Alexandersmap

    Category: Habits

    • The Climb of a Lifetime

      “Just remember, once you’re over the hill you begin to pick up speed.” — Charles Schulz

      The trick is to defer rounding that hill into decline for as long as possible. My personal goal is to be a fit and witty centenarian. Whether that’s in the cards is up to fate, but we all ought to have goals in life, shouldn’t we? Prolonging the active, healthy and vibrant years seems as worthy a goal as any.

      Those people who say it’s better to burn out than to fade away forget the third choice: living a fit, balanced life for as long as we can keep the party rolling. Good habits carry us higher up the hill, bad habits make us round the top more quickly than we’d want. Reckless behavior makes us stumble before our time. We know all of this, we just need to look up now and then to see what we’re straying into. When it comes down to it, we are what we repeatedly do, as the saying goes.

      “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” — Martin Luther

      As a gardener, I see the parallels to living a good life: Get out there rain or shine, ensure that the roots are well fed, nurture the good and weed out that which will create problems later, ignore the rest. And most important, keep investing in the future. We are tending to a garden we may never harvest, but there’s magic in the act of tending it anyway.

    • Creative Living

      “Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.” ― Albert Camus

      There are days writing when everything comes slowly, like a chore we didn’t want to do and resented each step until completion, when we felt the surprising satisfaction of having finished it. Today began with distraction and chores and not much thought at all to writing. These are the moments when you just have to begin and see where it takes you. The muse, having felt ignored, eventually concedes that you’re back again.

      I know that some of my best work falls flat when it’s published. What resonates with me doesn’t resonate with most people, just as the things that are popular—pop songs, fashion, celebrity gossip—don’t resonate with me. This is only problematic if I want to linger in such circles, or have my creative work become popular. When we follow our own path sometimes we’re shocked by the solitude, but find the path far more to our liking. We ought to go our own way, if only to see where it leads us.

      Creativity leads to more inspired living, just as more inspired living feeds creativity. There’s nothing new in this idea, but isn’t it good to remind ourselves now and then that this path is ours for a reason? Make it beautiful and share it. Whether others deem it beautiful is beside the point. Creative living is a habit just like anything else. We live and learn and grow and share, then repeat it again tomorrow. Incrementally, something beautiful may indeed emerge from our life’s work.

    • Start Again

      The birds they sang
      At the break of day
      Start again
      I heard them say
      Don’t dwell on what has passed away
      Or what is yet to be
      Ah, the wars they will be fought again
      The holy dove, she will be caught again
      Bought and sold, and bought again
      The dove is never free
      Ring the bells that still can ring
      Forget your perfect offering
      There is a crack, a crack in everything
      That’s how the light gets in
      — Leonard Cohen, Anthem

      For all the madness and imperfection in the world, this is our time in it. We may still let the light in and find our way again. This theme has snuck into my awareness a few times in the last few days, in social media posts, in video clips from commencement speeches, and engraved on a bench overlooking Rockland harbor in Maine. It seems everyone is reaching for something, and whispering to those who follow how to find their way. When we open ourselves to the universe, it will tell us all we need to hear.

      We know the world is imperfect just as we know that we too are imperfect. We ought to stop counting our flaws and focus on the things we’re doing right. Work on the good things, let the rest fall away like bad relationships. And aren’t the imperfections we focus on nothing but a bad relationship that we can’t break away from? Let it go already. Start again with the clean slate of a fresh outlook.

      Imperfections are beliefs about the things we don’t have in our lives. None of us are born whole, we each have something within us that is imperfect. My own list is uncomfortably long—but so what? Focusing on what we don’t have in our lives is the surest path to misery. Discomfort is good when we apply it to changes we can influence, but undermines us when applied to focusing on who we’ll never be. That person doesn’t exist and probably shouldn’t—they’re just a character in the story we tell ourselves about our place in this world.

      “When you cut water, the water doesn’t get hurt; when you cut something solid, it breaks. You’ve got solid attitudes inside you; you’ve got solid illusions inside you; that’s what bumps against nature, that’s where you get hurt, that’s where the pain comes from.” — Anthony de Mello, Awareness

      The trick, it seems, is to be more fluid in our perception of ourselves. Joyfulness is found in awareness and acceptance. Being aware of our imperfections and the gaps between who we are and who we wish to be is healthy and may lead to positive change. So is accepting that sometimes the gap is just there to show us who we aren’t meant to be. Ring the bells that still can ring.

    • The Routine

      You know the old expression, “how you do anything is how you do everything”? Every day I find the truth in it. When we half-ass our way through life, we live a half-ass life. When we put our best into our most important things, we seem to align something with the universe that grants us our best experiences. The lesson is to stop half-assing and do the best we can with every opportunity. Reality is, we’re human and inevitably we’re going to settle into (and for) the routine.

      Lately I’ve been looking at June 1 as a date to begin a new workout routine. This coincides with a fundraiser I’ll be doing this summer, but I’m asking myself, why wait? What’s stopping me from simply starting the routine now and continuing it when the fundraiser starts? And why does my mind need a cause to rise up to instead of simply doing the workout every day without fail?

      We fall into habits just as easily as we fall out of them. The trick is to engrain it into our identity, that we do the things we know we ought to do without mind games. If we’re capable of brushing our teeth and flossing every day, or writing a blog for that matter, then if follows that we’re capable of investing the time to exercise every day or do some other habit that makes us better humans. We’ve already created the proof that we’re capable of following a routine by not doing something we know we ought to do in the first place. So just do it already. Today is even better than tomorrow for the essential things in our lives.

    • Ready Now?

      “It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.” — Hugh Laurie

      It’s a theme woven deeply into the fabric of this blog: do it now. I repeat myself not to bore the reader but to remind myself to keep one foot moving forward even as the other is anchored in the moment we’ll soon leave behind. There is only now… and yet we often wait anyway, deferring to tomorrow what we ought to do today. The timing never feels right for some things, and definitely not right for some other things. The stars rarely align just so.

      One of the reasons I publish this blog every day is to maintain the habit of urgency. Writing first thing in the morning most days, I feel incomplete until it’s done. Depending on the circumstances of the moment, I usually stack another daily habit or two on top of the writing to feel like I’ve really done something with the day. This small blog isn’t going to change the world, but it changes my world every single day.

      We must break the habit of deferring to tomorrow what we may do today. Sure, we must also be fiscally responsible and learn the skills necessary to navigate the world we aspire to enter, but we must stop using such logical things as excuses for not doing anything. Small steps forward are still steps forward. And when we develop this bias towards action, when we grow into our future, we surprise ourselves with the momentum.

      Beliefs are formed through routine. Our future positive or negative outcomes are directly linked to what we do now. So it makes sense to stack today with the actions necessary to turn tomorrow positive. Ready or not, the future is coming. Carpe diem, already.

    • About Time

      ‘In headaches and in worry
      Vaguely life leaks away,
      And Time will have his fancy
      To-morrow or to-day.
      — W. H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening

      I tend to track time differently than I once did. Now I measure time by the length of my hair or fingernails (weeks versus days since my last trim). I don’t generally look at the clock before calling it a night, for what does time have to do with how tired we feel? Nor do I set an alarm to awaken, I simply wake up. In many ways, I woke up years ago to the folly of time, even if I still follow the rules and show up early (as any civilized adult ought to aspire to). In this way, you might say my relationship with time is complicated.

      When we see time for what it is, something inside us shifts. We become collectors of experiences and embracers of moments rather than maximizers of minutes on the schedule. For all my focus on productivity, at the end of the day I only care that I’ve done the essential few things that move the chains forward for me in the direction I wish to go. The rest float away like all the other past initiatives.

      Writing every day forced me to become an efficient writer. There’s no time to waste on things like writer’s block when you must ship the work and get on to other things. Similarly, other things I do every day become automatic for me, that I may check the box and move on to other things. If that sounds transactional, well, so be it, but it doesn’t mean it’s not the most important thing for me in those moments doing it. When we give something our complete attention for the time necessary to complete it, we may surprise ourselves at just how quickly we can do the work.

      One of the people who works for me was stuck on a presentation he had to deliver to the team, simply overwhelmed by how to structure a slide deck and what to talk about. After being his sounding board for all the built-up stress and despair over the unfairness of having to do this in the first place, I made the deck for him in 30 minutes and quietly sent it to him to personalize in his own way, that he might focus on more important things than a peer presentation. When we get wrapped around the pole on the details of things that aren’t all that important in the end, we waste our time. If experience has taught me anything, it’s to quickly create solutions to problems that I may go back to spending time on more important things. Spending time on my employee wasn’t a waste of my own time, it was an investment in his. I’ll take that trade-off.

      The thing is, I recognize the place that he’s in now in his life. Ten years younger than me, with family obligations that can overwhelm you when you’re just trying to get through the day—I’ve been there, done that. My doing his homework for him wasn’t meant to take him off the hook so much as to show him a clearer future. My priority is to develop an employee who can assess the nature of a commitment and allocate the appropriate amount of focus on it, that he may move on to more essential things. Looking back, I’m sure someone did the same for me once upon a time.

      Life always comes back to our operating system. When we ground ourselves in stoicism, we know that time flies (tempus fugit) and we must therefore seize the day (carpe diem). There’s no time to waste on how we feel about the matter. In the end, the quality of our life is measured in how effective we are at navigating the small things that we may accomplish the big things. What’s bigger for us than using our brief time on this earth on things that matter most?

    • Haven’t Found Right Yet

      “Being right is based upon knowledge and experience and is often provable. Knowledge comes from the past, so it’s safe. It is also out of date. It’s the opposite of originality… Experience is the opposite of being creative. If you can prove you’re right you’re set in concrete. You cannot move with the times or with other people. Being right is also boring. Your mind is closed. You are not open to new ideas. You are rooted in your own rightness, which is arrogant… it’s wrong to be right, because people who are right are rooted in the past, rigid-minded, dull and smug. There’s no talking to them.” — Paul Arden, It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be

      It takes an advertising person to call it like it is, and Arden is certainly that. I read all sorts of books just to get a different perspective than my own. Arden sold me on his book with the subtitle: “The world’s best-selling book by Paul Arden”, which is pretty clever (for who can argue the point?) and likely sold a few extra copies to people like me who appreciate a good spin of words. It’s not a heavy lift by any means, but there are a few insights like the one above that make it worth the quick read.

      The takeaway here is that holding on to our rightness is suffocating our potential to become something more than who we are now. If we aren’t currently masters of our craft, whatever that is, then we likely haven’t found right just yet (believing we have is simply keeping us from ever reaching it). Looking at the crafts we desire to master with a clear eye, which have we come closest to reaching mastery in? Put another way, if good is the enemy of great, what have we simply settled into good enough at? We owe it to ourselves to stop posturing right all the time and make more mistakes. Good enough is a trap.

      The truth of the matter is, we never quite master anything in our lifetimes, even as we aspire to excellence (Arete). Good enough is often all most people want for themselves, me included. But arete whispers in the quiet moments, challenging the status quo. We must stop dwelling on how right we believe we are to have arrived here and dare to make mistakes more often. Otherwise, we’ll remain in a rut that feels attractive for its familiarity but is simply a destination with no end. We’ll never find excellence in a rut, we must climb up to reach it.

      Carpe diem already.

    • Beauty in Focus

      You’re feeling that ice-cold
      Forgetting the good things
      Caught up in the problems
      Please stop complaining
      Tell me something beautiful
      Lovelier than usual
      Hope is the closest
      Haven’t you noticed
      There’s beauty in focus
      It’s dwelling in the depths of you
      A desperate longing to break through
      — half•alive, Ice Cold

      Over the last month I was focused on an upcoming trip. That proved a distraction from other things (for that’s how it goes), but now that the trip is behind me, focus is developing once again on other essential things. In a world full of distractions, a little focus goes a long way. What we focus on determines the quality of our production, in whatever form that takes—art, writing, work, attention to the needs of others. Focus is beautiful.

      Knowing this, we get to choose what to focus on. We may scroll through our social media feed, or on the ugly political climate, or on how the referees are calling the games, but to what end? None of it matters more than our most important things. We can’t go frittering away our opportunity to do great things, here and now.

      We become what we focus on. For that is the direction in which we inevitably move. We ought to choose something beautiful to move towards. Something calling from within, eager to be released. Feel the urgency of that for a beat. Imagine what we might do next when our heart, mind and eye are locked in on the same thing.

    • To Go Beyond

      “Firstly you need to aim beyond what you are capable of. You must develop a complete disregard for where your abilities end. Try to do things you’re incapable of.” — Paul Arden

      “The human spirit lives on creativity and dies in conformity and routine.” ― Vilayat Inayat Khan

      When you walk up to Michelangelo’s David at the Accademia Gallery in Florence, some of his other sculptures in an unfinished state line the aisle on either side of you. Spending some time with each instead of just rushing past to see David is the best way to see how he released the masterpiece from the marble, as he described it. You can almost see them fighting to break free from the block, just awaiting the help of Michelangelo’s chisel. And so it is when you arrive at David, you understand where he came from—released perfection from a famously imperfect block of marble.

      The interesting thing about that block of marble was that two other artists had begun work on it, gave up on it and it sat partially chiseled and ignored by other artists who couldn’t see the masterpiece within. It wasn’t until Michelangelo saw David within that it became his project. And we are left with the brilliant result, forgetting sometimes the imperfect marble it started as.

      Lately I’ve been wrestling with the imperfect block myself, deciding whether there’s a masterpiece in there or not. To commit and begin chiseling away at something beyond what we are capable of in the moment is the only way to release something exceptional from the average. But why wait? There are no perfect blocks, only something trying to break free from what we have now. So begin with whatever it is we’ve been given and find what calls from within. In those unfinished sculptures is the pain of a masterpiece that never broke free for want of more time.

      The journey to David takes you past unfinished would-be masterpieces
      Michelangelo’s unfinished self-portrait forever trying to break free from the block

    • Breaking Up with Temporality

      “You give yourself to life by leaving temporality behind. Desire for mortal gains and fear of loss hold you back from giving yourself to life.” — Joseph Campbell

      Admittedly, I’ve had a complicated relationship with time. I spent too much of it rushing from one commitment to another, always striving to be early so as not to waste someone else’s time should the universe align itself to create delays. I write this very blog post in a coffee shop having arrived early for a meeting just down the street. Temporality is deeply engrained within me. It’s a hard relationship to break with.

      That doesn’t make it a healthy or enabling relationship. In fact, much of the stress I’ve felt in my lifetime is related to my relationship with time. Productivity calculations in a quarter, splits on a screen as I try to beat some preconceived expectation of how quickly I can complete some workout, or the pressure I put on myself to read or write a certain amount in the time I have available for such things. Time isn’t a great measure of our worth, unless you’re an Olympic athlete or attempting to solve a Rubik’s Cube or some such thing. Tempus fugit, indeed.

      So I’ve promised myself I’d break up with temporality, once and for all. Maybe not today, mind you (for I do have these commitments lined up), surely not tomorrow (I have a flight to catch, after all), but very—very— soon. How soon? Well, maybe time wIll tell? But know this: I’m serious this, uh, time.