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    • A Lifetime Routine

      “The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.” — Abraham Lincoln

      We are forever building our foundation for the future in the action we take today. Surely it arrives, one day closer than yesterday. We arrived at today just the same way, with the skills and habits and temperament built on a lifetime of routine. Routine can have a negative connotation, but it can also be positive. Routine can make us fit and fluent and financially sound, or deliver us to a less desirable state. Routine is everything and nothing at all. A routine is the chosen path we take from here to there.

      Knowing this, we have today to make something better tomorrow. Habits change on a dime, for the better or the worse. What is routine will thus be who we are and who we will be. Sure, every now and then something unexpected changes the game, but for most of us, we are what we repeatedly do and always will be, just older.

      Yet the game can change. And we can always change our own game. We must remember this, and have the agency to take that first step, and the tenacity to keep going from here to tomorrow. It’s fair to ask what our routine is adding up to and change the equation to favor our future outcome. For we are indeed the sum of our days.

    • Yesterday’s Music

      I learn something about myself every time the Grammy’s are on. Mostly I learn that I’m out of touch with popular music. The kind of music I listen to doesn’t make the cut most of the time. You’d be hard pressed to find a lot of Americana or alternative on the live show nowadays. The fact that they sprinkled in a little rock and roll was something to delight in. Modern music is never really for the parents of the audience the music is targeting. How can a kid break away from their parents if they’re listening to the same music?

      The thing is, music is never truly original anymore. It’s all derived from something that came before. Sometimes it’s a riff or bass line borrowed from a classic, sometimes it’s a cover song that shakes up a new audience, like Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” as sung by old soul Luke Combs. Some of us were around for the original’s debut. Looking back at the music from that time (1988-1989) is a time warp for me, just as it will be for someone listening to Dua Lipa’s music of today in 35 years will be for them. Music is timeless, even if we aren’t. Cover songs and sampling are clear evidence of this.

      You got a fast car
      Is it fast enough so we can fly away?
      We gotta make a decision
      Leave tonight or live and die this way
      — Tracy Chapman, Fast Car

      When “Fast Car” came out I was still swept up in The Joshua Tree, which had come out a year before, and I didn’t embrace it at the time. The lyrics depressed me then—she sounded trapped and I didn’t want to be trapped. I was looking for anthems to inspire and lift me out of the trap. Yet the sentiment was the same for a restless spirit trying to figure out what the hell to do with himself when adulthood knocked on the door. Chapman and U2 were singing the same message to me, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.

      I have run
      I have crawled
      I have scaled these city walls
      These city walls
      Only to be with you
      But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for
      — U2, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

      Fast forward a few decades and I still watch the Grammy’s, if only to reflect on yesterday’s music and to see what all the fuss is about in today’s pop music. The themes are the same, only the faces change. We’re all just trying to figure it out as we move through our time. The trap has always been within, no matter the age. We can leave tonight or live and die this way. What exactly are we looking for anyway?

    • On Discovery

      “Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.” ― Henry Miller

      The fun of travel is to go to unfamiliar places and discover a world wholly different from our own. A place where we may find the similarities or delight in the rituals and traditions that make a place unique. The sin of travel is to go and not meet the place halfway. How many people go to a place and never attempt the local language? How many stick to food they know and never indulge in the local cuisine? Discovery is getting outside of ourselves and meeting the world on its terms, and finding out something new, not just about that place, but about ourselves.

      The thing is, most of us recognize this about travel, but what of art? When we dive into the unknown in our creative work, are we going deeper with it or retreating back to familiar themes? I’ve heard the feedback: this blog dances on the same ground more often than not, and I’m straying further beyond the themes of memento mori, carpe diem, tempus fugit and amor fati to see what I may find within. Now familiarity with these themes are so central to a well-lived, productive life that they inevitably find themselves in the mix again and again, but who wants to be a one-trick pony?

      The routine changes slightly, adapted to circumstance and commitments, but the daily reckoning continues. Open up a blank page and see what comes out to greet the world. We must be creative and chase our impulses, or we cannot truly live the life we were meant to live. The question to ask ourselves is, are we settling for the familiar and comfortable so much that we aren’t challenging our perspective?

      How will today be different than yesterday? Go do the unusual: live and tell about it. There is so much untapped within. We ought to shake that tree and see what falls out.

    • Truth and Stories

      “Truth is the only safe ground to stand on.” ― Elizabeth Cady Stanton

      Truth is not found in the media or popular opinion or in the best of intentions. It’s seen in the boxes checked (or unchecked) day-after-day, cold indicators of what we have done or not done with the promises we make to ourselves. Truth is the scale and the waistline and the recycling bin. We know the truth when we encounter it staring right back at us. Maybe that’s why so many prefer to focus on other people’s stories instead of their own truth.

      Stories are what we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it. Stories scare us into submission or make us feel better about unchecked boxes. Stories are watercolors of hopefulness or fear, the promise of better somedays, and reasons for why we didn’t act then. Stories are lovely things or scary things, and sometimes confused with truth, until truth knocks a story down to size. Some people live their whole lives in a story, never finding the truth. What a sad story indeed.

      Change may be built on the truth or a compelling story. We ought to know what is driving us, that we may arrive at a place better than the one we departed from. What are we tracking in our lives? Properly tracked, metrics tell the story of who we might become, while telling the truth about what we’ve done thus far. We are what we repeatedly do—that’s truth, but we may decide what to be and go be it—that’s a story. Both are necessary for us to reach another place in our lives.

      It’s fair to ask ourselves where we stand, and what we stand for. What do we find acceptable in our lives? What do we settle for? Just where are our stories taking us? When we encounter the truth in these questions, we may change the chapters to come in our lives. For tomorrow is a story to be written, the only truth is today. Which begs another question: what will we do with it?

    • To Live For

      “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” ― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

      You may have heard this before here, but time flies (tempus fugit). The more we put behind us, the more we might see just how essential purpose is to our identity. We produce what we might in our lifetimes, we nurture a character that grows through the seasons, systems, habits and trends we put it through, and always, we are that average of the people we associate with the most. To live for others is to carry ourselves in such a way that we make a ripple that rolls outward beyond us.

      A friend was recently trying to lure me to another company with tales of a great culture, fancy resume-friendly titles and high earnings potential. A different version of me would have jumped at the chance to make a big splash. Imagine the splash on LinkedIn when I posted that change? But this version of me sees the folly in that plunge. I’ll take the quiet ripple, thank you. To be present and engaged in this place and time with those who mean the most is everything.

      Purpose seems such a lofty word for the average person. We conjure up heroic images—characters who transcend the routine and lead to us to salvation. The idea of a purpose can be a trap disguised as a compass heading. The trap is in forever looking elsewhere for true north, when it’s usually whispering in our ear all along.

      What’s it all about, Alfie?
      Is it just for the moment we live?
      — Burt Bacharach, Alfie

      The right it transforms us. The wrong it has us running around in circles. Life is short and yes, time flies. We have no time to waste chasing the wrong cause when the essential is right there waiting for us.

      We spend far too much time trying to find a higher purpose and not nearly enough embracing the essential truth we encounter along the way. It’s all about being there for those who mean the most to us in our time. As infuriating as it might feel for those who haven’t yet found it, trust in the process: we know what to live for when we find it. When we give of ourselves to the right people that love is reflected back to us.

    • What Are Words For?

      My lips are moving and the sound’s coming out
      The words are audible but I have my doubts
      That you realize what has been said
      You look at me as if you’re in a daze
      It’s like the feeling at the end of the page
      When you realize you don’t know what you just read
      What are words for
      When no one listens anymore
      What are words for
      When no one listens
      What are words for
      When no one listens
      There’s no use talking at all
      — Missing Persons, Words

      I’m dating myself pulling out a New Wave song from the 80’s, but the lyrics are timeless, and really, more relevant than ever. In this sound bite world, the art of listening seems to be lost. It feels like so many are in such a hurry to speak that they never really listen. Worse, those who shout over others seem to be rewarded for their behavior by the crowd. We don’t live in a professional wrestling script, no matter how much politicians and talking heads want to embrace it. Life is far more nuanced than forever seeking the mic drop moment in everything that comes out of our mouths.

      Who is more powerful, the person who talks all the time or the one who listens to understand what is being said before speaking? The real power broker is the quiet one in the corner pulling the strings, unnoticed for the theatrics up on stage. Who do we aspire to become ourselves? The puppet or the puppeteer? The very best conversations aren’t happening in the populist shouting matches, they’re happening behind the scenes. The ticket to enter that circle is to learn to listen and speak intelligently, with insight and purpose.

      “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”
      — Epictetus

      The thing is, the people reading a blog focused mainly on philosophy, poetry, history and self-improvement have already figured this out. The trick is to influence the people on the edge of our circle that they may be less inclined to join the shouting and begin to listen and see the world for what it is. The world needs a voice in the crowd to rally around now and then, if only to corral the masses towards a common vision. But the real momentum in life is built one quiet conversation at a time. Here we find meaning and understanding and consensus. Here we find a path forward, together. We ought to ensure it doesn’t become a lost art.

    • More Movingly Visible

      “What are the needs and impulses that make a man spend years of preparation, and then months of labor, to produce a work of art? Presumably because he wishes to express himself, his ideas, and his moods; because he longs for distinction and reward; because he has a keener sense of beauty than most of us; because he aspires to combine the partial beauties and veiled meanings of actual but transitory forms in a vision of clearer significance or more lasting loveliness. Usually he sees more than we see, in fuller intensity or detail; he wishes to remove some of these perceived aspects in order to leave the essence and import of the scene more movingly visible to our eyes and souls.” — Will Durant, Fallen Leaves

      Empathy is a conditioned response. We are empathic when we live and struggle, find our way around obstacles or alternatively, find no way around it and find some other way to live, knowing deep down that that other way was closed to us. Those “not for you’s” burn inside as a driving force or a ready excuse for other behavior. If we’re lucky, we find a person who encountered a similar obstacle in their life and made something of themselves anyway. The world is full of examples of people who rose to greatness and also those who spiraled into darkness. Empathy is seeing ourselves somewhere in each.

      The artist learns to see through similar conditioning. Art is a daily struggle to express ourselves in a world that wants us to shut up and fall in line. It takes courage to put oneself out there under such circumstances, but the art takes on a life of its own. The very best artists turn the lens over to us to see what they saw, and maybe something more. Art, like music and prose, is digested and interpreted by the audience. We work through some things, run into our own share of “not for you’s” and produce some time stamp of the person we were at the time. Some work resonates, some falls flat, but the work continues for as long as we choose to dance with the universe.

      Writing, like my amateur photography, helps me to see. Each attempt expands my idea of what’s possible, and I lean into it a bit further with each session. I’ve read books I’d never have read otherwise in my pursuit of more, taken side trips that I might never have considered, and most essentially, turned my gaze outward. We all have an internal dialog happening within us, the artist trains themselves to open that dialog to the universe and expand the conversation. The art is thus a transcript of the moment, a scene made more movingly visible for others to see.

      The thing is, the universe reveals itself to us on its own terms. We learn to be patient, to do the work, to engage and observe. We may be witness and yet not have the wisdom to see the beauty in our moment. Some art is not for us to express. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t express what we can in our time. Like sketches in a student’s notebook we mark our journey to a higher place.

    • On Changing a Routine

      “The next few minutes or days or months–sure, you own them, and you can put them to whatever use you choose. But just because you’ve been using your time in a particular way for a long time doesn’t mean you need to keep doing that.” — Seth Godin, The Best Possible Use

      Normally I won’t read a blog before writing my own, because it often pulls me away from whatever I was going to write towards something else entirely. But today I read Seth Godin first specifically because I’m changing up the routine and what does Seth do but reinforce exactly what I’d been thinking anyway. As Tao Te Ching put it, “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

      Everything is habit and routine stacked upon intent. When we want to make a specific recipe, we pick up the ingredients necessary to make that dish and get to it right away. When we have no plan, we stare into an empty refrigerator wondering what in the world we’re going to eat for dinner tonight. Worse, we’ll purchase a bag full of great ingredients without a plan and throw them all away a week later when they’ve rotted in the produce drawer because we stuck to the same old things while that fresh thing slowly lost all its vibrancy. Even as I write this I can hear once-fresh ginger and red peppers screaming for attention. A bit of pre-planning goes a long way when we make changes in our lives.

      Seth’s post calls attention to a question we all face in our lives. Are we using our time in the best possible way? Is this what we should be doing today and again tomorrow? Are Tuesdays forever destined for taco’s or might we change things up now and then? We know the answer, we just need to stack the deck in our favor with a new plan, well-executed. We don’t own the future, but we surely can influence our little corner of it in small ways.

      For years now, writing first thing in the morning has been my tried and true way of ensuring that I write every day. The day soon floods in to greet me, and other habits are washed away. James Clear would suggest habit stacking as a way to build off the one good habit. A trusted way to stack a workout or reading on to my writing habit is to get up even earlier.

      “The reason I wake up at 4:30 in the morning is because no one else is awake yet, so that gives me the opportunity to do things that I need to get done, kinda selfishly for myself, and the big one in that category is working out.” — Jocko Willink

      Now we know that everything in life has a price. The price of getting up earlier is going to bed earlier, lest we suffer the consequence of burning the candle at both ends. Sleep deprivation is not an aspiration of mine and I’m not sure 0430 is my magic number. We’ll see whether this habit stack grows or tumbles. The only thing assured is change, and we must be willing to try new things now and then to learn what is possible for us beyond the norm.

      What drives us to become all that we might be? Habits and routines and the discipline to get up and meet our commitments to ourselves. When we build our days with intent, great things may happen in a lifetime. When we settle for more of the same day-after-day, we are destined to meet regret someday sooner than we expected. Completely changing a routine that’s working well for us makes little sense, but layering on new positive habits to that routine freshens the recipe now and then. What might we produce with a bit more creativity in our days?

    • To and Through

      “There’s goal setting to and goal setting through… do we want to simply land the people on the moon? I would like to return them safely to Earth. When JFK said, “By the end of this decade, we will have landed a man on the moon and returned him safely to Earth,”… the most important part of that mission was the returning the person safely to Earth. That’s to and through: to the moon; through the moon was bringing the person back. So your goal wasn’t to make it to the NBA. Okay, so you got drafted, made it there on day one, and they cut you on day one. Is that what you actually wanted? No, what you wanted was to make it to the NBA and have a 10-, 12-, 15-year-long career where you were a leader on the team and you were a top producer as well. And then some people might go, ‘“’And I want to be the legend; I want to be the greatest of all time.’ Maybe that’s it.” — Todd Herman: The Power of Identity [The Knowledge Project Ep. 182]

      Increasingly, my own goals fall into a five year plan. The five years are what I plan to do, year 5+ is my through. When I reach that point, I will arrive at a starting place, having finished the last five years of focused effort. As we know, the world throws all sorts of obstacles and surprises our way in the interim, but the point is make the journey and course-correct as necessary along the way.

      Five years feels like a long time, but it flies by like all the rest. Knowing what our through is going to be is to have a vision for ourselves at that future point in our lives. From there we break down the years and months into a steady progression plan. What needs to be accomplished in the next 90 days? What needs to be accomplished in the next 30 days? And of course, this breaks all the way down to “what needs to be accomplished today?”

      The thing about identifying the through is we aren’t simply reaching a goal and celebrating it, we’re identifying the true success metric of who we want to be on the other side of that goal. The goal isn’t to lose 20 pounds, but to be a fit person who can do the fun things in life now and who has laid the foundation for a healthier journey through that next phase of life and the one after that. The goal isn’t to write a single novel, it’s to establish an identity as a writer with a future body of work that spans the rest of our life. The through matters a great deal for us. What good is landing on the moon if you can’t finish the journey home safely again?

      Big visions are fine things indeed, but once established, we must roll up our sleeves and get to work on crafting that vision into the piece of fine art we wish ourselves to be. We get lost in our day-to-day and need a vision to show our true north, but we won’t arrive there unless we take this next step and the one after that. Each step is a push on the flywheel, building momentum and the exhilaration of progress. All that momentum shouldn’t suddenly stop when we reach that goal, it should be the wind in our sails for what’s next. That’s the thrilling thing about designing the journey—when done well we may just yet make it a heck of a ride.

    • A Moment with Eugene’s Birds

      Nay, I will; that’s flat:
      He said he would not ransom Mortimer;
      Forbad my tongue to speak of Mortimer; 555
      But I will find him when he lies asleep,
      And in his ear I’ll holla ‘Mortimer!’
      Nay,
      I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak
      Nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him 560
      To keep his anger still in motion.
      — William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1

      In 1890, a man named Eugene Schieffelin brought European starlings to the United States. According to The New York Times, his motive apparently was to have all the bird species mentioned by William Shakespeare in America. So I have Eugene and a single name drop by Shakespeare in Henry IV to thank for the mess that starlings leave in their wake when they come to the bird feeders in my backyard. We ought to be more careful introducing invasive species to places where they never existed, but when has common sense ever directed anything that humans do?

      You learn a lot about the local bird population when you put the right variety of food out for them. I lived in my home for almost twenty years before I saw bluebirds visit the feeders, largely inspired by putting food they’d actually eat in the feeders. From that point on I’ve had an abundance of bluebirds. The starlings were never invited to the party, but they’re masters at crashing it anyway. Perhaps that’s why they call them invasive.

      This winter I brought the feeders back close the house, that we may enjoy the view of wild birds just outside the window. I forget sometimes the mess that comes with feeders in the form of bird droppings and seed shells, but it’s the uninvited guests like starlings, squirrels and rodents that make me question my sanity. But the birds are worth it. Even the squirrels are entertaining, and I give them just enough of a head start before I let the dog out that they stand a chance of escaping (there are some messes I don’t want to deal with).

      Winter isn’t what it once was, but we do have snow again. The bird feeders become very popular when the ground is coated in snow. The buffet is open for business, and as the movie line goes, build it and they will come. And really, that’s the point. When I go into the kitchen for a cup of coffee or tea, I look out in the yard and see life. Life in turns inspires me to be more lively myself, and the work benefits from my time with the birds. I suppose that’s worth a bit of mess from a couple of uninvited guests.