Alexandersmap

    Category: Culture

    • Squeaky Toys

      You learn quickly that you simply cannot write as effectively when a puppy has a squeaky toy in close proximity to you (anywhere you can hear it counts). So you redirect that puppy towards another toy that doesn’t squeak, at least for that time when you’re writing. This process works equally well with mobile phones and television news. There’s always another notification, just as there’s always more breaking news. The most unproductive people in the world are those addicted to some form of squeaky toy.

      But not us friend. We sequester ourselves in solitude. We get up early for the quiet it brings. We seek calm for the deep thoughts it brings. And we await the combined rewards of inspired creativity and greater insight. If we so choose, squeaky toys may be the reward for having done the work, not the distraction from it.

      I write this knowing the world is far more complicated and enraged today than it was a few days ago (when it was pretty complicated and enraged already). We cannot control the universe, only how we process our place in it. In order to do this, we must find a quiet place within ourselves to think and do what must be contemplated and acted upon.

      The thing is, the world will still be there in all its madness, barely noticing that we missed anything at all. Think of it as the loud talker in the room that doesn’t give you a second to respond. It only wants to hear itself talk. Sometimes the only thing to do is leave the room for awhile. The question we must always ask ourselves is, what is our verse? Can that be found in a room full of squeaks?

    • Make it Poetry

      “The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.” — Jean Cocteau

      The thing about listening is we sometimes hear things contrary to the way we’ve always done things. Do we follow this path or stick with the tried and true? What’s so true about the tried anyway?

      The muse isn’t the author, it’s the voice of countless generations of poets and writers, philosophers and gurus who precede the author, channeled into insight. We derive from the act of listening and act upon it. There’s a lot of action in that statement. A great artist creates something meaningful and profound from what they’ve observed, which requires action and a healthy dose of boldness. Listening is passive until it serves as a catalyst for something more.

      We must begin. Simply if necessary. A timid step forward is nonetheless a step forward. We must progress in our work. We must be out in the world to know the world. We must accumulate knowledge and experience and then do something with it, or it becomes trivial. I think back on the accumulated knowledge I picked up in school and laugh to myself at how much was actually utilized in real life. The real game in school was the human dynamic flowing around the structured learning. Doesn’t it remain so still?

      Of course, that Cocteau quote applies to so much more than poetry. Take a look around and listen to the world, for it’s telling us plenty. It too should be a catalyst for something more. The trick is to create something better out of that which we observe. Again, we must progress, or it’s trivial. Haven’t we had enough of trivial? Whatever our life’s work, we must make it poetry.

    • Stable Centers

      “Continue to progress, do not stagnate. Consider a spinning top. It moves around a stable center. It spins and spins until it finally falls over, exhausted” — Awa Kenzo, Zen Bow, Zen Arrow

      In this blog I refer a lot to Stephen Covey’s concept of pushing the flywheel, and having momentum in our lives through rigid positive habits. The thing about momentum we sometimes forget is that it’s not about the spinning, though surely action is essential, but about the stable center. We may spin like a whirling dervish, but without a stable center we quickly spiral out of control. Like centrifugal force, positive momentum abhors instability.

      We see this in people, companies and political parties that have lost the thing that made them stable. Sports teams may peak at the level of their superstars, but unravel over the course of a season without strong leadership from the role players that are the true foundation of a team. We call them the glue that holds a team together, or lifts it up when things go poorly. It’s those people in an organization who exemplify how things ought to be done and lead by example.

      That stable center in an individual is our morality and sense of purpose. It’s our why, to borrow from Simon Sinek. When we have this in our lives, we do the work that must be done, we don’t skip over the little things that mean a lot, we are proactive in our days, and we have agency over our lives. Why do we get up every day to start anew? It’s often the people in our lives we hold most dear, isn’t it? Family and friends offer community and a sense of place. Teams, congregations and great company cultures do this as well. We need something bigger than ourselves to make our lives larger and more meaningful. When we have it we feel complete, when we don’t we crave it and desperately seek it out.

      Stable centers are usually obvious to us when we have them in our lives. We know what centers us, because our life revolves around these why’s. We are capable of spinning ourselves into greater and greater orbits when our footing is solid. Finding stable centers thus becomes as essential to our growth as establishing good habits and surrounding ourselves with the right people. In fact, when we do these things, we find that we ourselves become a stable center for others. And isn’t that a magical feeling?

    • Morning Coffee

      The line for coffee in a hotel Starbucks is informative. We learn about the lives of others in cross line chatter between coworkers, learn who slept well and who was having a rough morning and we learn who in line has never ordered a Starbucks coffee before. The barista, seeing the confused looks, explains automatically that a Tall is a small and a Venti is a large, and I watch their eyes glaze over in confused despair. I think to myself that I’ve been ordering Starbucks for three centuries and I’ve never seen so many novices in one line before. It’s the arrogance of the familiar. I shift to helpfulness to expedite the ordering process that I may get a coffee before lunch.

      I write this next to a brand new Keurig machine in my hotel room, still with packing tape on it and never once plugged in. The hotel staff had stocked it with decaf coffee pods, which explains why it has never been used. If you’re going to use an in-room coffee-making system at all, make it matter. Some of us take our morning cuppa very seriously.

      It’s not about the coffee, really, but the ritual. It marks the beginning of the day, and importantly for this coffee snob, the start of the writing process. I’ve had to write without it before, but it’s nothing to celebrate. To reveal the extent of my love for coffee, I’m meeting people for breakfast at a local diner, where I’ll surely have more coffee. But it’s not stopping me from having this one first.

      We all have our routines and rituals. Those people in line used to pouring a cup of the hotel courtesy coffee had their morning routine turned upside down. I can understand the feeling of exasperation they were feeling as they ran into the strange world of Starbucks. We are, each of us, dealing with some challenging circumstances. Some are Tall, some Grande, and some are Venti. We’re all in this together friends.

    • Shards of Light

      “We’re only here for a minute. We’re here for a little window. And to use that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the great story.” – Brian Doyle, from the Forward of One Long River Of Song

      The news about the Sycamore tree at Hadrian’s Wall reached New Hampshire perhaps around the same time that it reached everywhere else in the world. That one person can bring light or darkness to an inordinate amount of people is secretly understood by most of us, but we all hope that people will choose light. Surely, most do, or our species would never evolve and grow. And yet we must be prepared for the darkness.

      The obvious thing about my writing is that I remain almost singularly focused on the positive. This is a reminder to myself and anyone who might stumble upon this blog that there is grace and beauty in this world, in spades, and it’s often the common ground that illuminates all of us. Sometimes it’s a simple thing, like a dahlia holding on to summer after the rest of the garden fades away. In a way that tree along Hadrian’s Wall was like that dahlia, holding on long after the rest of the forest was swept away. Do we focus on the beauty in that realization or the darkness of how it came to be?

      Like a muscle broken down through physical stress, darkness brings with it the opportunity for growth and improvement. Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls this antifragility, in which we grow stronger collectively in the face of the stressors that life throws our way. But only if we learn and grow together. Alternatively, we might shrink back within ourselves and atrophy. We must choose growth, and go to the light.

      Forget Instagram-worthy singularity. I’d plant a thousand trees where one stood at Hadrian’s Wall. Return the forest to the land. Bring beauty back a thousandfold to honor the last holdout. That would be a great ending to a dark story.

    • Top to Bottom

      “On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.” — Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

      Collectively, we tend to elevate some people in society to positions of power and influence. Some people crave power at all costs. And luckily for them, some people want to follow a compelling leader at all costs. This following takes many forms, from religious to political to celebrity. There’s a belief that some people are above us because they’re born into a certain family or went to a certain school or have a certain position that infers authority.

      And yet we’re all human. We all hit the birth lottery and will eventually pass from this world. We all carry the weight of expectations for who we might be in this world because of the stories we and society tell us based on nothing but commonly held beliefs. But stories change all the time, as people do.

      We ought to evaluate the stories we tell ourselves now and then as a level-set. We’re all just people, from the top of the heap to the bottom, and doing the best we can to figure things out as we move through life. We do have a say in how our story goes, and so ought to set our aim higher. Decide what to be and go be it.

    • All the Miracles

      “To be alive, to be able to see, to walk, to have houses, music, paintings—it’s all a miracle. I have adopted the technique of living life from miracle to miracle.” — Artur Rubinstein

      We get tired sometimes, and forget about miracles like being born at all, in this time, relatively healthy and of sound mind. We’re blessed, but still find things to complain about, to compare ourselves against, to make us feel less of a miracle than we are. Isn’t that a shame? We ought to dabble in magic and dance in the miracle of where we are, and instead we dwell on the incremental differences between us.

      I went out in the rain for a walk with the puppy. She’s not so much a puppy now, but still curious and a little fearful of the unknown things around her. But she loves the rain tickling her skin and the feeling of cold, wet grass on her belly. We can learn a few things seeing the world through the eyes of the youngest among us. Puppies and toddlers experience the miracle differently than adults do. We know it’s not practical to dwell on every little thing—we’d never get anything done! But what are we really doing anyway?

      Now and then I get tired of things as they are. Routines are made to keep us in line, but are inherently routine. That we take all the miracles around us and dull them down to average is very adult of us. But is it any way to live?

    • Talkin’ to Myself

      Talkin’ to myself and feelin’ old
      Sometimes I’d like to quit
      Nothin’ ever seems to fit
      Hangin’ around
      Nothin’ to do but frown
      Rainy days and Mondays always get me down
      — The Carpenters/Adam Williams, Rainy Days and Mondays

      Rainy days and Mondays never really drag me down. Sure, we’ve had way more rain than we should this season, while others aren’t getting nearly enough of it. I can fret about climate change but I don’t usually care that it’s raining or sunny on any given day. Likewise, I don’t worry all that much whether it’s a Monday or a Saturday, as each is a gift. The key is whether you feel in control of your days or whether you feel someone else is controlling them. We can’t control the passing of time or the weather, only our reaction to it. The jury is still out on whether we collectively have the fortitude to do anything about climate change.

      I saw a friend the other day who parroted the dangers of “mass murderers swarming crossing the border and descending upon innocents across the country”. I didn’t have the energy to get in a debate with him, having learned during the last two elections in the United States that people are going to believe what they believe and you just can’t force an alternate story line upon a zealot. It made me sad to see another one gone though, reminding me of that closing moment in Invasion of the Body Snatchers when you realize someone you once believed in had switched over to the dark side. Sometimes you just want to scream. But like the weather, this is a reaction we can choose or opt out of. Instead I focused on what we had in common.

      The quality of our lives is always going to be about who is controlling our time and our belief system. When we accept that some things are out of our control, we learn to work with what we can. Amor fati. Our beliefs, on the other hand, can be developed independently of what those around us may believe. We may yet become who we want to be in this life, and we ought to have faith in others to find a way forward too.

      Lately my posts have been all over the place in both content and when they’re published. It’s a sign of a complicated life, perhaps, or maybe it’s just the time bucket I happen to reside in at the moment. Either way, it’s documented and best viewed through the lens of time. What I’m sure of is that I’ve often wanted to quit, but just keep writing anyway. That’s how life works too. Just keep showing up and doing the work and things usually work out in the end. Nothing to be down about at all, really. Just one soul in a wild world, talking to himself.

    • The Layer Cake of Happiness and Purpose

      “[There is an] age-old debate over two kinds of happiness that scholars refer to as hedonia and eudaimonia. Hedonia is about feeling good; eudaimonia is about living a purpose-filled life. In truth, we need both. Hedonia without eudaimonia devolves into empty pleasure; eudaimonia without hedonia can become dry…. I think we should seek work that is a balance of enjoyable and meaningful. At the nexus of enjoyable and meaningful is interesting.” — Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength

      There’s a special kind of joy that comes from marrying purpose with happiness. When we find our engagement with the world has both a why and joyfulness we enter blissful work. If this seems evasive, it’s because it is. Some people never find one or the other, let alone both in their lives. I believe it’s usually tapping us on the shoulder asking us to stop staring straight ahead and take a look at what we’ve been missing all along.

      The secret, always, is the people we surround ourselves with. When we’re constantly lifting up those around us, we can’t help but be dragged down ourselves. When others share the lift, the weight of the world seems lighter. When others lift us up in turn, we reach heights we might not have thought possible previously. We are the average of the people we surround ourselves with, so we ought to raise the average both in whom we spend our time with and the character we bring to the table.

      When we stop trying so damned hard to be happy or to find purpose and simply contribute our verse, we find over time that things like happiness simply happen organically. Building a lifetime of contribution and engagement with the world we find our foundation becomes stronger and we’re able to weather the inevitable storms that wash over us that erode weaker foundations. Life becomes a layer cake of happiness and purpose, repeated. When done in the company of exceptional people, what a wonderful life we might build together.

    • Unhurried and Wise

      “Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      I logged on to a Software-as-a-Service account I use for work thinking I’d quickly check a box that was nagging me. Upon login I was prompted for a mandatory password change, adding another box to check instead of eliminating one. So it is that even the quickest tasks lead to more tasks, and the whirl spins our heads just when we think we have it all figured out.

      Some of us aspire to be unhurried and wise. Certainly, during the pandemic we all examined our priorities. Many pivoted to more meaning, while others leaped back into the familiar trap of distraction. I was somewhere in between, with an inclination to seek waterfalls and summits balanced by a series of compelling shows streaming on too many services to count that I simply had to catch up on so I could keep up with the conversation. I never quite met my objective on either count, but don’t feel compelled to finish any of them at the moment. Checking boxes is a game, and there are times in our life when we grow tired of games.

      When we make time for nature and poetry in our lives, we aren’t being frivolous, we’re seeking the essential. To do this properly is to eliminate distraction and focus on where we are now. Some of us become masterful in adding one more thing to the list, thinking it will be the one thing that will fulfill us or at least make the day complete. This is a form of frenzy, which is never an attractive state. Better to shorten the list than shorten our state of awareness and calm. The goal of life should never be to rush through it.

      If I aspire to anything in this stage of life, it’s to move closer to unhurried and wise. By all accounts I’ve got a long way to go in both respects, but there’s no rushing to unhurried, and there’s no shortcut to wise. It begins with shorter lists and lingering longer on the quietly beautiful magic around us. Some tasks are inevitable, but they should never be at the expense of what has a right to be in this moment.