Alexandersmap

    Blog

    • Fading Tracks Across Time

      Yesterday morning I stood outside, barefoot, on the deck scanning the woods.  A dozen deer were moving silently through, silhouetted by the sun reflecting off the rapidly melting snow.  Unusually warm weather has created this opportunity to stand barefoot for me, and given the deer access to acorns and other edibles that should be locked into a frozen vault for a couple more months.  The deer don’t worry about climate change, only food and safety, and they graze uninterrupted as I walked back inside.

      Late morning we met friends for a walk on the Windham Rail Trail.  The trail changes every day, and today brought slush mixed with large bare spots.  We discussed using micro-spikes, but they would’ve been overkill on most of the trail, with just one section of about 100 meters testing our decision to leave them in the car.  No, this was a day for water-resistant footwear, good socks and focus on where you stepped next.    The week ahead brings more mild temperatures, and it’s likely this trail will be all pavement by next weekend.

      As usual on this trail, there were many animal tracks crossing this way and that.  Wildlife has their own trail system, but crossing paths with human roads and trails is inevitable.  Deer tracks mixed with turkey, squirrels and the other regulars.  But one set of tracks stood out from the rest; like a small child doing handstands across the snow, beaver tracks punctuated the softening snow.  Their front paws are very defined and human-life.  The back paws are more like a ducks.  The combination convinced me it wasn’t a racoon’s tracks we were looking at.  Beaver don’t hibernate, but they usually aren’t moving about that much this time of year.  Looking around there was no apparent evidence of tree damage from beaver, but we were right next to a pond.  Beaver store their winter food underwater near their nest.  Nest building isn’t a winter activity.  So I wondered what the beaver was traveling through here for.  Visiting friends?  Booty call? Or like me earlier just stepping outside to see what was new in the world?

      Yesterday was a big news day with the death of Kobe Bryant.  Social media and traditional media alike erupted in a flurry of reaction.  It’s a jolt when someone so young and vibrant is killed so abruptly.  Stoicism points out that it could happen to any of us at any moment, so live this moment fully.  So many forget that until a famous person or a loved one shocks the system with a reminder.  Living this moment starts with awareness of everything around you, feeling the changes in the air, seeing the deer moving through the woods, seeing the tracks in the snow, and having an extended conversation with people you care about while you navigate a slushy trail.  Life is now, today, whether it’s a Monday morning or a Friday night.  Bryant, and the other people on that helicopter were taken unexpectedly, tragically, but they were living a full life.  If you aren’t fully alive in this moment, fully aware of the magic around you, are you really living?

      As we left the trail yesterday, our own tracks marched along for 3 1/2 miles in one direction  and back again, covering seven full miles of conversation, observation, exercise and being alive.  Many of those tracks were turning to slushy mush even as we took them, and disappeared with the thousands of other tracks that have walked this path over the years.  Our time here is limited, the memories are made now, so what shall we do with this day before it too disappears?

       

    • Excellence Is The Next Five Minutes

      “Excellence is the next five minutes or nothing at all. It’s the quality of your next five-minute conversation. It’s the quality of, yes, your next email. Forget the long term. Make the next five minutes rock!” – Tom Peters

      “It is a simple two-step process: Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins.” – James Clear

      “The work is quite feasible, and is the only thing in our power. . . . Let go of the past. We must only begin. Believe me and you will see.” – Epictetus

      It’s easy to get bogged down in strategy and planning. It’s a form of busywork that makes you feel productive even when you aren’t really moving forward. I’ve struggled with this over the years, and it’s fair to say I still haven’t mastered time. Then again, who ever does? But focusing on the action needed right now, with an eye towards maintaining our overall course, makes a lot of sense.

      Excellence is the next five minutes or nothing at all. The point isn’t to master time, just to win the next five minutes. What we do now matters more than what we do tomorrow. Setting a course is important; we all need to know where the we’re going or what’s the point? But right behind that is meaningful action. The Tom Peters quote is a favorite call to action because it reminds us of the urgency of now. Peters’ quote pairs well with James Clear’s work, and both quotes would be very familiar to stoics like Epictetus. Ultimately we all build off the legacy of those who came before, and hope to leave something meaningful for those who come after.

      I’m posting late today, watching the sun dropping in the west while I write instead of feeling it rise behind me as the morning progresses. I wanted to sit on this post awhile, feeling there’s more to say. There’s always more you can say, and always more to improve upon, isn’t there? But you also need to ship when it’s time to ship, a necessary call to action that keeps us from sitting on our work. And so it is that I’ve checked a few boxes today knowing I could’ve done more but generally happy with what I’ve done with the time I’ve been given today. Let’s call that a small win (and, always, work to go a step further if I’m blessed with the gift of tomorrow).

    • Seeing the World for the First (?) Time

      “Our awareness has been stretched wider than ever in history, but often at the cost of taking away a lifetime of experiences.” – Seth Godin

      “We were the first humans who would never see something for the first time.” – Gillian Flynn

      Both of these appeared in my feed within minutes of each other this morning, in turn each pointing out the world we live in being smaller than ever before, and casting a neon glow on a topic I should explore before the muse carries it on to the next writer. Candidly I’m itching to return to writing more local history, but it’ll have to wait a bit longer. I’d be a fool to turn a cold shoulder on the muse, wouldn’t I?

      Godin laments the cost of awareness in our world of YouTube, Instagram, streaming media and, yes, travel blogging. We tend to know about things just by casually dipping our ladle into the stream of information flying past us in all directions. But sipping from the ladle isn’t immersive exploration of new places and ideas. It’s the Cliff Notes, not War and Peace. As Godin writes, there’s no excuse for being uninformed, but there’s also no good reason for being inexperienced.

      Flynn laments that media often offers a better picture of the world than going there and seeing it does. I’d say she’s partially right in that we cheat ourselves of the wonder of the new having seen it before we get there. But I disagree that the experience is better through media or that we don’t experience something substantively better being there versus seeing it on a screen. I can look out the window and see snow, or I can walk outside and understand snow.

      The crew of Fayaway are in Saba at the moment. It was nothing for me to pull up a video of people hiking up the mountain they hiked up, see the massive leaves they saw and the same view out to St. Kitts that they sent me in a text message. But a YouTube video is a very small sample of the experience they had of talking to locals, feeling the heat, getting out of breath climbing to the summit, and the exhilaration of reaching the summit and catching a first glimpse of the panoramic vista. That is their experience of a lifetime, while I’m simply aware of what it generally looked like for them after watching a YouTube video.

      The world is smaller than ever, and we’re blessed to experience the wonders of it without the cost of earning it in money, risk, sweat equity and sacrifice. But experience on a screen isn’t experiencing life, it just eliminates the surprise of knowing what’s around the corner when you can Google street view so much of this world. Surprise can be good, and surprise can be very bad. Maybe the answer is to use all this technology to mitigate the impact of the bad while minimizing the reduction of the other.

      Maybe VR will bring us closer than we’d ever imagine in the next few years. There’s enormous value in practicing on the flight simulator to get it right before you fly the Boeing 777 overseas, but you still need to get experience on the real thing after that before they load passengers on with you. Likewise, seeing what the Google street view was prior to pulling out of Edinburgh in a rental car made me more comfortable when I did it. It didn’t simulate the tactile oddness of the left hand shift instead of the right or the adrenaline rush of the first roundabout going the opposite way, but it eliminated sensory overload having seen a bit of it already.

      Humans are meant to move, and to interact and react to the world around them. Media is getting exponentially better at recreating this experience, but that doesn’t make it experience. The answer is to get out and be a part of the world, not just watch it through someone else’s lens.

    • Echoes in the Kitchen

      This morning I got up quietly while it was still dark, dressed and walked downstairs for the normal habit loop when I paused in the kitchen, hearing echoes. I glanced at the clock, used to it’s mocking, but it stayed on topic this early, offering up 6:20 AM. I looked around, placed my hands on the island countertop, and felt it… Sandwich assembly lines, the loud themed (naturally) playlists designed to inspire the sandwich maker and stir the zombies for the final dash to the bus or, later, to their car(s) for the ride to school. First call usually led to second call and third, and the tactics changed with the runway shrinking for a successful launch. Clapping as I walked up the stairs became the final straw, and they’d finally be up and sort of moving.

      That assembly line of sandwiches, the bin of snacks to dump in the bag with them and the drink all placed in a bag was a luxury for my kids, and they knew it. Some of their friends either made their own lunch or went hungry that day. You learn quickly to make the lunch, but I usually put enough in the bag to share food with those who needed it. There’s always someone a little hungry nearby, if you pay attention.

      Living on a cul de sac meant having a second chance at the bus if you missed it going up the street. That came in handy many times, especially with the second child. But it saved me on many occasions too with curbside trash and recycling. Miss it going up? Drag it across the street and catch them on the way down. Bless you, cul de sac. I’m reminded of the scramble when the bus rolls up the street. No longer my scramble, I glance casually at the streak of yellow flashing from one window to the next, sip my coffee and return to work.

      There’s a tweet being passed around about only having 18 summers with your kids before they’re off doing their own thing. The adrenaline rush of getting the kids to school before you go off to work is an even shorter window. Is it a relief to not have the timed sandwich assembly line game before the weasel pops? Absolutely. Has the habit loop that filled the void made me more productive in other things? No doubt. I don’t miss the mad dash, but the muscle memory is still there. I’m proud to have co-managed the responsibility well enough that the sandwich eaters are productive members of society. Though I still hear the echoes now and then.

    • Something More

      “…I don’t believe

      only to the edge
      of what my eyes actually see
      in the kindness of the morning,
      do you?

      And my life,
      which is my body surely,
      is also something more—
      isn’t yours?”
      – Mary Oliver, from The Pinewoods

      Reading this, I thought of the familiar analogy of a stone dropped in a still pond and the ripples it creates. We aren’t our bodies but a sum of the actions and interactions we have with it over our time in it. The more we learn, the more we offer to the world, the bigger our ripple.  I think of people in my own life who offer a pretty large ripple, and I hope I’m doing the same. Mary Oliver offered an example of a tsunami with her work, and this excerpt from The Pinewoods demonstrates her keen awareness of her own something more.

      I think of living a larger life as well.  Something more involves more, and more meaningful, contribution over time. Acquired skills and knowledge enable a greater contribution.  Something more also means showing up and doing work that matters.  It’s the unseen, uncredited things you do for your family, friends or complete strangers that make a small or sometimes significant difference.  And it’s sacrificing the immediate gratification for the long term vision in daily actions.  What is your contribution?  What are you offering the world in this moment?  And how can you improve today?  I ask myself these questions every day, and sometimes I have the answer readily at hand.  Other days it’s more evasive.  But I do believe being present is a large part of the answer.

      My life, which is my body surely, is also something more – isn’t yours?  I’m watching people I care about age in different ways.  The body aging is a natural, if not always welcome, condition of being alive longer.  Something more when your older seems to be either left in your legacy of previous contributions or in your ongoing contribution.  As long as the mind is sharp, there’s no reason for contribution to stop.  If Stephen Hawking can leave such an incredible wave across the pond for centuries after learning he had a slow moving form of Lou Gehrig’s disease, then why shouldn’t someone who has full speech and much better, if slower than it once was, mobility not contribute as well?  I’m not elderly yet, but I’ll be damned if I just sit in the corner watching Wheel of Fortune when I get there.  I’ll be moving at a modified version of full speed as long as the mind and body allow, and if the body doesn’t allow, then my writing might accelerate even more.

      Don’t believe only to the edge of what your eyes actually see.

    • What Can You Do In 100 Days?

      I was scanning the shelves at a bookstore a couple of weeks ago and saw a book called The 100 Day Goal Journal, subtitled “Accomplish What Matters To You”. And I thought, well, what would I try to accomplish in 100 days anyway? I’m currently powering along habit stacking and generally pleased with the incremental results. But I appreciate the concept of focusing intensely on a specific goal to achieve it over time. It falls in line with the Warren Buffett’s 5/25 Rule in only focusing on the top five and forgetting the rest until you’ve accomplished each of the five.

      I’ve listened to John Lee Dumas’ podcast… It’s not my thing; too cheerleader or drive time radio DJ for me. I’m sure there’s a powerful message in that presentation, I’m just not reaching across the chasm of peppy delivery to embrace it. So buying the book seemed outside my zone. I’m chipping away at plenty of goals already, and really, how do you prioritize one over the others? Which is exactly why I bought it: to focus intensely on the one. And what is the one anyway? Write the novel? Lose weight? Master the French language? All personal goals for sure, but I’m already chipping away at those. I needed something that was currently outside my habit loop but important to me. My career. In this case a work goal of bringing the region to quota by the end of Q2. If you subtracted the weekends 100 work days gets you to June, so it falls in line with an audacious goal. If I fall short the region will be better for the intense focus on it, but why hedge bets?

      I postponed the start of audacious while I beat back influenza. Shift the start line and you shift the finish line, but it’s still well before the end of June. And so it began yesterday as soon as I realized I could stand up for more than two hours without curling into the fetal position coughing and shivering. I’ve been sequestered in the home office while I climb back to normalcy, but a quick check tells me I’m ready. Excuses put aside like warm blankets early in the morning. You’re ready? Lovely. So get going already! Go!

    • Sick Day

      My collection of streaks was disrupted by the flu yesterday. I managed to get the writing in, and the Duolingo French lesson, and the reading too, but the 10,000 steps petered out at the halfway mark, and work goals mostly pushed into today. I’ve lost six pounds in an involuntary fast, and the expectations for today have been modified by how long it took to drag myself out of bed. Such is a bout with the flu. It changes your priorities pretty quickly.

      We take our health for granted. I felt great and accomplished X the last couple of months in a row, so why shouldn’t I expect the same today? I have people reading this who are chuckling that the guy who never gets sick is conceding to the flu. So be it, the virus has asserted itself, now it’s time for my body to push back. I’ll try to check each box today anyway, beginning with this one.

    • The River As Time

      “The river is everywhere at once, at the source and the mouth, at the waterfall, the ferry, the rapids, the sea, and the mountains. It is everywhere at once, and there only the present exists for it—not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future… Nothing was and nothing will be: everything is, and everything is present and has existence… were not all sufferings then time, and were not all self-torments and personal fears time? Weren’t all the difficult and hostile things in the world gone and overcome as soon as one had overcome time, and as soon as time could be thrust out of the mind?” – Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

      This analogy of the river as time/timeless isn’t new, it’s been around as long as humans have looked at rivers (the Stoics would have recognized it). And it’s an important character in the book Siddhartha too, as the central/title character learns about himself from the river at his lowest points in the story. Rivers run central in my own life: transformative as an 18 year old on the Merrimack, restorative as a 27 year old on the Connecticut, enlightening as a new father riding down the Colorado and an old friend ever since. I’ve travelled rivers source-to-sea, and I’m forever drawn to them, forever a disciple. For each river offers the same lesson in its own voice, if you’ll listen.

      Time flows as a river. What’s upstream no longer matters (so don’t spend today living on past glories or regrets), and what’s downstream isn’t guaranteed to us (so don’t drown today focused on reaching for what isn’t yours – tomorrow). We all reach the “ocean” someday, whether our journey is turbulent or tranquil.

      So what of the destination? The ocean becomes a symbol for “Om”, for entirety, the timeless sum of all that ever was and all that ever will be. So the timeless river flowing into entirety is a philosophy I can understand and embrace. Am I on a journey to Eastern Philosophy? I don’t believe so, but neither am I on a journey to Western Philosophy. I’m just on a journey, like you are… and they were, and others someday will be. I just happen to be writing about it as we float along.

    • Walking the Line

      Walking this morning on Cape Cod I saw turkey tracks in the snow. The funny thing about turkey tracks is they look like arrows, pointing this way and that, as if to tell you to Go here! No, go there! Turkey walk in circles looking for food, and their tracks point you, if you tried to follow the “arrows”, towards the same madness. It’s a wonder of confusion and I smiled at the sight of it.

      I’m glad I walked early, because overnight snow didn’t stand a chance on the edge of Buzzards Bay, where the ocean moderates temperatures as easily as it moderates moods. Looking at the temperatures in New Hampshire, there was a 21 degree difference between the hills up north and Cape Cod. 100 miles and 200 feet of elevation make a big difference between order and chaos when you’re talking snow.

      If turkey tracks are scattered madness, the surf line offers a measure of predictability, for even on its own erratic path it still runs roughly parallel. The surf line finds its own path, curving and cutting this way and that based on the push of the swell, the contour of the sand and the strength of the breeze. The funny thing about the surf line is that it looks similar whether you’re up close on a quiet pre-dawn beach on Buzzards Bay or flying 1000 feet above the New Hampshire coast in a Piper Cub. Up close very different. Add the right distance and the mind tricks you.

      We’re incredibly lucky now, with these great leaps across time and space. Anything is possible, really, in our timelines in this time. Yesterday I woke up in Ithaca, New York, watched a college basketball game in Rhode Island, and went to sleep on Cape Cod. This morning I walked on the beach and this afternoon I was shoveling snow back in the hills of New Hampshire. I could easily be in London or California or some other place for breakfast tomorrow morning if time, money and responsibilities allowed. Quick leaps between here and there are possible, which makes the world a magical place.

      I run into a lot of people who march along a pretty straight line in their lives, not straying far from home, going to the same job every day, taking the same vacation to the same place for a week or two every year. I’ve tried that line, and it’s not me. Granted, you don’t want to be a turkey moving about in circles with no rhyme or reason to where you’re going. But what’s the fun in traveling a straight path from here to there? Don’t be a turkey, play along the surf line! Follow your own path as it meanders along, but with an eye towards the destination. You’ll still get from here to there, but the path will be a lot more interesting.

    • Fences on Bridges

      When you live in the north, you don’t even see them most of the time. And why would you? When you’re driving you’ve got other things to worry about, like other cars and large mammals leaping in front of your vehicle. There’s plenty of evidence of how that ends for the mammal dotted along the roadways. So inanimate objects understandably don’t get a lot of attention, especially when the inanimate object is a chain link fence atop a bridge you’re driving under. But I think about those fences, and was reminded why last week.

      There’s only one purpose to fencing edging the sides of bridges; to keep what’s on the bridge from plummeting off the bridge to the ground or road below. This is critical for keeping, say, an avalanche of snow coming off a snowplow from suddenly blinding the vision of an unsuspecting driver when it lands on their windshield. I’ve experienced this, and don’t recommend seeking it out in your winter travels.

      The fencing also serves to keep people from accidentally or deliberately exiting the bridge using the side exits. And I was reminded of this purpose last week as I drove down I-90 last week, looked up and saw the flowers. And the flowers reminded me of the darkest day in a college friend’s life, when he looked over that bridge and saw his daughter lying on the side of the road, feet from where I was driving last week, almost two years since he held her lifeless body in that place. She’d climbed over that fence in the middle of the night, and forever shattered many lives as she ended hers. I’m shattered for them, still.

      And now I look at bridge fences differently, especially that one. I’m grateful for the people the fences keep in to live another day, and mournful for the families of those who didn’t find the necessary impediment to their darkest inclination of the moment. May the fences be taller than the depths of someone else’s darkest moment.