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    • Outward Expression

      “I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it.”
      ― Henry David Thoreau,       A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

      There’s a tricky thing in writing—deep introspection is conveyed through outward expression. When you read a lot you stumble on some deeply damaged characters who had the courage to put it all out there on paper for others to see. I’ve mined myself similarly, but I don’t have the deep scars that others seem to have. Blame it on a good family growing up, but the fuel for the writing isn’t to draw out the pain of the past but rather to tap into the experience and intense gratitude of being alive at this time. That doesn’t mean there aren’t scars, how does anyone live an unsheltered life without scars? That which you once were is a memory that haunts you or spurs you towards becoming a better person. I’ve long ago buried the character I hated in myself, though he keeps trying to crawl out of his grave.

      Decide what to be and go be it.

      There’s a feeling that comes over you when you decide what to be. It’s like a magnet that pulls you in the direction you want to go in. My sailor and hiker friends know this, for it relentlessly pulls them towards their True North. I smile when someone questions why someone would put all their eggs in one basket. If you haven’t found your basket you can’t possibly know why others do what they do.

      “I don’t want to swim in a roped off sea.” — Jimmy Buffett, Cowboy in the Jungle

      We all have our calling. Do we listen to it or to the helpful guidance of others? When you find that direction, killing time on other things feels like you’re strangling yourself. Urgency and purpose demand your attention. The only way forward is deliberate action. Growing outward requires we stretch ourselves beyond what we once were, and then to keep doing it over and over again. To reach out towards where we want to be often means pulling away from what we once were.

    • What We Hold On To

      “You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. Opening the front door to the first snowfall of my life, you whispered, ‘Look.’” — Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

      We write to express ourselves, don’t we? But also to see. For the writer observes the world. Otherwise what do we hold on to, in the end? Memories and the occasional catchy phrases. For a moment to last we must create. I think all artists work to share a vision with the world. Their work naturally exists after the vision the artist is sharing, and thus becomes a way to retain that which would have otherwise disappeared.

      A photographer snaps a picture that represents an instant in time. Immediately it becomes a historical document of what once was. It becomes a way of holding on to the past. We can all play this game of looking at pictures and remembering moments that had otherwise slipped to the recesses of our minds. People and objects that once were but are now just memories and memorabilia. All art drives a similar stake in the ground, capturing that moment in the artist’s life expressed in their creation. Art captures us as we once were.

      What do we hold on to? What do we let go of? Some moments are forever locked in amber, some drift away immediately. What we experience and what we hold on to are never the same thing. Think about the things we’ve all experienced over the last few years. We can’t agree on what we all saw, how could we possibly agree on how to capture this moment?

      Art is always subject to interpretation. It captures a moment through the perspective of the artist, and is received by the audience with their perspective in their moment. Life, and art, are indeed fleeting. The world passes through us, and we all disappear into the past together. All we can hold on to is the moment. But the artist tries to share it.

    • The Lingering Glow of a Great Book

      There’s a feeling that lingers in you when you finish a magnificent book, a glow that feels a lot like the feeling you have when you’ve had a wonderful conversation with an old friend, returned from a beautiful vacation, or still feel the magic stay in the air well after a stunning sunset slips beneath the horizon. For all the bickering and sickness and change in the world, we know delight and wonder when we feel them. For it makes us forget everything else in the world and celebrate that one brief moment for all it brings to us.

      “Alexander Rostov was neither scientist nor sage; but at the age of sixty-four he was wise enough to know that life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions. Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate, and our opinions evolve—if not glacially, then at least gradually. Such that the events of an average day are as likely to transform who we are as a pinch of pepper is to transform a stew. And yet…” — Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

      It would be a disservice to you to offer more than this. Like life itself, this book unfolds before you, revealing wonder and delight and frustration and finally that lingering affection for a novel that has no right to grab you by the shoulders, spins you around and firmly shouts, “Look! Do you see it now? This is how it’s done!”

      When you finish a book that completely captures your imagination, that becomes an old friend in the span of a few days, you want to raise your own game. You feel the stirring warmth and the catch in your throat from the magic you’ve been breathlessly consuming. You see once again just what is possible should you commit yourself to it. If you’re wise, you surf that swell of emotion to places beyond the pages of the very book you’ve finished. The very best storytelling lingers, and it inspires greatness within us.

    • What You Put Out


      “Calling yourself creative doesn’t make it true. All that matters is what you’ve launched. Make finishing your top priority… When you’re gone, your work shows who you were. Not your intentions. Not what you took in. Only what you put out.” — Derek Sivers, How to Live

      “When you ship, you silence the lizard brain. You beat the resistance and your ideas get out in the world. It’s not easy, but it’s very important. I am shipping because I don’t want to create art for art’s sake; I want to do work that matters, that makes a difference in people’s lives. Not tomorrow, today.” — Seth Godin, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

      Anyone who does anything creative knows the scorecard. What you intend to do has no place at the table: The only thing that matters is what you produce. If you don’t put it out there you aren’t a part of the Great Conversation.

      I focus a lot on productivity in this blog. More than some think I ought to. For me, productivity is the natural outcome of habits and routines and the gumption to click “Publish” every damned day. The lizard brain is a very real struggle, so is imposter syndrome, and so is the relative comfort of low agency. To overcome each of these hurdles, you must learn to be audacious. For most of us this doesn’t come in a spark of magnificent insight, it comes through incremental daily actions: teaching the brain that this is what is expected of it today and every waking day from here to the very last.

      This daily routine of writing profoundly changes you. I’d read that for years in Seth Godin blogs before I finally started posting regularly. I don’t look at my early posts often, for they’re full of typos and grammatical errors and run-on sentences (some things don’t change). But each brought me here. And here brings me to whatever comes next.

      What you consistently put out builds boldness and audacity and a blatant disregard for keeping up appearances. What I’ve learned during this dance with daily productivity is to avoid telling the world what you’re going to do. All that matters is what you have done. So by all means: ship it. Lizard brain be damned.

    • What You Drift Away From

      My spouse recently deprioritized potato chips and Diet Coke from her life. For me, I could pass the rest of my days without ever consuming either of them, but for her these were a big part of her eating ritual. You make a sandwich for lunch, you need something crunchy and salty with it. And of course something to wash it down with. Dropping each was hard for her but she’s finding her stride.

      I’ve got my own demons. A love of great cheese, pasta, rice and beer — wonderful foods that I’ve largely eradicated from my life in 2022. In previous years I used to have cheat days where I’d eat all of this stuff in a binge of epic proportions. Now I let things drift away. I’ll have an occasional beer with friends, and I’ll sprinkle a bit of grated cheese on a meal now and then, but surprisingly I don’t miss it much.

      Food in this way is like old friends you don’t see anymore, you just fill the void with other things that bring you delight. Jennifer Senior wrote an article called It’s your Friends Who Break Your Heart in the latest edition of The Atlantic that speaks to the drifting away of friends in your life. We’ve all experienced it: In school or in your career you collect friendships. When you’re a parent of active children you tend to collect fellow collaborators who become friends. It’s only when the nest empties and a pandemic grabs a couple of years of your life that you look around and find that only a small core group remains. The great reckoning of what’s really important in your life is a harsh judge.

      I have long work relationships that fell away like a bag of chips with lunch. I have some people in my life that I haven’t talked to since it became clear how different our worldviews were on science and politics. Friendships of convenience always drift away with physical or emotional distance. The ones that stand the test of time are honed on common interests, deep roots and a shared commitment to keeping it going.

      Lately I’ve been struggling with my daily rituals. The morning has always been about writing, but work increasingly pulls at me, prompting me to cut short my writing and jump into the fray. The workouts and long walks became a casualty too frequently. This won’t do. We become what we prioritize, and you must fold positive habits into your daily life or you’ll eventually find yourself overweight, unproductive, uneducated and void of meaningful relationships.

      We are what we repeatedly do.

      You are what you eat.

      We are the sum of the five people we hang around with the most.

      There’s truth in these statements, which is why we all know them by heart. So why don’t we do more to prioritize the positive actions, food and people in our daily lives? I believe it’s because we all live in a whirlwind, and sometimes it just feels easier to turn on the television and distract yourself with other people’s problems than to deal with your own. Grab a bag of chips and beer while you’re at it. Habits and rituals work both ways. We’re either improving our lot or slipping sideways down the cliff. You just don’t notice it right away until there’s some tangible negative momentum in your slide.

      Maybe the answer really is all things in moderation. But you know even saying that that it isn’t really true. The real truth is some things in moderation, some things not at all. Some things in abundance, and nothing in excess. We ought to stop drifting through the whirlwind of life and decide what brings you closer to who you want to become. In doing so, we must allow some things to drift silently away from us. And hold on to other things for dear life.

    • Starting Over

      Well the road rolls out like a welcome mat
      To a better place than the one we’re at
      And I ain’t got no kinda plan
      But I’ve had all of this town I can stand
      And I got friends out on the coast
      We can jump in the water and see what floats
      We’ve been saving for a rainy day
      Let’s beat the storm and be on our way
      — Chris Stapleton, Starting Over

      There’s an interesting twist to writing a blog every day; you start having conversations with friends and family who know perfectly well that you write a blog every day, may read the very words that you write and offer commentary on those words the next time you see them. And what, dear writer, do you do with that? Do you carefully edit your blog posts? Shut it down and write anonymously? Or just say the hell with it and write whatever you want to write about? The answer, I think, depends on who you’ve become during your passage through time. This blog isn’t a journal, definitely not a diary, but well-meaning friends and family interpret each post in whatever way they will.

      With that in mind, beginning this blog post with the lyrics to Chris Stapleton’s Starting Over might seem risky, inviting all sorts of interpretation about the restless state of my wandering soul. This is the latest in a string of “hit the road” songs that stir the imagination, right there with Bob Seger’s Roll Me Away and Lord Huron’s Ends of the Earth. I could write a blog post on escapist songs that carry you from here to, well, there. The reason these songs stick is because they resonate. Secretly, we all want to fly, don’t we?

      This month the house was turned upside down as a few rooms are getting painted. One room grew to two, and now a third (it’s a slippery slope, this home remodeling business). When you start moving your collection of things, you get a sense of time spent in limbo. Some of that accumulated stuff has grown a thick layer of dust that you weren’t aware of. The funny thing about dust: it collects on the things that feel most permanent to you.

      Travel is a way of clearing the dust that accumulates on yourself. It sparks the imagination, changes perspective, and informs you about the world outside your comfort zone. Staying in one place just gives the dust a place to land. You ought to fly away now and then, just to feel the changes that have come over you.

      This week my father was moved from his home to a care facility to assess his dementia. It seems the accumulated dust in his brain is getting worse, and the only viable answer was for him to leave his nest and land somewhere else for a little while. It serves as a reminder that none of this is permanent, everything changes, and if you want to fly from the nest you’d best do it while you can. Every day you can start over, until the day you can’t.

    • Life’s Incessant Aspiration

      “I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it. That is the law of my life. That is the working within me of Life’s incessant aspiration to higher organization, wider, deeper, intenser self-consciousness, and clearer self-understanding.” — George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

      I understand old George, for I’m right with him on this point. When we hear the siren, when we strive for something better than ourselves, we begin a lifetime process of chipping away at the stubborn facade that hides that potential deep inside. What we don’t quite realize when we begin is just how tough a journey this can be. For it takes a lifetime, and even then some, for we never quite reach what we aspire to, do we?

      “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” – Michelangelo

      Is it any wonder most people just skate in their lane? Who needs to lump more pressure on themselves when we can just enjoy where we are? Well-meaning friends and family remind you to keep your blinders on and stick with what brought you here. We experience this most deeply in work, where we’re often thought of as who we were when we walked in the door, not who we become as we grow and learn. Isn’t that why so many change jobs?

      We aren’t salmon in a fish farm, we have streams and oceans to explore! We have an opportunity—an obligation—to reinvent ourselves daily. To reach for something better than ourselves in all that we do. Life is a short game, unfair and fickle. We’ll all leave something on the table in the end. Don’t let it be that which means the most. Aspire for that which you might be, and do the work to set it free.

    • Incremental Pulses

      “A story is a series of incremental pulses, each of which does something to us. Each puts us in a new place, relative to where we just were.” — George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

      Swap “Life” for “A story” in the quote above. It does something different to you, doesn’t it? All storytelling is just sharing experiences and lessons with each other. Some are completely made up, some are relatively on point, but all are told through the perspective of the writer.

      This month a family friend is painting a couple of rooms in my home. Normally I’d do this work myself, but for several reasons it’s better that he’s doing it. In the process, the house is turned upside down, and we’re all feeling the accumulated fatigue of these relatively new places and experiences, stacked one atop the other. The one taking it the hardest is the younger cat, who’s had three years to establish her world order, her safe places, only to have it all turned upside down in a few days. And so she’s a basket case of concerned meows and fearful hiding. New places can be hard to adjust to.

      The world is changing rapidly around us, and the stories we tell each other about the future are all so very different than they were not that long ago. We’re collectively in a new place, and finding it hard to adjust to it. What do we do next? Stop using plastic straws? Buy (or sell!) crypto currency? Stockpile canned goods and bottled water? It feels like we all just worked through our pandemic stock!

      So now what? It begins with the stories we tell ourselves. What we share with the world. Storytelling is a way to share lessons, to offer a path for others to follow. We listen to each other for shared perspective. Change happens, how we react to it usually determines what happens next.

      The last few nights, I’ve coaxed the cat out of deep hiding places. She walks out timidly, fearful of this new place she finds herself in. I’ll give her a moment to adjust, then pick her up and give her a reassuring hug. This too shall pass. Soon we’ll be in a new place yet again. And maybe it will all be okay. We ought to stick together, just in case.

    • Best Intentions

      “What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing.” ― Pablo Picasso

      “Do or do not. There is no try.” — Yoda

      Intentions. We all have the best of them. I intended to have a stellar week of work and working out. Both have been a struggle. Such is the way. Life is funny and fickle. We either do or we do not. The trick isn’t in the intentions, it’s in the verdict after the fact. Judge or judge not. There is no getting around it.

      You reach a point where you become. You decided what to be and you went out and became it. Or maybe you didn’t, but you had the best intentions. Life is assessing what you are and deciding whether you like it or not, and then deciding what to be next. One hop across the stream of life at a time, you look for that next landing spot, with an eye on the far shore. Sometimes you slip and get wet. Sometimes you took a hop in the wrong direction. Sometimes you park yourself on one comfortable rock a little too long. Intention and action are the only things that get you to the other side.

      Intentions are nothing but a direction we wish to point ourselves in. Intent only matters when it meets consistent action. Which begs the question, what are you doing?

    • Bluebirds in Winter (Playing the Long Game)

      Many moons I have lived
      My body’s weathered and worn
      Ask yourself how old you’d be
      If you didn’t know the day you were born
      Try to love on your wife
      And stay close to your friends
      Toast each sundown with wine
      And don’t let the old man in
      — Written by Toby Keith/sung by Willie Nelson, Don’t Let the Old Man In

      There are few things more beautiful than a bluebird set against snow on a brilliant, sunny day. But bluebirds don’t just randomly show up to brighten your snowy landscape. If you want bluebirds in winter you’ve got to give them a compelling reason to visit. The work starts in the longer and warmer days establishing a consistent and reliable place for them, to be rewarded when the days grow shorter.

      Age is an attitude. Sure, you might make a case for the gradual breakdown of the body, but with consistent effort you can control the rate with which the body breaks down. There are plenty of voices out there pointing towards habits and social norms dictating our long term health and vibrancy, not the number of trips around the sun. We all know people who defy expectations about age, bouncing around well into their 90’s and beyond. And we can rattle off examples of people who died too young, with the wheels coming off at a shockingly young age.

      We know there are no guarantees in this world, but barring accident or underlying hereditary conditions, when we die often comes back to how we live. Which makes you think, as you see the days fly by, how are you going to play this hand? What are the habits and norms that are going to dictate how we feel when we wake up tomorrow morning, or how we feel in five years? What can we do today to feel better in ten years than we feel now? Shouldn’t we focus on doing more of that?

      If we want to play the long game, we ought to walk away from the short term temptations that compromise our fitness tomorrow. Eat well, drink less, move more, experience something new every day and spend time with friends and loved ones. The long game means putting our bodies and minds in the best possible position to meet the future.

      Remember the old expression: The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is right now. What are you building towards? Best to get started today. Plant that tree. It’ll give you a place to hang the bluebird feeder.