Alexandersmap

    Category: Culture

    • The Slow and Gradual Cure of Blindness

      “Great discoveries are but reflections on facts common to all. People have passed that way myriads of times and seen nothing; and one day the man of genius notices the links between what we do not know and what is every minute before our eyes. What is knowledge but the slow and gradual cure of blindness” – A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

      The accumulation of knowledge doesn’t make one an intellectual, though it might make one better at trivia. It’s the connection of the jigsaw pieces into a complete puzzle for all to see that makes the genius. Something to aspire to, I think, and something valued. The person who can draw together disparate bits of information and turn it into insight will have no problem working in a world with an increasingly short attention span.

      Becoming that sort of person takes time and a good filter. What do you say no to? The very distractions everyone else is obsessing over. Cultural, technological, social distractions designed to pull our attention from more productive uses to linger a moment just over here. Harmlessly fun. Distractingly fun. Blindingly fun.

      The people that see the obvious we’ve all been missing tend to look at the world through a different lens. Perspective matters, and we need those who can make sense of it all more than ever. Look around the world at the noise and you’ll see some folks are too eager to drink the Koolaid and less likely to ask “why?”

      There are exciting things happening at the genius bar. Rockets bringing telescopes to deep space. Huge advancements, accelerated by mRNA sequencing, in the treatment of disease. Robotics and Artificial Intelligence that have the potential to clear mechanical and intellectual hurdles humans have been unable or unwilling to clear. What will it all mean? And who’s paying enough attention to care?

      The way to get a stool at the genius bar is to think more deeply, seek new perspectives, read material that challenges you, visit places out of your comfort zone, and then weigh these new inputs against the stuff previously stored in your personal data center. Find the connections, find the contradictions, and make sense of it all over time. Here lies the cure for blindness. And maybe the hope for humanity.

    • Destinations Are Where We Begin Again

      Ships go sailing
      Far across the sea
      Trusting starlight
      To get where they need to be
      — Josh Groban, Believe

      A challenging couple of years brings us back to Christmas morning 2021. We know it’s not over just yet, this pandemic, but we have optimism for the year ahead. Tempered by other challenges in the world, other realities at home. Life isn’t easy, it was only framed that way by our support system of family and friends and community. Generous spirits that touch our lives at just the right time. Helping us navigate the stormiest of seas. Relationships make life worthwhile. Belief in ourself begins to develop in our tightest circles, and carries us to destinations we never imagined when we began.

      May you have the opportunity to spend time with those who love you most today. Merry Christmas.

    • If We Are to Live Ourselves: Thoughts on Didion

      “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
      ― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

      I feel the truth in Didion’s observation, seeping into to me like caffeine hitting the bloodstream. For who doesn’t look back on who they used be and shake their head? That’s no longer us, and in many ways, we might wish it never was. But that person helped carry us here.

      Joan Didion passed away yesterday. There are people far more familiar with her work—far more qualified—to write her obituary than me (See Parul Sehgal’s Joan Didion Chronicled American Disorder With Her Own Unmistakable Style”). If you want to glimpse the soul of a writer of consequence, read the words that they themselves offer to the world in their most personal moments. The words that bring you into their world in common bond. Such as this quote Sehgal highlighted:

      “I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package,” she once wrote. “I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

      Can’t you see it? Didion placing her hands on your shoulders, looking you square in the eye and imploring you to listen. Get to it straightaway! Live a bit more recklessly. Sing and dance and live outside your comfort zone. Take more chances. Decide who to be, and go be it.

      Didion knew urgency and pain. She lost both her husband and adult daughter within a couple of devastating years of each other. She herself suffered from Parkinson’s Disease in her final years. She might have lived a glamorous life bouncing between Malibu and Manhattan early on, but she suffered losses that would floor any of us. And she shared her journey out of the abyss with her readers:

      “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. — from The Year of Magical Thinking

      Ultimately we either shatter into pieces and fade away ourselves or climb back out to make something of our remaining time on this earth. Didion was a fighter. And her words that remain even as she passes betray her spirit and prompt those who remain to carry on the work:

      “Do not whine… Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.” — from Blue Nights

    • Bottle Cap Time Machine

      I casually cracked open a bottle of water and placed the cap on the table. Sitting there, it seemed insignificant and commonplace. But hidden inside that cap is a time machine, bringing my brief encounter with it to the future, likely long after I’m gone myself. That bottle cap may survive the entire bloodline of my family, and by its very make-up an artifact representing an instant in my own brief moment in this world.

      Walk into any museum or visit an archeological dig and you’ll find artifacts to past lives. These were the bottle caps of their time, pottery, utensils, arrowheads and other trivial bits from which we derive the larger life of the person who left that artifact behind. That bottle cap represented but a moment of hydration in an otherwise ordinary day of business travel. I wonder what might be derived from it in the future, when millions of such plastic caps live on as time machines for countless other lives?

      The only thing certain is that they will point back at a time when the trivial bottle cap immediately became an afterthought, cast aside to begin its life cycle beyond our own. A life of hundreds of years, all to serve a few weeks of containing whatever fluid we happened to consume. The entire transaction is so commonplace in the average life of one soul on this planet, and yet has such a lasting impact on the environment.

      I wonder, what will it say about us?

    • Dancing in a State of Solitude

      “The spirit of silence must… pervade the whole of life. That is what matters most of all. It is said sometimes that solitude is the mother of results. Not solitude, but the state of solitude. So much so that we could, strictly speaking, conceive an intellectual life based on two hours’ work per day. But does anyone imagine that having set those two hours aside one may then act as if they did not exist? That would be a grave misconception. Those two hours are given to concentration, but the consecration of the whole life is none the less necessary.” — A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

      Living in a state of solitude sounds lonely, but really it’s just the opposite. Lonely is feeling apart from the world, living with a spirit of silence opens you up to the world, to be a part of it. And this is where the magic happens, or, if you will, the consecration of life. To live sacredly, fully alive, fully aware, and full of possibility. This isn’t derived from background noise and distraction, but from quieting the mind and truly seeing.

      “A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness and that to seek it is perversion”
      — John Graves

      A coworker resigned earlier this week to return to a job he’d previously left, not because the current position wasn’t lucrative and full of growth potential, but because he felt lonely. What he meant by that was he couldn’t drop by to see old industry friends every week in a route, like someone delivering milk. This is a life of the familiar, and there’s comfort in it that we can all understand. The pandemic robbed us of much of this, and even as variants spike people stubbornly hold on to interaction with others because it’s a part of their lives they don’t want to be away from any longer. Who doesn’t understand the draw of the comfortable and familiar?

      A state of solitude turns inward, not to be antisocial or reclusive, but to open up the senses to awareness. Awareness of the inner tension inside of us helps us see that battle others have inside themselves. And this awareness leads to a state of receptiveness—to take in the world as it comes to you. I’m no expert on such things, but I can see that those hours of concentration have brought me closer to it.

      “When someone is anxious about being aware all the time, you can spot the mild anxiety. They want to be awake, to find out if they’re really awake or not. That’s part of asceticism, not awareness. It sounds strange in a culture where we’ve been trained to achieve goals, to get somewhere, but in fact there’s nowhere to go because you’re there already. ” — Anthony De Mello, Awareness

      Do you want to dance in your awareness? Seek solitude, wherever you might be. Walk in the natural world. Breath deep, listen and look at the world buzzing around you, look inside, and see. And you’ll find, in the stillness of that moment, that you’re already dancing with it.

    • Now I Saunter

      “I don’t like either the word [hike] or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains – not ‘hike!’ Do you know the origin of that word saunter? It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the middle ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going they would reply, ‘A la sainte terre’, ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.” — John Muir

      I’ve been absent from the mountains for a long stretch now. A heel injury nags and before that an ankle injury right above it and really, what’s it all but excuses and reluctance to push onward through a bit of pain? I’d been saving this quote for my next saunter up the mountains—to the Holy Land—but I’m done waiting for the moment. For all my enduring love for the mountains, my pilgrimage is with life itself.

      John Muir turned the act of hiking to where it belonged; towards reverence. For who doesn’t encounter reverence deep in the mountains? And what of life? Life can be an unfair grind, filled with misery and pain and setbacks, and maybe we feel a bit of reluctance to be reverent about the slog we feel we’re on. There’s immense suffering in this world, serious challenges to our collective future, and I don’t turn a blind eye to it writing about sauntering merrily through life. But shouldn’t we meet each moment for the ripe potential it offers? Shouldn’t we seek a path that brings us to a better place?

      Once I plodded through life, grinding it out in jobs I didn’t love, invested in relationships that didn’t matter all that much in the end, wasting time on the inconsequential. Humans are very good at frivolously consuming away our time like so many empty calories, until our fingers reach the bottom of the bag and we realize we’re left with emptiness and greasy fingers. I’m not so much like that now. Now I celebrate moments. Now I saunter.

      The world continues to assault our senses. Sauntering is an embrace of the world as it is, taking it on the chin but greeting life as it comes. A move away from consumption in the present towards the mission of the future potential in all of us. Staying on the path with a spirit of aliveness despite the worst hardships life throws at us. Living with reverence for the gift of the pilgrimage.

    • Crossing the Stream to Deeper

      “If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else….

      The way to discover a terrifying longing is to liberate yourself from the self-censoring labels you began to tell yourself over the course of your mis-education… Focus on the external objects of fascination, not on who you think you are. Find people with overlapping obsessions.

      The information universe tempts you with mildly pleasant but ultimately numbing diversions. The only way to stay fully alive is to dive down to your obsessions six fathoms deep. Down there it’s possible to make progress toward fulfilling your terrifying longing, which is the experience that produces the joy.”
      — David Brooks, “The Art of Focus”, The New York Times

      The tricky thing about discovering “primary source” material is that you’ll uncover that what you believed to be primary source references other primary sources, which infers they aren’t the primary source at all. Such is the Great Conversation, spinning through life one book, interview or article at a time. We leap from one to the other, like stones across a stream, until we reach our destination with delight (and a new stack of reading material).

      Something recently pointed me towards Cal Newport’s Deep Work, which is a how-to book on pushing the shallow work aside to get to the deep work, where we differentiate ourselves and find true meaning in our careers and lives. Newport, in turn, pointed me towards several articles and books that I hadn’t previously been aware of, and a couple that I hadn’t fully absorbed on the first go-around. I’ve pursued them all recently, all in an effort to get meaningful work done. For we all must go deeper if there’s any hope for us to contribute something meaningful. And that requires breaking the spell of distraction:

      “Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.” — Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

      Here’s the thing: In diving into all this material around deep work, I’ve questioned whether this blog is itself deep or shallow (It aims for deep, but sometimes skims a bit shallower than I’d like). But what is the purpose of the blog but to establish a daily habit of writing and finding things out—things that gradually pull me deeper? Put another way, those stones I’m hopping across in life are documented, one at a time, for anyone that wishes to follow along. But even here, we all choose our own path across that stream of life, we just happen to land on the same spot now and then.

      That terrifying longing? It’s on the other side, and the only way to reach it is to stop watching the debris float by in the stream of distraction and focus on the next landing spot, and the one after that. Our time is short, and we have so far to go. So go deeper.

    • Raising a Voice in a Storm

      We’ve somehow arrived at a place where a lot of people seem to take issue with other people. Where people in power want to grab a lot more for themselves to stroke their egos. Where grabbing as much as possible now is more important than saving things for later. And I wonder at the strangeness of it all. For I view the world in just the opposite way. And I think that most people do as well.

      And yet the angry voices prevail. What do we make of it? And how do we turn things back towards collaboration and generosity? Back to where it felt we were not all that long ago.

      I believe the key is to raise our voice more often. I never was much for raising my voice and questioning the logic of some unusually vocal outlier. Too confrontational. But the problem is we have too many people just keeping their mouths shut and letting things be. And that’s when the people on the angry edges get their voice heard. That’s when the development edges out the forest. That’s when extremists storm the capital and pretend it wasn’t what you saw when it fails.

      Can’t be singing louder than the guns, while I’m gone
      So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here
      – Phil Ochs, When I’m Gone

      Maybe it was hearing this song again, thinking about the battles for peace and equality 50 years ago that have never been fully resolved, that has me thinking this way. Maybe it’s being sick and tired of all the violence and twisted logic parroted back to me from people sipping the poison a little too much. But I’ve about had it with passively listening to people justify what I believe to be wrong.

      We’re all taught to be polite, to not make a fuss about things. But others break this unspoken rule all the time to advance their interests. At some point you’ve got to rise up and speak for what is right. We have to speak up to save what is left of the planet and humanity. While it’s here.

    • Falling Into That Anne Rice Universe

      “We’re frightened of what makes us different.” – Anne Rice

      Anne Rice passed away on December 11th. She created Interview with the Vampire and the series of books that followed it, all of which I consumed ravenously as she awakened in me a new perspective on the world. To be swept up in a world of androgynous vampires where humans are definitely lower on the food chain, written from the perspective of a powerful woman, shook up the very different world of Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum novels I’d been hooked on at the time.

      Anne Rice turned the world upside down with her vampire series. She brought us face-to-face with what makes us different and forced us to confront it in captivating stories, and influenced a generation of writers who followed her to dive deeper in their own work. Here are five more quotes that stir and bolster and inspire:

      “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

      “To write something you have to risk making a fool of yourself.”

      “You do have a story inside you; it lies articulate and waiting to be written — behind your silence and your suffering.”

      “And books, they offer one hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.” – from Blackwood Farm

      “And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually… it doesn’t matter. Because if God does not exist, then life… every second of it… Is all we have.” – from Interview with the Vampire

    • I Guess I’ll Have to Do It While I’m Here

      And I won’t feel the flowing of the time when I’m gone
      All the pleasures of love will not be mine when I’m gone
      My pen won’t pour a lyric line when I’m gone
      So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here.
      – Phil Ochs, When I’m Gone

      It’s that time of year—the mad shift towards Christmas and New Years Eve and all that represents for us. There’s a natural and sometimes confusing triangulation of planning for the future, wrapping up the present and reflecting on what’s done and gone. I’d suggest that listening to this 55 year-old Phil Ochs folk song is a great way to pause and reflect on what might be prioritized from this moment onward.

      Ochs would end up committing suicide a decade after singing this song, with a family friend commenting in a New York Times obituary that “Mainly, the words weren’t coming to him anymore.” We all have our timeline and our perceived value to the world, the demons caught up with Ochs before he could climb back out of the darkness. The word “prescient” is used a lot when When I’m Gone is introduced, usually dropped right before telling people of Ochs suicide, as if it isn’t prescient for all of us.

      That’s the relentless message in this smooth folksy song: Stop waiting and do it while you’re here. For we’ll all be gone soon enough. Plan for the future, as we must, but live now.