Alexandersmap

    Category: Culture

    • Calm

      “Real power is not in momentary desires, but in complete calmness.” – Leo Tolstoy

      I have a bit of nervous energy as I write this. I’m traveling tomorrow for the first time in seven months and there’s a vibrating exhilaration deep inside knowing that I’m getting on a plane again, going to another state and driving around to places new to me. Mind you, its not like I’m flying to Antarctica for an extended climate change study, I’m going to Cleveland. I’ve been to Cleveland at least a half dozen times that I can recall and maybe a time or two beyond that. But it’s travel in a time of no travel, and this year that alone creates a buzz.

      I got the same vibration hiking solo up Mount Tecumseh earlier this summer. Not because it was a particularly challenging hike, but because I was hiking it alone late in the day. Just enough risk to raise the level of uncertainty, but calculated risk. Hiking alone at night inherently offers risk to the hiker. You just don’t have people walking by you to offer assistance. So you take extra care or alternatively, you charge ahead brazenly challenging fate.

      Calmness in the face of potential stressors is a superpower. In an age of talking heads stirring the pot of anxiety for advantage, of a pandemic ramping up for killing season, of a time when we teeter on the brink of a deeper recession or a depression and irreversible climate change should we get this wrong, in this time the calm prevail. We can take the bait and react, or swim calmly in the present storm.

      “Do not be concerned too much with what will happen. Everything that happens will be good and useful for you.” – Epictetus

      The posters used early on during the Blitz, “Keep Calm and Carry On” naturally come to mind. Those posters weren’t successful at the time as people viewed them as patronizing, but the expression has exploded in popularity in the last twenty years. Whether you view it as patronizing or nostalgic now, the expression does carry weight as a stoic reminder to keep your head about you. For in calmness we find clarity.

      During that time when the British were facing down Nazi aggression, Viktor Frankl was living a nightmare in a succession of Nazi prison camps, ending at Auschwitz before finally being freed at the end of the war. He observed that state of mind had a lot to do with who survived and who didn’t as much as the whim of fate. Some people were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but others just gave up in the face of hopelessness and horror. Some people survived simply because they had a purpose for living. Based on this experience, he wrote the extraordinary book Man’s Search for Meaning after the war.

      “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
      – Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

      Today we live in a time when everything is hyper-scrutinized, everything is a perceived affront, everything is designed to invoke a spark of fear or outrage. But when we swim in our sea of calmness, we overcome the efforts of those who would inspire a follow or a like or another cycle of commercials before they tell you the rest of the story. A calm mind sees the truth in the world and in ourselves. It remains the best foundation for a life of purpose and happiness. Want to improve the state of world? Be calm. And yes; carry on.

    • Choosing the Path

      “A lot of people don’t want to pick up the new skills that are necessary, or they don’t want to, for example, physically move, or they don’t want to disappoint the people in the relationships that they already have to make room for new relationships.

      So everybody wants to start where they are. Nobody wants to go back down the mountain to find the path going to the top. Everybody wants to stay on the path that they’re on, maybe make a few tweaks and get to the top. Or like Charlie Munger jokes; ‘You know people always ask me how do I get to be rich like you except quicker. I don’t want to be the old rich guy, I want to be the young rich guy.’

      So I think these are the hard parts. The hard parts aren’t the learning it’s the unlearning. The hard part isn’t the climbing up the mountain its the going back down to the bottom of the mountain and starting over. Its the beginner’s mind that every great artist or every great business person has, which is you have to be willing to start from scratch. You have to be willing to hit reset and go back to zero. Because you have to realize is that what you already know and what you are already doing is actually an impediment to your full potential. And most people just don’t want to acknowledge that.” – Naval Ravikant, on The Tim Ferriss Show Episode #473

      That’s a long quote, but I found it compelling enough to include it in its entirety. Naval has a way of waking you up to yourself. He’s a deep thinker who demands deep thinking from you as well. And he reminds you that you ought to demand it of yourself.

      Sometimes you climb to a certain rise in your career, your relationship or with some other pursuit you’re deeply invested in, you look around and realize that the path you’re on isn’t going to the top of the mountain you were meant to climb. That’s happened to me a few times in my life. It will surely again at some point in the future should I stick around long enough. The question is whether you make the decision to go back and start all over again. Can you teach an old dog a new trick?

      The obvious example of this is in my inner circle is the crew of Fayaway climbing off the mountain in their individual careers and going back to zero (income) with a three year sabbatical to see the world. And with the pandemic they’ve descended back down off of this mountain that they just started climbing and gone back to jobs to reset yet again. I admire their willingness to keep at it, and they challenge and inspire me to climb other mountains myself.

      So the question is, are you climbing, descending or stuck in place? What you’re already doing is an impediment to reaching your full potential. Staying put is the easy part. The hard part is turning back down the mountain and starting all over again. So where are you going anyway?

    • Jump In First

      I called three work friends yesterday to check in. I’m a bit old-school that way; I’d rather speak with someone than text with them. Two were doing well, one not so well with troubles at home and an uncertain job situation. All are surfing the same wave of 2020 crazy that the rest of us are. But we all react to things a bit differently, don’t we? I’m not a surfer, but I know a bumpy wave in choppy conditions is less enjoyable for surfing. I believe bumpy applies equally well in how some are facing this current year.

      I wouldn’t have known about the current situation with my friend if I hadn’t called him. He’s not posting marriage updates on Facebook (and I’m avoiding that platform at the moment anyway), and you don’t just run into people this year, so you haven’t heard about so-and-so from some mutual acquaintance. No, if you don’t reach out you don’t know how someone is really doing. So by all means, reach out. Jump in first. They could probably use the connection right about now.

      I’m not a natural at this, but I make a point of trying to connect with people. If you aren’t calling to check in, you’re waiting for them to reach out to you. They could well be waiting for you to do the same, and months and years go by without a call. I have some relatives who I adore and love speaking with who I haven’t connected with in years. While that’s on both of us, I believe the fault is mine. If the phone works both ways, then there’s no reason for you to not pick up the damned phone first. You might just be the difference in a dark day.

      And that got me thinking, if life is a collection of experiences, shouldn’t we:

      Make the call?

      Jump in first?

      Ask?

      Say it?

      Get out there?

      Try?

      Do the work?

      I suppose I could go on like this, but you get the idea.  Life is a brief collection of experiences, so why not experience life? Be the first couple on the dance floor. Be the first to jump in the cold water. Be first to do it. Be the first to say it. And if you aren’t first be quick to voice appreciation for those who go before you. It took a hell of a lot for them to jump in first.

    • Past Peak

      Normally this weekend in New Hampshire is peak foliage season. But a sustained drought has stressed the trees just enough to pull peak ahead by two weeks. So the thousands of people plugging up the roadways of the Mount Washington National Forest were seeing the forest muted in dynamic impact. And yet they came. And they saw enough. For the mountains offer their own ruggedly stunning backdrop. I considered the tourists on my afternoon commute home from a day of hiking. Clusters taking a photo next to the roadside sign announcing you were in the MWNF, picture-taking all around you. Cars parked in odd assortments along the sides of the road, as if clung together by magnets the way the metal dust would clump together in the old Wooly Willy toy would clump into beards and eyebrows with a magnetic stick. Funny what you think about when you observe tourists in the wild.

      To be amongst the mountains is relatively easy when you live in New Hampshire. Less so, I suppose, if one were to live in Florida. But they have that tropical water hugging them on three sides, and I suppose the amusement parks and fresh oranges to consider too. But you can’t swim in a pond in Florida without risk of being dragged down by an alligator. There are no alligators in the mountains of New Hampshire. Maybe the occasional bear or mountain lion, but they mostly want the food in your pack, not you as food. The bigger threat to your well-being are the damned rocks. New Hampshire is the granite state, and as if to hammer that point home every trail is worn down to ankle-bending, knee-twisting rock. And in October those land mines are covered over in a bed of beautiful leaves. So a descent becomes a shuffle of sorts, as you work to avoid catastrophic injury on remote yet well-traveled trails.

      I have a friend who points out my tendency to pick overindulgent goals for myself. Really though; all my friends point this out. Like rowing a million meters on an erg in three months, or taking my family on a hike up the toughest mile of the Appalachian Trail, or peak-bagging three out-and-back peaks in one day, as I did yesterday with Mounts Willey, Field and Tom. I might have taken a hint from my hiking pro friend who refers to these three as the WTF hike. I chose to experience it on my own, with an extra helping of previous injuries I was nursing. WTF indeed.

      The morning after a hike like the WTF hike, the first step is to get out of bed without incident. Plant your feet and gradually put weight on the ankles and knees that you abused so ruthlessly the day before. Assess how much they resent you, and then shuffle to the bathroom for relief and some Motrin. This isn’t a walk of shame as much as a recognition of all you’d done, in the form of some tender moving parts and sore muscles. And I wonder in those moments of truth, am I past peak myself? Or simply overindulgent? I’d like to think the latter. All I can do is keep moving. Perhaps with a bit of moderation next time. I suppose that’s a perfectly reasonable request.

      Past Peak

    • Reading is Autobiographical

      “The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand other things well.”

      It happens this way, that I’ll pick up some random quote such as the one above, plucked from a James Clear newsletter, and immediately I feel compelled to hunt down the source. In this case Hugh Walpole’s Reading: An Essay. Short enough to devour in a few quick bites, I blew through his essay in no time at all. I suppose it was inevitable, I’ve heard about this short essay for years, but never got around to it… until I read the quote above.

      Written in 1929, the essay references “The War” frequently, and I shudder to know what he didn’t know about the world to come over the next 12 years. There would soon be another war. Walpole would pass away in 1941, well before the outcome was certain. A discretely gay man in a time when discretion was required, he never had children and turned his energy into a prolific writing career. Reading: An Essay is a love letter to his favorite pastime, and I found myself plucking quote-after-quote from it. I’m sure there are plenty I missed, and perhaps I’ll read it again sometime soon. But who wants to get everything out of an essay on the first go-around anyway? With reading, Walpole is a kindred spirit from a hundred years ago. He capitalizes “Reading” as if it were a person or a sacred subject, because of course it was to him. And in his reverence for the topic, the essay felt like a quiet conversation with a friend. So here are a few gems from this short essay:

      “I believe, with the pleasures of Reading it can be nothing if it is not autobiographical, for the only certain thing about Reading is that it is personal first, personal second, and personal all the time, and Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Divina Comedia may be the twin dominating peaks of a glorious range, but they are nothing to you whatsoever if you happen to be looking the other way.” – Hugh Walpole, Reading: An Essay

      “For the rest of my days there should be always at my hand a land of escape and enchantment.”

      “Reading must be a personal adventure or the salt goes out of it.”

      “Libraries should be penetrated with the love of books, so that when you enter a room where the books are the air is warm with a kind of delicious humanity, and the books have been always so affectionately treated that, like the right kind of dog, they know no fear and yet have their fitting dignity.”

      “I believe that circumstances have altered very little, and that a novel to be absorbing has to have precisely the two ingredients that it had a hundred years ago, a narrative gift (and it doesn’t matter whether the narrative is about a tea party or a murder trial) and the creation of living characters.”

      “There is a kind of luxury in reading which is perhaps the best thing in the world; it is to be captured only, I think, through the old books, books that you know so well that they step out and meet you, take you by the arm and whisper in your ear: ‘Now lie back and talk to us, and then we will in turn tell you a thing or two. There’s no need to be clever this evening, we don’t want you to shine, we’ll have an hour or two together so pleasant that you’ll scarcely know we’re here.’”

      All of this talk of libraries and Reading makes me want to immerse myself in a good book. The house is still quiet, the sun hasn’t risen yet on this cold morning, and there’s time for another mug of coffee and a few chapters before the frenzied swirl of activity begins. If you’ll excuse me…

    • Double Four Time: Dire Straits in Four Songs

      October makes me gravitate to a certain style of music. I grow more reflective and pensive as we move past harvest time and into a time of frosts and falling leaves, and my playlist tends to reflect this mood. Van Morrison, U2, Steely Dan all start appearing more than they did in the warmer months with longer days. And so too does Dire Straits. Four in particular become standards of Autumn evenings, which grow longer by the day. A good time for roaring fires and a dram of your favorite scotch.

      Sultans of Swing
      “You check out guitar George, he knows-all the chords
      Mind, it’s strictly rhythm he doesn’t want to make it cry or sing
      They said an old guitar is all, he can afford
      When he gets up under the lights to play his thing”

      This one has to be there, of course. Perhaps you might make a case for Money For Nothing as the “hit” to include on the list, but I’m partial to their first big song. Packed with relentless energy, this one is a great driving with fallen leaves scattering about behind you song. Or maybe early in the evening before the coals really start glowing and reflecting the truth right back at you.

      Down To The Waterline
      “Up comes a coaster fast and silent in the night
      Over my shoulder all you can see
      Are the pilot lights
      No money in our jackets and our jeans are torn
      Your hands are cold but your lips are warm”

      One of those songs that starts in a moody, almost sultry place. But you know its going to burst into flames of passion soon enough, and it doesn’t disappoint. You know these guys lived the portrait they’re painting in this song, going down to the waterline to have some quiet intimacy. The song ends way too soon, like those waterline visits probably did.

      Brothers in Arms
      “Through these fields of destruction
      Baptism of fire
      I’ve watched all your suffering
      As a battle raged high
      And though they did hurt me so bad
      In the fear and alarm
      You did not desert me
      My brothers in arms”

      As a student of the violent history of humanity, I get a catch in my throat when I hear this song. I’ve never been to war, never been in the military for that matter, but I pay attention when those who have tell what it was like. I’ve heard this song resonates with veterans, and while I’ll never fully understand what they went through, I think I can understand why.

      On Every Street
      “There’s gotta be a record of you someplace
      You gotta be on somebody’s books
      The lowdown, a picture of your face
      Your injured looks
      The sacred and profane
      The pleasure and the pain
      Somewhere your fingerprints remain concrete
      And it’s your face I’m looking for on every street”

      Haunted by someone you once knew, or wanted to know. If The Police’s Every Breath You Take was a “stalker song”, this is a song of longing unfulfilled. And who hasn’t felt that? As Mark Knopfler guitar songs go, this one is right up there on my list of favorites, along with Sultans of Swing and Wild Theme from his solo catalog.

    • Vigor (and a Smile)

      Eddie Van Halen passed away yesterday. And so it is that another chunk of my childhood drifts away into the otherworld. I was never much of a guitar player, but it isn’t hard to see Eddie Van Halen playing his guitar Frankenstein and see a virtuoso at work. I suppose there are other guitar players I personally love listening to more for their particular style, but there was no better guitar player on the planet than Eddie Van Halen. That he never learned to read music amazes me, but it shows the difference between knowing the music on paper and living the music in practice. You don’t have to be great at everything, just your particular thing.

      My own life is about as far from the life that Van Halen lived as anyone’s. I’m a New Englander, he grew up an immigrant child in Los Angeles. I dabbled in bass guitar and put it aside when I started college, a victim of my overall casual approach to any form of discipline at the time. He latched onto music and went all in. In the ten years from 1978 to 1988 he was about as big a rock god as you could find. I quietly went about my life, stepping stone to stepping stone, from kid watching Star Wars to high school and college. Completely different life tracks. A pity he always had that damned cigarette burning away. Those would kill him eventually, just as he was entering his elder statesman stage of life.

      I suppose the big lesson with Eddie Van Halen is to put in the time necessary to master your craft. Don’t half-ass your work. But the thing that sticks out with him is that huge smile when he played guitar. He was a guy in love with his craft, exuding joyous electricity. And that love of craft was exactly why he put in the insane amount of time necessary to become one of the best guitar players who ever lived. If you don’t love your craft, why the hell would you do it? And that’s the difference between a craft and your job. You work to make money to feed the family and pay for the stuff of life. You perform your craft to extend some of your life force out into the world. That’s true whether you’re knitting a pair of mittens or writing a novel or playing guitar.

      So a fair question to ask as you follow your muse then is will this pursuit make me smile like Eddie Van Halen playing his guitar? If yes, proceed. If no, well, find another way to express yourself in the world. For if Eddie taught us anything yesterday, it would be that life is too damned short to flitter away your life force on other things. Pursue your thing. And do it with vigor (and a smile).

    • Choosing the Mindset

      “Your mindset is the filter through which you see the world. It determines how you spend your time, what decisions you make, and where you invest your resources.

      There’s an old saying in business that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

      If you want to be fit, hang out with friends who exercise.

      If you want to think big and aspire to change the world, hang out with people who have Moonshots and a massively transformative purpose (MTP)….

      As an entrepreneur, answering these questions is a critical part of your journey to be successful during this era of exponential change.

      The next step on that journey is choosing the mindset(s) that works best for you.”
      – Peter Diamandis       (from his Twitter thread)

      I found myself lost in PowerPoint for the last two days, creating a presentation well into the evening for a meeting on Monday afternoon. You might think being lost in PowerPoint is a bad thing, and we’ve all suffered through plenty of really bad PowerPoint presentations, compounded by webinars that eliminate the human-to-human interaction that makes them more engaging. But in this case, I was taking a large topic and boiling it down into concise slides. And the time flew by as I researched crime data and regulatory requirements and other such things that make a slide deck come alive. It occurred to me that I actually loved the creative aspect of creating slide decks. And then it occurred to me that it isn’t using the Microsoft product that I love, it’s finding creative ways to tell the story that I love.

      How to best leverage that creative energy remains (always) the question. And I think about Moonshots and massively transformative purpose in the way that Diamandis suggests, and find myself challenged to perform at a higher level still. Blogging every day seems to be a good direction, but I’m not seeing it as the community of writers I thought it would be. I suppose it was never going to be that. Blogging may not be a Nitya Puja, but it is a daily step on the journey that pushes aside the accumulated clutter of life for a time. Writing becomes a meditation of sorts, and brings you closer to the truth… so maybe, in a sense, it is a Nitya Puja after all.

      Jim Rohn said, and Diamandis references in the quote above, that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. In a pandemic that generally means being inside your bubble of family and a few close associates. Every other relationship and engagement with others seems to be remote: Zoom, Facebook, InstaGram, Twitter, TikTok and all the rest. Are those people raising your average or dragging you down? Increasingly it feels like the latter. Watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix and see how manipulative the world of social media is, and ask whether it should be a significant part of your life (Netflix has mastered manipulative distraction itself). And yet I pulled the Diamandis quote from Twitter, so there’s value in social media platforms. But little value in distraction.

      All that noise is clogging the mindset filter, and I find myself wanting to cut the cord once more. When you start checking how many likes your last post had or figuring out how many views you got on your last blog post it can drag you into the depths of distraction. How do you get anything meaningful done if you’re always distracted? And getting things done seems to be the real purpose. Not meaningless things, but the purposeful things that make you a better human. To contribute more. To be more. To reach your potential in this maze we call life. And it begins with your mindset.

    • A Moment With Harold Evans

      “I appreciate engineers, I wrote a book about their achievements, but I deprecate what they and other techies do to English words. Hey, these nouns and verbs aren’t bits of silicon you can dope with chemicals (boron, phosphorus, and arsenic), drop into a kiln at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and slice and dice. Words breathe. They need TLC—you know,”
      ― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

      When the world seems to be looking too far inward, when everyone around you seems to be spun up into things that shouldn’t matter, when the conversation turns towards the latest scandal in Hollywood or Washington or Buckingham Palace… seek other voices. Because the only way you’ll grow is to rise up towards it. The larger conversations in the world are happening without you until you join the adult table. When you get to the adult table, by all means be ready to join the conversation.

      Sir Harold Evans passed away last week at the age of 92. In a wild case of six degrees of separation I once had Thanksgiving dinner with Harold Evans and his wife Tina Brown, putting me literally at the adult table with two of the most influential and brilliant people in the publishing industry. I was a college student who happened to be in the right place at the right time – they lived next door to the place we were for the long weekend and we invited them over. Simple. The parents were up to the conversation at hand, I wasn’t quite up to the task – a college kid who still thought he knew everything and not bothering to do the work needed to get closer to there. Harold Evans asked me a question about which candidate in the Republican Primary I liked, and without any thought to the matter I blurted out “Bob Dole” without explanation. It seemed like a safe answer at the time. He looked at me patiently and diverted to other topics with someone else, ending our conversation instead of trying to draw any logic out of my answer. He and I both knew I’d punted. I always regretted not being better prepared for a conversation like that.

      “His parents had taught him to make the most of himself, so he had. Though he kept a certain working-class deference and friendliness, did not shout, was “Harry” to everyone and would quite kindly tell reporters their copy was hopeless, he had taken on almost every part of the establishment and made it quake.” – Harold Evans’ Obituary, The Economist

      Reading about Evans’ life, I was struck by how hard he had worked to raise himself up and to demand the best from himself and others. I remember he was a voracious reader, and would often devour several books on the drive from New York City out to Quogue, New York. As the editor of Random House he needed to read quickly because he had an endless stream of books coming at him. I would try speed-reading a few times over the years attempting to get as much from it as people like Evans did. But I’ve found that speed-reading doesn’t work for me. I like to linger on words and sentences a bit too much. If I were to have that one conversation with him again I might ask how he approached reading. I suspect he did it two ways, for work and for pleasure, and the speed varied based on which it was. It would have been a better conversation than the Republican Primary of 1987-1988.

      “Running a newspaper gave him “a glorious opportunity of attacking the devil”. – Harold Evans’ Obituary, The Economist

      Harold Evans was fired from The Times by Rupert Murdoch, setting up his move to New York and his rise to the top of the publishing industry. Had he not been fired I would never have met him. He used it as fuel to rise up even higher, and it was surely a gift not having to cater to the whims and biases of Murdoch. Attacking the devil was a purpose, and I wondered sometimes what he thought of the nastiness of present-day politics. But there it was, an interview from 2017 where he called Boris ‘buoyantly reckless’, Trump dangerous and May ‘terrifically smart’. I believe he was on point with all three. No surprise for a man who did the work necessary to find the truth of the matter with the most evasive of characters. Thinking back, I was no match for him at the time. But he helped inspire me to try harder, as I suspect he did with many others over the years. I wish I’d had another conversation with the man, I was more prepared for the next one.

    • Life on Venus

      “Apparently it smells basically like death… It just smells horrific. We once, I think, found a report of someone saying it smelled like the rancid diapers of the spawn of Satan.” – Clara Sousa-Silva, NPR interview

      Life on Venus? Not exactly, but life swirling about in the clouds of Venus is apparently a very real possibility. That there’s a possible confirmation of life in the universe beyond Earth is extraordinary. That the life in question – Phosphine – smells like the bad gas of a rat after a night of dumpster diving is extraordinarily 2020. And yet here we are.

      In another year the announcement of life on another planet would have been front page news. But Phosphine isn’t particularly sexy as life goes, and we have enough alien life to deal with right here on Earth already. Honestly I’m happy there are brilliant people like Clara Sousa-Silva and her peer Jane Greaves are out that the very thing that we’ve all been looking at all along has potential living matter dancing in the Venus clouds. My mind simply doesn’t function in such a way that I’d make that connection between the chemical signature of Phosphine as proof of life on Venus. Or rather, life in the clouds of Venus.

      That brilliant women are leading the discovery of life on Venus leads to the rather obvious men are from Mars, women are from Venus analogy, but I dare not go further than that. I’ll simply concede that these women are far ahead of me in the brain matter department and doing mind-blowing work. I spend my time with words and images and making connections between people, not immersed in science. Shame on me, really, for this is really fascinating.

      And yes, I’ll admit it: Venus and I have had a long relationship. It’s not exclusive, mind you, but we get together often on long evening walks or quiet moments of stargazing. I admit I even take the binoculars out sometimes to get a closer look. But I knew the relationship was best kept long-distance. Venus has a toxic personality, after all. Best to look but not touch. And now to find out that she has bad breath too. It’s all too much, really. To gaze in wonder at this heavenly object for years only to find out she’s not at all what you expected her to be. But expectations are funny things, and we spend far too much time elevating objects of our affection to higher levels than they ought to occupy. That’s a lesson we can bring right back to Earth straight from the clouds of Venus.