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    • Consider Life an Adventure

      “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” ― G.K. Chesterton

      Admittedly, I’m tired writing this. Two weeks of travel and burning the candle at both ends and I’m worn out. But that’s why we dance with coffee, isn’t it? To press ahead just a bit further.

      The thing is, we’ve had a couple of years to reset. We all did the best we could under the circumstances. Getting back to whatever this normal is gives us a chance to stretch our imagination more. To find new adventures just around the corner, and to have the gumption to venture much farther. Not to fill our InstaGram feed or gain subscribers, but to shake loose of the cobwebs of the commonplace and experience the world.

      “Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.” — Henry David Thoreau

      Who ever looks back with pride on a moment when you decided to sleep in instead of dancing with adventure? We ought to consider life an adventure and do more with that notion. We ought to rise and seek more from our days, for we only have so many to work with. We’ve spent time with people on their deathbed who literally can’t go outside to see the stars, who are we to complain about stepping out into the world? Dance with the gift of freedom. Be part of something livelier.

      “Who can guess the luna’s sadness who lives so briefly? Who can guess the impatience of stone longing to be ground down, to be part again of something livelier? Who can imagine in what heaviness the rivers remember their original clarity?
      Strange questions, yet I have spent worthwhile time with them. And I suggest them to you also, that your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life be richer than it is, that you bow to the earth as you feel how it actually is, that we—so clever, and ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained— are only one design of the moving, the vivacious many.”       — Mary Oliver, The Moth, The Mountains, The Rivers

      We all have our shackles of responsibility and routine. We can bend our days to find adventure while still honoring our core responsibilities. And we should question our routines when they hold our rambunctious spirit in place. Consider, for a moment, that convenience is a shackle disguised as a mindset.

    • A Sunrise Walk on Historic Calf Pasture Beach

      There’s a lot of history lurking in plain sight. Take Calf Pasture Beach in Norwalk, Connecticut. on the surface it’s a pretty municipal beach on Long Island Sound. I suppose that might be enough. But there’s a significant link to the Revolutionary War on this beach. As an eager participant in maximizing the potential of any trip, I’d read about the beach while looking for a good place to watch a sunrise. As a history geek I leapt out of my chair when I learned more about the beach. A sunrise visit became a no-brainer.

      So why the strange name? Calf Pasture Beach was exactly what the name infers. When the first European settlers arrived in 1651, their cattle grazed on the grass just off the beach. Names have a way of sticking, don’t they? But there’s even more history whispering on this beach. On July 10, 1779, British Lieutenant General William Tryon led 2,600 troops on the Revolutionary War raid of Norwalk. They camped right on the peninsula where the beach is located, and the next morning burned most of the town to the ground.

      There’s no sign of British encampments or cows now, just a municipal beach with a fishing pier and bathhouse, a few baseball fields and a large parking lot. The property might have developed into any number of things, from industrial facilities to a housing development. Thankfully it was donated to the city exactly 100 years ago by the Marvin-Taylor family, who had owned the land for generations. That’s a gift that keeps on giving, and I hope Norwalk has something planned for 2022 to commemorate the family.

      All this history lured me to that particular beach for a wonderful sunrise over Long Island Sound. Arriving during magic hour, the sky was lit up in pink, and Sprite Island offered a beautiful contrast with its bare trees. A short walk down the beach brings you to a fishing pier, which offers a different perspective on the sunrise, and a different perspective on the beach itself. This small peninsula feels like it would be a million miles away from the congested I-95 corridor, yet here it is just a few minutes away. It’s funny what you find when you pause to look around a bit. Not every early morning micro-adventure pays off, but this one surely did.

      Sprite Island during the magic hour before sunrise
      Calf Pasture Beach, Norwalk, CT
      Sunrise over Long Island Sound from the Captain William Clark Fishing Pier

    • April Underfoot

      Star and coronal and bell
      April underfoot renews,
      And the hope of man as well
      Flowers among the morning dews.
      — A. E. Housman, Spring Morning

      Spring in the air, with a twist of biting cold thrust like a knife into the gut to keep you on your toes. That’s April in New England—best to appreciate the brief moments of wonder before the weather changes yet again. Daffodils are one of my favorite flowers precisely because they take it on the chin over and over again and still rise to the occasion. Who are we to complain?

      I’m not in a hurry to awaken the garden this year, feeling busy and distracted, but it doesn’t much matter whether I feel like awakening the garden or not, for the garden awakens. You either snap out of it and get ahead of things or you suffer through the ramifications of a rough start. There are beds to rake out, fallen branches to clear, fences to stand up, and soon sowing with more hope than a casual gardener has a right to. You’re either all in as a gardener or you concede it to the wild.

      I suppose I’m not quite ready for that. Like the daffodils we must rise and do what must be done. Our season is so brief and well underway. And there’s still hope for the harvest.

    • You Are What You Eat

      “The longer your food lasts, the shorter you will.” — David Sinclair

      Simple tweet from Sinclair that elegantly sums up the mission: eat fresh, natural food without preservatives. Eliminate the sketchy processed foods from our diets. Stop piling on junk atop junk for our bodies to stress over. We all know it intuitively yet make exceptions for what we chew on. We forget the long game for the savory moment.

      When you read a statement like that, are you inclined to dismiss it? Challenge it? Or accept it as a wisdom nugget? Do you change the way you eat or defer action to another day? If we are what we eat what exactly are we becoming?

      The shorter the truth nugget, the longer it lingers in the mind.

    • Incremental Awareness

      As the days grow longer in the Northern Hemisphere we detect the changes around us. The changes were happening anyway, but it seems to accelerate. Just this morning I watched the sun rise through a window where I haven’t seen the sun rise since last autumn. A mix of travel and weather conditions made it a complete surprise when it happened.

      And what of the changes we take ourselves through? We exercise, eat the right food, read and write every day and nothing seems to come of it. And one day we catch ourselves in surprise at who we’ve become without realizing it. Hey, that’s me! The light dawns on Marblehead, as they say in Boston when you’re the last to know. We know we’re changing, but don’t often see it in ourselves.

      Until we do.

      Why don’t we have more incremental awareness? Why don’t we see the smallest of changes in ourselves as we’re making them? Are we lacking self-awareness or are we just not giving ourselves the credit we deserve for doing the work? It’s as if we’re trained not to notice that we got up and worked out for three days in a row, we have to wait until we have washboard abs to be allowed to celebrate.

      The only way to be incrementally aware is to track ourselves. To write it down. To draw a big X through another day on the calendar (especially when you didn’t really feel like doing X that day). It’s not about the washboard abs or the number on the scale or the published novel, it’s about the process — saying we’re going to do something and following through on it. And then doing it all again tomorrow. Incremental action isn’t suddenly seeing the sunrise after your first day, it adds up over time and reveals itself slowly.

      When it will suddenly dawn on you.

    • Discipline, Daily

      Watch the man beating a rug.
      He is not mad at it.
      He wants to loosen the layers of dirt.

      Ego accumulations are not loosened with one swat.
      Continual work is necessary, disciplines.
      — Rumi

      We’re all on our journey of becoming. We’re all working to grow in our chosen work, to experience life more richly, to continually refine and reinvent ourselves, to reach our potential. But we can’t grow in a box. The journey requires some space and momentum, which necessitates cleaning out some old beliefs and habits acquired along the way. Sometimes cleaning up the old is easy because it was never really a part of our core, but sometimes the old is so embedded in who we are that we’ve got to beat it out.

      I have some old beliefs and habits I’m not particularly willing to carry around with me anymore. I don’t give them any light to grow, but ugly beliefs and bad habits don’t need a lot of light to fester. The process of clearing them out requires a lifetime of consistent effort.

      Discipline is derived from the Latin disciplina, which means “to learn”. But any dance with the dictionary will indicate that discipline also has another meaning: “to chastise or scold.” Discipline thus has both a positive and negative connotation. No wonder people shrink away from discipline! So what are we to make of it?

      We’re all works in progress. Old habits are like old friends that remind us of what we once were. Sometimes that’s a delight. But often we shake our head at who we used to be. To live in the present is to acknowledge that former self and see who we are today. Every day is a reset, a chance to move forward or to slide back. Every day we get to decide what to be and go be it.

    • Ambient Noise

      After a few nights in New York and New Jersey, I returned to New Hampshire to reflect on the differences. I’d hiked in pristine woodland next to gorgeous streams, the kind of stuff you see regularly in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I’d stayed in a beautiful resort surrounded by hills. I’d eaten at a vineyard next to a lovely river. I’d visited New York City itself, deep in the heart of it. And capped my visit to the city with a trip to Liberty Park in New Jersey with its striking Upper Bay view of Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty.

      It was all beautiful. The days and nights were lovely. The people were generous and friendly. You learn to love the spirit and energy and vibrancy of the place and miss it when you’re away from it. And yet I’ve never gotten used to the ambient noise.

      The Metropolitan New York region has a relentless buzz that stays around you all the time. If you live there you likely don’t even know it exists, but when you’re a country mouse coming to the big city regularly you pick right up on it. The automobile traffic, the air brakes on trucks, the train whistles, the sharp roar of planes and helicopters flying overhead, the steady rumble of ships on the Hudson River and the constant beeps and thumps and shouts of close proximity that collectively create a soundtrack of urban living. This soundtrack bleeds for miles up the Hudson River, far out into the Atlantic on Long Island and deep into the hills of New Jersey and Connecticut. It begins with the roar of the city and fades to the sound of sprawl.

      Hiking the amazing Harriman State Park next to a pristine river, you’d think the white noise would drown it all away. But reach a bit of elevation and you hear the traffic informing you that you must go even deeper into the green splashes that surround the map of New York City. Even Harriman, as big a green space as it is, has roads full of commuters cutting through it, like Central Park in the hills of the Hudson River Valley. Those roads surely serve, but they also detract if you let them. Don’t let them.

      For it’s all so very beautiful. Even the ambient noise, that guarantees no escape from the world, fades just enough when you focus on what they’ve protected from the sprawl. This is a place that offers the advantages and disadvantages of one of the greatest cities in the world, the constant beat of progress and growth and rising to the occasion that New York is famous for. But within an hour are these places like Harriman where you might immerse yourself in nature, so long as you accept the soundtrack playing way in the background and focus on the wind in the trees and the water finding its way through ancient boulder fields.

      The farther away you get from the ambient noise of New York the more faint it is. Somewhere along that spectrum of noise we reach a place where we feel the ambiance most vividly. Life isn’t about escaping from the world, but finding our place in it.

    • Gridlock Perspective

      If you had any doubt that we’ve mentally come out the other side of the pandemic, drive around a few of the metropolitan areas. Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Miami, or any other major city or the connecting smaller cities that they’re connected to. The roadways are all back to gridlock traffic. How some react to that reality is distinctly different. Welcome back–who are we now?

      When traffic is moving, some people dial up the crazy. I see more mad dash drivers than ever trying to squeeze into every pocket, using the breakdown lane for passing, multi-tasking with texting… whatever. It can all seem mad, because it is maddening. So how do we counter the madness outside the windshield?

      When I get tired of the same old characters around me, I’ll pull into a rest area or take an exit to stop for five minutes, whether I need to or not. It’s like moving out of a neighborhood with too much drama—instant refresh! Get out of the car, walk around a bit, refuel the body and mind. And when you get back on the road, the new “neighborhood” seems interesting enough to carry you through.

      I know a lot of people crank up the music on commutes, and sometimes I’ll do that too. But frequently I’ll use the time to reconnect with people using [gasp!] phone calls. Conversations are like time machines, transporting you for miles seemingly in an instant. Likewise, podcast interviews do the same thing for me. The time isn’t wasted, for the mind is moving faster than the car you’re in.

      Nobody welcomes traffic, but when we can’t time our trip better we ought to accept it as a part of living in this particular time. A bit of perspective after what we’ve all been through, and a desire to be in a better place despite it all. After all, aren’t we all trying to get somewhere a bit better than where we just were?

    • A Pre-Dawn Waterfall Chase

      Harriman State Park in New York is the second largest state park in the state, and honestly it feels pretty big when you’re in it. Still, it doesn’t feel like there should be this kind of elbow room so close to the gridlock of Metro NY. And yet here it is.

      This story began two days ago, when I participated in a group hike with several co-workers. As these things go, our available time for hiking got compressed and we had a couple of people who were a bit slower than the average hiker speed. Combined this created a situation where we had a little more than an hour to hike one of Harriman’s most popular trails, the Reeves Brook Trail Loop. Instead of reaching a waterfall and pond we’d been hoping for, we had to cut the trip short and head back. Still, that waterfall stayed with me.

      There was only one thing to do: get up early and take a solo hike to find it. If there’s a problem with April hikes, it’s that it doesn’t really get light out until close to 6 AM. I didn’t have that kind of time and headed out at 5:30 in search of the waterfall. I had a headlamp with a weak battery and two iPhones as backup for light, but found I didn’t really need any of that once my eyes adjusted. It helped that I’d done a good part of the trail two days earlier and knew the landmarks that might otherwise have been a mystery in the dark.

      I eventually found that waterfall, just ten minutes away from where we’d turned around on the previous hike. So close and yet so far. But the waterfall looked smaller than I’d anticipated, so to be sure I hiked another ten minutes up to a bridge where the trail split. Looking at my watch, I recognized that there was no way I’d have the time to hike the entire loop around the Reeves Brook Trail Loop…. damn. The pond and rock scrambles would have to wait for another day. I headed back down with a solid hike completed and a hot shower waiting for me. And like the waterfall before, the pond now calls my name. Knowing there’s so much more to see, I’ll carve out half a day for going much deeper into the network of trails next time. Definitely something to look forward to.

      Stony Brook lives up to it’s name
      An elusive waterfall, wrapped in boulders and capped with a bridge.
      Crossing this bridge convinced me that I’d best turn back and try again another day for the pond.

    • Create Evidence

      “Belief in yourself is overrated. Generate evidence.” — Ryan Holiday

      What does your personal scorecard look like as we crossed off the first 100 days of 2022 earlier this week? What were your highlights? What hasn’t met your expectations when we began the year?

      Doesn’t that inform us of what needs to change immediately?