Alexandersmap

    Category: Culture

    • The Length and Breadth of Life

      “Go out this morning. Love yourself, and that means rational and healthy self-interest. You are commanded to do that. That’s the length of life. Then follow that: Love your neighbor as you love yourself. You are commanded to do that. That’s the breadth of life.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

      Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. day in the United States. It’s also inauguration day for the new/old President. We may choose to celebrate what we wish to celebrate today, that’s our right. I’ll be a voice for hope, love and understanding today. May we all become better versions of ourselves than we’ve been thus far, for we still have so far to go.

      We ought to take care of ourselves better. Eat better, drink more water and less alcohol, move more, find ways to let stress float away instead of embedding itself inside us until it metastasizes. Living a healthy lifestyle is a choice that pays dividends, hopefully with a longer life, but surely with a more vibrant, energetic life now.

      All that newfound energy ought to be put to good use. We may find a community of positive, productive people who raise our expectations of what is possible. Opening ourselves to the world allows our minds the elbow room necessary to expand our perspective. We are the average of the five people we associate with the most, so why settle for a community that drags us down? There’s no reason why can’t reshuffle the deck and raise the bar.

      Asking what we’ve been conditioned for is often the first step to moving ourselves to a better condition. A longer life is not guaranteed but possible. A broader life is like changing our glasses out for a new prescription—life-changing perspective is often a matter of changing what we’re focus on. It can happen today. And really, what better day is there than today to bring positive change into our world?

    • The View of Here

      Gratitude—is not the mention
      Of a Tenderness,
      But its still appreciation
      Out of Plumb of Speech.

      When the Sea return no Answer
      By the Line and Lead
      Proves it there’s no Sea, or rather
      A remoter Bed?
      — Emily Dickinson

      As I write this, my daughter has moved twice to put some distance between herself and the wildfires raging in Los Angeles. She is now thankfully in a safer place, but it was a stark reminder of just how fragile our days are. I read about people losing everything but what they carry with them and I look around and wonder what I’d grab on my way out the door should it happen here. The answer is both everything and nothing at all but the souls who orbit my world.

      It’s no surprise that this blogger leans into productivity and improvement. The question we must always ask ourselves is, towards what? Where is all the hustle and effort bringing us? When we read a book, is it for the simple pleasure of reading that book or are we trying to glean something out of it to help move the chains down the field? We ought to remember the simply pleasures in our march, and learn to savor the view of here.

      The things we are grateful for generally outweigh the things we find lacking in our lives, but humans have a way of focusing on the latter anyway. Constant, never-ending improvement is a blessing and a curse, for this march to personal excellence means we’re rarely satisfied with where we are. Simply taking stock of all that we have already clarifies exactly how deep our blessings run. We don’t need a crisis to clarify, we simply need to stop forever chasing the promise of potential to swim in the abundant depth of here and now.

    • Silence, Exile, and Cunning

      “I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.” ― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

      We’re in a strange new world, full of people believing unbelievable things. Or maybe the world has always been strange and unbelievable, and I’ve just risen above the din to finally see it all myself. These are days we’ll remember, at least if we survive long enough and the victors are on the right side of history.

      Belief is a funny thing, carrying us to places we may never have imagined we’d go to, simply because we believed the story that pulled us there. This can serve us well, when used for snuffing out imposter syndrome and such things for productive work. The day I stepped away from anonymous blogging to having friends and family fully aware of what I’m writing (if at all inclined) was a notable moment in my development as a writer. There are other notable moments to come this year on the writing front (I believe this to be true).

      Belief can also be used to control the masses. The world is a far more dangerous place because of shared beliefs of “us versus them”. It leads to mass indifference at the separation of families at borders and the bombing of hospitals and schools, all to keep them from threatening us. We all know the world is a complicated place with no easy answers, but when someone loudly starts pointing their fat finger at another group and screaming “Them!” it’s usually time to back slowly away to look for the real story. But who tells real stories anymore?

      There is no them
      There’s only us
      — U2, Invisible

      The thing I tell people who dare to ask me what I think is that we must build resilience into our lives. Some people believe resilience is hoarding guns, food and toilet paper. There’s a whole economy built around those folks. My own form of resilience lies in creating more diversity in my diet. Better nutrition for the mind and body through selective consumption. More books, poetry and song, less curated social media and billionaire-run mass media. And, as James Joyce suggested, the use of silence, exile and cunning to build a mote between the zealots and all that I know to be true in this world.

      There’s nothing silent about a blog post. It’s a stamp of stated beliefs marking this moment in time. A betrayal that I’m still trying to change the world for the better. We may choose to be a voice for reason and acceptance, after all. At least until things really go to hell and they ship us all to Greenland to mine precious metals for the next generation of self-driving cars, weaponized drones and phones that tell us what to believe next (I digress).

      We may be selectively silent when it suits our purposes, just as we may exile ourselves from the zealots who would have us fall in line. Both tools have limitations in a small world with big reach. That leaves us with cunning. We must be smarter than the average bear, to stay one step ahead of what they want to tell us is true. This is the ultimate resilience, and it begins and ends with our audacity to think differently.

    • Happy Holidays

      “All you can take with you is that which you’ve given away.”
      — Pa Bailey, It’s a Wonderful Life

      We had the clan together at the same table for the first time in forever last night. It was a wonderful way to celebrate Christmas Eve, breaking bread and catching up face-to-face. All adults now. We’re spread across the country, this clan, and it’s a joy to be under the same roof again, if only for a day. And that’s the whole point of this holiday season; our gift of time together.

      For those who celebrate, Merry Christmas. And Happy Holidays to all who don’t. May these days bring peace and love to your doorstep.

    • It’s the Zombies Who Burned the Witches

      “All empty souls tend to extreme opinion. It is only in those who have built up a rich world of memories and habits of thought that extreme opinions affront the sense of probability. Propositions, for instance, which set all the truth upon one side can only enter rich minds to dislocate and strain, if they can enter at all, and sooner or later the mind expels them by instinct.” — William Butler Yeats

      I stumbled upon the social media rantings of an old college friend recently. I was shocked by the conspiracy theories being spouted, and recoiled at the gap that has developed between her worldview and my own. I’d tried to debate her before on her accuracy, but alas, she wouldn’t budge. Another college friend reminded me of the line they use when logic isn’t working: If you only knew what I knew. Right. If only…

      I understand better how people once burned witches. They were simply too devoid of experience to understand the things happening to them. When we know how to prevent smallpox or the plague, or to mitigate infant mortality or crop failure, we stop blaming the neighbor’s daughter who looked at us funny. We’ve entered a time when extreme opinions are paralyzing our progress, and it’s a direct result of the poverty of experience in the daily diet of so many. We’re all in danger of being burned at the stake as we look at these people who once seemed normal spiral into conspiracy theories fueled by an over-reliance on “Internet facts”.

      Have you noticed that all of the people living in the world’s intellectual centers perish in the zombie apocalypse movies? The survivors all move to remote walled villages with high walls and guns that somehow kill already dead people. In the real world, the zombies are the people building walls that close out contrary opinions and buying guns to fend off those who would dare cross them. We all agree that we must not become zombies, we just don’t agree on what a zombie actually is.

      In truth, I am conspiring—to keep hope alive. To help people find informational nutrition, and with it, to form better opinions. To seek experience beyond the walls, where insight lives. That pendulum has to swing back to consensus and shared beliefs some day, right? The alternative is to build our own walls, and doesn’t the world have enough of those already?

    • Becoming Better at Seeing

      I was talking to one of my in-law’s neighbors while walking the pup on their street. The neighbor has reached a place where you might call her elderly and frail, but was out shoveling her driveway because her grandson hadn’t shown up to do it. We’re all so busy this time of year… the grandson surely wouldn’t have let his grandmother shovel her driveway alone on a frigid day, but he wasn’t there to witness it and step in. My daughter and I were, and finished her driveway, cleared off her car and asked her if she wanted to come over to join us at the holiday party we were having. She politely declined and thanked us for the invitation.

      We become comfortable in our routines, even when those routines don’t make sense for us anymore. In a perfect world the tribe would revere and support the tribal elders. We live in a world where we’re tapped out and stretched thin, and sometimes we don’t get around to making the call or stopping by to see how those tribal elders are doing. Often they’re holding on by a thread, doing the best they can. A burst of snow quickly freezing into concrete has the potential to put someone over the edge without a lifeline.

      When we slow down a beat and stop rushing on to the next thing with our blinders on, our peripheral vision improves greatly. There are people moving through this world who easily see gaps and fill them with their full attention. I aspire to be more like them, while knowing I’m one of those people who are often too busy to have that situational awareness. We all want to help, don’t we? We just don’t always see. As we move down our path towards personal excellence, becoming better at seeing and solving is something to aspire to. We’re all in this tribe together, aren’t we?

    • Living Towards

      “People think being alone makes you lonely, but I don’t think that’s true. Being surrounded by the wrong people is the loneliest thing in the world.”
      ― Kim Culbertson, The Liberation of Max McTrue

      I live in a small town with no traffic lights in New Hampshire that snugs up against Massachusetts. I’ve been here for three decades now and for the life of me I know I’ll never feel like a local despite knowing many of them, watching our children grow up together and watching some of those children begin to have children. How can one spend more than half their years in a town and still feel they’re an outsider?

      I’ve been plotting my escape from this town for years, but then I keep running into people with a shared history and find the conversation pleasant. I stood out in the semi-frozen front yard raking up acorns and wore out my arm waving to neighbors driving past on their way back from Sunday activities. I recognize the patterns of the season in this town, from how the stars align against the hillsides to where the deer go to hide from all the hunters. There’s a rhythm to familiarity that we may wear like a warm coat.

      Life is what we make of it. Where we live, what we do for work, and how much time we spend with people who don’t see the world the way we do is often up to us. We are the light in someone’s day when we encounter them, or we’re a reminder to them that they’ve got to get out of this place. The world largely reflects back what we project out to it. The last few years I’ve projected that I’d rather be somewhere else than this small town. Who can blame the town for feeling the same about me?

      The thing is, we ought to be building our lives towards something, not recoiling from something. It’s a subtle difference, but the latter has us on our heels, the former has us charging ahead. One is regression, one is progression. Don’t we all want to feel like we’re making progress in our lives? When the world seems to be shrinking from us, it’s usually a reflection of our own stance with it. We must lean into our future, wherever we want it to take us. Just be sure to give a wave and a smile to the neighbors, they look like they’re going through some things too.

    • Tradition (Happy Thanksgiving)

      “Tradition is the illusion of permanence.” — Woody Allen

      The fact that we’ve always done something a certain way doesn’t mean that thing ought to be done that way forever. Tradition is merely a form of habit, ritualized and accepted as the way. But life is change, and tradition is thus always in a fragile state. We all crave some measure of permanence and familiarity in a world that guarantees nothing. And so it takes people deliberately choosing to do something the same way again and again that makes a tradition stick. For Americans, the ultimate expression of tradition is Thanksgiving.

      For more than half my life I’ve been getting up early and prepping a bird for a mid-afternoon meal with family and friends. It’s a lovely tradition, but admittedly unusual. I mean, it’s right in the middle of the work week, we’re all spread out across the country now, and the whole thing is just so expensive in time and effort. And we love it so because we’re all together again, for no other reason than that we choose to be. And that’s cause for celebration.

      We know (or we must know) that time flies (tempus fugit) and we’re all quite fragile (memento mori), and any one of these Thanksgivings may be the last for us. The whole holiday is an acknowledgement that we made it to here, today, and mostly together despite all that is happening in the world, and we ought to celebrate our arrival here today with a traditional meal altered slightly for dietary considerations. Yes, life is change, and we are surely changed by this complicated business of living, but today we still have this wonderful tradition and each other. Happy Thanksgiving.

    • Here We Are

      “A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.”
      ― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I

      Those who pay attention know the score. Those who don’t are happy with the distractions the world flashes in front of them one after the other. They don’t want to know the score, they want to be entertained in the moment. Let the world crash down later as long as we all have a good laugh now. And here we are.

      To pay attention is to watch a story where you know the ending but you just hope maybe there will be one of those Hollywood twists that make everything all right. Whoops, the scientists forgot to carry over the extra value! Climate change is magically fixed! Only a clown would believe that, and here we are.

      The only answer is to build a resilient life for ourselves. Live in places that put us in the best position possible for the best or worst case scenario. Invest well financially, but also in our knowledge, our network and in our physical and mental health. Resilience is a way of life, not a lock on the door. It’s seeing how high the flood waters might rise and building ever higher than that. Yes, here we are, but maybe we need to move up and over there.

      The stoics went through their version of all this themselves. That they wrote about it offers us a light in the darkness with which to navigate. We too may be writers and thinkers and live boldly individual lives apart from the whims of a distracted society. We’ll be fine or we won’t, all we can control in the universe is how we react. Amor fati (love of fate). And here we are.

    • Another Way

      “Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way.” — Franz Kafka

      Nothing is forever, it’s easy to see that in the transactions of life, but some things return back to us in another form. I will always believe the world reflects back what we project into it, and when we project love, we find we receive just enough back. We can’t very well hoard such things as love, for the act of hoarding isn’t love at all, and results in a reflection back that isn’t love. There are plenty of examples of people whoring themselves out thinking they’ll get love in return, when all they really get are a bunch of whores hanging around them. That ain’t love.

      I started a new gig yesterday, mostly because it felt like the right fit but also because I don’t like to sit still very much. Between the old and the new gig, I’d done all the yard chores, participated in a window replacement project and painted rooms. All just to get things done. Each of these things may feel like chores, but they’re all opportunities to return love to those who have loved us.

      Each act in a lifetime is a message to those around us about the type of person we’re going to be. When all feels lost we may be a beacon to help someone find their way. This is how to live in a world that often feels cold and dark. There is always another way, and it begins with love.