Alexandersmap

    Category: Habits

    • Push and Pull

      “Pull the string and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

      Motivation is a pull. It is something that is internal that fuels you, that drives you.” — Julie Gurner, Dr. Julie Gurner (Part 1): Caring Deeply, Challenging Directly [The Knowledge Project Ep. #169]

      Lately I’ve been pushing myself to finish a few projects that have been mocking me for not completing them. Mountains to hike, work projects to finish, customers to meet with. I find in each case that the self talk isn’t supportive encouragement but sternly disciplinarian: “Do it already!” instead of “Isn’t this a great time to finish?” And shockingly, I find the mountains aren’t being hiked, the projects are stalled, and certain customers aren’t getting the face time they need. The push isn’t working all that well.

      I used to go to the dentist anticipating the lecture about flossing more. One day I decided to add it to my habit tracker as a box to fill in each day of every month, and thus forever. I’ve found that I haven’t missed a day since then, and my dentist is a lot happier with me as a result. Is this a push, not missing a day, or a pull? I think the latter. I’m drawn to streaks, and make it a point to mark as many days as possible before missing one. Flossing is an easy habit, writing is more time-consuming, yet I write this blog every day no matter what. Some days it may be a small post, and on some particularly challenging days it may likely be a post not fully fleshed out yet, but damn it there’s a blog post sitting here every day. When I miss the morning it calls to me every moment until I finish it. That’s a pull.

      Eisenhower was a great leader because he believed in leading from the front. You pull your team up and over obstacles and challenges, you don’t get great long term results when you push them. Lead by example. The old adage “do as I say, not as I do” rings true because we all quickly see the fallacy of trying to follow someone pushing from behind. It’s the same with bosses and coaches as it is with generals. Show you’re invested and we’ll follow you anywhere.

      Another old adage, “follow your passion”, is often dismissed as unrealistic in a world where the bills need to be paid and there are only so many passion jobs to go around. Yet it rings true. We do our best work when we’re drawn to it. We go through the motions when we feel it a chore. Flossing was a chore until it became a game of never breaking the streak. Writing was an unfulfilled dream until it became a daily mission. You probably have a few things that pull you equally hard, saying, “This is the way.”

      It’s not in our best interest to be frivolous with all that attracts us—there are habits and behaviors that clearly shouldn’t be followed at all. But the underlying draw ought to be examined. Why are we drawn this way? What is the root positive within this pull that will help in my development? Put another way, is this a good habit worth following, or a bad habit that feels good in the moment? Choose wisely and check the right boxes. Forget the push; seek the pull.

    • Upsetting the Apple Cart

      They say that habits are made to be broken. But who wants to break positive habits? Still, every now and then our routines are disrupted by forces out of our control. Sometimes people or events occur that upset the apple cart. Sometimes [gasp] even the very things that define our identity are disrupted.

      This summer has been a stack of disruptions that are taking their toll on my systems and routines. A home remodeling project, great and much-needed time with family and friends, and soon, a new puppy in the family all conspire to disrupt the very routines established to improve my health, fitness and intelligence. These are all worthwhile disruptions, so the trick isn’t to eliminate pattern disruptors, but to modify my habits to account for them. We can’t do everything, but we must continue to do the really important things.

      Our systems and routines help structure our days, allowing us to think about other things while the things we ought to be doing get done on autopilot. When that autopilot fails us, we must revert back to deliberate action. Doing things out of order is confusing, missing a day entirely is frustrating, but giving up on a positive habit should be out of the question. Start anew, with renewed vigor and focus. Most importantly, check the box and stabilize that apple cart again. For we still have much work to do in our days.

    • The Right Time

      I spent a lifetime
      Waiting for the right time
      Now that you’re near
      The time is here, at last
      It’s now or never
      Come hold me tight
      Kiss me my darling
      Be mine tonight
      — Elvis Presley, It’s Now or Never

      What is your five year plan? Do you have one? Or should we simply live in the moment? Is there purpose in the moment or only intent? Intent can cause all kinds of problems if it conflicts with purpose. Some say that five years is too long a period of time, entire cultures (looking at you, Japan) may think it too limited a scope. A long view is seeing the forest for the trees and setting the compass heading, while a short view is the immediacy of successfully executing this next step. It’s equally fair to say that we must know our general direction or we’ll walk in circles as it is to say it doesn’t matter where we were heading if we stumble and fall off the cliff.

      The lens of a lifetime is simply too broad a focus because there are only so many things we can focus on at any given time. Given this, it’s better to set auto-pilot whenever possible so we can get back to the business of now. 401(k) plans are helpful because you set it and forget it. We can say the same about healthy lifetime habits like exercise and flossing. Such tasks are best left to auto-pilot, but we can’t very well live our life on auto-pilot, for one day we’ll look around and find we’ve missed everything that mattered.

      Using the lens of time buckets becomes a way of understanding what our priorities ought to be in this particular phase of our lives. We only have so many years to do physical things, only so many years to be a parent, only so many primary earning years… it all adds up to a lifetime of only so many years. Within that lens of time buckets, our reason for being, raison d’etre, becomes more focused. Asking big questions about the entirety of our lives is impossible to answer, because we change so much over our lifetime. My raison d’etre at 20 was entirely different from my raison d’etre at 40. Looking ahead to someday 60 or 80 (if we’re so bold as to believe we’ll reach it), you see the reason changing dramatically over and over again. Sure, family and friendships will matter at any age, but a purposeful hike of the Appalachian Trail is rapidly shrinking down in relevance. It’s fair to say it’s now or never for such a life goal.

      Waiting for the right time seems counterintuitive when we become hyper aware of our own mortality. Memento mori naturally leads to carpe diem, doesn’t it? It turns out it mostly doesn’t. Most people just live their lives as best they can. We can’t do everything, but we can surely try to do the most important things within the context of the time bucket we’re currently residing in. The time is always here for something. Prioritizing the really essential things for this time lends focus and urgency to the moment, enabling us to seize the day.

    • Leading Indicators

      I was bragging about a blister yesterday. This wasn’t just any blister, this was a rowing-induced, thousands-of-meters-sweating-and-working blister. I haven’t had one of those in a long time. Partly, this is breaking in a new rowing ergometer with a handle that doesn’t offer the cushioning of the previous rowing ergometer’s handle. But the handle is also angled slightly, putting a subtle pressure change in a new place on my fingers. And so I celebrated the emergence of a blister. Before you click unfollow, bear with me just a bit longer.

      As you surely have guessed, the point was never the blister, but the accumulation of sweat equity that it indicates. A blister is a leading indicator of change. I’m making progress on some fitness goals, one day and one workout at a time. You may hear more about that sometime in the future. For now, there’s incremental progress and the desire to keep it going. A great habit, replacing a bad habit, does a body good.

      Positive habits means checking boxes and building streaks. You check off a mission accomplished that day, then the next, and soon you want to keep that streak alive for as long as possible. When you achieve some momentum with this and then you do miss a day or two, beginning again is all you think about. The trick is to find the things you want to do to establish that positive momentum. The rest is checking boxes.

      Except that it isn’t that simple. Life gets in the way, we get busy, or other things take priority, like that cold beer your closest friends want to have with you. Finding the time anyway is the trick, and when you do that beer tastes a lot better than it might have otherwise. In moderation anyway, for we’ve got more work to do tomorrow.

      This is what momentum does to us. This is what progression towards a goal feels like. Incremental, positive change one workout at a time. That spot where the blister is will become callused eventually, telegraphing something even more significant: long term commitment towards a healthier life.

    • Experiencing More “Ought to Do’s”

      Lately, my personal quest to stack memories seems to be paying off. Scheduled experiences this year have been notable and surely memorable, but so too have the family cookouts, early morning plunges into the pool and evenings throwing axes or on a lake with friends. These are things we ought to do more often, we tell ourselves, and then we never seem to do them very often at all. Best to put it on the calendar. Or forget the calendar altogether and just do it now.

      Our perspective on what ought to be done changes over time. Some people rise up to become far more important investments in our time than others. Likewise, some activities do the same. Lately I’ve had everything from pickle ball to scuba diving dangled in front of me as things we ought to do. It all sounds fun. Find me the time. Take, for example, hiking. I’m still trying to get in more hiking time. I’m not like some other friends that prioritize it every weekend, with a nod to them for making it so. No, I’m an acknowledged casual hiker chipping away at a list of peaks I’d like to hike in the near future. When it isn’t scheduled, it simply gets pushed down the stack.

      And what of that stack? Life is full of trade-offs, and each yes is a no to something else. In the end there will be far more “no’s” than “yes’s”, so we must choose wisely. Living an active and meaningful life is taking those most important “ought to do’s” and prioritizing them immediately. Sometimes urgency matters a great deal more than at other times, when we play the long game. Some experiences simply won’t be around next time; we may never pass this way again. They say that everything has its time. At least until we’re out of it.

      There are two lenses with which to determine what to choose: Our fitness and how meaningful the experience is. Regarding fitness: will we be able to do this in five or ten or twenty years, or is this one of those things we ought to do now? If you want to run a marathon or hike the Appalachian Trail, you’re better off doing it sooner than later. But there also has to be meaning to what we do. We aren’t nihilists, we’ve got a soul that speaks to us in the quiet moments, looking for something more than a good time.

      Contemplation and reflection have a place in our lives, which is why writing is another “ought to do” that I’ve managed to do every day for almost five years now. Clicking publish and sending these blog posts out into the wild, where everyone or nobody will read them, is important for me. The goal has never been to become a wildly successful blogger (thank goodness), but to become a better writer. If there’s an obvious side benefit, I get to communicate regularly with people invested in what I might have to say. Thanks for that. It also prompts me to seek out more experiences, that the writing isn’t just a repository of philosophy notes and collected poetry.

      There are a lifetime of experiences waiting for us, should we find the time to have them. Is it audacious to expect more than we’ve currently got? Clearly—but who else is going to advocate for such experiences? We must each determine who we want to be and set out to go be it. Adding more “ought to do’s” to our days is a lifetime mission. This isn’t bucket list fare, it’s setting out every day to raise the bar on what we experience. Accumulated, this makes for a more exceptional life than we might have otherwise.

    • We Do What We Can

      “A second chance—that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” ― Henry James, The Middle Years

      Our life’s work is an accumulation of the things we did today. This we know, as we know we don’t do our best work sometimes and squander some days altogether. We are imperfect beings, wishing it weren’t so but not always trying especially hard to remedy the fact. Still, we persist.

      We wonder at those who create brilliant work until the very end. Poets and songwriters, artists and the occasional world leader, pushing to complete their vision while there’s still time. Will that be us? Will you and I still be creative beings to the end, or will we shift to less majestic dreams, like art class in the senior center? Shouldn’t our latter years, should we arrive there, be more than simply being fully present when the grandchildren arrive? Shouldn’t we offer a spark of wonder and mystery, even to the end?

      But I get ahead of myself. We’re in the productive years now. These are the days of wine and roses, after all. We know deep down which season we’re in, and we have much work to do still.

      They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
      Out of a misty dream
      Our path emerges for awhile, then closes
      Within a dream.
      — Ernest Dowson

      The cadence of our days is set by our systems and routines. Each day we get to create our best work, to do what we can with what we have in us that day. We try to measure up to our previous best, and dare to exceed it. This is a quest for mastery, not of the work, but of ourselves. The work is nothing but breadcrumbs that others might follow.

    • The Greatest Ghost

      “In the end, we are haunted by the examples of the past, the denied permission to live a free journey. We are haunted by the partial examples of those in our purview, taking their pusillanimity or oppression as predictive of our own. We are haunted by the social constructs that tell us what a woman is and what she can or cannot do, and what a man is and how he will be shamed by living beyond these calculated constrictions. We are haunted by bad theology, bad psychology, and bad social models into thinking we are defined by our history, by our race, or by cultural heritage. We are haunted by the unexamined lives of our ancestors and caregivers. We are haunted by the widespread impression that history is the future. We are haunted by the limited imagination of our complexes. And even more, we are haunted by the small lives we live in the face of our immense possibilities. Haunting is individual, generic, cultural, and extremely hard to challenge because it so often seems bound by generations of practice, ancestral fears, and archaic defenses of privilege.
      The biggest haunting of all, the biggest shadow that occludes our sense of sovereignty in the outer world, is the specter of our unlived life. Something within each of us suffers, longs, despairs, persists, and even goes underground to reemerge as fantasy, as projections onto surrogate objects of desire, or as anesthetizing self-soothing. When the soul is not honored, when our possibility is denied by an outer oppressor, a social proscription, or worse, our own pusillanimity, our pathology intensifies. We are bombarded with pharmaceutical anodynes, cultural distractions, and rationalizations and evasions that facilitate these deflections from the summons to personhood. In the context of such hauntings, the greatest ghost for us is the apparition of what was possible but that we shunned. Such moments are not very pretty and may have to haunt us even more to get our actionable accountability. If we live in haunted houses, we are called to turn the lights on and clean house.”
      — James Hollis, Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey

      I suppose Hollis’ words might be broken down to this: We mustn’t live our lives encumbered by the embedded beliefs that have held us back thus far. We must break away from that prison and go live boldly. To do otherwise is to succumb to our limitations. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau put it.

      These are lessons that come to us in time. We see the ghosts for what they are and work to open our minds that they might drift away. Are we the best of what we might have been? Probably not, but we can point to the highlights proudly and remind the ghosts that we’ve lived a good life nonetheless. We each know where we might have done more. That doesn’t make what we’ve done worthless, but it ought to be a foundation more than a prison cell. Who we become next is largely based on what we do with the days left for us.

      The trick to chasing the ghosts away is boldness. Our ghosts don’t want to follow us into scary places. Just as a bully often caves in when confronted, so too do our self-limiting beliefs. We are capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for. A bit of audacity is good for the soul, and sets it free to go be. Audacity is the antithesis of pusillanimity (I don’t even like writing pusillanimity, let alone being it). Like the character George in Seinfeld, doing the opposite opens up all kinds of possibilities for us.

      We are what we repeatedly do, this we know to be true. So it’s fair to ask ourselves, what voice directs what we’re repeatedly doing? Is it a ghost or the song of freedom from who we used to be? Is it time for a new dance track? Stop shunning possibility. Dance with audacity, it may just turn the ghosts on their heads.

    • Leaving Baggage Behind

      “The beginning is always today.” ― Mary Shelley

      “There will never be a perfect time to do something that stretches you. If you were ready for it, it wouldn’t be growth.”― James Clear

      Each day we start over, usually carrying the weight of yesterday on our shoulders. There is something in this that is comforting, but also self-limiting. We ought to pack lighter at the beginning of each journey. We might ask ourselves, what are we carrying that is better off released?

      This is the nature of habits and routine, but also of baggage. Baggage wants to be carried from one place to the next. Let it all go and see how light our steps can be. Imagine how far we might leap!

      How far might one swim carrying such an anchor? We’re more likely to sink and drown. Let it all go and feel the buoyancy.

      Today is as good a day as any to try something new. Small, incremental and worthy of the investment we’re making in our future. The baggage will always be there if we want to return to pick it up. We might treasure burying it instead.

    • A Sentient Being

      “There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate—the genetic and neural fate—of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death. I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” ― Oliver Sacks, Gratitude

      Thinking about the progress I’ve made in some areas, I’m pleased with the progression but still frustrated with the gap between who I am and who I want to be. This is a natural state, and leads to either positive change through action or the despair of the powerless. I don’t dabble much in despair, but we’ve all been down the well now and then in the course of a lifetime. Climbing back out is easier for some of us than others. We simply accumulate enough evidence of the light to dwell in the darkness for long.

      I work to treat every living creature with the respect due a fellow traveller in this place and time. My work is on myself and making my contribution bigger than it’s been to this point. If we each aspired for greater contribution and a deeper engagement with the world, it follows that the world would be a far more exhilarating place to be. For now, we’ve identified gaps that must be filled. It’s a good thing we’re here to do the work. Awareness and the boldness to take initiative are the beginning of all great progress.

      I’m simply a sentient being working to understand the place I fill in this world, and the gap that would otherwise exist were I not a part of it. Developing an awareness of what our unique value is, and creating more of that value for more people, is one way to mark an extraordinary life. The gap between a really great life and extraordinary is what I’ll spend the balance of my life trying to fill. Measured as contribution and value, it feels a worthy use of my remaining time. How about you? Where will you spend yours?

    • Rounding the Mark on 2023

      The forest is dead quiet in the early morning hours when you walk out into it. At least until the creatures assess you and, seeing no imminent threat, go back about their business. It’s akin to going to a cocktail party and either working the room as the life of the party or receding back a bit and seeing what’s actually happening in the room. You might believe you’re the life of the party in the one case, but you won’t know what’s actually going on around you. It pays to shut up and read the room now and then.

      Sitting quietly in my trusty Adirondack chair, the woods soon erupted into chatter, as various couples expressed distain or encouraged more urgent attention to the nest. A young squirrel chewed through maple branches and hauled them back to the nest, where another squirrel seemed to be dissatisfied with the progress. Nearby, a house wren destroyed the silence with loud chattering birdsong. It’s always the smallest birds that make the most noise. Some might say the same about people. Two ears, one mouth is the ratio I taught my children. Sometimes I even take my own advice.

      There have been precious few mornings like this, just sitting outside listening to the world wake up around me. We’ve arrived at the month of July, and in New Hampshire it doesn’t really feel that’s possible. Blame it on the rain, relentlessly taking control of the month of June in the region. We’d all like to gift the precipitation to places that desperately need it now. Canada, on your big day, please have as much as you’d like. Feast or famine: that’s the climate now. The lawns thrive, the tomatoes and basil are horrified.

      I use that Adirondack chair for more than just listening to wildlife. It’s the place to listen to what’s happening between the ears as well. Assessing where we are, what we’ve done, what was left undone. Sometimes you have to sit still long enough to recognize it wasn’t ever about listening to the squirrels and house wrens or the weather. Assessing moments with people, places seen for the first time or the thousandth time, projects completed, projects put aside for another day. Where did it all get me? How about you?

      We’ve rounded the mark on the year: six months down, six to go. When we look back on the first half of the year, now ended, how do we feel about it? Do we like the view? A good life is represented by stacking our days with memories and small wins, all measured as progress. Sometimes we aren’t progressing at all, but receding and trying to hold it all together as best we can. Sometimes everything slips away and we feel we’re left with nothing. That’s life too. We all know how this ends, but it doesn’t mean we have to let today slip away without a small win. Maybe tomorrow too. String enough wins together and half a year later maybe we actually have something to celebrate. I hope so. But either way, there’s this other half of the year to reckon with, beginning today.