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    • Can’t See the Open Road

      Mellow is the man who knows what he’s been missing
      Many, many men can’t see the open road
      — Led Zeppelin, Over the Hills and Far Away

      Huddled in a group at an Irish pub, four men scheming for the future: one free of obligations and ready to roam, one surfing the peak of his career and working to cash in before it crashes, one just riding the swell and hoping this time—this time— he’d caught the right wave, and me, a would-be writer and wanderer observing the human condition. I’m surfing my own wave, of course, but don’t we all dream of coming about, hoisting the main and sailing away instead?

      “We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

      Nowadays we can all see what we’ve been missing in YouTube videos, Instagram and Facebook posts, or wherever you choose to live vicariously through the lens of others. My own favorite footage often involves drones flying above stunning landscapes, as if I were flying myself. And don’t we all wish to fly?

      But the question is, do we wish to fly away from something or towards something? For life is short and we can’t waste our precious time running away from ourselves. Yet so many do, in distraction and debauchery and debate. It’s easy to run away, but impossible to really get away from that nagging discontent.

      Old friend Henry David Thoreau pointed out that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” He would also say that, “So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.”

      In other words, life is change, everything is changing around us even as we debate what we ought to do with ourselves. Which brings me back to a constant refrain: We must decide what to be and go be it. And be content with that which we leave behind.

    • Make the Ordinary Come Alive

      Do not ask your children
      to strive for extraordinary lives.
      Such striving may seem admirable,
      but it is the way of foolishness.
      Help them instead to find the wonder
      and the marvel of an ordinary life.
      Show them the joy of tasting
      tomatoes, apples and pears.
      Show them how to cry
      when pets and people die.
      Show them the infinite pleasure
      in the touch of a hand.
      And make the ordinary come alive for them.
      The extraordinary will take care of itself.
      William Martin, Do not ask your children to strive

      Sleet and freezing rain tap against the windows. It’s not a day to be outside in the elements, and yet I consider the consequences of a walk. We take the world as it comes to us, make of it what we can, celebrate the ordinary and find the magic where we may.

      Celebrating ordinary isn’t what the world highlights. Everyone is hyper-focused on placing themselves in the most extraordinary places, doing the most extraordinary things, living their “best life” (whatever that means when you stop to think about it). Perhaps our focus should be on the moment at hand, wherever we might be.

      I celebrate waking up this morning, hearing that tap, tap, tap of the rain and sleet and the roof over my head that makes it all seem so far away. I celebrate the conversations I’ve had with those I love, listening to how their day went, and celebrating with them the moments that made their ordinary more alive. I celebrate the quiet in an often chaotic world, removing myself from the noise but listening for the voice of those in need.

      Life is infinite pleasure when you focus on the small joys. Life is more realized when we wrestle with our pain and loss and setbacks. Each moment informs, when we are taught to see. Learning to savor our ordinary vitality is the path to a magical life. A life worthy of our short dose of days.

    • A Wednesday Walk in the Woods

      “Listen! Let the high branches go on with their opera, it’s the song of the fields I wait for, when the sky turns orange and the wind arrives, waving his thousand arms.” — Mary Oliver, Wind

      The woods were quiet save for the steady clump, swish, click of this clydesdale making his way through the fields and woods on snowshoes. The snow had transformed from powdery bliss Sunday to snowball clingy in the warm sun. In New England you work with whatever Mother Nature gives you, and a lunch walk on a warmish day brought isolation from humanity and companionship from thousands of naked old friends biding their time to bud in Spring.

      Steadily I make my way through the forest to revisit favorite spots. I have memories of who I once was in certain places, for the trail whispers. Why do we settle on the familiar so often, when the world offers so much to discover? The trick when walking in familiar woods is to look for the different. The most obvious tell was the snow itself, tracks and consistency completely transformed in a few days, and it will be again on every visit.

      Autumn leaves lay scattered near a dug-up clump of snow. Deer tracks? No… Canine. The tracks and leaves tell the rest of the story. I realize I’m telling my own story with every step. I wonder who might read it? The trees stand stoic and unmoved.

      I climb up a small rise on virgin snow. Something catches my eye and I walk closer for a look. Someone built a lean-to between two oak trees, with netting and fallen tree branches making up the roof. This wasn’t new, just unnoticed on prior walks. They’d wanted it that way, of course, building it up away from the trail. I wondered at the builder for a moment, and left the mystery unsolved. The world is full of questions, I don’t feel compelled to answer every one of them.

      Turning back, I recalled this line of poetry from Mary Oliver about tree branches waving in the breeze. We know this song, the woods and I. Looking around one last time I look for an excuse to linger. They stand in cold indifference and show me the way home.

      Biding their time

    • Tom Brady in Five Quotes

      What do you do with consistent excellence? How do you process it? How do the average masses view the brilliant contribution of the few? Many dismiss it as trickery, cheating, luck, or chance. This minimizes the painful gap of comparison. For others, recognizing that brilliance leads to hate for what it brings: defeat and frustration. Excellence is a mirror, and when we look at it we see our own shortcomings.

      Tom Brady retired. Why is that a surprise? He’s 45 as I write this, won 7 Super Bowl rings for two teams and long ago became the G.O.A.T. for those who celebrate the level of excellence he’s reached. Those who would knock him down a notch or two for perceived slights or for the extreme discipline he lives by grudgingly note the results. This isn’t a guy who does things half-assed.

      When you live in New England, and you’ve lived through the really, really dark days of professional sports in New England when every team was losing in heartbreaking fashion every year from 1987 until 2001, well, you recognize the difference that one or two people can make in a game, or on a team, or in a region. Tom Brady was a sparkplug for New England, and winning became contagious. It became expected. Because the standard was raised, and it remains higher than it was before he rose up to lead that first Super Bowl win in the aftermath of 9/11 for a team called Patriots.

      There are a million Tom Brady quotes out there. I mean, the guy played Pro Football for 22 years; you accumulate a lot of quotes in all that time! But here are five that I found most enlightening about the man. Thanks Tom, it’s been fun seeing excellence on display for so many years:

      “It’s never come easy for me. I don’t think my mind allows me to rest ever. I have, I think, a chip on my shoulder, and some deep scars that I don’t think were healed.”

      “A lot of times I find that people who are blessed with the most talent don’t ever develop that attitude, and the ones who aren’t blessed in that way are the most competitive and have the biggest heart.”

      “I think I have a certain respect for people, you know. And I guess a lot of times I expect that respect to go both ways.”

      “If you waste your time and energy on things that don’t matter in the outcome of the game, then when you get to the game you’re not going to give your teammates the best that you have to offer.”

      “I knew I became a professional when I stop paying attention to what time it was.”

    • Strategic, Interested Experiencing

      “When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life. And when people start believing in progress—in the idea that history is headed toward an ever more perfect future—they feel far more acutely the pain of their own little lifespan, which condemns them to missing out on almost all of that future. And so they try to quell their anxieties by cramming their lives with experience.” — Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

      Burkeman’s statement isn’t something you just fly by without contemplation. I have people in my life who would be indignant about the very idea of there being no afterlife. You might say I’m more open to the concept. But no matter what your belief about what happens next, most would agree in the concept of the infinite unknown. It was here before we were conceived and began our march through borrowed time, and it will envelope us again sooner than we’re comfortable with thinking about. Really, it’s all around us, we’re just stubbornly alive beings bumping up against infinity every day until we rejoin it. Giddy-Up.

      We get busy in life, marching through our days and obligations. I was just thinking to myself that I’m a bit short on micro-adventures lately. Blame it on my day job running parallel to this blog. I have a few friends that question my sanity for trading so many of my four thousand weeks for a career. But life is more than chasing waterfalls and sunsets. You’ve got to make something of your time, don’t you? Or do you need to do something in your time? Can you do both? Can we really have it all?

      Burkeman recommends “strategic underachievement”, which is simply “nominating in advance whole areas of life in which you won’t expect excellence of yourself” to mitigate the underlying stress of living for both commitments and experience. Focus on what you want to excel in, and gently put the rest aside on the priority list—placing the not-so-important stuff into tomorrow is a gentle way of punting what doesn’t really matter in this brash act of living life on our own terms.

      “Tomorrow is for the lazy mind, the sluggish mind, the mind that is not interested” — Jiddu Krishnamurti

      The answer, I believe, is to focus on the things that make you feel most alive, things that put you right in the mix of a fulfilling, satisfying life. That might be a sunset in the tropics or washing the dishes with your favorite song playing louder than it should. Embracing the mundane and the remarkable as it comes, but prioritizing that which places you squarely where you might maximize these experiences. We ought to decide what we want to savor most, and what to let fall away.

      Let’s face it, passively waiting for life experiences to come your way leads to a whole lot of waiting. Strategic underachievement in one area of your life means you’ve got to proactively work to strategically overachieve in other areas. Be interested in this business of living! Get up off your passive expectations about living and go out and meet the things you most want to achieve, be and do in this short life. Not so much “cramming experience”, but rather, strategic, and interested, experiencing. Wherever we might be.

    • Unbroken Snow & Writing

      There are different kinds of snow, and different kinds of snowshoeing. Snowshoe hiking up a mountain is very different than snowshoeing across a snow-covered field. Like walking on these terrains when there’s no snow, there’s a certain tactical change that develops with each. Hiking up a mountain, there’s a unique relief in flipping up the heel lifts on snowshoes to level your foot to the incline that you naturally wouldn’t feel on flat terrain. There’s also a wholly different intensity in grinding up an unbroken mountain trail. Steep terrain and unbroken snow are a workout. For me it’s a bit like technical writing, you know the payoff will be big but in your lowest moments the effort feels like it isn’t worth it (it’s almost always worth it).

      Flat terrain snowshoeing is a different story altogether. Easier, in a lot of ways, but that ease releases you to explore more than you might on something more technical and demanding. But that very freedom can force people to stick with the formula of the familiar. Why be uncomfortable in breaking new ground? Because that’s where things get most interesting!

      There are times when you’ve got to stay on the path. Inevitably, you’ll begin on broken ground: trails that lead from a parking lot to open fields, or woodland trails that must be honored before you reach open space. There’s an obligation, unsaid, to help groom the trail by tamping it down with your snowshoes. We do our part, but it feels like paying penance, and you look ahead to where you might break free. The very unevenness of the broken trail is what makes it a chore. Compacting broken snow means staying in your lane, taking what others have left for you and finding a path through it. Broken snow, especially when regular walkers use the same trail, exposes boulders and roots and ruts that lead to post holing on the trail. There’s a certain satisfaction in tamping down the brokenness, akin, in a way, to editing a sloppy bit of writing.

      But the real fun begins when you find an opening to fly. A small break in an old stone fence that leads you to a virgin field of unbroken snow, or a wide open field with a single broken path going across it each whispers, “It’s time: FLY!” and gives you the opportunity to break from all expectations and obligations and just go for it. Like a plane freeing itself from the obligation of the runway, launching yourself into unbroken snow is freedom. It’s just you and the snow, and you can go in any direction you want.

      Writing can feel very much the same. You chafe at the obligatory structure, you get caught up in the rules of punctuation and order, you try to clean up run-on sentences and spelling errors and the like as you go. But to really fly with writing you’ve just got to just launch yourself into it, technique and order be damned, and just see where it takes you. Inevitably to places you never imagined when you started. If you truly let yourself go you don’t worry about editing the broken trail you leave behind you. There’ll be time for that another day. No, this is your time to take wing.

      If you’ll forgive me another analogy about snowshoeing and writing, it’s the conditioning. When you haven’t been out on snowshoes in a while you forget the pace and rhythm and become a bit breathless. When you do it every day you quickly find your pace and rhythm and just get right to it. It becomes natural–a part of you. And when you reach that point you can cover so much more ground than you would otherwise. The lesson, of course, is to get to it every day.

      The obligation of the broken trail
      The freedom of unbroken ground

    • Finding Balance in a Hot Tub in a Blizzard

      The forecast called for a blizzard, and officially it met the requirements to be called one in some places. Not so much where I call home. But a significant storm nonetheless. A storm you take seriously. A storm you hunker down in. A storm in which an adventurous spirit might look out at the hot tub and think to oneself, “I’m going in, now”. And fancying myself so, I changed into a bathing suit, slipped on my adidas slides, a cap and the warmest shirt I own and headed out into the swirl.

      Taking a broom with me, I swept a path through the 4 inches of light accumulation to the tub, swept off the cover, opened the tub and took a deep breath. Off came the warm shirt and the tickle of snow landing on my back greeted me immediately. Stepping out of the slides into the 39 degree Celsius/103 degree Fahrenheit water, I felt the sting of fast-frozen toes meeting heat. I quickly brought my other foot in for the party and dropped down to chin level to warm myself.

      Immersing yourself in hot tubs (or hot springs) is supposed to improve your health in several ways. First, it puts you in a state of weightlessness, easing stress on your joints and relaxing muscles. But it also improves cardiovascular health and helps lower your blood pressure. The jets in a hot tub offer some massage for those sore muscles. But mostly a hot tub draws the stress out of you and plunges you into a relaxed state.

      That state change is most obvious when you’re sitting in hot swirling water in a snowstorm, with the steam rising up to meet the snow as it swirled down to reunite with the water. That’s some extreme swirling, to be sure, and with your head places squarely on the line between chaos and order, Yin and Yang, you have a front row seat for the dance. Too much in either direction and you’ll freeze or drown. Choices. It was life, amplified, in the splurgy decadence of a hot tub in a blizzard.

      The fine snow accumulated all around me, coating all cool surfaces. I felt it landing on my exposed skin, sliding down to greet the hot water or melting in surrender to the warmth of my body. But the snowy assault kept on relentlessly. My knit cap, my eyelashes and nose collected snow. The line between chaos and order is very thin in such conditions, and I delighted in the opportunity to be right there. Nothing else mattered in that moment.

      But all good things must end, and at some point you’ve got to brace yourself for the retreat from the hot tub through the swirling snow to the warm house. This is best done with purpose, and I reached up and shook off a towel, quickly stood and wrapped my shoulders and reached for my wool shirt, shook that off too and replaced the towel with the cold shirt as I got up. I offered the adidas a dip in hot water to clean off the snow and slipped them on.

      It was all a choreographed dance on the edge of chaos, and I loved it without lingering. Buttoning up the hot tub and walking through the accumulation was my penance paid for the indulgence. Still radiating heat, I shuffled back to reality while scheming a return.

    • Be Yourself

      To be nobody but
      yourself in a world
      which is doing its best day and night to make you like
      everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
      which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
      ― e e cummings

      “Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.”
      ― e e cummings

      Delighting in a blizzard, I forgo the endless news telling you what’s right in front of you and instead read poetry and sip espresso. Were the snow deeper I might slip on the snowshoes and fly. Give it time, I think, and it will catch up to where my dreams are. Who doesn’t become a child again when hunkered down in a snowstorm?

      There’s a spirit in a blizzard that calls me outside. Swirling snow globe bliss, shaken again and again until it spins madly about. The landscape is cloaked and the familiar appears foreign. I suppose it’s the adventure of being immersed in a storm that draws me outside, or maybe it’s the thought of doing what most people would tell me not to do. A blizzard is a rebellion against the norm. It turns our expectations upside down and does its own thing, and I find it reassuring and a bit thrilling.

      “The snow doesn’t give a soft white damn whom it touches.” — e e cummings

      The ego is the enemy, the Stoics and Ryan Holiday would suggest, and this week my ego experienced a generous portion of highs and a healthy dose of lows. I put it all aside and focus on who I’d like to be instead. There’s no use living your life for the approval of others, for they only see the world through their own filter. You’ve got to be yourself, and find out who you are with every new experience, every new thrill and setback and odd twist of fate.

      The wind picks up, and billions of snowflakes surf the breeze to beach themselves where they may, transforming the landscape in their huddled masses. Packed in together in swirling madness, most land where the wind takes them. But the funny part of a blizzard is that where the snow lands isn’t always where it might stay. The wind can easily lift snow up again, to land in an entirely different place.

      The world is similarly mad. The masses land where they’re carried by the wind currents of place and expectation and obligation. Yet we might still surf the breeze and find our own landing place. Should we choose to get out there and fly.

    • Catching Up & Bridging Gaps

      The idea of catching up is tantalizing. I use this phrase often in two contexts; catching up with someone I haven’t spoken with in some time, and catching up on work that’s piled up in my work or personal ambition buckets. This week I did a fair amount of catching up in both contexts. But we never really catch up, do we? We mostly just shrink the gap between people, workload or expectations before we inevitably see the gap widen again. We’re all just so… busy.

      The act of getting reacquainted, of meeting to see how someone’s been, what’s up with the family, how so-and-so’s doing, is a lovely form of catching up. There’s so much loneliness and division in the world today, fueled by the pandemic and political inclination, and the general categorization of people into one camp or another. It should be so easy to just put it all aside and listen to each other. Many people just don’t want to deal with conflict or focus on differences of opinion, and so we just don’t communicate at all.

      But there’s joy in bridging the gap. Finding common ground and dancing in the light of understanding and acceptance. When we close that gap we draw closer together, and feel the humanity of another. When we ghost each other, block people on social media, and gossip about what the other is doing the gap widens. I’ve shrunk from a few people over the last several years, finding their opinions repulsive. Yet I know there’s still common ground should we ever sit down to catch up. We go on with our lives without those people in it, but feel the void where the relationship calved. Stack up enough of these and it’s death by a thousand cuts. No wonder people are lonely and stressed out.

      At least there’s work to take our minds off the world, right? But even here the gap between what needs to be done and what we can possibly accomplish feels impossibly large. We catch up on one thing and see the gap widen in another. Supply chain issues, labor shortages, trust issues… it’s enough to make you throw your hands up in the air and buy a boat or camper to get out of Dodge. We work until the wheels come off and then teeter trying to balance on what’s left.

      The reality is we’ll never quite catch up, and that’s okay. We decide where to close gaps and where to let things stay adrift. When the time is right–if the time is ever right–we’ll come back to that which we’ve neglected and, well, catch up once again.

    • Trivia Night

      You might say it was doubling down on trivia. A local pub hosts a trivia night contest in Rhode Island. I met family there to participate. I’ve done this before, but the crowd seemed bigger this time, as if people are eager to get out in the world again, variants be damned. I understood all too well. Vaccinated, boosted, and with a mild case of COVID during the holidays (when it became particularly trendy), I felt super immune and ready to get around people again. The couple hacking away at the table next to mine made me wonder if I was pushing my luck. We’ve all become hyper-aware of other people’s sniffles, haven’t we?

      As the questions rolled out, one-by-one, it was clear we could have used another ringer or two in the group. Trivia contests are part knowing the right answer, and part getting the right questions in a series that you know the answers to. The last ingredient to success is having the courage to go big when you have an opportunity to. The last time we played trivia we were leading (!) with one final question to answer. We bet conservatively and other groups overtook us in the end, even though we all got the question right. Such is the nature of trivia contests.

      In the corner of the pub, quietly playing while we all participated in our game of trivia, Jeopardy! was playing on a big screen television. If you haven’t been keeping track, or are from another country that doesn’t broadcast it, Amy Schneider was on a 40-game winning streak, becoming a millionaire in the process. But lately she’s been missing the final Jeopardy! question. It hasn’t been a problem because she’s been building such a lead, but in this game, in front of all these trivia folks, the game was a toss-up going into the final question with Schneider and another contestant. So it would literally come down to who answered correctly and who bet what.

      As you might imagine, in a room full of trivia people, this quickly captured the attention of the entire room. Our own trivia game paused as the final Jeopardy! question was answered, and one-by-one the contestants answers were revealed. The challenger, just behind in money, had the right answer and bet big enough to take the lead. A hush came over the room as Schneider’s answer was revealed–wrong answer! The room erupted in astonishment, the queen dethroned! This is the world of trivia geeks, treating this moment like the Super Bowl or World Cup final. And why not celebrate general knowledge? The world could use a few more educated people agreeing on facts.

      As the buzz in the room calmed, we refocused on our own trivia game. Questions weren’t lining up in our favor, and we finished in the middle of the pack. Such is the way. You get the questions you get, and you go big or you go home.