Alexandersmap

    Category: Culture

    • Pack Light

      “Travel like Ghandi, with simple clothes, open eyes and an uncluttered mind.” – Rick Steves

      Packing for a trip, or for a hike, informs. It teaches us what we can do without. And it turns out we can do without a lot of things. Add a few layers, a few event-specific bits of fashion if you must, and always (always!) good shoes. Don’t forget your toothbrush. If you have to weigh your suitcase to keep it under the limit you’re doing something wrong. The goal with suitcases and backpacks is the same: maximize the empty space available to you. Simplify.

      The lesson here naturally applies to all things. We ought to live a more simple, uncluttered life. We ought to speak less and listen more. We ought to write with more brevity and fewer clever words we throw around too often (like brevity).

      We carry too much baggage with us. We use too many words. We speak too much. Simplify and open enough space to experience the world. Navigate the world as a poet might do. With lightness and an eye for detail.

    • For a Little Bit More

      “You’re not lazy, you’re in the wrong job. Do what moves your soul.” — @master_nobody

      This tweet is admittedly a bit fluffy, but it poked at me all day after stumbling upon it in my feed. I suppose it’s because there are times when I scold myself for being lazy. For not doing the work necessary to make more progress in my profession or with my overall fitness. We all get like that sometimes, don’t we? Self-critical about our productivity. Maybe our labor is misdirected?

      There are plenty of times when I’ll forget I’m working at all. I’ll find myself moving six yards of loam after work and pushing past a point of exhaustion to get it done before nightfall so the coming rain doesn’t turn it into a mud pile. Or being teased about not ever relaxing on weekends or vacation, instead constantly working on the garden or doing an errand instead of sitting still with a book or a beer. Or methodically writing and re-writing a sentence in a blog post that may or may not resonate with anyone but me. These actions are not lazy, they’re stored up energy attracted to heat. There’s nothing hotter than clear purpose.

      Why do we waste the vitality we’re blessed with on anything but the pursuit of our individual greatness? It takes a few turns through the grinder of absolutely-wrong jobs to see the tragedy of misapplied energy. We do what we must to keep food on the table, but we ought to always be moving towards blissful work. Work that makes us laugh at the thought of ever retiring.

      Sure, we may just be able to relax someday, but I don’t know if that nagging feeling that we could have done more would ever disappear. Doesn’t it make sense to make a go of it with this, our one precious life? To do things that inspire and excite us, and make us want for a little bit more at the end of a long day. When we move to purpose laziness disappears.

    • Facing Reality

      “Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.” – Søren Kierkegaard

      There’s no doubt that, for most of us, reality is a handy place to anchor. We all must face the reality of living in a world that doesn’t go out of its way to cater to us. And yet, we all know people who anchor themselves to delusional stories instead of reality.

      We ought to fully experience all that life has to offer, but we all see things we’d rather not include in our lives. Mass shootings (welcome to America!), war, racism, toxic television… who wants any of that crap to be part of our reality? Still, we must face it just the same if we’re ever going to transcend it.

      We have a hand in the reality we live in. We don’t have to accept all that we experience, but we must acknowledge it and choose how we react. Life has its problems, but it also has its fair share of wonder.

      I wonder, what do we dwell on?

    • Shall We Sparkle?

      “The last stars will die out 120 trillion years from now (at most) followed by 10^106 years of just black holes.
      Condensed, that’s like the universe starting with 1 second of stars and then a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion years of just black holes.
      Stars are basically the immediate after-effects of the Big Bang. A one-second sizzle of brightness before settling into an essentially endless era of darkness.
      We live in that one bright second.”
      — Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy)

      When we think of our infinitesimal smallness in this context, in relation to the stars and the eventual endless darkness of the universe, we might feel a bit overwhelmed by it. We might feel existence itself is pointless in the vast emptiness to follow… this. Then again, we might celebrate the spark of time we’ve all collectively lived in—you and me and every human who ever existed or ever will in a brief spark of magnificent light. Doesn’t that feel a bit more extraordinary?

      If infinity is endless darkness, and we aren’t currently residing in said infinity just yet, we ought to settle into the moment and savor it. We think we’ll live forever. Well, forever is somewhere beyond that 120 trillion years, isn’t it? Forever is folly. The only thing that matters is this instant.

      Shall we sparkle?

    • Love and Limes

      In the empire of the senses
      You’re the queen of all you survey
      All the cities all the nation
      Everything that falls your way
      There is a deeper world than this
      That you don’t understand
      There is a deeper world that this
      Tugging at your hand
      Every ripple on the ocean
      Every leaf on every tree
      Every sand dune in the desert
      Every power we never see
      There is a deeper wave than this
      Swelling in the world
      — Sting, Love Is the Seventh Wave

      We’re aware of the hate-mongers pitching their mantra of fear and scarcity and race theory. We’re aware of wars and desperation and greed even as we wake in relative peace, paying for the sins of the world with higher supply chain prices and a distinct and distressing shortage of limes due to climate change and drug cartels playing games. What are we to do in this scenario? Hoard? Buy more ammunition and higher fences?

      Maybe the answer is to be better ambassadors of truth and understanding. To embrace our community, warts and all, and make something of it. To go out into the world and embrace cultures distinctly different from our own and show them that we’re not as bad as what they’ve heard about us either. Maybe we ought to double down on love and respect.

      The carefully curated news washes over us, wave after unrelenting wave. We either accept their view of the world or we make one of our own. They say that the seventh wave is the largest of all, the one that surfers seek out and sailors watch out for. We might think of it as the wave that will wipe us all out or the wave that will wash away all the madness in the world. I guess the answer lies in which wave has the most mass and momentum as it heads for the beach.

      Creative optimism and a healthy dose of love ought to trump hate and madness. When life gives you lemons make lemonade. When it gives you limes make margaritas. But let’s stop all this bickering and enjoy a drink together. For we have work to do.

    • Where Deep Roots Grow

      From the bottom of my heart
      Off the coast of Carolina
      After one or two false starts
      I believe we found our stride
      And the walls that won’t come down
      We can decorate or climb or find some way to get around
      Cause I’m still on your side
      From the bottom of my heart
      — Jimmy Buffett, Coast of Carolina

      Long-term relationships are about finding the space to grow together. We’ve all seen examples of couples who find a way to make things work because they want to make it work. We’ve seen the opposite too. The thing about walls is they’re always there—we either find a way around them or we let them close us off from the people who are most important for us.

      Relationships work when we break down barriers. They fall apart when we let the barriers define the relationship. None of us has to think too long about a friendship or romantic relationship that suffered from one or both parties seeing the differences of opinion but not the way around it. Nothing grows very well in a tight box.

      We live in a world that amplifies our differences. What might grow if we knocked down a few walls instead of throwing up more? The very question prompts a new level of thinking, doesn’t it? Thinking in possibilities instead of limitations opens us up for deeper relationships, wider experiences, and stronger bonds.

      It brings us to a place where deep roots grow.

    • Time for a Friendly Visit

      When a friend calls to me from the road
      And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
      I don’t stand still and look around
      On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
      And shout from where I am, What is it?
      No, not as there is a time to talk.
      I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
      Blade-end up and five feet tall,
      And plod: I go up to the stone wall
      For a friendly visit.
      — Robert Frost, A Time to Talk

      Imagine the audacity of pressing deadlines and the urgency of the moment pulling us away from what is most important. And we willingly do it, thinking there will be another time when we’re less busy and feeling less obliged to do what clearly must get done. Where do we best spend our time, if not for furthering relationships with our fellow time-travelers?

      We hear about rampant depression and a longing for something tangible. There’s nothing tangible in the comments section of those popular social media platforms. We must meet each other face-to-face and sort out the world together, or together we’ll spiral deeper into chaos. To do this requires nothing more than meeting halfway. Doesn’t that idea feel as antiquated as the horse in Frost’s poem? Yet it remains the obvious answer to the problems of the world: diplomacy, compromise, mutual respect and understanding. These aren’t signs of weakness, in fact just the opposite: they betray inner character and a measure of emotional development.

      We are the diplomats, you and me. We walk across the minefield of distrust and find common ground. Seeking first to understand, and then to be understood. There’s nothing easy about this in a world that rewards mic drops and jaw-dropping tweets, but the world has always been divided between those who make all the noise and those who quietly keep things from falling apart.

      Imagine if we all simply stopped shouting and began to listen instead?

    • Knowing the Songs

      I can see, it took so long just to realize
      I’m much too strong not to compromise
      Now I see what I am is holding me down
      I’ll turn it around
      Oh, yes, I will
      — Boston, Don’t Look Back

      When you go to a concert to see a band play, are you looking for new or familiar? Go to an Eagles or Paul McCartney concert and it’s a greatest hits collection where you know every song and everyone around you does too. It becomes a sing-along festival. Tasty, but not exactly pushing your boundaries.

      Think about the last time you went to see an up and coming band with all the buzz and you didn’t know any of their songs at all, but want to see what all the fuss is about. That was a voyage of discovery, one that carried you to places exciting and new. You knew you were going to know those songs soon enough when that band broke like a wave over the airwaves.

      That band that you’ve known for years knows the score. They want to play you the new stuff, because that’s what excites them the most. But they know people pay to see the songs they love performed live. So they layer in the new with the old, hoping the ratio is just right to keep the crowd from going flat.

      We humans play our own greatest hits in our head. We tell ourselves we’re going to change but stick with the same soundtrack we had on yesterday and the day before. Maybe we have a circle of fans around us that only want to hear our greatest hits and feel uncomfortable when we start to change. It’s easy to get trapped in that old soundtrack.

      The trick to turning things around is to layer in the new songs. Change a small habit, then another. Learn something new today and stretch even further tomorrow. Pretty soon you’ll find that you don’t look back so much anymore because you’re so busy becoming what you want to be next. We might even find that our best fans enthusiastically go along for the ride, changing with us.

    • No Regrets

      The Regret Minimization Framework is simple.
      The goal is to minimize the number of regrets in life.
      So when faced with a difficult decision:
      (1) Project yourself forward into the future.
      (2) Look back on the decision.
      (3) Ask “Will I regret not doing this?”
      (4) Act accordingly.
      — @SahilBloom

      This Regret Minimization Framework business seems a bit hokey, doesn’t it? Even when you watch the incredible Jeff Bezos video where he admits to being a bit of a nerd with the name. But when you watch it through the lens of perspective in who Bezos has become, and what has become of Amazon, well, it seems less hokey.

      Which brings us back to the question: what will you regret not doing today? Will that spur you to action or will you punt it to tomorrow with some story that you’ll really do it then? Isn’t it better to punt the safe route to the future, and tell ourselves that we can always go back to it if these things we’d regret not doing don’t work out?

      Choose the path of no regrets.

    • Wanting Wild

      “I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It’s impossible not to remember wild and want it back.” — Mary Oliver, Green, Green is My Sister’s House

      If we’re lucky, we never really grow up, we just get a bit more creative with our diversions. I used to crave responsibility, now I try to build enough flexibility in my schedule to chase waterfalls. Intense curiosity about the world around us is the key. Life is a quest, after all, adulting be damned. What are we wild things to do but seek adventure where we might find it?

      “In conclusion, it appears that nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in distant countries.” ― Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle

      Adventure is easier when you’re on the road. You see things all the time that stir your soul. It’s much harder when you’re working in an office or sheltered in place at home. If we don’t venture out into the world we’ll never find out what we’ve been missing. Charles Darwin found adventure on the other side of the world, Henry David Thoreau found it a short walk from his bed. Adventure isn’t about how far you go, it’s about getting out of your own shell. What is a shell but a prison of our own making?

      Wild is always stirring about inside of us. We must want it back in our lives enough to seek it. The world will always ask for everything we’ve got. We ought to be the wild thing that rebels against that and turns towards adventure instead.