Alexandersmap

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    • Blank Places

      To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part. – Aldo Leopold

      Blank places on maps are increasingly rare.  With technology we’ve managed to reveal extraordinary detail on the contours of the land, water sources and potential sites to camp for the night.  You can hike many trails virtually from the comfort of your home with street view images of what you might see.  Even some of the most remote places in the world have 360 degree images uploaded from some soul that visited before.  And yet there are still blank places on maps that tease and mock those who would plot the world.

      Blank places on calendars betray opportunity lost, or not fully leveraged.  Time is money, they say, and to leave blank places on calendars is to waste our most precious resource.  Make the most of your day and fill every moment with appointments, meetings, conference calls, time for tasks, workouts, dates, drive time and even time to think.  There’s merit in a full calendar, but there’s also merit in blank places on the calendar too.  Some of my best career moments came in blank places that developed into magic moments.

      Blank places in ourselves are harder to see, but we know they’re there.  Revealed in quiet moments, in challenging tasks completed, in new things tried and most especially in things avoided.  Risks not taken reveal as much as they forever hide what might have been had we just begun.

      “Oh, I kept the first for another day!
      Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
      I doubted if I should ever come back.”
      – Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

      The funny thing about maps is that they reveal where others have already been.  When you follow the map you’re just following someone else’s path.  Way leads on to way, and blank places might never be revealed.  That’s true for most everyone, isn’t it?  We tuck aside those unreasonable pursuits in favor of the tried and true path, never getting around to seeing what’s down that other path.  Don’t despair for what might have been, but be bold enough to see what might be.  See where stepping into the unknown leads you.  Should you find you need to double back the world will be just as you left it.  They might not even look up from their screens long enough to realize that you left.

    • Thoughts on the Garden

      I spent an hour deadheading the roses early in the morning.  Just me in the garden, giving haircuts and quietly staking overeager plants that have reached too far to the sky for their slender stalks to support.  In the garden I don’t think about the political and environmental mess we have on our hands.  Instead I meditate with flowers and vegetables that don’t care a whit about the makeup on Trump’s collar or the temperature in the Arctic Circle.  I care about climate change and world peace and equality, but you have to have moments where you quiet your mind and take care of yourself for a spell.  For me the garden is as good a place as any to cast that spell.

      I found myself looking up the garden club in the town I live in, wondering who I knew that was a member.  I didn’t recognize a face or a name.  All women with an average age about 25 years my senior.  I could really shake up a club like that if I were to join.  Introduce cocktails with the clematis Tuesday nights, or run for garden club President on  a platform of composting for all ages.  It reminded me that a lot of people assume that my wife is the gardener in the family.  My wife, respectfully, is definitely not a gardener.  She’d rather hit the pavement in running shoes than linger in the loam.  But it’s easy to see why people assume she might be when you look at the typical garden club membership.

      If 2020 had been a normal year I had planned to downsize the garden a bit.  Fewer containers filled with flowers would mean less maintenance, which would mean more freedom to travel, hike, sail or pursue crazy ideas like Scuba diving again.  It takes commitment to have a good garden, that’s all.  Time and money and sweat equity and you get rewarded with a lovely show.  And you want to enjoy the show, but all you see are the bare spots where something didn’t perform as planned, or the leaves the rabbits are nibbling on, or the cursed chipmunk holes.  And you roll up your sleeves and get back to it.

      I know many people who do the bare minimum for landscaping, hire someone to mow for them, treat the lawn with chemicals, and even plant flowers for them.  That all seems quite attractive somedays, but that’s not me.  I’ve had a garden for as long as I’ve owned a house, and couldn’t see hiring it out to someone else.  Why should they have all the fun?  I even purchased a push mower so I could get more steps in.  Those days of coming home from work to see the lawn freshly cut in expertly angled lines by the landscaper are behind me for now.  And walking the entire property has proven to be more therapeutic than I thought it would be.  I might not be hiking a mountain, but I’m getting a good amount of exercise and spend a few seconds enjoying the fruits of my labor before moving on to some other task.

      The time to enjoy the garden is when the world is asleep and it’s just you and a hot beverage, watching the world wake up around you.  The garden is a magnet for bees and hummingbirds, but also for rabbits and groundhogs and chipmunks and hornets and snakes.  I take the good with the bad, and try to minimize the damage that the unwelcome visitors do while encouraging more visits from the stars of the garden.  It all becomes an immersive experience, better than any virtual reality game.  Why live virtually when there’s so much to see right outside the window?

      And so this morning at an hour most people shake their heads at I quietly tied twine onto stakes and gently coaxed thorny roses upward.  A few thorns managed to catch the back of my hand in the process and drew blood, which I wiped away and finished the knots.  The roses looked happier for the support, but a bit resentful for the restraint.  We all want freedom, don’t we?  For me the garden is my stake in the ground, offering support and refuge, though at times I grow resentful at the commitment.  But then I remember that the commitment is exactly what I was looking for all along.

    • Resetting the Mind

      Monday morning wasn’t offering me any free rides today.  The well of creativity felt tapped out.  I looked through the 27 drafts I had going and wasn’t inspired to pursue any of them.  I tried sitting in my favorite reading chair and read Seneca’s On the Happy Life for inspiration, highlighting many passages yet finding no inspiration for today’s blog.  I put on headphones and listened to my favorite create something of substance song (Wild Theme) on repeat.  Nothing yet…  but getting closer.  Coffee cup drained.  Walked outside and sat on my favorite outdoor muse capturing device and waited.  And finally it came to me.

      “One of the most effective ways to reduce the friction associated with your habits is to practice environment design….  “resetting the room”.
      The purpose of resetting each room is not simply to clean up after the last action, but to prepare for the next action…
      How can we design a world where it’s easy to do what’s right?” Redesign your life so the actions that matter most are also the actions that are easiest to do.”
      – James Clear, Atomic Habits

      It occurred to me that I’ve set a few spaces to optimize productivity.  Sit/stand desk, noise-cancelling headphones, proper lighting, indoor and outdoor spaces at the ready.  All of this is setting the room, as Clear writes about.  And it’s setting the mind as well.  When I hear Wild Theme I get creative.  When I sit in a specific chair my mind focuses on writing.  And eventually it clears the fog and I get to it.  These are all methods of flipping the switch.  Want to work out first thing in the morning?  Put your workout clothes out so they’re front and center when you get up.  Writing is the same way – take the necessary steps of setting the “room” to prepare for the next action.

      Ultimately resetting the room means resetting the mind for the actions you wish to prioritize.  Having a dedicated workspace is important so personal time and work time don’t bleed over into one another.  I think that particular point has been hammered home by just about every business or lifestyle writer out there.  I won’t regurgitate the key points here.  For me it’s not about the space you place yourself in but the mindset you achieve.  Monday mornings are generally difficult because you’re transitioning from weekend activities to the work week.  I don’t recall having a similar challenge with Friday nights or the first morning of a vacation.  It’s all in the mind, this calendar mentality, but the uncertainty of which hat am I wearing at the moment? is valid.  So in times of transition, to reduce the friction, the question how do we make it easy to do what’s right? is paramount to actually getting things done effectively.

      And that brings me back to Seneca, which didn’t seem at all connected to this topic when I started writing this morning.  In speaking about virtue, Seneca’s pointed out that he hadn’t quite gotten to a virtuous life just yet.  To which his critics pounced, saying why should we listen to a man who hasn’t mastered the very thing he lectures us on?  But Seneca turns this around on his critics, pointing out that:

      “I make this speech, not on my own behalf, for I am steeped in vices of every kind, but on behalf of one who has made some progress in virtue.”

      We all tend to think that everyone else has it all figured out, don’t we?  And it can be unnerving when someone who is “showing us the way” admits that they’re a work in progress themselves.  But I’ve come to a point where I view anyone that tells me they have it all figured out is a con artist – be it a fundamentalist, politician, overly aggressive business person: you know the type.  Like you I’ve learned to be skeptical of people who say they have it all figured out.  Instead, I write to show myself the way.  On behalf of one who has made progress in the things that I myself strive for.  Finding a way to flip the switch on a misty Monday morning, and sharing in the process for arriving at the desired state.  The well feels a bit less empty even as I tap from it.  Funny how that happens.

    • The House and the Road

      “My house says to me, “Do not leave me, for here dwells your past.”
      And the road says to me, “Come and follow me, for I am your future.”
      And I say to both my house and the road, “I have no past, nor have I a future. If I stay here, there is a going in my staying; and if I go there is a staying in my going. Only love and death will change all things.”
      – Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam

      Lately I’ve been thinking of the house I’ve lived in as an anchor.  An anchor can have both a positive and negative connotation of course, but I thought of it in the positive way.   I’ve been putting a lot of time in at the old anchor lately, quarantined in a pandemic and working from home.  And the completed projects have stacked up into something tangible.  I could almost stay here forever.

      Lately I’ve also been thinking about the road.  Getting out there and seeing the world again, almost like things were normal.  The list of places to go grows quietly urgent, for time is fleeting and the world changes but so do you.  I imagine a scene akin to the running of the bulls in Pamplona as would-be travelers run the streets, hoping they aren’t run over by time as they make up for 2020.

      I look at the trees when I sit in the backyard, thinking they’re beginning to encroach a bit in their search for light.  This won’t do, not if we stay.  Limb up the trees now added to the list.  The list that grows and nags.  It only takes the right ratio of time and money to make a house work out for you.  You either put in more time or more money, but one way or the other the house demands a mix of both from you.

      I scrolled through a list of the most beautiful place to visit in each state that Conde Nast Traveller put out a couple of years ago.  I’ve been to ten of the places listed.  Ten out of fifty.  For all my travel I’ve only been to 33 of 50 states, if you exclude layovers in random airports.  Using the same criteria, my results are much worse on global travel, where I’ve spent meaningful time in only 12 of 195 countries.  The road mocks me even as it calls.

      There is a season for everything, and the last twenty-two years have been the season of parenting and being present as a father, layered with epic travel blessings.  I travel more than many do in their lifetimes, and I’ve managed to do it while being present for my children in their own lives as they’ve grown into adults.  I see the people traveling the world with their children and I’m awed by the life these families are living, but I wanted my own kids to grow up in a neighborhood, playing sports and riding bicycles up and down the street and building lifetime memories.  I suppose I could have added another dozen countries to the list, maybe even 50 more.  But here in this house dwells my past, and it’s not such a bad past at that.

      “Come and follow me, for I am your future”

      And now?  Now I plot and scheme and decide what to prioritize. I have at least 47 reasons to stay in New Hampshire for the foreseeable future as I quietly chip away at the 4000 footers.  There’s a net benefit in hiking in better fitness as well.  Resuming global travel will have to wait a bit longer.  Same with a few of those places I haven’t seen in the United States.  And I don’t mind waiting, for the house is not just the past, but the future as well.  At least for a little while.  It’s good to have a solid anchor at the ready.  Today, Father’s Day in America, I realize I’ve been an anchor myself.  Paid in full through time and effort and love.  With one eye on the house and the other on the road, but always present when it counts.

    • Beginning With Waumbek

      “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.” – John Muir

      The workout today was pretty straightforward: hike a total of 7 miles round trip up one of New Hampshire’s forty-eight 4000 footers. I’ve hiked at least a dozen of them before , some multiple times, but I didn’t track it officially. So I’m simply starting over again. I’m not imposing a deadline on myself and I’m not in a race. I don’t go to the mountains to set distance records. I go to the mountains because I love the mountains. And I love who I become when I spend more time in the mountains. And so today was, officially, one. And some good tidings.

      I chose Mount Waumbek in Jefferson, considered a good beginner 4000 footer. I’m not a beginner, but I’m beginning again. Waumbek was as good a place to start as any. At 4006 feet, its one of the shorter 48, but it counts just the same as Mount Washington on the list. And so I announced to the family that I was going and got one taker; my daughter committed to getting up at 4:30 and joining me. You know someone is serious when they commit to 4:30 AM, and sure enough she was ready to go by 5 AM.

      Mount Waumbek is an interesting name. The White Mountains themselves were once called Waumbekket Methna, which either means “mountains with snowy foreheads” or “white rocks” in the dialect of the Abenaki. Or maybe some settler came up with that story after enough time passed. What I’m fairly certain of is that Mount Waumbek was once slated to be yet another ski area, but thankfully it fell through and was preserved. I imagine it would’ve still counted as a 4000 footer, as Cannon Mountain does, but it wouldn’t feel much like hiking then. I’ll take the New Hampshire rock and root tour, thank you.

      I like to start hikes early, especially in hot weather. It’s generally less crowded, making simple things like parking a car less of a process. And early makes a big difference on hot, muggy days. Get it done before the crowds, before the heat, and before the inevitable thunderstorms that roll through the mountains on such days. We began our first steps at 7:45, a bit later than desired, and with a bit more company, but thankfully no raindrops. Instead we ran into swarms of ravenous gnats, flies and a few odd mosquitos. None of them cared much for social distancing. None of them got the memo that we wore generous applications of bug juice, or that according to the small printed label, they’re supposed to hate this stuff. No, they actually seemed to view it the way I view olive oil.

      The only solution was to keep moving. Summit Starr King Mountain (now THAT is a name for a mountain), glance at the view, snap a picture, move. Summit Waumbek, sip some water and nibble on a snack (carefully brushing off the carnivores who made a reservation to dine on you), re-apply bug juice and get moving again. There was no getting around it, I chose the height of bug season to begin again. But a day of hiking, even with the swarm, is better than most workouts I can think of. 19,000 steps today, and I’ll surely feel it tomorrow.

      And so it was, we checked off the first of the 4000 footers, I’ll carefully note it on the tracking sheet, and I’ll move on to the next on the list. Maybe it’ll be a we? After all, I’m not the only one who checked a box today.

    • Is It Yourself You Seek?

      It is yourself you seek
      In a long rage,
      Scanning through light and darkness
      Mirrors, the page,

      Where should reflected be
      Those eyes and that thick hair,
      That passionate look, that laughter.
      You should appear

      Within the book, or doubled,
      Freed, in the silvered glass;
      Into all other bodies
      Yourself should pass.

      The glass does not dissolve;
      Like walls the mirrors stand;
      The printed page gives back
      Words by another hand.

      And your infatuate eye
      Meets not itself below;
      Strangers lie in your arms
      As I lie now.
      – Louise Bogan, Man Alone

      I seek myself in early morning quiet, listening for the whisper.
      I seek myself on long walks in rough terrain, one step at a time with an eye on the footing and the other at the way forward.
      I seek myself in the long drives to faraway places, with nothing playing but the soundtrack of the tires on pavement.
      I seek myself in pictures, vainly attempting to capture the light and never quite reaching perfection but smiling at the moment anyway.
      I seek myself in the dusty soil, that traps under fingernails and turns into beauty with water and time we hope we have.
      I seek myself in deep plunges into water, thoughts rising with the bubbles as we break the surface, clearer than before.
      I seek myself in lyrics captured from songs in the air, hearing words for the first time and desperately grabbing at Shazam to find the source before it disappears forever.
      I seek myself in habits made and promises to myself broken, with hopes of trying again tomorrow.
      I seek myself in reaching out in service to others, to rejoice in the moment of connection ever fleeting.
      I seek myself in old battlefields and graveyards and monuments to ghosts who only wish to be remembered once more.
      I seek myself in freshly chopped vegetables, sautéing in snaps and pops that betray my anticipation.
      I seek myself in the words that dance on the page, my own or those of strangers in my arms.
      I seek myself in skimming across water, skipping like a stone on the pull of an oar or the puff of the wind and wanting only to fly a little bit longer.
      Tell me, where do you seek yourself?

    • Grilling Pizza

      One silver lining of quarantining is that my cooking game is getting more diverse and adventurous.  More Indian food, more vegetarian options, and now, … grilling pizza.  I know: grilling a pizza isn’t exactly adventurous, people have been doing it forever!  But in this house, homemade pizza was always slipped gently into the oven.  When you spent time and effort making something as lovely as a pizza, why risk it on the variability of a charcoal grill?

      Flavor of course.  Flavor is the reason you grill anything on a charcoal grill.  Not a propane grill – that’s just an outdoor extension of the stove.  Charcoal grilling on a ceramic grill that heats up beyond oven temperatures when closed and the coals are bright orange and alive.  That’s ancient cooking right there –  none of this propane-fueled regulated blandness, thank you.  And that’s what I brought my homemade pizzas out to.  That’s right: pizzas.  Plural.  If you’re going to use charcoal, make the most of the resource.

      The first attempt was a traditional cheese pizza with dough spread thinly across a large, perforated pan that I’ve had since college.  This baby has seen everything in it’s time…  everything but a charcoal grill anyway.  Simple and classic cheese pizza recipe, thin crust, thin layer of sauce, generous layer of cheese, done.  My concern with this first pizza was the grill temperature.  I waited until it dropped below 500 degrees Fahrenheit before putting the pizza on the grill, and watched it carefully to make sure it didn’t just erupt into flames.  Using a grill spatula, I’d gently lift up an edge, inspect and spin it and try again.  Can’t be too careful with that first pizza.  And it turned out to be an excellent first attempt.  Congrats!  We won’t be ordering pizza to replace a burnt offering!

      The second pizza was slightly more daring: A thicker crust on a stone instead of a perforated pan.  This one had thinly sliced green peppers and chicken sausage spread on top.  And generally the results were pretty good.  Thicker crust on a stone meant risking an uneven, doughy crust in some places.  That proved to be the case in one particularly thick spot.  If it were a restaurant I might have sent it back, but in my backyard it was close enough.  Two large pizzas and leftovers for lunch.  And no sacrificial lambs.  Not a bad first effort!

      2020, for all the suffering and frustration, has offered opportunities to see the world in a different way.  Maybe grilling a pizza isn’t exactly tackling social justice, but it’s a step away from the norm.  And now I’m thinking about what else I can grill.  So grilling pizza became one very small measure of audacity that worked out.  I might not ever have tried it in a normal year when getting dinner done after a long day away from home was a task.  But 2020 replaced what is fast and easy? with what is going to be really interesting to try?  And that’s not such a bad thing at all. A moment of fun experimentation with relatively low stakes.  We can all use more fun this year.  

    • Capturing the Light

      There is a scene in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty where Walter Mitty looks at a picture of Sean O’Connell.  Walter is the daydreaming, play life straight ahead guy, Sean is the bold, adventurous photographer who masterfully dances on the edge between chaos and order.  Walter looks at the picture of Sean looking back at him and sees Sean waving to him “Come on, already!” as Wake Up by Arcade Fire begins to play.  I find it impossible to not be stirred up by this scene, no matter how many times I’ve watched it.  Because that’s all of us who play life straight ahead, looking at the bold and adventurous and wanting someone in that world to look us in the eye and tell us, “Come on, already!”  Mostly we forget that we can say it to ourselves.

      I took my typical plunge into deep water this morning and watched the sun beams streaming through the forest, lighting up each leaf it landed on in thousands of fluttering florescent green glowing congregation of the faithful.  Those who remained in shadow seemed to gaze longingly at the brilliant dancers, and I understood the look as my own.  I confess I’m awestruck at moments like that, and floated in the water watching the light probe deeper into the forest and continue the dance beyond my line of sight.  Light and shadow and me treading on the surface, floating in wonder.   It occurred to me at that moment that writing is capturing the light, and having the audacity to try.  There was better poetry in that moment, and I don’t quite have the words to reveal it to the world.  But I recognized it nonetheless and work to serve the muse who patiently awaits my contribution.

      I’ve been pondering the word audacity since I woke up this morning, but I don’t feel like it’s a word I can own.  After all, I’m not living an audacious life.  I fancy myself bold and audacious, but really I’m rather conservative in every day living.  I do audacious things on occasion – little exclamation points on a moment as I’ve written about previously.  But upon further review I’m more Walter than Sean.  I suppose most of us are, and that’s the appeal of a Walter Mitty moment.

      Whenever the fog of life clogs my line of sight I put on those noise cancelling headphones and watch Arcade Fire perform Wake Up at the Reading Festival and I’m jolted to clarity.  I suppose that’s what plunging into water does for me too.  An immediate state change.  An opportunity to reset.  But ultimately I come back to the reality that I’m still in the Walter skin.  And I choose to stay in it.  Secret conspiracies for audacious living remain, but Sean hasn’t waved vigorously enough to shake the inertia just yet.  Come on, already!  Absolutely, but could you wait for tomorrow?  I’ve got to finish this project I’m working on.  That wouldn’t be a very good movie at all, would it?

      Audacity has a negative connotation, but I’m rather fond of the positive connotation.  It derives from Latin, audacia  and means daring, boldness, and courage.  Three traits we’d all like to think we have in abundance.  Like most people, I’m chafing at the bit, restless at the quarantine and the impact on travel and getting out there.  It’s hard to live audaciously when you aren’t allowed to cross borders.  But then again, maybe it’s just waiting for you to wake up and get to it already.  Audaciousness is capturing the light within ourselves and showing it to the world.  Highlighting our spirit within for the world to see.  It seems you don’t have to cross borders to be audacious.  You just have to get to it.  Cue the music.

       

    • On Setbacks and Moving Ahead

      “Show me that the good life doesn’t consist in its length, but in its use, and that it is possible—no, entirely too common—for a person who has had a long life to have lived too little.” Seneca, Moral Letters

      Preparing to sauté a holy trinity of onions, celery and peppers last night, I found the counter loaded with dishes and grocery items that hadn’t been put away.  So I set about putting them away and in the process of pushing a bag of coffee into a cabinet a glass mason jar was pushed out and plummeted to the floor, where it transformed into hundreds of shards of glass.    Which transformed my evening of cooking into an evening of cleaning every bit of glass off the floor before I could get back to the original mission.  Life is full of setbacks.

      I have big plans – I always have.  Sometimes they play out but many times they peter out. So it goes.  Lately I’ve been planning big again, as documented yesterday in this blog, and planning big requires a healthy dose of optimism about tomorrow and the tomorrows after that.  But like the mason jar I know they’ll be setbacks along the way.  Ultimately plans are just a direction we decide to go in, and action is what we do to move in that direction today.  For there’s only today, as Seneca reminds us from his dusty grave.

      “I don’t complain about the lack of time . . . what little I have will go far enough. Today—this day—will achieve what no tomorrow will fail to speak about. I will lay siege to the gods and shake up the world.” – Seneca, Medea

      Bold statement to be sure, but there’s boldness in action, and boldness in the immediate. So why not be bold today?  Do something outside the ordinary.  And this is where we might book a trip to someplace new or dart off the some other adventure.  Since “darting off” options are limited for most of us, what can we do that strikes of bold?  What shall today’s one line entry in the journal be?  Rolled the trash bin back up from the street?  Or maybe something more?  We’ve got roughly 16 hours of useful time in a day.  What little time we have will go far enough if we would only get moving now.

      “The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.” – Seneca

      Every morning I wake up and get moving right away.  There’s always urgency in my mornings.  Urgency to write and read and think a bit about things before the rest of the world wakes up and imposes itself on my grand plans.  I value the mornings most of all for this reason.  We don’t know what mason jars are lurking about to mess up the plans we have, but worrying about lurking setbacks isn’t going to build momentum in this moment.  Focus on the actions you can take now to build resilience and momentum to handle the setbacks then.  When the setback happens, give it the attention it needs for the time it requires, and then find some small step forward.  And another step after that.  That’s life, one moment and one setback at a time.  Whether a shattered mason jar or a pandemic, it’s only a setback (and not a finale) if we work through it and put it behind us.  Stop signs are really only pauses before we get moving again.  Having looked both ways, I believe it’s time to get moving again.  Seneca is right there with us, prodding us along through our inertia: “Now”.

    • The Second Best Time is Now

      “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese Proverb

      Today is June 15th, which is the halfway point of the month that concludes the halfway point of the year.  The first half of 2020 felt like a decade with the massive shifts happening in the world.  I won’t subject you to a retelling of the tale now as you’re quite familiar with the journey we’ve been on.  If there’s a silver lining during this first half of the year, it’s the re-focusing on what’s important.  It’s the time with family and friends and looking at the simple things we’ve taken for granted, like going out for dinner or to a concert.

      I’m grateful for the opportunity to spend more time with immediate family, regret the opportunities lost, and look forward to getting back to it when there’s less risk to others.  Risk to others is always the calculus, not risk to myself.  I wear a mask in crowded places and wonder at the growing crowd of people who aren’t wearing one.  We aren’t there just yet folks, as much as we want to be.

      I’ve completed a long list of home improvement tasks and find that the list doesn’t get shorter.  Still, I walk around and I’m less inclined to say to myself I need to get to that someday when I look at a wall or ceiling or some other nook and cranny of this place I spend so much time in now.  Better weather has opened up an entirely new canvas for improvement.  It’s all a work in progress, and will continue until the pandemic releases its hold on us.

      I’ve taken to rowing 5000 meters at lunchtime every workday.  Weekends are reserved for other activity with the nicer weather.  Rowing replaced walking at lunchtime because it’s more efficient and there’s a timeless feeling I get when I’m on the rowing ergometer.  It could be 2020, or it could be 1990, the only thing that changes are the splits and the soreness afterwards.

      I’m ever so slowly learning French, and I’ve added Portuguese as well.  I have an eye on the world and will return to travel again someday, and speaking one language is simply not enough.  There are place to visit far from the tourist traps, where people expect some measure of knowledge of their language.  Je dois les rencontrer à mi-chemin – I’ve got to meet them halfway.  France is to be expected, but I also feel the pull of Portugal and Brazil.  And so I’ve added a third language, even before I’ve mastered the second.  Aprendi a seguir uma paixão e ver aonde ela leva – I’ve learned to follow a passion and see where it leads you.

      I’ve checked a few important boxes in my job that I’m pleased with and see all that might have been if only the world were normal. But it’s not normal and time flies relentlessly by anyway.  Some of the biggest project I was tracking have stalled in the quicksand of social isolation.  Even as things ramp up they may be a long way from where they should have been.  I’m grateful to work for a company that views the world through a long lens and measures its value by the people who work for it.

      And so we approach the second half of 2020, and more epochal moments are surely in store for us all.  There’s an election coming up in America.  Professional sports are tentatively starting up again.  People are dipping a toe back in the waters to see just how cold it really is.  And I find myself thinking about the trees I haven’t planted:

      When I was 18 I was a certified SCUBA diver.  And then I went to college and discovered rowing and girls and I gently tucked away the mask and fins and never went back to it again.  I’m told that the sport of diving is suffering a decline as people find other ways to spend time and disposable income.  I recognize the pull away from the water that’s held me away since I was a teenager, but also hear the siren call of the deep dive.  I’m going back to the deep water again, and depending on restrictions around COVID-19 I’ll do it in the second half of 2020.

      There’s another siren that’s been calling me for years, and it’s hiking.  I’ve long talked of hiking the Appalachian Trail and hold that out as my 60th birthday present to myself, when I get there.  But in the meantime I’m not hiking any other trail most days.  This won’t do at all.  I’m going back to the mountains in 2020, but not chasing others around.  I’m going to return to the 48 4000 footers in New Hampshire at my own pace, and check this box that’s been nagging me since I was a kid.

      So there you go: My own small version of Navy SEAL training.  Top of the mountains to the bottom of the sea.  Self-paced and documented.  Multilingual, multidimensional and adventurous in spirit.  Beats painting another room.  As my son would say, let’s go!