      As my two eyes make one in sight.
      Only where love and need are one,
      And the work is play for mortal stakes,
      Is the deed ever really done
      For heaven and the future’s sakes.
      — Robert Frost, Two Tramps in Mud Time

      When people ask whether I’m traveling for business or pleasure, I sometimes pause a beat to ponder the question. Business travel is a trade-off of obligation and discovery. We can be productive and explore the ripe potential of place. This blog was born of an inclination to wander about during business travel, and I’ve been the better for having closed the gap between work and my curiosity about the world around me.

      And what of the work itself? I hear the laugh of a friend who thinks of work as nothing but a means to an end. It’s called work for a reason, she would tell me. What’s love got to do with it? But looking back on every job I’ve ever had, even the most tedious and miserable of jobs, I still found delight in discovery. Like Robert Frost finding joy in splitting wood, the joy lies in learning new tricks in our trade. We each have our verse to write in this world. There ought to be joy in finding ourselves in it.

    • Later is Too Late

      “Später ist zu spät.“ (Later is too late) — Peter Altenberg

      If there’s one theme we ought to have learned from living in the aftermath of the unexpected, it’s to make the most of the moment we’re currently in. We may never pass this way again, as the song goes. Memento mori. Carpe diem.

      If there’s a theme I’ve worked to embrace this spring, it’s living with urgency. We must do what we can in the time we have. This means prioritizing the important and deferring the trivial to later. There’s simply no other way to get to the most important things.

      This week I surprised myself at what I was able to do with a relatively short burst of creative energy. What might I do with consistent and sustained output? There’s never been a better time to find out than now. For later is indeed too late.

    • Insist on Color

      “I don’t trust the answers or the people who give me the answers. I believe in dirt and bone and flowers and fresh pasta and salsa cruda and red wine. I don’t believe in white wine; I insist on color.” ― Charles Bowden (Via Outlawspoetic)

      There are surely shades of gray that warrant discussion, for there’s a place for nuance in this complicated world. But give me color. Give me personality and vibrancy. Give me that jolt that knocks me off my complacency when I encounter something out of the ordinary.

      There’s a reason humans seek out sunsets and the aurora borealis, knock down doors to see Van Gogh or sing about pink houses. We humans crave brightness and a rich color palate. Life is full of enough muted living; give us bold.

      This blog was started as a lens on a particular corner of the world I happen to love. It’s grown as my attention shifted, as I’ve changed. What comes next is anyone’s guess, but expect colorful wherever we go.

      Early Morning Orange

    • Art With a Spritz of Lime

      “Art is art and life is life, but to live life artistically; that is the art of life.”— Peter Altenberg

      A close friend has a flare for living well. He’ll spritz lime on a potato dish and make something extraordinary of what was moments before thought to be disparate produce. He’s always looking for the exceptional in an otherwise average day. And he drives many people mad as a result. Like that burst of citrus in a starchy dish, I find his perspective punctuates life perfectly.

      This business of living artistically is something to aspire to. Capturing moments with a bit of magic and moving through the ordinary with je ne sais quoi, these are the things that matter very much in a world that wants you to fall in line and fit right in. Certainly, we must do our job and do it well, but why always settle for vanilla?

      We each live on both sides of ordinary. It’s a gift to be human at a time and place when you can express yourself freely. We ought to use that gift and add more flavor to our days. Like every gift, we must choose to use it. Art is a deliberate act, expressed uniquely. What might we bring to the table if we have the gumption to try something new?

      We all know the expression: when the world throws you lemons, make lemonade. There’s another clever expression I once found on a kitchen magnet that adds a twist: when the world throws you limes, make margaritas. To this I’ll add, don’t forget to save some lime for the potatoes.

    • See the Changes

      She has seen me changing
      It ain’t easy rearranging
      And it gets harder as you get older
      Farther away as you get closer
      — Crosby, Stills & Nash, See the Changes

      I have a place along the shore that I’ve visited countless times. The hardscape hardly appears different from visit-to-visit, it’s the bay and the sky, the trees and the characters who surround this spot that change. I’m just another changing character in the history of this shoreline, witness to the changes around and in me. Here today, gone tomorrow. What are we to do, knowing this, but linger in the now?

      Like the bay, I return to the CSN song often. It remains the same, it’s the listener who changes. It will last longer than me, like so much in this world, and that’s as it should be. We are players in the game, writing our verse before we hand off to the next. We should celebrate this, not for the small hold we have on living now, but for our awareness. For we know the score, don’t we? It ain’t easy rearranging, but the truth shall set us free.

      Buzzards Bay

    • Others

      “In order to be the person I want to be, I must strive, hourly, against the drag of the others.” — Mary Oliver, Sand Dabs, Four*

      Some of them mean well, wanting nothing but the best for us. Some don’t care a lick about what we want, only that a glow might reflect on them. Some mean us nothing but harm in their own devious way, feelings born in some moment of contempt. We learn who some of these characters are over time. Some we go to our graves believing are one but are really the other. In the end they may scarcely matter, or they may matter a great deal. It depends, always, on us.

      We must find our own way. Sometimes this is with the help of others, sometimes despite them. We can’t be carried to our potential, we must reach for it ourselves. This is how we grow into the person we want to become.

    • Keep It Simple

      “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” —Jack Kerouac

      Simple seems so complicated some days. Mondays often openly mock the very idea of simplicity. Want to do big things in this lifetime? Meet your wrestling partner, complexity. Complexity usually doesn’t play by the rules.

      Of course, Kerouac danced with eloquent simplicity in his writing through applied effort. For him to point out he too was a work in progress is a generous gift to those of us fighting the same battle. If there’s a takeaway, it’s to do the work anyway. It won’t write itself, no matter how complicated our lives are. Simple isn’t easy, it’s only meant to appear that way.

      My own rulebook states I click publish every day. I always aim for morning, but that’s negotiable, while publishing daily is very much nonnegotiable for as long as life and luck allow. We all have our lines in the sand and our own idea of what simple means. Writing every day, each day becomes an incremental step towards our own version of simple.

    • The Next Circle

      As we become whatever it is we’ve decided to become, we naturally grow into who we’ll be next. Like a tree, the easiest analogy to reference, we might have some years where we grow a lot, and some years where we grow very little. But each season we grow nonetheless, building the next circle that will be part of our identity.

      It occurred to me that all this restlessness is just me pushing on into the next circle. We’re well into the new growth season now, not with trees and such, but within ourselves. What will this next season bring for us? The answer lies within. And friends: we have work to do.

    • More of This

      As I publish this, it’s the 18th of March, or the 77th day of the year. Lucky sevens, if you will, falling just after St. Patrick’s Day. The luck of the Irish following us? Let’s hope for that, but get back to living with purpose just the same. For we make our own luck, don’t we?

      We can usually predict the future by looking at what we consistently do. With that in mind, I’ll likely be writing every day, barely keeping the Duolingo streak alive and will have read my share of books (though never quite enough). It’s easy to see those filling in from now until the end, whatever that looks like. But what of the gaps? The inconsistencies also predict who we become, don’t they?

      It’s clear I need to get a dog soon if I want to maintain a walking streak, as walking the neighborhood at night without a dog just makes me feel like the weird neighbor. I probably don’t need to enhance that reputation. Alternatively, I could move to a place where walking is just the most obvious thing to do with your time. Kudos to friend and fellow blogger Joe, who managed to find a job and home in close enough proximity to each other that he can walk or snowshoe between the two. Joe doesn’t seem to complain about finding time to walk, he just walks. He proves every day that we can create the situation that works best for us when we focus on it.

      Life can surely be unpredictable, but we can safely predict that our life will mostly be more of this if we keep doing the same thing every day. The question to ask is, is more of this okay, or is it carrying us to a place we’d rather not go? Almost a quarter of the way into the year, we can see the trend we’re setting for ourselves, can’t we?

      “You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”
      ― James Clear, Atomic Habits

      When the year is over, it would be great to have written all I’d like to write, to have read all that I’ve got on my reading list, and to finally hold my own in a rapid-fire conversation in French. But it would also be great to be in better shape than I began the year, to have positioned myself for a successful year in my career, and to spend meaningful time with exceptional people. These are things we can look back on the blank spaces with regret, or we can celebrate as small wins strung together just so. More of this can be a positive statement, if we create the right situation for ourselves.

      So what’s the trajectory? Is more of this a good thing or bad? With this answered, we’ll know what to do next.