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    • Stepping Out of the Fog

      It’s a cool, damp and foggy morning in New Hampshire. The biting cold of the last few days now but a memory. Surely, the seasons are upside down nowadays, for all the reasons we already know. The lichen seem to appreciate the continuation of our soggy 2023 into December. It’s been a nonstop party for them. And what are we to do but dress appropriately and get out into it ourselves?

      Appropriate dress this time of year includes bright orange clothing. December 3rd is the last day of hunting season for those using firearms, and December 15th for those with crossbows. I don’t know these dates because I’m a hunter myself, but because I like to exit the forests as intact as I was when I entered them. One must be aware of the risk of wandering in the woods and dress appropriately to mitigate that risk. Or simply wait until hunting season is over—but what’s the fun in that? That’s like waiting for the rain to stop, which is exactly why my summit hiking has stalled indefinitely.

      The thing is, I was going to write about determinism and indeterminism today, but the woods seemed a better place to carry my mind. The world is either set in motion already or we have a chance to change the game by the choices we make. Most people believe the latter but how many actually take the leap? We aren’t just souls lost in the fog, rooted where we landed once upon a time. We have a real chance at changing the game. Is there luck in that landing? Of course there is, and perhaps that’s determinism set in motion, but it ignores the motion itself. We aren’t trees rooted in a foggy forest, we’re each walking through the wilderness in search of something more. Eventually the fog lifts and we might just find our way out.

    • Where the River Meets the Sea

      And inside every turning leaf
      Is the pattern of an older tree
      The shape of our future
      The shape of all our history
      And out of the confusion
      Where the river meets the sea
      Came things I’d never seen
      Things I’d never seen
      I was brought to my senses
      I was blind, but now that I can see
      Every signpost in nature
      Said you belong to me
      — Sting, I Was Brought To My Senses

      Nature is a highly effective lens from which to see the world. When we look at the complexity of even the simplest of things—say a leaf or a snowflake, we begin to see the truth of our place in it. We may feel small, but we ought to feel equally complex and an essential part of the universe. We are billion year old carbon, after all, brought together in this moment to dance with the present.

      There’s a part of me that feels a natural end to this blog on the horizon. There’s a part of me that sees it continuing for as long as I do, for the clarity it brings to my days. It brings me to my senses, such as they are, and raises the game by forcing me outside of my own head again and again. Why stop now? And so every day, eventually, there’s one more blog post to ponder or dismiss awaiting the universe.

      All these ideas flow into the larger ocean of ideas that is the connected world. That there’s some turbulence there is natural. That ideas settle and are often diluted in a vast ocean of thought and opinion is inevitable. That we are a part of the great and infinite conversation is essential and assured so long as we click publish and let our thoughts swim.

      Thank you. See you again tomorrow?

    • Earning the Warmth

      Through the window
      we could see how far away it was to the gates of April.
      Let the fire now
      put on its red hat
      and sing to us.
      — Mary Oliver, November

      November comes to an end, and just like that, December is at our doorstep. The ambient light of incandescent and LED bulbs make total darkness an impossibility in most cities and suburbia now. The decorations of Christmas have exploded onto the scene, to grow exponentially over the coming weeks. When we get beyond the constant advertisements for last-chance(!) savings on gifts from every retailer on the planet, we’re left with short, crisp days and long, cold nights.

      Some of us thrive in the cold. We have layers upon layers at the ready, lightly dusted from months of being ignored but feeling just right when we slip them on once again. The stakes are driven into the edges of pavement, awaiting their role as traffic cops or road kill for errant plow drivers. Snow? It’s nothing but a possibility for most of us. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll see snow soon enough. The thrill of the crunch! The hiding of all the brown landscape in a crystal blanket. Snow would make it feel like December has arrived. If not, well, we must seek it out in higher elevations as the hikers and skiers do.

      If November is a time for thankfulness and gatherings (and beards and hastily-written first drafts), December is a time for giving and hustling to find the perfect gift for someone before we give up and give them a gift card to use in seven months when they stumble upon it in the drawer dedicated to such plastic tokens of love. We want to celebrate our love for someone with the perfect gift, and somehow it ends up feeling like a concession to just give them the money. My feeling on such things is that the person who gave the card should be a part of the experience of using the card. Experiences are always best shared with those who wish it for you.

      I’m seeking more poetry in my long nights. More warming fires with conversation and a pet snuggled up close. More time reading the books that evaded me in sunshine. More cold walks around the block with a dog that’s come to expect something new on every stroll. We learn what we are unaware of from a dog on a night walk. I’d forgotten the thrill of the sky changing from step to step, the pull of the leash as the dog sees a rabbit, and the sounds of coyotes, fox and fisher cats crying in the night. I’d forgotten the welcoming warmth of that first step into the kitchen after a brisk walk telling me; “Welcome back”. Indeed.

      The days are still getting shorter for a few more weeks. We must embrace the long, cold nights for all that is hidden in them. For we are alive, and nothing makes you feel that like getting out into it, even for a little while. It’s easy to be warm in the tropics. Up north we must earn it. And in the work we find we love it all the more.

    • The Truth Is

      And you know that when the truth is told
      That you can get what you want or you can just get old
      You’re gonna kick off before you even get halfway through
      Why don’t you realize, Vienna waits for you?
      — Billy Joel, Vienna

      Today I deleted an old manuscript. The truth is, it was never going to get finish where it was, and it was holding me prisoner. Stephen King once said to kill our babies, and so one more dance with the muse has turned back into bits and bites to be used by someone else on some other project. Or perhaps it will be my phoenix, rising from the ashes after incineration. I don’t know… I’m just happy to see it go.

      One day perhaps the blog itself will end in just such a way. Here today, gone tomorrow, like a distant memory of that paper once written in school that felt essential in the moment and less so as the years go by. There are days when I wish it so, but push on anyway. For the other writing to have the elbow room it needs to grow, perhaps it’s the final solution. After all, you can get what you want or you can just get old.

    • Through Ourselves

      “Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”
      ― James Joyce, Ulysses

      29 November as I publish this, and the day after day march through our days seems a brisk and breathless march. What shall we be this day, different from the one before? What will define the moments between arising to meet it and pulling the covers up to dismiss it? Days are precious things indeed. This one ought to be unique in some way memorable, but likely a lot like the one before unless we step out of ourselves in some way.

      This business of living through ourselves offers a path. We are becoming who we will be next, this to that and so on, and through ourselves we traverse a lifetime. Through ourselves we might step boldly into the next or we opt out and sing the same song, like an old star on tour playing nothing but the hits. Through ourselves we may reinvent the day and shape it into something surprisingly different from our other days.

      Seen through another lens, this day, 29 November as I publish this, is so very different from the date a year before. The writer is entirely different from a year of days both challenging and invigorating. I suspect the reader might say the same. We live our days molded by them. Each individual stepping stone a memory, each book read, each summit climbed and each person encountered shapes us into something new. Through ourselves we’ve reached this point in our traverse. The view looks lovely and there’s still this path to navigate to the next peak. To step through ourselves into the next.

    • Choices

      A friend asked me which five songs I would choose if I could listen to no other song but those five for the rest of my life. An impossible task, really. Beyond your wedding song, if you truly loved it, what do you choose? Hard rock? Dance music? Introspective music? Singalong songs? Jazz? Classical? Death metal? Do you go with the first five you think of? The five most played on your phone? Or do you mine a little deeper, knowing that this is for keeps and there’s no time for casual affairs?

      When I put the initial list together in my mind and reviewed it, I noticed that my two favorite bands weren’t represented. Yet I could do the same five song exercise with either band and have a hard time deciding what to leave off. Another friend of mine once asked me to rank the best albums of a band we both love from best to worst. The worst is easy, but what do you choose as the best? It depends on your mood at the time. It’s the same with ranking songs, isn’t it?

      Imagine putting a list together like this, not as an ice-breaker, but as truly the only five songs you’ll ever hear again. Imagine the pressure, the last minute switches. The forgotten gem that you’ll regret excluding forever. Having to choose when the stakes are real sucks. The hard part is always what you must leave behind when you choose that other thing.

      The exercise should lead us to gratitude. We ought to be grateful that we don’t have to choose. We ought to be grateful that our days are filled with an abundance of choice on what we eat, what we read or watch, where we live, and yes, what we listen to. It’s truly an embarrassment of riches for most of us.

      It should also lead us to evaluate what our choices have been thus far in the game. We aren’t here for all that long, yet we remain frivolous with what we do with our time. I’m well aware that I’m choosing to write this blog at this moment instead of taking a long walk in the woods. Which is better for me in the moment? We must choose wisely, but then accept the choice that we’ve made if it’s working for us. Happiness is not found in constantly changing our mind about what we want.

      Life can never be about having everything. Just enough of some things. Things like beauty and love, engagement with the universe and the active pursuit of better. That’s the soundtrack to a great life. Something we can dance to.

    • Rooted in Happiness

      “People have often been happy here and the walls have absorbed some of that delight.” — Adam Nicholson, Sea Room

      It’s happened once again. The house transformed over a day from one holiday theme to the next. “Halloween” quickly flipped to “Thanksgiving”, “Thanksgiving” to “Christmas”. These are the days of rapid-fire theme decorating, supported by basement shelves full of every season of the year. In this house you don’t need a calendar to know what time of year it is, just look at the wreath du jour. You could build another house with the number of screws and nails holding up wreaths in the basement, just waiting for their season. I’m grateful there are only 12 months in a year, or we’d have to build a storage shed for the overflow.

      This home has known delight. The walls echo with memories built on joyful moments. The backyard is a place where dogs and now-grown children sprint to for the happy memories they’re drawn to just out the door. I’ve returned aching from the grind of business travel and soothed myself in the comfort of place as well. To be present in a place where so much positive energy reverberates off the hardscape is delightful—and I would argue, essential to our well-being. We must know places like this to stand up and face the world again tomorrow.

      My adult daughter informs me that we are never allowed to sell the home she grew up in, for the memories of place are so overwhelmingly part of her identity that to change it would crush her. I have known many such places in my lifetime, and have yet to be crushed by moving on. A sense of place is one thing, but permanence is entirely another. Nothing is permanent, even home. But we aren’t going anywhere just yet.

      That familiar feeling of a place you’ve spent some of your happiest days is comforting in a world that is so desperate to be unhappy. Why choose to be unhappy when you may be happy? Is it a choice at all or a steady diet of misery and fear doled out on the doom loop? Fear of missing out, pressure to keep up with the Jones, crisis news 24/7, and politicians telling us how horrible the world is without them leading us out of it all create a soundtrack of unhappy. Yet here we are; happy anyway.

      They say home is where the heart is. I say home is what you put your heart into. Happiness isn’t a place, but it is built into our lives with deliberate purpose. We invest in a home, but also in the people we surround ourselves with and the time we spend with them. Home is either a labor of love built for a lifetime or a nest people fly away from to free themselves emotionally. Roots must grow in fertile soil, and in their growth, they stabilize that ground. Seasons and houses and people are always changing, but they may be rooted in happiness when we invest our time well.

    • Changing Pictures

      People come and go from our lives all the time. This is felt most profoundly during the holidays, when family comes together, or sometimes doesn’t. We are each pieces in somebody’s complex life puzzle, and when we lose a piece the puzzle is never again complete. But we must carry on, holes and all. Unlike those cardboard affairs, life puzzles are meant to be full of holes.

      This year flies by like all the years before it, and we reconcile ourselves to the idea of being another year older, and the picture changes once again. We spend our lives filling holes to get a better idea of what our picture looks like before things get scrambled again. Like puzzle pieces in the box we’re shaken up and dumped out on some hard surface to adapt and start anew. At some point we figure out that the picture isn’t really the end game at all. The game of life is finding the pieces that fit right now and being happy with the incomplete picture that emerges. Perspective is knowing it will all change again anyway.

    • A Serious and Omnivorous Reader

      “I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike- intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits.” ― Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar

      I’m determined to read 5-6 more books before the calendar year ends. This necessitates lifestyle choices, of course, but that’s par for the course with a reader. We who read often absorb the judgement of both those who choose to watch, and those who choose to do. As if reading as an alternative to watching a movie or a game or going out on the town is such a poor choice. The only poor choice is lethargy and sloth. There’s nothing lethargic or slothful about an active brain engaged in reading.

      The thing is, there are only so many books we can read in a lifetime. There are only so many movies one can watch, only so many walks we can take or bars we can close out, only so many dogs you can bring into your life, only so many stamps we’ll ever have in our passport, and so on. Whatever the lifestyle choice we make for ourselves, we must recognize that it’s inherently limited, because we are.

      When the year ends, I’ll have read about 25 books. That includes some pretty heavy lifts, but a few page-turners as well. This is down from a year ago, when I cleared 30 books leaning more heavily into fast fiction reads. Reading is also heavily dependent on how we travel, how we engage with the rest of the world, and whether we choose to write a blog every day during prime reading hours. With a full house this summer, I read much less than I might have with an empty nest. The trade-off was naturally worth it, but the unread books mock me nonetheless. And then there’s Goodreads, which only tracks the new books we’ve read, not the total including old favorites that we return to again and again. Shouldn’t it count when you re-read Walden or Awareness or Meditations for the umpteenth time? Of course it matters a great deal, but why are we counting anyway?

      Somewhere over the last year I’ve stopped worrying so much about the count and began focusing on what I absorb in my reading. I linger with a quirky set of authors who bring all manner of perspective to the universe. Why do we rush off to read the next big thing instead of revisiting that thing that’s whispering in the back of our mind? That person who read Slaughterhouse Five in high school is nowhere near the person who re-read it this summer. What have you re-read with an entirely different perspective?

      There’s a popular conversation starter that begins with the question, which albums would you bring to a deserted island with you—which ten albums would you listen to over everything else that’s out there, should you be destined to spend the rest of your life listening to no other music? It’s an impossible ask, really, but reveals a lot about the people around the table, should they be truthful. Music is always a deeply personal choice, influenced by our environment. So it is with books. So taking that question from music to literature, what books would you bring with you? If you were told to leave the planet on a trip to Mars, never to return and not having the Internet to constantly refresh your feed what would you want to read again and again to the end of days? A serious and omnivorous reader could tackle that list readily, with the natural regret of the large stack of books left behind.

      My own list would include the Thoreau, de Mello and Marcus Aurelius books listed above, along with some history, some poetry, and some fiction. None of the books I’ve read thus far this year—even the books I’ve rated as five stars—would make the list. Does that make this year a failure in not elevating my library, or a validation of that which I’ve already danced with? The answer lies within us, doesn’t it?

      Returning to the inherent limitation of how many books we can read in a lifetime, shouldn’t we be very deliberate in what we choose? I believe we should read as much and as widely as we can, that we may gain perspectives otherwise untapped. Particularly in a world that wants more than ever to control the conversation, we owe it to ourselves to go well beyond the populist fare to find voices that otherwise get drowned out in all that shouting and posturing. In the end, it’s the well-read who bring perspective and stability to an otherwise reactionary world.

    • A Splash and Ripple

      One day you finally knew
      what you had to do, and began,
      though the voices around you
      kept shouting
      their bad advice —
      though the whole house
      began to tremble
      and you felt the old tug
      at your ankles.
      “Mend my life!”
      each voice cried.
      But you didn’t stop.
      You knew what you had to do,
      though the wind pried
      with its stiff fingers
      at the very foundations,
      though their melancholy
      was terrible.
      It was already late
      enough, and a wild night,
      and the road full of fallen
      branches and stones.
      But little by little,
      as you left their voice behind,
      the stars began to burn
      through the sheets of clouds,
      and there was a new voice
      which you slowly
      recognized as your own,
      that kept you company
      as you strode deeper and deeper
      into the world,
      determined to do
      the only thing you could do —
      determined to save
      the only life that you could save.
      — Mary Oliver, The Journey

      We become what we focus on and apply ourselves to. People and pets in our lives demand and deserve the best of us in the moment. There is a stack of unread books demanding attention just to my right, and work equally insistent on my attention just to my left. Directly in between is the Mac I write on. What we do with our time determines so much of who we become. Yet there’s only so much time. Even as I write this I can hear the last of the oak leaves (there never is a true end to oak leaves) falling onto the lawn. The time it takes to clean up those leaves is an investment in nominal physical fitness, but also a mental cleansing. It turns out I need the leaves to pay penance for this plot of land I center my life around. It’s a bullseye of my identity in an indifferent universe.

      The scale whispers something else entirely: What have you done? What are you going to do about it now to fix this? It turns out that clearing leaves isn’t quite enough to balance out the chocolate and wine and that extra serving of stuffing. We are all slaves to our habits, and become what our master demands. We must break free of the worst habits while there’s still a chance to escape the default of less for the potential of more.

      Lately the world seems to occupy ever more and more space of mind. Do you feel its pull? To do anything in our time, we must eventually shake off the noise of our world and move to our own calling. We ought to have the audacity to believe we have a place in whatever the world will be. Something will come of all this, for simply by going to it we are transformed. Now and then, that transformation reaches the attention of others. A ripple begins with a splash. And a splash begins with a leap into the unknown.

      Becoming requires motion: a vivid expression of what we believe might be, realized. We must move away from what we once were to what we envision our future self to be. What have you done? What are you going to do about it now to fix this? Filling the gap between the two end points is our lifetime mission. The more we make of our lives the bigger the subsequent splash and ripple.