Alexandersmap

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    • Venture

      “Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything. Be brave enough to dare to be loved. Be something more than man or woman. Be Tandy.” — Sherwood Anderson

      So what, one might fairly ask, does Anderson mean by Tandy? It’s not an English word and you won’t find it in the dictionary unless there’s reference to Jessica. Well, he spares us all of that, as Tandy is defined in the very quote and the short story of the same name that it comes from. Venture anything. Be brave enough to dare to be loved. There we go. Some people venture into dark places. Some shine brightly in a lifetime of growth and transformation. Choose wisely.

      Anderson was an influential author who apparently really embraced the roaring 20’s and the personal freedom that brought to those who let it all hang out at that time. Henry Miller mentioned him as one of his favorites. William Faulkner spent a good deal of time with him. A hundred years later most people don’t know his work, but it lives on through the work of authors who became giants themselves. His epitaph reads, “Life, Not Death, Is the Great Adventure”, which is a statement we may get behind ourselves. He seemed to be quite a character, and his work is on my radar. This is how we expand into broader reading, isn’t it? This blog is full of such characters who come to life through their words and Wikipedia bio.

      What do we aspire to? Are we willing to pay the price to reach that place? Perhaps. Anderson himself turned his life upside down a few times over to become who he wanted to be. Novels and some measure of fame aside, his life doesn’t read as a hero’s journey, and ended abruptly when he swallowed a toothpick that created internal bleeding and likely sepsis. There are so many strange ways to end a life. But the question remains—how do we live?

    • Living Joyfully

      “To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.” — Henry Miller

      The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time
      Any fool can do it
      There ain’t nothing to it
      Nobody knows how we got to the top of the hill
      But since we’re on our way down
      We might as well enjoy the ride
      — James Taylor, Secret o’ Life

      There are people in my life who have seen me frustrated, angry and depressed. We can’t go through life without these feelings, particularly with things we can’t control, like the death of a loved one or frustration at the ineptitude of the U.S. Congress (by no means am I equating the two of those). But it’s those things that we can’t control that are the very things we can’t have drag us into darkness. Amor fati: love of fate. We don’t have to love the outcome (often we feel quite the opposite) but we ought to learn to accept that which we are living through.

      Every year I’m on this planet I feel myself move further away darkness and closer to joy. I know life won’t get easier, my peak fitness level is a distant memory, and the longer I’m on this planet the more things can go horribly wrong for all of us. We can know these things and still enjoy the ride. Who’s more likely to keep things together when it all goes to hell, the sad ghosts among us or the optimistic people who get things done?

      I know joyfulness is considered quaint and naive in some circles. I’ll take joy over melancholy any day. Self-pity is an indulgent act we have no time for in a lifetime measured in trips around the sun. We must move beyond ourselves and embrace the world. Indeed, embrace our place in this world, and make the very best of it. There is truly madness and misery in this world, but there’s also joy. Which do we want to dance with?

    • A New Day

      “Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

      Emerson wrote a version of this quote as advice to his daughter in a letter. Over time it evolved into this bite-sized quote that makes the rounds in our sound bite world. It’s a lesson for the writer, for our long form thoughts will eventually be boiled down to their very essence by the reader (if we’re bold enough to assume we’ll be referenced at all). Life is short: get to the point.

      The older I get, the less I worry about blunders and absurdities. We’re simply humans doing our best in a complex, hurried and harried world. Try as I may, I still post blogs that are incomplete, with typos or words that clearly don’t belong in the sentence. If I catch it the same day I’ll fix it, but plenty of older posts have mistakes that will linger for as long as this platform exists. So it goes.

      Today is a new day, full of possible adventure and meaningful leaps forward on our quest to become what’s next. It’s possible there might be a blunder or two along the way. Most every one of them can be an opportunity to laugh at the situation and get right back to living a bold life. The only real choice is to get out in the world and see what’s possible. We must be zealous when we’re writing our own history. Someday when we’re gone we’ll be summarized in a few concise words as well. What are we writing for those who will remember us? Carpe diem, friend.

    • The Different Angles of Experience

      “Our state of mind is never precisely the same. Every thought we have of a given fact is, strictly speaking, unique, and only bears a resemblance of kind with our other thoughts of the same fact. When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle, apprehend it in different relations from those in which it last appeared…
      Experience is remoulding us every moment, and our mental reaction on every given thing is really a resultant of our experience of the whole world up to that date.” — William James

      The experience of being on a full domestic flight down the coast is different every time I take it. This is obvious as the people, service and weather conditions make every flight different. What we sometimes forget is that we too have changed, and with these changes our reaction to the next flight changes in kind.

      Some flights, like some days, are better than others. Some planes and seats and expectations of service are better than others. We too are either more prepared to roll with the changes or worse. Developing a keen sense of awareness is helpful, but not nearly as essential as having a fully developed sense of self awareness.

      I used to travel for business far more frequently. Flights all over the continent honed my travel acumen. Each flight offered both opportunity and a cost, but in all cases a new entry in the chronicles of life experience. The hope is to learn and adapt to each, that we may be better for the next day.

      Travel is just living in a different way than we live when we aren’t traveling. Life will throw its curveballs at you in either case. Experience teaches us to anticipate some of those curveballs, but more often than not something new will upset the apple cart. Such is life. Change happens and will happen again. Appreciate the journey is the most important thing we can ever realize.

    • Keeping the Old at Bay

      And I knew all of my life
      That someday it would end
      Get up and go outside
      Don’t let the old man in
      Many moons I have lived
      My body’s weathered and worn
      Ask yourself how would you be
      If you didn’t know the day you were born
      Try to love on your wife
      And stay close to your friends
      Toast each sundown with wine
      Don’t let the old man in
      — Toby Keith, Don’t Let the Old Man In

      I haven’t been a skating exhibition in years. Why would I? I didn’t know any active figure skaters, or at least I didn’t know I knew any active figure skaters. It turns out I did know one, and so we went to watch her skate last night. What I saw was women and men of all ages skating in synchronized acts of skill and grace. No Olympic-style jumps at this event, just large groups of people gliding across the ice not hitting each other. I was likely the person in the arena with the least knowledge of the sport and found it enjoyably unique. It turns out you don’t have to travel to faraway places to place yourself in an environment foreign to you—just step into someone else’s world for a few hours.

      We’re all getting older, friend. Given that reality, we must keep the old at bay. Do things that challenge the mind and body and spirit. Stretch in new directions while we’re limber enough to reach without injuring ourselves. Take Thoreau’s advice and rise free from care before the dawn and seek adventure. We aren’t getting any younger than this. Toby Keith, whispers his lyrics from the grave: Someday it will end. Memento mori. So don’t let the old man in.

      You can laugh when your dreams
      Fall apart at the seams
      And life gets more exciting
      With each passing day
      And love is either in your heart
      Or on it’s way
      — Frank Sinatra (Carolyn Leigh/Johnny Richards), Young at Heart

      They say that people who retire early age quicker than those who work well into their senior years. I say it’s not about the work, it’s about having a reason to get out of bed in the morning. What stirs the imagination? We ought to be leaping out of bed to go do that. Stack new experiences one atop the other and see where it takes us. Get off the phone, step away from the computer screen and dance with the world.

      Sure, we all have obligations and responsibilities. We have deadlines and commitments. Just now I got a notification to check in for a business flight. The work seemingly never stops, but if we aren’t careful we won’t notice our best years have slipped away without doing those things we most want to do. Watching those people skate around on the ice, some of them old enough to be the grandparents of some skaters who preceded them, was a great reminder to get up and get out there. Carpe diem.

    • Being Helpful

      “We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for, I don’t know’” — John Foster Hall

      There are people in this world less inclined to help others. We tend to identify them rather quickly by their presence in our lives. Presence is a blessing or a curse, depending on the willingness of the helper to let the helped learn to fly on their own. We’ve all seen helicopter parents who stunt the development of a child in their eagerness to help make everything perfect in the lives of their children. We’ve all had micromanagers as bosses, who won’t let a single detail slip in their quest to control the situation. Presence isn’t always welcome, but in the right dosage it becomes the gift of a lifetime.

      Most of us want to be helpful in some capacity. What’s really helpful is awareness. When we are truly aware of the world around us, we form situational awareness. Situational awareness is seeing the big picture and the critical details all at once. First responders must develop acute situational awareness to truly understand what they’re charging into. Teachers must develop situational awareness to truly understand the struggles their students are having, that they may address the hurdles that impede a student from rising to meet the lesson.

      Helpfulness is a skill developed through living. When we learn how to cook or clean up and bandage a cut we’re developing helpful skills. When we learn to listen to understand we develop the skill of getting the the root of the problem, that it may be addressed head-on. We find purpose in our lives when we discover where we may be most helpful in this world.

      The best teams, and the best partnerships, are made up of people who bring different skills to the table. Great teams, partnerships and marriages last because each party is present and aware of the needs of others, and steps in to fill gaps each individual is best equipped to fill. Whole societies are built on the shoulders of people willing to set aside their differences and work to a common good. When we choose to be helpful the world is a far better place.

      Knowing that helpfulness is a skill, and knowing that the world is full of people in need of help, we may find a path to purpose. There’s no doubt the world needs more people willing to roll up their sleeves to lend a hand. Being helpful is the glue that holds this whole thing together. There’s joy in helping others. Why else would we be here anyway?

    • Processing Time

      “Wash the dishes relaxingly, as though each bowl is an object of contemplation. Consider each bowl as sacred. Follow your breath to prevent your mind from straying. Do not try to hurry to get the job over with. Consider washing the dishes the most important thing in life. Washing the dishes is meditation. If you cannot wash the dishes in mindfulness, neither can you meditate while sitting in silence.” — Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation

      The writing of the blog post started late this morning, with fresh snow to clear from the driveway a priority, and a relatively subdued morning to follow. The words will come, as they always do, and they’re often better for having changed up the routine. I know I was the better for having done a small bit of exercise in the cold air with a pink and orange kaleidoscope of dancing clouds greeting me through the bare trees.

      The driveway and I have an understanding. If the snow is heavy and wet and more than two inches, I use the snowblower. If light and fluffy and less than four inches, I alway shovel. All other conditions fall somewhere in between, but I default to the shovel when it’s a reasonable ask of myself. I do this because so little in our lives is analog or manual anymore. We’ve got engines and batteries and computers for everything nowadays. These things do the work for us, but rob us of time to process anything in our minds. How many drive to the gym to walk on a treadmill, watching the screen in front of them take them to another place? How does that stir the imagination? I have a friend who walks through the woods to work every day and consider him the luckiest commuter I know.

      We must design a lifestyle that allows us to contemplate things, and to dream and discover things about the world and ourselves. There must be time in our daily lives for us to reflect on the world and our place in it, or we will remain nothing but distracted souls like all the rest. That’s not us, friend. Carve out and protect that processing time. As a bonus, we’ll be greeted with a job well done and a wee bit more clarity.

    • Countdown Days

      I dabble in spreadsheets. It began (and continues) as a necessary skill in my career, but really I love the story that numbers tell you. Not too long ago I mapped out the next five years on a spreadsheet, just to see what I was working with. Using a specific date of relevance as a target date for zero, I created a countdown to that date. It turned out to be a nice round number: 1900. That became my five year plan number, and so a countdown began.

      A countdown to what? Why, the person I want to be at that number. What I want to be doing and where I want to be doing it. All sorts of things come into play then: fitness level, financial goals, career accomplishments, places to be visited, books to be read or written, and yes: daily blog posts (who’s up for 1900 more?!).

      You can fit a lot into 1900 lines on a spreadsheet if you try hard enough. I have many goals in my life, and I started plugging in events and trips and milestones onto that spreadsheet. It turns out there’s a lot to do in 1900 days, and one can’t very well waste them. But 1900 is a big number, best broken down into bite-sized bits. 90 days is something many of us can relate to. It’s a quarter of a year, three months, one trimester. 90 days is a number we can grasp and work with. Divide 1900 by 90 and you get 21 and change. It turns out 1900 wasn’t optimal after all, but it’s the number and loose change be damned. That loose change is full of days of ripe experience, or at least they ought to be, and who’s going to complain about a few extra days as a buffer against the curveballs of life?

      90 days offer countdowns within countdowns. We can break it down to 30 days and weeks and single days, and do what we can with them in their time. Life is a countdown, and we all know the score. The end game isn’t the zero we reach on our expiration but the blank spaces we fill up along the way. Putting things in black and white offers a clear imperative. Do something with today lest it slip away. Tempus fugit.

      Upcoming events become countdowns within a countdown too. Some trips I’m looking forward to are counting down as I write this, and I calculate the things that must happen between now and then, adding to-do items to a growing list and get to it. There’s growing excitement in a countdown, and I feel the stir of faraway places and future goals and tasks accomplished in each entry on the spreadsheet.

      The key to a blank spreadsheet is filling in what we’re measuring. We aren’t just counting down to nothing after all: we’re creating a lifetime of memories, filled with all the things that make up our days. A countdown merely brings focus to an otherwise ambiguous stack. Like any great salesperson, we must sell the vision. In this case, we’re selling ourselves on the vision, that we might take the necessary steps to get from here to there. When we finish, we can see all the things we did to get there, and celebrate the journey all the more.

      But why five years and change? Haven’t we got so much more left in the tank than that? We must set a fixed date in our future that we might strive for more in that timeframe. Sure, we all anticipate many more days. If we’re lucky enough we can add a few more countdowns after this one is done. But that’s a much longer spreadsheet, isn’t it? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

    • Maps

      “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” — Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity

      “A map is the greatest of all epic poems. Its lines and colors show the realization of great dreams.” – Gilbert Grosvenor

      I was having a conversation with a friend the other day. I’d asked him when was the last time someone had pulled up asking for directions? It just doesn’t happen now—there’s a phone app for that. That same app takes us to parties and work appointments and the Grand Canyon. Maps are relegated to the wall or the imagination. GPS rules the road now.

      Grosvenor, the founder of National Geographic, had it right when he compared a map to poetry. It stirs the imagination similarly. When you look at a great map of a place, how can you not be stirred to explore that place? Maps whisper to me like Sean O’Connell beckoned to Walter Mitty: Go!

      The name of this blog is Alexander’s map for a reason, it’s based on William Alexander’s pamphlet Encouragement to Colonies and my own wanderings around the northeast corner of North America. I saw a replica of the map Alexander commissioned in a conference room in Newfoundland and it sparked my imagination, which is exactly why he had it commissioned in the first place. I just came into the picture a bit later than he’d planned. That one map completely changed the person who viewed it that day.

      If maps are no longer needed for everyday use, they still have a place in our lives. Maps give us the big picture, while a GPS just tells you where to go. We must always reference the big picture when determining where we want to go in our lives, while remembering always that the map is not the territory. The world is more complicated than that.

      What sparks our imagination? Where do we want to go in our lives, and what tools are we using to get there? The answers to these questions are more important than we might believe.

    • Shared Experience

      Calling California or new to New York
      It don’t matter where you wanna roam
      It don’t matter high or low or the clothes you wanna wear
      We’re making good time with your hand fitting into mine
      Every mile you’re where my story goes
      It don’t matter fast or slow we’re gettin’ there
      — Graham Colton, Gettin’ There

      It’s still very much winter in New England (snow is flying even as I write this), but spring fever is beginning to creep up within me. The desire to get out in the world and meet it is always present, balanced by an underlying sense of place appreciating right where I am already. Life is full of choices, and with choice comes opportunity cost. We can’t do it all, but we can build a life that allows us to optimize some experiences we value more than others.

      I write this knowing I’m traveling a lot in the coming months. Travel doesn’t feel real until you’re doing it, and the paradox of travel is it doesn’t always feel real when you’re actually doing it either. That is unless you travel frequently and become conditioned to living out of a bag. Having lived both sides of this lifestyle, I know the opportunity cost of both.

      The best travel is done with people you want to share experiences with. In the end, our experiences together are the most rewarding. When we think about our favorite memories, most of them involve being around others. My solo hikes and visits to incredible places around the world were wonderful, but would have been that much better as a shared experience. If I ever seem to be in a hurry to get to any next phase of my life, it’s mostly so that I might share more experiences with the people who mean the most to me.

      We can’t rush through life. Experience means nothing if we aren’t immersed in it. Yes, there is a cost, but also an underlying opportunity in being “here, now” that we can’t miss out on. The trick is to be aware and present for all of it, even as we structure our lives to maximize that time together. We’re writing a story of a lifetime, after all, and every great story is better shared with others.