Alexandersmap

    Category: Culture

    • The Way We Live

      “There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

      On Martin Luther King day in the United States, I celebrated quietly by reading some of his words and doing my part to lift up instead of pushing down. No doubt, he’d be disappointed with much of the world since he was assassinated, recognizing much of the rhetoric even if the characters have changed. But he’d be pleased at the growth in diversity, understanding and acceptance. And he might give a nod to the persistent courage of those who champion what’s right in this world.

      I’ve embraced the long game, trying to outlast and grow beyond the worst tendencies in my own life, and work continuously to pick up habits and knowledge that gradually broaden my view. If we are what we repeatedly do, and we are the average of the five people we associate with the most, and we are each a work in progress, then we must build better habits, broaden our circle of influence towards the person we wish to become and stick with it through thick and thin.

      The thing is, nobody wants to be told what to think, the only path to meaningful change is to help people see. That’s not easy to do in a world full of noise and amplified division, but the alternative is to give up. Look around and ask, what are we growing into? The only way to drown out the hate is to grow a larger chorus. The way we live, the things we tolerate and the way we treat others carries a weight far more impactful than words.

    • Kindred Contributors of Light

      Kindred comes from a combination of kin and the Old English word ræden (“condition”), which itself comes from the verb rædan, meaning “to advise.” — Merriam-Webster Dictionary

      Talking to a friend about poetry, I mentioned a poem by Li-Young Lee, and paused our phone conversation while she read it, waiting for the payoff when one reacts to great poetry. We do this now and then; find some magic in the world and bring it to light for others to see. We each find our fellow torchbearers by the light they bring to the world. We learn, don’t we, that our light alone is not enough in the darkness? But just as the stars bring light and meaning to the infinite void of the universe, kindred spirits bring hope to us back on earth.

      Another poem, discovered in the infinite darkness of social media, drew me to Lee, and I in turn put his work out there that others may see:

      So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I
      make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
      we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
      measuring by eye as it falls into allignment
      between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky,
      she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.

      One day we’ll lie down and not get up.
      One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

      Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize
      what we love, and what it takes
      to tend what isn’t for our having.
      So often, fear has led me
      to abandon what I know I must relinquish
      in time. But for the moment,
      I’ll listen to her dream,
      and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
      more and more detail into the light
      of a joint and fragile keeping.
      — Li-Young Lee, To Hold

      We are co-conspirators, you and I, each kindred contributors of light to the universe. We wrestle with the why, make the most of the how, and reconcile our when. It’s a fragile grip we have on our moment, but our hold feels more secure when the load is shared. Eventually we all must release our hold, but think of the light we might pass along before our torch burns out.

      But let’s not talk about fare-thee-wells now
      The night is a starry dome
      — Joni Mitchell, Carey

      Thanks Joni. Yes of course, there’s more: Hope. Meaning. Dreams realized. To be a contributor of light in the face of infinite darkness is to illuminate possibility. To live a full and wonderful life requires the friction of active engagement with all that this world offers us. We must wrestle with thoughts and ideas and opinion and find a greater truth than the myths we were taught to calm us in our moments of doubt. Friction creates a spark that, nurtured, brings light. Here we may warm ourselves in the glow of our potential, realized in this, our moment of fragile keeping.

    • Plant the Good Days

      “Don’t plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me. Choke those little bad days. Choke ’em down to nothin’. They’re your days. Choke ’em.” — Tom Waits

      We look up sometimes and wonder where the time goes. Times flies for all of us, good days and bad. It’s guaranteed until the very end. The trick is to work on our days—to string together as many days as we can full of joyful nuggets and fanciful moments. This requires active participation and an inclination to change things up when we see a trend in the wrong direction. We can’t control everything, but we can do something today to make it better than it might have been.

      When we have a few bad days, do we plant them and let them grow? We ought to let them wither, never gone but not sustained. And what of the good days? Shouldn’t these be nurtured and brought to light? Plant the good stuff and watch it grow.

    • Experience and Understanding

      “If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” — Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82

      “I shall act as I now think—as a man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” ― Charles Darwin, The Life & Letters of Charles Darwin

      (Quick aside: I’ve posted a link to Darwin’s autobiography above, just know that the content is included in the Life & Letters link as well if you’re interested in reading online without purchasing.)

      I read these two quotes from Darwin as the reflections of a man who realizes that life is short and all work and no play makes Charles a dull boy. Darwin was anything but dull, of course, and lived an extraordinary life full of contribution to our understanding of evolution and humanity’s place in the universe. But it seems he couldn’t summon a verse of poetry off the top of his head. We all beat ourselves up over something, don’t we?

      The thing is, the accumulation of experience and seeking to understand it all are bold and beautiful acts, and transform us from soulless cogs in the machine into free-spirited humans actively engaged in living. This blog evolved from a travel blog to a living experience blog in which I process all that I encounter as best I can in the moment. Sure, I may lean in on philosophy and productivity more than the average bear, but it all counts, doesn’t it?

      Clever quotes inspire us by drawing on the magic derived from a few words written or spoken by someone we might admire. I generally see a quote and wonder where it came from, seeking out the books and poetry that the line was plucked from and trying to understand the larger meaning of those magical words. In each quote above, you’ll see I’ve done just that—going beyond the famous quote to add some meaning. You can do the same by clicking on the latter link and searching for some key words in the quote to find the original. Blame it on the researcher in me: One must get to the source to truly understand the subject matter.

      And here, friends, is our subject matter: Darwin understood what we all know deep down: this ride is a short one, and we ought to make the most of it. This living business is a deliberate act, and we are what we focus on. We must push aside the atrophy of a limited life and expand our experience and understanding. For that is where growth happens. We dare not waste an hour of our precious time.

    • Here it Comes

      Another year already? With so much left undone?! So many good and bad days, rolled into twelve months. It’s been a great year. It’s been a horrible year. And now it’s over. And so it all begins again tomorrow.

      If we’ve learned anything from our stack of years, it’s that time flies, and 2023 will go just as quickly as 2022 did, and 2021 before that. We ought to feel that urgency and apply it to our days. I hope we do.

      Ready or not, here it comes. Beginning with today and tomorrow and each precious nugget of living. May we use it wisely.

      Happy New Year!

    • Diligent Awareness (Life as a Poem)

      “The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem.”
      ― Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart

      “Imagine that you’re unwell and in a foul mood, and they’re taking you through some lovely countryside. The landscape is beautiful but you’re not in the mood to see anything. A few days later you pass the same place and you say, “Good heavens, where was I that I didn’t notice all of this?” Everything becomes beautiful when you change.” — Anthony De Mello, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality

      It’s easy to say we should live with awareness, but harder in practice. This business of living demands attention, or rather, distracts our attention from much of the things we’d be focused on if we weren’t so damned busy with that other thing. We forget, sometimes, that life is merely what we pay attention to and everything becomes beautiful when we change. Most of us won’t change or become fully aware, but isn’t it pretty to think so?

      Most don’t want to change, they want to live with what they have, while wishing for more, and do it again tomorrow. When someone does we wonder at their boldness, but don’t connect the dots to doing it ourselves. If we are what we repeatedly do (Aristotle), then doing something completely different strikes at our very identity. No wonder so many refuse to cross that line in the sand.

      “How many people do you know who are obsessed with their work, who are type A or have stress related diseases and who can’t slow down? They can’t slow down because they use their routine to distract themselves, to reduce life to only its practical considerations. And they do this to avoid recalling how uncertain they are about why they live.” ― James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy

      The thing is, awareness isn’t about turning our lives upside down, it’s being fully present in the moment. Being open to everything that surrounds us, not just those practical considerations. We aren’t quitting our jobs and living like a hermit in a hot tent when we’re aware, we’re simply inviting more of the universe into our present moment. It seems if we want a more fulfilling life then we ought to fill more of our life with beautiful things.

      I was once a closed young man who thought of poetry as frivolous. Something was missing within me that took years to fill. When you close yourself up the world simply cannot find its way in to fill you. Over time my awareness pendulum has swung wide open. Not coincidently, I write more, listen more, seek more and linger more with the world. When we realize the world exists as a poem, we’re more inclined to dance with its verse.

      “Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive—that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily.” — Mary Oliver, Upstream

      We expand into the world we create for ourselves through diligent awareness. Knowing what we are, and who we are, is the job of a lifetime. When we open ourselves to everything, we discover more, and we live a bigger life.

    • Tossing Aside the Blindfold

      “In the eighteenth century, when educated European tourists visited the Alps, they deliberately blindfolded their eyes to shield themselves from the evidence of the earth’s horrid irregularity. It is hard to say if this was not merely affectation, for today, newborn infants, who have not yet been taught our ideas of beauty, repeatedly show in tests that they prefer complex to simple designs. At any rate, after the Romantic Revolution, and after Darwin, I might add, our conscious notions of beauty changed. Were the earth as smooth as a ball bearing, it might be beautiful seen from another planet, as the rings of Saturn are. But here we live and move; we wander up and down the banks of the creek, we ride a railway through the Alps, and the landscape shifts and changes. Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture, and lapse into a dreamless sleep. Because we are living people, and because we are on the receiving end of beauty, another element necessarily enters the question. The texture of space is a condition of time. Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurtling shuttle. Did those eighteenth-century people think they were immortal? Or were their carriages stalled to rigidity, so that they knew they would never move again, and, panicked, they reached for their blindfolds?” — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

      I think the point of Dillard’s quote, and the reason I chose it, was to highlight the imperfect nature of our time here, and the extraordinary capacity to receive and embrace beauty despite, or perhaps because of our awareness of the duration of the ride. We are active receivers of the ugly truth and the beautiful realization that life is a brief dance with wonder. Our version of modern blindfolds is of course a mobile phone with its infinite distractions flashing pretty images in our face. Do we truly see the rugged imperfections surrounding us when we’re a click away from something with ten million views just waiting for ours?

      A man died of exposure on a trail I’m very familiar with over the Christmas weekend. The details haven’t fully been released but it appears he was unprepared for the elements, trusted his phone to guide him and light his way when it got dark, and perished when he lost the trail and his battery faded away with his life force. Friends or relatives on the other side of the planet alerted emergency personnel, who found him too late to save him. That mobile phone might connect us to the world, but it isn’t active connection to other people, just the illusion of it. Life is a fragile dance with beauty, and (it seems) his ended when he got too comfortable with that illusion in a cold and unforgiving place.

      The thing is, that trail is one of the most beautiful and popular trails in the White Mountains. It’s easy to understand why he chose it. The tragic irony is that he received the beauty he sought in his climb, but his blindfold killed him in the end. It’s unfair to judge the hiker who perished, for at least he was out there trying to make the most of his moment (if tragically unprepared).

      There’s a lesson for every hiker in his story. But isn’t there another lesson hidden in plain sight? For shouldn’t we wonder, how many others are slowly wasting their lives staring into their own blindfolds? We must be actively engaged in our lives to see the imperfect beauty surrounding us.

    • Change Agent

      “It is necessary to uproot oneself. To cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it every day.” — Simone Weil

      It begins in earnest now, doesn’t it? We each become change agents in our own lives, advocating for the elimination of bad habits, the acquisition of new routines, and the wholesale disruption of the things central to our identity that we would rather see cancelled outright. Naturally this is a heavy lift in practice, but it sure is easy to write down as our ideal self.

      And so it is that resolutions fall by the wayside so quickly. Big, bold plans aren’t meant to be achieved easily. They’re meant to be broken down into bite-sized bits of habitualized change. So dream the dream, but simplify the steps that get you there. It’s not a mystery, it’s a process.

      Change is itself a habit we ought to embrace. When you look at the pace of change in the world, it’s essential to get comfortable with rapid changes in the way we consume media, filter information, pay for things, communicate with one another and earn a living. We don’t have to be early adopters, but we need to be prepared for whatever is coming next. This is called situational awareness, or simply knowing the environment you’re in or about to step into.

      We might get knocked over by the wave of change or surf it until it peters out. Either way they’ll be another wave arriving soon that we ought to be aware of. The trick in life is to avoid drowning long enough that we find our footing again. But in the confusion of the moment, isn’t it funny that we sometimes forget that we know how to swim? We must condition ourselves to being change agents, aware of our strengths and weaknesses, and forever adapting to find buoyancy in an unpredictable world.

      Life informs, we adapt and grow, then do it all over again. For the art of living is navigating and even embracing that continuous uprooting. We must carry whatever life throws at us, but that load makes us stronger and more resilient. It doesn’t get easier, we simply grow into the people who can manage such things.

      So as we look towards the New Year, we ought to view ourselves as change agents with an eye towards resiliency and growth. Life will keep throwing challenges at us—how do we thrive in such moments? Getting stronger, smarter and more comfortable with rapid change are thus goals worthy of our resolute focus.

    • Sharing Moments, After

      “I’ve never taken a photograph of someone and created a persona, I’ve just discovered what was already there.” ― Anthony Farrimond

      I’ve been known to take a few pictures in my time. As with writing, it helps me focus on the things around me in a way I might not otherwise. I have friends that send me pictures of sunsets that they’re not putting on social media as a reminder that I tend to put a lot of such pictures on social media. I celebrate the ribbing, for it means I’m doing my part to share a bit of beauty and positivity in a world full of people inclined to share ugly and negative. That’s not us, friends. We’re here to light the world during our shift.

      During occasions when family and friends come together, my attention shifts from pictures of nature’s beauty to the beautiful souls around me. There’s a fine line between being a part of the party and being apart from the party, and I try to stay in the moment while capturing some of it. Stopping a conversation for a picture can be disruptive, but if done well it might enhance and draw people together. When done well it captures the illusive and fragile moments we have together. Looking back on pictures from the last few years, it’s striking how many people are no longer with us. We can’t control fate, but we can capture moments before it intervenes.

      At a Christmas Eve party just last night I was talking to someone about some of the settings in an iPhone. They shared a few tips that I immediately started trying. In portrait mode you can tap on someone’s face and everything in the background blurs, highlighting the face or faces you’ve chosen to focus on. It’s a nice trick that brings a measure of professional photography to the amateur. Perhaps my favorite thing about it is that focus. As in an intimate conversation, you’re drawn completely into the world of the person you’re focused on. In such moments we capture something more than the moment, we capture a glimpse into their soul.

      I’m not a great photographer (I know too many great photographers to claim such mastery for myself), but I take enough pictures that I get a few good ones worth sharing. The way I look at it, that picture is a time machine, shared after the moment, carrying life force from one moment to another. That after moment might be turning the image around to show those you’ve just taken a picture of what it looks like, or it might be our great-grandchildren feeling the love through the eyes of a long-lost ancestor. This is the nature of photography, it tends to outlast us.

      As the photographer in such moments, as with writing, one hopes for mastery, but accepts the best we can deliver in the present. Don’t we owe it to each other to capture our best moments together? Having captured an image, it becomes a gift for others in moments after.

    • Delicate Things

      “Why shouldn’t we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music […], some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world?” — Elizabeth Bishop

      For all the big plans we make, most of our life is lived in routine. This blog is most often fueled by an early rise and a freshly ground cup of coffee. But when routine fails me and I really need to focus on writing or some other work, I put on my noise-cancelling headphones and play the same song on repeat until I’ve completed whatever it was that was getting overwhelmed by the gigantic. No surprise for readers that for me, that song is Wild Theme by Mark Knopfler. You can go right ahead and put it on my playlist when I pass.

      I’ve paired that song with a Scotch whiskey nosing glass filled with sand from Camusdarach Beach, sitting just out of reach of a certain curious cat who loves nothing more than knocking delicate things off of solid places. That beach is one of the stars of another work of art, Local Hero, that elicits eye rolls whenever I mention it to family and friends.

      I still have a water bottle filled with a bit of Walden Pond from a few weeks ago. I’m somewhere between boiling it for a cup of tea and pouring it in the pool, that I might have a bit of Walden around me every time I go for a swim. This might seem odd to the masses, and I respect that, but isn’t it just as odd to fixate on the lives of the Royal Family or to get a Mickey Mouse tattoo? Everyone has something that holds on to them through it all.

      A sprinkling of adventure does a soul good, but so too does the collection of delicate things that quietly surround us and makes us whole. These prove to be more important to us in our daily lives than the bucket list moments. That quiet inventory of art, music, prose and poetry lifts us up when we need them most, keeping us from drowning in the angry sea of everyday.