Alexandersmap

    Category: Culture

    • Solitude as a Path Forward

      “Society is the cave. The way out is solitude.” — Simone Weil

      We know, deep down, that our way is found in the quiet moments. It’s so easy to be caught up in the expectations and scandals of society, so easy to trap ourselves in the words so tightly shaped around the stories of our lives, that we might never really fly. Yet we must fly, whatever our flight path may be, if we are to get out of that cave. How many countless souls never fly?

      We grow up hearing we might be odd if we aren’t part of the group. As adults we hear that we’re either in the collective party of the righteous or there’s something suspicious and odd about us. To be a part of the tribe we must participate in the rituals of the tribe. And so we all fall in line, find our career path, work to strengthen our relationships, build our bridges, marry up and in, and then have kids and place them carefully into the right environments to maximize their own potential in society.

      There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a part of things. We learn and grow in society. We play our part and find meaning through our connection with others. We meet people who help transform us from what we were to what we might become. We rightfully celebrate our place in society and the people who are woven into the fabric of our lives.

      One might point to the social structure as the clearest way to find our place in this world. We get in the mix, bounce ideas off each other, collaborate, feed off the energy in the room, get a leg up with the help of others, and so on. And indeed, so it is that we thrive in a world built on maximizing the contribution of the individual for the benefit of our collective future together.

      But if there’s a shared secret we all know, it is the critical nature of solitude in finding our own path forward. It’s the voice inside your head saying, “And what of me?” We can’t really make out what that voice is saying until we step away from the din. What we find, if we are so audacious as to listen, is that that voice has a lot to say.

      Is it narcissistic to ask such questions? Parts of society would shout down such selfish ideas. The very idea of contemplation and individuality are reckless and dangerous in many corners of this world. But is it selfish to seek solitude, or selfless to find places to reflect? We don’t run away from society, we stride boldly towards ourselves. The boldest ideas are conceived in solitude.

    • Time in Orange

      The early morning is my game: fresh ideas, new hope, quiet time with the reset before the madness begins. All the petty frustrations of yesterday punted abruptly to a previous version of me, not today’s me. No, not yet.

      A rising waning crescent moon, just a sliver, dances with Venus, also rising, calling for attention herself. Behind me, Jupiter, god of the sky, living up to his nickname as he brightly dominates the western sky, not conceding any royal status as the sky brightens ever so timidly around him. A satellite glides quickly past, just below the king, brash in its intrusive busyness. “A little decorum, please?”, I think to myself, quietly admiring the boldness of technological advancement in the face of custom. Jupiter, playing the long game, remains stoic and proud, despite the affront.

      I return to yesterday, thinking today might be better. It ought to be better, with a bit more effort, a bit more applied acting the part, and maybe, like that satellite, a bit more intrusive busyness. But there I go again, dwelling on the past, cheating the present. This rusty, orange, glowing, hopeful present. It demands more from me. It deserves more from me.

      I dreamed of a TSA agent who wouldn’t set me free. I’m not someone who remembers dreams, but this one woke me at just the right moment, freshly minted in my brain as it was, that it stayed with me through the ritual of orange. I think of it still, that maddening limbo. And it made me think of fresh starts with a sprinkling of boldness.

      Time in Orange

    • Becoming That Shape

      “The ability to fantasize is the ability to grow. [For] boys and girls… the most important time of their day, or especially at night before going to sleep, is dreaming themselves into becoming something, or being something. Into being something. So when you’re a child you begin to dream yourself into a shape, and then you run into the future and try to become that shape. When I was 10, 11, 12 I began to dream of becoming a writer, and the rest of my life has been the real task of shaping myself to that boyhood thing. So fantasizing has been very creative.” – Ray Bradbury, from Day at Night Interview, with thanks to The Marginarian for showing the way.

      It’s easy to spot potential in others, when you pay attention to such things. A nephew with a knack for brilliant cooking, a niece with an eye for brilliant photography, a friend with the aptitude and attitude for finish carpentry, a son or daughter with the unique combination of empathy and talent that they bring to the world. When you look for the spark in others, often it’s easy to see. And sometimes it’s barely detectible, needing space and air to spark into something more substantial. We, witnesses to the fire burning inside others, either feed the spark or snuff it out. Which will we offer in the moment?

      And what are we with ourselves? Are we stoking our own dreams or snuffing them out? We ought to be arsonists with our spark, stoking our dreams and lighting the way for others. For in those moments alone with a dream, when we see so clearly what we might become, we discover our anima. In Latin anima refers to “a current of air, wind, air, breath, the vital principle, life, soul” (wiki). There’s magic in air as we dance with that vital principle, for there we form our (dare I say it) life’s purpose. For us humans trying to reach our potential, the question or what animates us ought to be front and center in our journey to becoming what we might be.

      In our brief dance with light and air, we must build our beacon in earnest. Shaping ourselves into whatever we believe possible shouldn’t be the stuff of childhood fantasy, it can be our lifetime pursuit. For dreams ought to be stoked, if only to see how brightly that spark might burn.

    • Input vs. Output

      We must consume books and art and bits of the universe both sweet and bitter to produce anything of consequence. From birth we’re actively consuming to stay alive and grow, to learn from those who came before us and ultimately to mold ourselves into an active, thinking adult. But we weren’t born to be sponges, we were born to produce.

      Input and output go hand-in-hand, but output isn’t guaranteed simply because there was input. We need agency, don’t we, to transform all that input into something resembling output? It’s comfortable always being the student of life, soaking in all that this universe offers. The stakes go up considerably when we put ourselves out there with our own work. To raise our hand and speak up, to offer a new twist, to boldly contribute to the Great Conversation.

      If there’s a disease in humanity, amplified in these times, it’s mistaking combativeness and criticism for output. This is “Man in the Arena” territory, where those who don’t do the work feel perfectly fine condemning those who do the work. We ought to collectively have no patience for it and turn the trolls and charlatans away. Yet too many treat the noise as input, and think themselves clever by parroting the same sound bite as their own output. These are empty calories for the brain, and distract us from building.

      We don’t need more noise, but we definitely need more insight, more contribution to the critical issues of our time, more solving of problems, and more collaboration and meeting in the middle to find a way forward. We are what we consume, this is true, and we are also what our actions demonstrate we are. We must do better, collectively, with our output.

      Input is fine, I suppose, but where are we going with it?

    • Colors Out of Reach

      Well, I see the end of the rainbow
      But what more is a rainbow
      Than colors out of reach?
      — The Avett Brothers, Swept Away

      There’s a fine line between being satisfied with what you’ve got and yearning for what you haven’t got. I follow, and thus am constantly teased by, Aurora Borealis updates. I happen to live in a place with a very slight chance of seeing the Northern Lights, but sure, I’m saying there’s a chance. The hardy souls who stay up all night on mountain tops for the ten minutes with the Aurora post their photos immediately, making me grumble when I rise early the next morning and see what I’ve missed. But I know that that show wasn’t meant for me.

      We are in our moment, in our place, with or without the things we yearn for. There’s nothing to do about that which we’ve missed out on. For the things we seek, we must either go to them or let them fly away unencumbered by our attempt to grasp them.

      When you go to a place you’ve dreamed of going to, be it a tropical paradise or Paris or (just maybe) Iceland for volcanos and waterfalls and the dance of the Northern Lights, you close the book on dreaming and capture its memory, like a flower folded into a book. The thing is, memories are rainbows out of reach too. But with memories, bits of the color embed themselves in us that live on through us. You can see it in your eyes when you look at yourself in the mirror, and others see it in you too. Each encounter brings more color to our lives.

      Ultimately we can’t have it all, and we ought to focus on the things that are most important to us. Yet there’s something to be said for a recurring dream of light and color dancing in the sky. It will always remain just out of reach, yet so very close to our heart.

      So what do we chase, and what do we let fly away? Don’t we already know? For our answer appears when we stop chasing every rainbow and really think about what’s important now.

      Edinburgh Rainbow

    • What We Will

      “If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” — E. B. White

      I grow cilantro, not so much to eat it, but to watch bees roll around in the wispy white flowers that wave ever so lightly in the breeze. Surely someone must grow cilantro for all the tasty dishes (or soapy dishes) one might imagine it worthy of, but give me the bees, please. Summer officially ends for me the moment the cilantro peters out—like life itself—entirely too soon.

      The dance between the earnestness of rolling up your sleeves and fixing things versus opening up your heart and savoring all the world offers is a constant struggle. As with everything, we must skate the line between the world of order and the world of chaos, Yin and yang. Nobody said this living business would be easy, but it’s such a short ride we ought to make the most of it.

      Still, there’s work to be done, and no time to waste in solving the world’s problems. As anyone out there trying to get things done knows, there’s just not enough people willing to make a go of it and do the work. Every school, every hospital, every landscaper and construction firm and restaurant is struggling to find a warm body with an eager mind to simply do the work. Who are we to ignore the call? Yet so many do.

      Every day should be filled with a bit of challenge, and a bit of seduction. Every life lived well ends with a measure of satisfaction for the things we did well and a measure of consternation for that which wasn’t accomplished. That’s life, and we must learn to skate that line. In the end, we do with it what we will.

    • Reaching Enough

      About suffering they were never wrong,
      The old Masters: how well they understood
      Its human position: how it takes place
      While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
      How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
      For the miraculous birth, there always must be
      Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
      On a pond at the edge of the wood:
      They never forgot
      That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
      Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
      Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
      Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
      In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
      Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
      Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
      But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
      As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
      Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
      Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
      Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
      — W. H. Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts

      The big things happen around us, things that are planet-changing, culture-changing, life-changing, yet most people go about their business in the most human of ways—intently focused on themselves. Walk into any scene playing out around us and chances are the actors are engaged in the mundane while largely ignoring the monumental. Wars, political scandals, climate change, images from deep space…. all are monumental but don’t quite make the cut when compared to that itchy nose or debate over what’s for dinner or who is taking the recycling out.

      It’s this we must understand in our attempts to influence and cajole the apathetic. It’s not about us, it always must be about them. To inspire, stir or instigate the story necessarily must reach into the souls of each member of the audience. Storytelling, selling, pandering for votes—each is a form of engaging the audience and making them feel the story is all about them. For even if it feels like it’s about something much larger, it never really is. It’s always been, and forever will be, how might I stir something in you?

      And even then, someone else will be walking past oblivious to the two of us. No matter, for we can’t reach everyone. We just have to reach enough.

    • Break the Chain

      “For you and your children hold a message: act so that the fruit of hatred, whose traces you have seen here, bears no new seeds, either tomorrow or forever after.” — Primo Levi

      This world offers a full sampling of good and evil. We sip from the fountain we choose to belly up to. It may be perplexing to see so many choose a path contrary to all that we believe to be true, but that doesn’t mean we should join them. We might instead offer a different path, one without hate.

      Despite it all, we each may choose what we perpetuate.

    • Brand Awareness

      “To me marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It’s a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us—no company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us… But even a great brand needs investments and caring if it’s going to retain its relevance and vitality, and the Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect in this area in the last few years. And we need to bring it back. The way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds. It’s not to talk about bits and megahertz. It’s not to talk about how we’re better than Windows…
      The question we asked was, ‘Our customers want to know, who is Apple and what is it that we stand for? Where do we fit in this world?’ What we’re about isn’t making boxes for people to get their jobs done—although we do that well. We do that better than almost anybody, in some cases. But Apple is about something more than that. Apple, at the core, its core value, is that we believe people with passion can change the world for the better. That’s what we believe. And we have the opportunity to work with people like that. We’ve had the opportunity to work with people like you. With software developers, with customers who have done it in some big and in some small ways. And we believe that, in this world, people can change it for the better. And that those people who are crazy enough to believe that they can change the world for the better are the ones that actually do.” — Steve Jobs, speech at the release of the ‘Think Differently’ advertisement

      The speech is in low resolution. The transcript is inaccurate in some places (I’ve tried to correct it here). But Steve Jobs words shine through this grainy time machine like a beacon. When he plays the ad, viewed from the lens of time, you see that he was and would always be one of the crazy ones, one of the misfits, rebels and troublemakers. And we celebrate Jobs today for what he created, even as we recognize he was never perfect. But who is?

      Even a great brand need investments and caring if it’s going to retain its relevance and vitality… this is true whether we’re looking at our company, our country, and certainly, ourselves. Jobs points the way with the question, “where do we fit in this world?”. It’s a question we ought to wrestle with in our own lives, in quiet places when the day is ripe with possibility. For in the quiet moments we’re best prepared to answer such questions.

      And we ought to answer boldly. Our brand—our identity—isn’t something to trivialize. It ought to give us goosebumps just to think of it. And it must be more than words. For we are what we work consistently towards. We are the sum of our lifetime contribution. But really, we are the next five minutes.

      We’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us…. no person is. Our brand ought to be remarkable and memorable for all the right reasons. We can’t control who pays attention, but we can control just how compelling our story is when the world stumbles upon us. Compelling begins with how we view our own contribution. Our identity—our brand—is ours to shape and mold, honed by life but envisioned and realized by the intangible force deep inside of us. We ought to craft something remarkable and memorable.

      For this moment is our own time machine, isn’t it? What will we remember of ourselves in this five minutes of boldness or timidity? We aren’t what we think we are, we are what we do! Just what is our brand?

    • Wednesdays Reveal Our Roots

      Wednesday is called hump day because once you clear it you’re over the hump of the week and it’s all downhill to the weekend. When you’ve worked in a job that makes you count down the hours until the weekend, you appreciate the jobs where you forget which day it is altogether. But doesn’t that make you wonder, if we’re all here for such a short time, why exactly would we spend so much time doing work that make us wish the time away?

      There’s work that puts food on the table and work that is transformative. If we’re really lucky they’re one and the same. Most transformation is earned over time and hard to see while we’re doing it. Hindsight makes that job we hated seem more worthwhile when we see where it led us in our career, skills that proved more useful than we originally thought, and especially, who we met in the trenches who helped us later on. For the network is everything in a career, and the sooner we develop deep roots the faster we’ll grow.

      We learn that most roots aren’t all that deep. Most are shallow connections that don’t nurture us, just as we aren’t nurturing them. LinkedIn connections are 90% shallow connections and 10% deep and meaningful. We collect thousands of connections in our careers—how many know the names of our spouse and children, or what we did to stay sane during the pandemic?

      Still, even shallow roots help keep us upright most of the time. When times are good anyway. We play the game when the sun is shining and hunker down when it rains. It takes stormy days in our career to find where our deepest roots lie. When there’s a recession or a layoff and careers are being uprooted all around us, it’s the deep roots that keep us standing. They can also help us replant ourselves when everything goes badly in that one dark storm.

      The very best thing about establishing deep roots is being there to help anchor others during their growth spurts or in their own time of need. There’s natural reciprocation in deep roots, and the bond strengthen both ways. It’s always better to take the initiative in helping others, for roots intuitively know where to find nourishment just as they know where the dead ends are. How we feel about Wednesdays might be one indicator of the health of our root system.

      When we establish such deep roots, we don’t think about things like hump day much at all, we think about contribution and collaboration, and we think about growth. Our lives, and certainly our careers, will fly by before we know it. What will it mean in the end? Generally, through good jobs and bad, shallow roots and deep, it comes down to what we put into it.