Alexandersmap

    Category: Health

    • Riding the Shining Sea Bikeway

      Rail trails offer a great opportunity to walk, skate or ride without dealing with the resentful glare of automobile drivers who believe they own the road while controlling your life in their distracted hands. The Shining Sea Bikeway ups the ante with beautiful views and a diverse landscape. The trick on this trail is to avoid being too distracted yourself as the views stack up one upon the other.

      The trail lives up to its name, with views of Buzzard Bay across both of the Sippewissett Marshes (Little and Great—but aren’t they both great?) and of Vineyard Sound and Martha’s Vineyard as it hugs the beach. Shining Sea runs from North Falmouth to Woods Hole, offering plenty of options to linger for time on the beach, stroll through woodland trails, or a visit to the many shops and restaurants of Main Street in Falmouth and Woods Hole.

      As a sucker for salt water, it was easy to fall in love with the beachside section of the trail. Here you’re treated to those expansive views, the latest trends in beach fashion, and a monument to the trail’s namesake, Katharine Lee Bates, author of “America the Beautiful”, which ends with the famous line, “from sea to shining sea”. Very few Americans can recite every verse of America, the Beautiful, but everyone knows that last line.

      The magic on this trail is in riding through a tunnel of woodland canopy, salt march grass, past that beach sand and finally to the trail’s terminus at the Woods Hole Ferry. For a cyclist with dreams of never getting in a car for a vacation on the Cape and islands, the Shining Sea Rail Trail makes a strong statement of what’s possible. For this cyclist, it was an opportunity to give the feet a break while getting some exercise with a view.

      From the North Falmouth terminus, it’s a 21 mile (33 km) round trip. That’s very manageable on a good bicycle. The human body connects with a bicycle in five places, each essential to a great experience. Perhaps none more than the seat. My bicycle seat was apparently designed to maximize suffering, but no matter, a sore saddle wasn’t going to ruin one of the prettiest rail trails in the northeast United States. The seat is replaceable, the memories will last far longer.

      There may be no better time to experience the Shining Sea Bikeway than autumn. September is a great time to get the warmth with the crowds, and October should be spectacular for fall colors in that canopy. It’s a trail worth considering if you’re interested in experiencing Cape Cod without the hassle of driving in traffic.

    • Go Be It

      “The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process, is its own reward.” — Amelia Earhart

      I woke up sore all over, with muscles tight and grumpy, protesting the last week of doing what they’re supposed to do but somehow forgot about in lazy compliance with the mind. The soreness is a lag measure of work applied, simply that, and eventually the lag will be replaced by acceptance of the new reality. It was certainly far easier to get out of shape than to climb back to shape. Such is the way.

      Decide what to be and go be it… simple on the face of it because it is in fact that simple. The hard part is hidden under the surface of those words: Go be it. Talk is cheap, and decisions without action are nothing but talk until we drag ourselves along for the transformation.

      It’s far easier to have a bit of wine and cheese after a long day than it is to change into workout clothes and earn the right to wear them. It’s far easier to start our work a bit later, and end it a bit earlier. And it’s far easier to doom scroll on our phones than to turn off all distraction and dance with the important but not urgent tasks that move the chains in our lives. But there’s a reason easy has a negative connotation. Deep down, we know it in the moment.

      So sure, I’m sore today, just as I’ve been sore for well over a week. It’s just the gap between where I am and where I want to be expressing itself. And what is expression but the manifestation of a feeling? Whatever discomfort we feel in the moment is part of the process of becoming, a manifestation of what we want to be. It’s that voice in our head reminding us that this time, if we stay with it, we might actually be it.

    • The Passing Lane

      “We are all of us clocks whose faces tell the passing years.” — Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World

      The older you get—and I’m in no way conceding I’m old yet—the more it feels like life is lived in the fast lane. not in that cool Eagle’s SoCal vibe way, but in that “Where did the time go?” way. We are each passing the time, while our accumulation of wrinkles and grays keep score. The rings on a tree tell the story of years of abundant rain balanced by years of scarcity and drought, and so do our faces.

      Someone in the family recently tempted fate and announced he was cancer free all over social media. I sure hope he is, but can’t help but shake my head at the recklessness of his announcement. I’ve seen cancer return with a vengeance, reclaiming those who believed they were liberated. Does that mean we should we walk on eggshells? Of course not, but we shouldn’t tempt fate either.

      It’s never been about how old we are, but how healthy. As the years pass by we see too many examples of vibrant people rapidly fading away as they succumb to injury or illness. Each example informs, and we learn not to be reckless in our habits, with our time, or with our proclamations.

      Time flies by, and with each year we pick up another growth ring. Wrinkles tell a story of time and resilience. But we know that we’ll all enter the passing lane sooner or later.

    • The “What’s Our Fire” Exam

      “Proper examination should ruin the life that you’re currently living. It should cause you to leave relationships. It should cause you to reestablish boundaries with family members and with colleagues. It should cause you to quit your job.” — @naval

      We march through our day-to-day life without serious thought about the big picture. What really matters to us, and are we moving towards that? Sometimes examination tells us we’re on the right track, sometimes we find more smoke than fire. But we ought to sort out what’s going on either way.

      Examination doesn’t invite trouble, it offers a lifeline. We get in the habit of saying things that won’t rock the boat. I’d suggest that the boat ought to be rocked now and then. There’s nothing wrong with a spring cleaning for the soul. Purge all those pent-up resentments and simmering anger and give them air to breath. They’ll either ignite into a bonfire or smother for lack of fuel. But we can’t just live every day ignoring the growing inferno without being burned alive from the inside-out.

      Socrates famously said that “The unexamined life is not worth living”. Are we meant to be a torch or merely kindling for someone else’s dreams? Think of the things that we accept in our life that are frivolous and inconsequential on the surface, and worse, distract us from the things that might be life-changing given the chance. The thing that makes Naval’s statement incendiary is that we may find we’ve just been kindling all along. Isn’t it fair to ask, what is our fire, anyway?

    • You Are What You Eat

      “The longer your food lasts, the shorter you will.” — David Sinclair

      Simple tweet from Sinclair that elegantly sums up the mission: eat fresh, natural food without preservatives. Eliminate the sketchy processed foods from our diets. Stop piling on junk atop junk for our bodies to stress over. We all know it intuitively yet make exceptions for what we chew on. We forget the long game for the savory moment.

      When you read a statement like that, are you inclined to dismiss it? Challenge it? Or accept it as a wisdom nugget? Do you change the way you eat or defer action to another day? If we are what we eat what exactly are we becoming?

      The shorter the truth nugget, the longer it lingers in the mind.

    • Plans

      What is an intention when compared to a plan? —Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

      What you intend to do is meaningless.

      What you actually do is everything.

      What requires a why for fuel in its darkest hours.

      What flounders without a plan.

      Habits carry plans to their completion.

      Plan your habits wisely, then follow through as if your life depended on it.

      Doesn’t it?

    • To Let It Go

      If I could through myself
      Set your spirit free, I’d lead your heart away
      See you break, break away
      Into the light
      And to the day
      — U2, Bad

      When you think about the trajectory of U2 prior to the ubiquitous madness of Joshua Tree, it was Bad that became the song the crowd took possession of. The band carries it, always, but it soars with the collective energy of the crowd. It was the performance that everyone was talking about during Live Aid (at least until Queen took the stage). U2 grabs moments in that way, elevating a simple song about heroin addiction into so much more.

      This desperation
      Dislocation
      Separation, condemnation
      Revelation in temptation
      Isolation, desolation
      Let it go

      Each person who hears the call in Bad feels themselves in it. We never dabbled in drug addiction but we have our own demons. Listen to it now, with the perspective of a global pandemic and yet another war and the collective addiction of social media and its demand to pick sides. Listen to it now having lost something of yourself. Listen to it having seen parts of yourself slip away. It takes on a meaning it didn’t have in simpler times.

      Even with—especially with—this bruised and battered lens of 2022, the call is the same: To wake up and find hope somewhere above the darkness in the world. Above the darkness in ourselves. To let it go and set your spirit free. It remains a timeless call waiting to be heard.

    • Holding the Love I’ve Known

      When my body won’t hold me anymore
      And it finally lets me free
      Where will I go?
      Will the trade winds take me south through Georgia grain?
      Or tropical rain?
      Or snow from the heavens?
      Will I join with the ocean blue?
      Or run into a savior true?
      And shake hands laughing
      And walk through the night, straight to the light
      Holding the love I’ve known in my life
      And no hard feelings
      — The Avett Brothers, No Hard Feelings

      I’m watching four people in my family waste away before my eyes. We all have our time, but it still comes as a shock when that time is in such close proximity to now. When you’re the one holding it together for them and others you learn a few things about yourself. Mostly you learn to stop deferring and just say and do the things that need saying and doing.

      I’ve noticed some doubt and regret overwhelm those facing rapidly receding time on this earth. Life is unfair, we all see that and reconcile with it as best we can, but it’s particularly unfair for those who have the rug pulled out from under them in the prime of life. You mean to have that conversation, experience that moment, see that place for the first time or maybe for one last time, and realize that you’ll never reach it.

      What are we to do, knowing we haven’t done all we want to do, but celebrate what we did have the chance to do? To hold on to the love we have known? For that’s all that matters in the end. We make the ripple we make, and hope that the world might feel the urge to surf it. Life isn’t the accumulation of stuff or places or rungs on the career ladder, it’s the people you love in this world.

      We all have our time, sometimes far sooner than we ever imagined. We either hold a grudge with the universe or dance in the time we have left. No hard feelings—only love.

    • To Be Alive

      “The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond them.” — Alan Watts

      “The sound of the rain needs no translation. In music one doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of the composition. Same way in dancing, you don’t aim at one particular spot in the room… The whole point of dancing is the dance.” — Alan Watts

      If there were ever a counterargument to an overt focus on productivity and shipping our work every day, it would be these two quotes (and just about every Thoreau quote I draw upon). Life is about the dance, not about arriving at a place. To be alive is the whole point. Knowing that, how are we doing? Do we greet today as a new song to dance to, or as “Monday”? If every day is a new song, what do we hear when we wake up? Do we go immediately to our to-do list or simply begin to dance?

      Happy Monday.

    • What You Drift Away From

      My spouse recently deprioritized potato chips and Diet Coke from her life. For me, I could pass the rest of my days without ever consuming either of them, but for her these were a big part of her eating ritual. You make a sandwich for lunch, you need something crunchy and salty with it. And of course something to wash it down with. Dropping each was hard for her but she’s finding her stride.

      I’ve got my own demons. A love of great cheese, pasta, rice and beer — wonderful foods that I’ve largely eradicated from my life in 2022. In previous years I used to have cheat days where I’d eat all of this stuff in a binge of epic proportions. Now I let things drift away. I’ll have an occasional beer with friends, and I’ll sprinkle a bit of grated cheese on a meal now and then, but surprisingly I don’t miss it much.

      Food in this way is like old friends you don’t see anymore, you just fill the void with other things that bring you delight. Jennifer Senior wrote an article called It’s your Friends Who Break Your Heart in the latest edition of The Atlantic that speaks to the drifting away of friends in your life. We’ve all experienced it: In school or in your career you collect friendships. When you’re a parent of active children you tend to collect fellow collaborators who become friends. It’s only when the nest empties and a pandemic grabs a couple of years of your life that you look around and find that only a small core group remains. The great reckoning of what’s really important in your life is a harsh judge.

      I have long work relationships that fell away like a bag of chips with lunch. I have some people in my life that I haven’t talked to since it became clear how different our worldviews were on science and politics. Friendships of convenience always drift away with physical or emotional distance. The ones that stand the test of time are honed on common interests, deep roots and a shared commitment to keeping it going.

      Lately I’ve been struggling with my daily rituals. The morning has always been about writing, but work increasingly pulls at me, prompting me to cut short my writing and jump into the fray. The workouts and long walks became a casualty too frequently. This won’t do. We become what we prioritize, and you must fold positive habits into your daily life or you’ll eventually find yourself overweight, unproductive, uneducated and void of meaningful relationships.

      We are what we repeatedly do.

      You are what you eat.

      We are the sum of the five people we hang around with the most.

      There’s truth in these statements, which is why we all know them by heart. So why don’t we do more to prioritize the positive actions, food and people in our daily lives? I believe it’s because we all live in a whirlwind, and sometimes it just feels easier to turn on the television and distract yourself with other people’s problems than to deal with your own. Grab a bag of chips and beer while you’re at it. Habits and rituals work both ways. We’re either improving our lot or slipping sideways down the cliff. You just don’t notice it right away until there’s some tangible negative momentum in your slide.

      Maybe the answer really is all things in moderation. But you know even saying that that it isn’t really true. The real truth is some things in moderation, some things not at all. Some things in abundance, and nothing in excess. We ought to stop drifting through the whirlwind of life and decide what brings you closer to who you want to become. In doing so, we must allow some things to drift silently away from us. And hold on to other things for dear life.