Alexandersmap

    Category: Habits

    • Knowing the Songs

      I can see, it took so long just to realize
      I’m much too strong not to compromise
      Now I see what I am is holding me down
      I’ll turn it around
      Oh, yes, I will
      — Boston, Don’t Look Back

      When you go to a concert to see a band play, are you looking for new or familiar? Go to an Eagles or Paul McCartney concert and it’s a greatest hits collection where you know every song and everyone around you does too. It becomes a sing-along festival. Tasty, but not exactly pushing your boundaries.

      Think about the last time you went to see an up and coming band with all the buzz and you didn’t know any of their songs at all, but want to see what all the fuss is about. That was a voyage of discovery, one that carried you to places exciting and new. You knew you were going to know those songs soon enough when that band broke like a wave over the airwaves.

      That band that you’ve known for years knows the score. They want to play you the new stuff, because that’s what excites them the most. But they know people pay to see the songs they love performed live. So they layer in the new with the old, hoping the ratio is just right to keep the crowd from going flat.

      We humans play our own greatest hits in our head. We tell ourselves we’re going to change but stick with the same soundtrack we had on yesterday and the day before. Maybe we have a circle of fans around us that only want to hear our greatest hits and feel uncomfortable when we start to change. It’s easy to get trapped in that old soundtrack.

      The trick to turning things around is to layer in the new songs. Change a small habit, then another. Learn something new today and stretch even further tomorrow. Pretty soon you’ll find that you don’t look back so much anymore because you’re so busy becoming what you want to be next. We might even find that our best fans enthusiastically go along for the ride, changing with us.

    • Divided Attention

      “Divide the fire and you will sooner put it out.” — Publilius Syrus

      We become what we focus on. For everything else? We never fully realize the potential of what might have been.

      What is the fire? Where is our passion? If we know why do we divide it so? We split our focus into micro-bursts, smothering the creative fire within us. To give life to dreams requires fuel and room to breath.

      Better to stoke the fire than to watch it die out.

      It gives such a lovely glow.

    • Haze Be Damned

      “No one cares about your potential if you never deliver.” — @orangebook

      There are many moments when we don’t feel like doing whatever it is we must do. The last two days were filled with a few examples for me. Ultimately we’ve got to follow through on our obligations if we’re ever going to achieve anything meaningful.

      What does that have to do with a hazy sunrise picture over Buzzards Bay? Well, the haze was coming from two directions: The show in the sky and the feeling in my head. Some combination of pollen or common cold had grabbed ahold of me (the virus that shall not be named was negative) and was working hard to persuade me to just stay in bed. I’d have to be handcuffed to the bed to not make it to a sunrise, and so, haze be damned, I made my way down to the water’s edge.

      Returning from the celebration of another day to tackle some writing, I came across the timely Orange Book tweet above, which reminded me once again that most of life is simply showing up. We all make our streaks and try to be present for everything meaningful in our lives. Some days we feel great, some days we feel a bit hazy, but every day we ought to make the gift count.

    • Coffee Indebtedness

      How do you earn your first cup of coffee in the morning? Or do you set the table for your day with that first cuppa, creating a debt that must be paid back with sweat equity? I’ve always used the latter process with coffee, but lately I’ve been thinking that maybe it ought to be the former.

      Maybe that’s the trick, simply get a good workout in right off the bat, no wasting time. Get right to the tough stuff. Get all Jocco Willink about it and take a picture of my watch and sweaty workout gear. Not today, mind you, but someday when I don’t need this first cup quite so much as I do now.

      Habits are funny things. We begin our day with ritual, we end our day with ritual, and in between is a chaotic mix of reaction and routine. Where do you stick your workout? How about your writing? And what of that immersive reading? Just what makes a day successful for you anyway?

      All these questions come to mind with that first cup of coffee. By the second cup the day is underway, the writing is at least partially complete. The first boxes are checked on that to-do list. But there’s still that nagging question lingering in the back of your mind… have I paid back that debt to my coffee yet?

    • The Meaningful Routine

      Routine is yet another English word with a couple of meanings. It can work in your favor, a ritual of habits that get you through your day in productive fashion. And it can be used to evoke the commonplace (“Yet another routine day”). As with words like habits and ritual and discipline, your routine is what you make of it. Surely there are a whole lot of self-help gurus who love to dole out healthy portions of advice on routine. But getting beyond the transformational power of routine as a magical shortcut to all of your dreams (ack), what is it to you and me?

      “Perfection is a theory. You cannot be a perfect human being, perfect artist. You cannot be a perfect husband, you cannot be a perfect father probably and probably I am not. But go through your daily routine with hope you will be a little better in all respects, and do something meaningful” — Mikhail Baryshnikov

      I like Baryshnikov’s take on routine. Let’s not make more of it than we should, but recognize that the things we do daily matter in bringing us to somewhere more meaningful than where we began the day. Each day is another step towards better. Each step is part of our routine. Simple, right?

      Routine is on my mind yet again, because some of mine are working really well, but others aren’t getting established to the level that they must. A bit more emphasis on fitness would be beneficial, but it gets lost in the shuffle. Writing the blog is a cornerstone activity, but writing that potentially great novel is more sporadic. If we are what we repeatedly do, then it follows that we won’t become what we consistently aren’t doing.

      All this speaks to the need to assess our routines and make changes to reflect that new compass heading we want to follow. Without getting all self-helpy, routines are both our greatest ally and our greatest enemy. That makes what we do with our routine… meaningful.

    • Consider Life an Adventure

      “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” ― G.K. Chesterton

      Admittedly, I’m tired writing this. Two weeks of travel and burning the candle at both ends and I’m worn out. But that’s why we dance with coffee, isn’t it? To press ahead just a bit further.

      The thing is, we’ve had a couple of years to reset. We all did the best we could under the circumstances. Getting back to whatever this normal is gives us a chance to stretch our imagination more. To find new adventures just around the corner, and to have the gumption to venture much farther. Not to fill our InstaGram feed or gain subscribers, but to shake loose of the cobwebs of the commonplace and experience the world.

      “Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.” — Henry David Thoreau

      Who ever looks back with pride on a moment when you decided to sleep in instead of dancing with adventure? We ought to consider life an adventure and do more with that notion. We ought to rise and seek more from our days, for we only have so many to work with. We’ve spent time with people on their deathbed who literally can’t go outside to see the stars, who are we to complain about stepping out into the world? Dance with the gift of freedom. Be part of something livelier.

      “Who can guess the luna’s sadness who lives so briefly? Who can guess the impatience of stone longing to be ground down, to be part again of something livelier? Who can imagine in what heaviness the rivers remember their original clarity?
      Strange questions, yet I have spent worthwhile time with them. And I suggest them to you also, that your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life be richer than it is, that you bow to the earth as you feel how it actually is, that we—so clever, and ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained— are only one design of the moving, the vivacious many.”       — Mary Oliver, The Moth, The Mountains, The Rivers

      We all have our shackles of responsibility and routine. We can bend our days to find adventure while still honoring our core responsibilities. And we should question our routines when they hold our rambunctious spirit in place. Consider, for a moment, that convenience is a shackle disguised as a mindset.

    • 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.

    • Incremental Awareness

      As the days grow longer in the Northern Hemisphere we detect the changes around us. The changes were happening anyway, but it seems to accelerate. Just this morning I watched the sun rise through a window where I haven’t seen the sun rise since last autumn. A mix of travel and weather conditions made it a complete surprise when it happened.

      And what of the changes we take ourselves through? We exercise, eat the right food, read and write every day and nothing seems to come of it. And one day we catch ourselves in surprise at who we’ve become without realizing it. Hey, that’s me! The light dawns on Marblehead, as they say in Boston when you’re the last to know. We know we’re changing, but don’t often see it in ourselves.

      Until we do.

      Why don’t we have more incremental awareness? Why don’t we see the smallest of changes in ourselves as we’re making them? Are we lacking self-awareness or are we just not giving ourselves the credit we deserve for doing the work? It’s as if we’re trained not to notice that we got up and worked out for three days in a row, we have to wait until we have washboard abs to be allowed to celebrate.

      The only way to be incrementally aware is to track ourselves. To write it down. To draw a big X through another day on the calendar (especially when you didn’t really feel like doing X that day). It’s not about the washboard abs or the number on the scale or the published novel, it’s about the process — saying we’re going to do something and following through on it. And then doing it all again tomorrow. Incremental action isn’t suddenly seeing the sunrise after your first day, it adds up over time and reveals itself slowly.

      When it will suddenly dawn on you.

    • Discipline, Daily

      Watch the man beating a rug.
      He is not mad at it.
      He wants to loosen the layers of dirt.

      Ego accumulations are not loosened with one swat.
      Continual work is necessary, disciplines.
      — Rumi

      We’re all on our journey of becoming. We’re all working to grow in our chosen work, to experience life more richly, to continually refine and reinvent ourselves, to reach our potential. But we can’t grow in a box. The journey requires some space and momentum, which necessitates cleaning out some old beliefs and habits acquired along the way. Sometimes cleaning up the old is easy because it was never really a part of our core, but sometimes the old is so embedded in who we are that we’ve got to beat it out.

      I have some old beliefs and habits I’m not particularly willing to carry around with me anymore. I don’t give them any light to grow, but ugly beliefs and bad habits don’t need a lot of light to fester. The process of clearing them out requires a lifetime of consistent effort.

      Discipline is derived from the Latin disciplina, which means “to learn”. But any dance with the dictionary will indicate that discipline also has another meaning: “to chastise or scold.” Discipline thus has both a positive and negative connotation. No wonder people shrink away from discipline! So what are we to make of it?

      We’re all works in progress. Old habits are like old friends that remind us of what we once were. Sometimes that’s a delight. But often we shake our head at who we used to be. To live in the present is to acknowledge that former self and see who we are today. Every day is a reset, a chance to move forward or to slide back. Every day we get to decide what to be and go be it.

    • Create Evidence

      “Belief in yourself is overrated. Generate evidence.” — Ryan Holiday

      What does your personal scorecard look like as we crossed off the first 100 days of 2022 earlier this week? What were your highlights? What hasn’t met your expectations when we began the year?

      Doesn’t that inform us of what needs to change immediately?