Alexandersmap

    Category: Art

    • Serious, True Work… Foreseen

      The stamina of an old, long-noble race
      in the eyebrows’ heavy arches. In the mild
      blue eyes, the solemn anguish of a child
      and, here and there, humility—not a fool’s,
      but feminine: the look of one who serves.
      The mouth quite ordinary, large and straight,
      composed, yet not unwilling to speak out
      when necessary. The forehead still naive,
      most comfortable in shadows, looking down.

      This, as a whole, just hazily foreseen—
      never, in any joy or suffering,
      collected for a firm accomplishment;
      and yet, as though, from far off, with scattered
      Things,
      a serious, true work were being planned.
      – Rainer Maria Rilke, Self-Portrait, 1906

      Rilke wrote this after three decades on the planet, with an assessment of himself that doesn’t leap out for its enthusiasm, nor with overt criticism. Here was a man who was planning great things for himself but knew he had a long climb ahead. He apprenticed with Auguste Rodin around the time he wrote this, and got a sense of what the singular pursuit of mastery looks like. And he’d apply it to himself.

      Rilke’s future was hazy, but he could sense his own potential. He sought an apprenticeship to learn how to cross the chasm from average to master himself. The last line betrays his belief in bigger things. I don’t speak German, and thus rely on the translation. Here is his original:

      Das, als Zusammenhang, erst nur geahnt;
      noch nie im Leiden oder im Gelingen
      zusammgefaßt zu dauerndem Durchdringen,
      doch so, als wäre mit zerstreuten Dingen
      von fern ein Ernstes, Wirkliches geplant.

      So here we are, collectively emerging from the shadow of a couple of dark years and looking squarely in the face of a new year. New possibilities. What do we make of it? What do we sacrifice or say no to in pursuit of our plans? For in looking inward for the answer we must wrestle with the question of what we might leave behind. The comfort of the familiar pulls us backwards. The only choice is moving ahead. Should we dare act on what we’ve foreseen.

    • Reaching Your Creative State

      “Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the work; acquire that state of soul unburdened by desire and self-will which is the state of grace of the intellectual worker. Without that you will do nothing, at least nothing worth while.”
      – A.G. Sertillanges, O.P. The Intellectual Life

      Every day is a reinvention, a chance to be reborn into whatever you wish to become in this life. For me, this becoming is the whole point of living. But it begs the question—becoming what? Not an easy question, one most people immerse themselves in distraction to avoid answering (present company accepted). Blogging is a public sorting of this becoming bit. The messier work happens behind the scenes.

      When you have a general idea where your compass is pointing, you must put yourself in a state where you might execute on that vision for yourself. And this is where it gets tricky. All those skills you’ve learned to distract yourself from figuring out what you want to be when you grow up work equally well at keeping you from getting things done.

      “Creative people organize their lives according to repetitive, disciplined routines. They think like artists but work like accountants.” – David Brooks, “The Good Order” The New York Times

      And there lies the secret sauce to doing anything worthwhile: Repetitive, disciplined routines applied daily from now until… ad infinitum. Sertillanges calls this productive place your state of soul. A place where we can actualize the spirit of our deepest work and bring it to the world. What a gift. When you’re in this state, why would you ever want it to end?

      The trick to reaching this state of soul is hidden in plain sight: Establish routines and have the discipline to stick with them. Repeat. None of this is revelatory, what’s required is consistency of effort. So get to it. The world awaits your best work.

    • Creating Something, Daily

      “All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.” – John Ruskin

      The great thing about writing every morning is that feeling of creating something out of nothing. Reinforcing long term habits you once told yourself you ought to have with a little discipline. Discovering new things and figuring out a bit of yourself one post at a time. Blogging is similar to painting every day and sticking the finished work in the barn. Every now and then someone actually sees what you produced, but mostly you do it for yourself.

      When you think about it, could it be any other way? We are all in the business of creating our better selves. Bloggers just document it for the world to see.

      There are other “ought to” habits I should get better at. I ought to optimize the site to make it easier for people to follow. I ought to be more active in following and liking the work of the wonderful people who follow me. I ought to stick with popular topics that get a lot of attention, things like fitness and travel. But it’s more likely that I’ll continue to write about whatever strikes my fancy, which lends itself to finding more interesting things in this world through travel and reading and putting myself out there a bit more than I might have otherwise.

      Writing became my most consistent habit over the last four years. That pleases me, but no more than the artist who places those paintings in the barn. You might look back on them now and then, but you move on to making new babies. The act of creating every day, and seeing where you might bring yourself next, is why we write. Maybe one day you’ll take all that art out of the barn and do something with it, but the analogy stops there. In blogging you’ve already let it fly.

    • Plymouth’s National Monument to the Forefathers

      Plymouth, Massachusetts might not be the oldest European settlement in the United States, but you can safely say it’s where England got its foothold in America. They might have landed in Provincetown first, hit a few places along the Cape Cod coast as they looked for a better place to settle, and maybe they would have been better off if they’d landed in what would become Boston or Providence, but they landed here. And the great floodgates of immigration began, changing this continent forever.

      That narrative of settlement and conquest is… complicated. But you can make a good case that the Mayflower Pilgrims’ pilgrimage was driven by religious freedom and a desire for peaceful coexistence with the Native American population. They happened to settle in a place where the native population had recently been decimated by disease, making for a bit more elbow room to root themselves in the place, but let’s stay on point. That first generation tried to fulfill the mission as best they could.

      To honor those noble intentions, and to put a spotlight on the best virtues that we humans aspire to, the Pilgrim Society of Plymouth conceived of a huge statue that would dominate Plymouth Harbor. The original monument was supposed to be 150 feet tall and right on the water. Reason eventually took over and they moved the monument to the top of a small hill with a commanding view of the harbor, then shortened it to 81 feet.

      The National Monument to the Forefathers is believed to be the tallest granite statue in the world. There is impressive detail in the carvings and a sense of Victorian optimism about what we aspire to be throughout. The cornerstone was laid in 1850 and the monument completed in 1889. That’s a lifetime for someone in the middle of the 19th century. Throw in the Civil War and violent conflict with Native Americans as the country was settled ever westward and those ideals were challenged even as the monument was being built.

      Today the National Monument to the Forefathers stands in dignified silence, 132 years after the dedication ceremony and a year after the 400th anniversary of the settlement of Plymouth by those Mayflower Pilgrims. That big party got cancelled last year with the pandemic, the narrative of living up to the best of virtues is more challenging than ever as we Americans sort out just who we want to be, but the monument stands. Still waiting for us to measure up.

    • Getting to Deeper Work

      “In an age of network tools… knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction. Larger efforts that would be well served by deep thinking, such as forming a new business strategy or writing an important grant application, get fragmented into distracted dashes that produce muted quality…. Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.” – Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

      I think the reason I get up early is to think, uninterrupted. And when I am interrupted, by other early risers or by something as simple as the cat meowing for food my own deep thinking is disrupted, often to a point where I have to put away the work and find a way to reset myself. The beautiful thing about posting a blog every day is I’m forced to find a way through the shallow pool I find myself swimming in back to deeper waters, distractions be damned. But the work never feels the same.

      Noise-cancelling headphones help a lot. When I go deep I’ll play the same song on repeat until I’m done with whatever project I’m committed to finishing. For me, two songs work particularly well for this, Mark Knopfler’s Wild Theme (no surprise if you know what my favorite movie is) and Claude Debussy’s Clair de lune because they both quietly soar and have no lyrics to draw me out of my focused state. After years of this trick, playing one of these songs becomes Pavlovian in snapping my mind to attention.

      Long walks in nature help reset the mind when you find yourself in frenetic shallowness, and I have my go-to spots for this too. Walking helps you sort out the puzzle pieces in your subconscious mind, putting all the pieces on the table and shuffling them one step at a time. If the walk goes well you sort things out just enough. But sometimes I find myself dwelling on another puzzle altogether, and realize the distraction wasn’t swimming shallow at all but this elephant in the room that you’ve got to remove before you can properly focus on the original project. Long walks help sift the pieces enough for you to see what you’ve been staring at all along.

      Another trick of the trade that countless brilliant minds subscribe to is strict daily application of Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages. Write whatever comes out of your mind onto the page for three pages in a gushing stream of consciousness until you’ve gotten all the noise out of yourself, and then shift to creative output. I’ve tried this a few times but find myself frustrated by the time spent on Morning Pages that I could be spending on the work itself. The fault isn’t in the process but in my commitment to it. Enough people swear by it that it must work, and to go deeper I might have to recommit to this process myself.

      “The way to live is to create.
      Die Empty.
      Get every idea out of your head and into reality.”
      – Derek Sivers,       How to Live

      Whatever gets you there, deeper work is where we mine the very best of ourselves. Eliminate as many distractions as possible, retreat to your proverbial cabin in the woods and do the work. While there’s still time.

    • Look at That Sky, Life’s Begun

      Don’t let me hear you say life’s taking you nowhere
      Angel
      Come get up, my baby
      Look at that sky, life’s begun
      Nights are warm and the days are young
      Come get up, my baby
      — David Bowie, Golden Years

      Attitude is everything in life, and at some point you’ve got to shake yourself loose from whatever holds you back and get going already. Even during the pandemic, a dark time for modern humanity, we hear of plenty of people who got out in the world and did something amazing. So why not now?

      If you believe the stories, David Bowie wrote Golden Years for Elvis to sing. Admittedly, that would have been a fascinating take on the song. There’s an element of sadness in the lyrics, and I can see Bowie having someone like Elvis in mind when he wrote it. I think about the Elvis of 1975, only a couple of years before he died. He felt like old news and a bit used up in the world, but he was only 42 when he died. He was dragged down by drugs and distraction, not by age.

      There’s a lesson there. Don’t get bogged down in the muck life throws at you. Focus intensely on the things you want to do in your life. For all the celebration of those who rise up, this world would rather have you consume than produce. Consumption will be the death of us all. Instead, get up and produce something of consequence.

      Lean into your dreams. Look up at that sky. Life’s just begun, Angel.

    • Have Your Day

      Time drops in decay,
      Like a candle burnt out,
      And the mountains and woods
      Have their day, have their day;
      What one in the rout
      Of the fire-born moods
      Has fallen away?
      – WB Yeats, The Moods

      The Moods, as I understand it, are the messengers from God (God, in turn, is fire). Whatever your beliefs, there’s truth in the core message: time slips away drop by drop, and we all must pass. Whether a poet or philosopher or the woods or even the mountains themselves, all must “have their day”.

      Let us turn to old friend Henry and consider the phrase differently:

      “The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it. Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry—determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream?” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      We get so caught up in life’s minor distractions that we lose track of the days slipping by. Shouldn’t we channel that inner fire and spend our lives in conceiving while we have this time? But wait! If even the mountains themselves eventually erode to sand, how can we be so bold as to expect a measure of immortality?

      This is why the concept of God and eternity hold so much meaning in our brief lives, we seek to understand the meaning of it all. Poets and philosophers and amateur bloggers each confront the brutal fact that we all must pass, and we don’t really have an answer for what lies beyond.

      So be it. But knowing that the track is indeed laid before us, shouldn’t we reach for our own measure of immortality, as fragile as it might be, and make a day of it? That, friends, seems to be the point all along. Have your day.

    • From Scratch, Daily

      Every morning I glance at a blank page and begin to write from scratch. I’m sure your own writing process is different in many ways, but for me the act of beginning to type is a signal to the brain to get to it already. Often I’ll delete entire paragraphs that ultimately don’t make the cut, but Stephen King told us to kill our babies, didn’t he?

      That last paragraph may ultimately disappear into bits and bytes of what might have been. This one too, may pay the ultimate price for being in the early stages of a thought. Or maybe not, should I be so bold as to believe an idea is worth putting out there as it is when it dances off the fingertips. Time will tell.

      The easiest blog posts to write are about places I’ve been to or things I’ve experienced. The hardest are about things I process in my brain in the early morning hours as I contemplate whatever ideas I’m toying with at the moment. But isn’t that the way conversation works too? We enthusiastically jump into conversation about things we’ve experienced, but are more reluctant to dip a toe into deep philosophical or abstract waters. Want to ice the waters even more? Make it deeply personal.

      This blog about places I visit in the northeast corner of North America evolved into a deeper dive into waters I didn’t expect to swim in. But a blog is meant to evolve as its writer does, and this writer is ever-so-slowly evolving into something better than the person who started writing it. One book or one experience leads to another, which opens the mind to new ideas, which end up in the blog when they’ve properly steeped in the brain for a time. That’s life, isn’t it? A bunch of people figuring things out lumped together and occasionally bumping into each other.

      The easiest path to a blog post is to drop in a quote or poem that inspires deeper exploration. I use this frequently, and have a stack of drafts awaiting further exploration. Likewise, I revisit highlighted passages on the Kindle or pull old favorite books off the shelf now and then to flesh out a thought that sits in limbo a beat too long. Like that conversation you have in a coffee shop or on a quiet walk, contribution from others opens up new ideas in your own mind.

      A blog ends up being a mostly one-sided conversation, as one person figures things out in this strange and complicated world we live in. But nothing is more complicated than the human brain, reacting and adapting to the changes, both within and without. We’re all a work in progress, and a blog offers you the chance to place it out there for all to see. I wish a few more people I know would start writing their own.

      Until tomorrow….

    • Aspired Greatness

      “I believe that the first test of a great man is his humility. I don’t mean by humility, doubt of his power. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not of them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.” – John Ruskin

      If we agree, and I hope we do, that there’s a divine spark in each person, then each of us has something to offer. I know there some particularly hideous exceptions to that rule, but in general most people in this world are trying to do the right thing. The outrage we feel when some dark soul erupts in the world demonstrates our shared faith in humanity. Outrage originates out of a feeling of betrayal of shared beliefs.

      To reach greatness in the world doesn’t require the most followers or likes on YouTube or a particular net worth. Really great people have an aura of positive energy exuding from them. Really great people lift those around them up. Really great people strap themselves to the helm to steer the ship through the worst of storms. There are plenty of really great people in the world, and you’re probably thinking of a few examples right now.

      “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.” – Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire

      Divinity isn’t within us, it runs through us in our chosen pursuits, our relationships, our empathy and our sacrifice. It’s a calling, a purpose, that demands us to give of ourselves so that others may feel the Divine Spirit as well. That spirit may mean something religious to you (capital D, capital S), or simply something far greater than ourselves.

      I humbly write in pursuit of the divine – not to capture it, but to channel it through my writing. I’m a long way from greatness, but I see the path grow incrementally shorter with every hour devoted to the craft. Writing hasn’t been my life’s work to this point, but it’s woven in everything I’ve ever done. A modest, often futile attempt to share the divine that I’ve encountered in this world with you. Does that make it a purpose or a pursuit? I think the latter, but I hear the call of the former.

      And shouldn’t we aspire for greatness and a way to share it?

    • Every Setting Sun

      “Let every dawn of morning be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close.” – John Ruskin, The Two Paths

      You see the difference in the days now. September brings that perceptible tilt of the earth, shrinking daylight hours and with it a persistent tightening up of that time between sunrise and sunset. Soon the trees will react and the world will turn a kaleidoscope of colors. In the northern hemisphere we’ve turned the corner from the laziness of summer and you can feel the quiet insistence of the harvest season upon us.

      There’s work to do, meaningful work, and it must begin in earnest while there’s time. It’s funny how September does that. Deeply engrained in our souls, this feeling of bringing all your work to a satisfactory conclusion. A harvest. Like the setting sun you can feel when one chapter is ending, with a bold suggestion that something new might begin. But we’re fools to focus on that which isn’t promised to us.

      Sunsets are lovely, but you earn the sunrise. And when you greet the day your thoughts turn naturally to what you might do with it. Life is best lived in the urgency between sunrise and sunset. When the sun sets this evening, what will we have harvested in these brief hours? For the days grow shorter with every setting sun.