Alexandersmap

    Category: Habits

    • Catching the Wind

      Waking up early I dress straight away and head outside for the Spring performance. Birdsong in spring is like no other time of year, and you must be out there early to catch the peak. Soon the tall pines caught the wind and danced together with it in a song of their own. And the harmonies of birds and breeze and trees sang to me their morning song. April mornings in New Hampshire; playing for a limited time only.

      I thought I might read a favorite Mary Oliver poem, and read ten times the one. Some days every word grabs you and shakes you to the core. Other days the words aren’t for you. I apologized to Ms. Oliver for not having my mind on the lesson and gently put poetry aside for another time.

      And turn to music. Wild Theme, Symphony No. 5, and finally Suite bergamasque: Clare de lune. Like poetry you know when it’s the right moment for a song. And so this morning Debussey and I walked about the quiet house while the world slept. But soon the restlessness returned.

      “The child is in me still… and sometimes not so still.” – Fred Rogers

      Mondays hand us the friction of the weekend meeting the work week. The question of what must be done taps on the shoulder demanding answers. Each passing minute you linger with birds and poets and symphonies amplifies the urgency of the questions. What must be done?

      Listen to the world around you. Accept the day as it comes, but plot your course with clarity of purpose. Find stillness, if you can. If only for just a moment. If you listen, you’ll hear what it’s been telling you all along. Minimize that friction and dance with the world on your own terms. Catch the wind, and fly.

      Of course! the path to heaven
      doesn’t lie down in flat miles.
      It’s in the imagination
      with which you perceive
      this world,
      and the gestures
      with which you honor it.
      – Mary Oliver, The Swan

    • Quicksand and Tasks of Consequence

      “Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self.” Toby Litt

      “The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” – Cyril Connolly

      The time we spend, these moments slipping through the hourglass, are either consequential or quicksand. And so the tasks filling those moments are loaded with questions – is this the right use of this brief moment in time or might there be a better place to spend the grains of sand? Is this a task of consequence, or is it a love poem to the self, mere folly?

      You know when you’ve stepped in quicksand. Maybe not immediately, but soon enough you recognize the stickiness of a habit and the sinking feeling that you’re not making any forward progress. Quicksand is tricky stuff. The one thing you don’t want to do when you’re in it is flail in place.

      Writing a blog every day might not be a masterpiece, but is it folly? The act of writing is pouring your grains of sand into a jumble of words and placing them just so. With a picture in your mind of what they might be if you could just get it right.

      The ultimate measure of tasks is whether you’re flailing in place or going somewhere consequential. What might you otherwise be doing with those grains of sand? The answer isn’t what are you doing now. Not really. It’s what are you becoming? That is what really matters. For what will your masterpiece be, in the end?

      Work towards that.

    • A Meaningful Walk

      If you’re counting walking as a workout, at what point does it really count? When you reach 10,000 steps? By how many flights of stairs it equates to? Or is simply getting out and walking enough to count? It depends, doesn’t it? It depends on fitness level, on injuries or disabilities you’re working with, and on state of mind. Every walk counts for something. Every walk can be meaningful.

      Any walk of substance, whether hiking a mountain or a long walk on a bike path, could be called a workout. And a walk with the stars or a dog curious about the world can be especially meaningful. A walk filled with an abundance of steps and curiosity can be both. I think the point is to get out there and do something. To experience the world on her terms.

      This month I’m in a challenge to do 25 workouts in the month of April. Given my fitness level, which is decent but not Olympian, I count a walk as a workout when I hit 10,000 steps (5 miles), and the walk itself is brisk. Sometimes I don’t have the time to do 5 miles in one walk and I’ll walk again at night to finish the steps. It’s my workout, these are the rules I put in place.

      Walking as a workout isn’t the most efficient use of your time. I can row 5000 meters in half the time that I can walk 10,000 steps. If I broke that 10K into meters I could have a killer workout of 5x2K or 10x1K. And I can quickly raise my heart rate swinging a kettle bell, and mix in those workouts too for the pure intensity they offer. But sometimes you don’t care about efficiency. Sometimes you just want to walk.

      I’m doing the math on those 25 workouts in the month challenge and figure I need to do a few double sessions this coming week to make the total. I’m having my second vaccine on the 27th and would like to be done by then just in case I have side effects. I haven’t done double sessions in some time, but I’m drawn to the idea. A mix of rowing, kettle bell swinging but especially those brisk walks. A micro burst of meaningful workouts to get across the finish line. And a burst into spring.

    • Moving through Liminal Space

      If 2020 was a year of transformation forced upon all of us by a pandemic and political and social unrest, then what is 2021? A continuation of the same or something different entirely? We see the light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re still very much in the tunnel. Are we in limbo, or is it something else?

      I don’t know what life will show me
      But I know what I’ve seen
      I can’t see where life will lead me
      But I know where I’ve been
      – Jimmy Cliff, Sitting Here in Limbo

      “Limbo” originally was the region on the border between Heaven and Hell, now commonly thought of as being stalled in a period of transition. Plenty of us felt like 2020 was Limbo. But you can make a case for it to be something more.

      This place of transformation between one place or phase and the other is also known as “liminal space”. I’d first heard the phrase from Richard Rohr, who points to Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process as the origin. Rituals seem straightforward: sweet sixteen parties, bar mitzvahs, commencement ceremonies and funerals are all rites of passage signaling a change. But what of the passage itself? Passage is motion, not stalling. And that’s where liminality comes in.

      “Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold” is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite’s liminal stage, participants “stand at the threshold” between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which completing the rite establishes.” – Wikipedia

      The passage through “liminal space” infers movement between phases of life. This seems a more focused use of the time, don’t you think? Passage is high agency, decide what to be and go be it liminality. Stalled is low agency, waiting for things to happen to us limbo. You see this in how people use their time during the pandemic. Some bought and used bicycles and hiking boots, others hoarded toilet paper and literally waited for shit to happen.

      Life is about transformation and passage. If we’re all in this transition between one place and another, are we using this liminal space to proactively move into a better place or are we simply waiting for things to open up again? The thing about passages is you have some measure of control over the direction you’re going in. We ought to have something to say about which threshold we cross on the other side, don’t you think?

    • What Shape Waits in the Seed of You?

      Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
      toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
      what urgency calls you to your one love?
      What shape waits in the seed of you
      to grow and spread its branches
      against a future sky?
      Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
      In the trees beyond the house?
      In the life you can imagine for yourself?
      In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?
      – David Whyte      , ‘What to Remember When Waking‘

      We get lost in the person we told ourselves we’d be today when we were someone else yesterday. To-do lists and created obligations conspire to hold you to what your scheduled to be. There’s a future you being created in that schedule that should make you burst out of bed with excitement. But waiting a beat or two to listen to the calling informs.

      I’ve mentioned before that I do a one line per day entry at the end of the day. I sometimes wake up thinking about it, contemplating how I might make the line worthy of the ink. Worthy of the day crossed off the short list of days we have on this earth.

      Morning writing forces the hand, you might say. It forces you to reconcile the whispers before getting to those other things. I highly recommend it for anyone looking to figure out what that voice is actually saying in your ear. And when you hear it, what then? Does it chafe against that which you’ve planned for yourself?

      The beginning of the day sets our course based on the conditions and circumstances we find ourselves in. We know where we’d like to go, but must reconcile it with our current reality. With our previous expectations for ourselves, set on the calendar. The question is whether we’ve left ourselves the room to grow into that future sky. The answer, like the question, lingers in that quiet, solitary moment.

    • Incrementally Better

      “A mistake repeated more than once is a decision” – Paulo Coelho

      “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” – Richard Rohr

      When you live long enough you start to lose some of the hard edge that once defined you. That sarcasm you voice to others was nothing like the self-talk you once gave yourself. Quite simply, you stop worrying about the chase for perfection and start living with who you are.

      The Coelho quote above once tortured me for the patterns of decisions I’d made over time that didn’t help me. Eating the wrong food, opting out of exercise, not making the call you know you needed to make, not following through when you should have, and then not following through the next time either. Decisions made, not mistakes. This quote can eat you alive if you let it.

      And then I stumbled upon the Rohr quote, and recognized the incremental improvement in myself over time. When things aren’t going well in some area that self-talk amplifies the worst traits, making it more of who you are. Once you’ve recognized and completely own past decisions, what do you do with them now?

      You work to reduce their impact in your life. You get better each day at the things you once avoided. Slowly, surely, you incrementally grow better and the bad shrinks to memories of the way you once were. Still a part of you, always, but not who you are.

      Freud would rightly point to the Id, Ego and Superego at this point in the game. As you get a couple of years older you recognize each for what they are inside you. When you’re young and wild you run with one voice (Id) and just eat the chips with abandon. A bit later another voice (Ego) will start pointing towards the weight loss goals on your list and tell you to stop eating those chips. The Superego makes you feel guilty for eating the chips or proud for not eating them and working out. (This moment of pop-psychology brought to you by Pringles).

      Today, I’m just trying to be a bit better than I was yesterday so that tomorrow I’m proud of the progress made. It’s not that the Superego cuts me more slack, more that I choose not to wallow in self-criticism. The best way to diminish that critical voice is to show it progress towards the person you’re trying to become. Because that identity you’re aiming for is impressive. And even if you don’t reach it, “close enough” is still pretty good.

    • 7 Observations on Reaching 1000 Blog Posts

      We all write for different reasons, and my observations might not be yours, nor should they be. But reaching a milestone like 1000 blog posts deserves some measure of reflection. As I look forward with anticipation to post number 1001, I pause to give you seven observations about the journey to this point:

      1. The well never runs dry. You just run out of time. Writer’s block is a myth. If you’re earnest and curious you never run out of things to write about. But you will wrestle with perfection and trying to make a post reach its potential. When you post daily you learn to love it as it is and know when it’s time to let it fly. No, it’s never perfect, but you post it anyway.
      2. Everything becomes a potential blog post. I started writing Alexanders Map intending to have a local travel blog with historical sites with visits to amazing places. The name itself infers this. But it quickly expanded to include a diverse (some would say eclectic) mix of topics. You learn to listen to the muse, and embrace the new. And in the unexpected you find your own voice. You are the link between each post, and part of you reflects back on what you’ve visited.
      3. This business of blogging is your own business. You can quickly grow your blog follower list by playing the game of actively following and liking other bloggers. Or you can do the opposite and grow organically. I choose the latter: I’m very selective about who I follow, I “like” what I actually read and appreciated, and I don’t follow to gain followers. You choose what you want to be in the blogging world. I didn’t even mention I had a blog to family and friends until I’d written a hundred or so posts. I do link to Twitter, but rarely on other media. Choose what works for you, because your blog is how you present yourself to the world.
      4. One sentence at a time, you become a better writer. Let’s face it, none of us start a blog thinking we’re bad writers. Bloggers tend to believe they’ve got some skill for writing or they’d start a YouTube channel or build an Instagram or TicTok site. But the craft of writing develops through the daily struggle. I’m nowhere near the writer I thought I was, and I’m nowhere near where I want to be. But I keep chipping away at it, day-by-day. Blogging is an apprenticeship in writing, but you never meet the master.
      5. Some of your favorite posts will be completely ignored. You will work on a blog post that stirs something deep inside you, feel a wave of emotion crash over you as you click publish, and see the world react with complete indifference. Write these posts anyway, and write them often. Because when you tap into this well you aren’t blogging for instant fame, you’re writing to find something inside yourself that you thought, maybe, was there all along.
      6. You develop an eye for the interesting and an ear for the hidden stories. You stop more frequently in fascinating places, detour to find and celebrate the obscure and forgotten, and do things you might not have done otherwise. You become a ghost whisperer, visiting old graveyards and monuments to the past engraved by some soul long forgotten, who was honoring something of note that brought us to where we are today. You learn poetry and philosophy and Latin phrases and stir up the magic in an old pile of words. You hike to places of wonder and seek adventures. In short, you become more alive, and you appreciate this journey more than ever before.
      7. You learn to follow through on the promises you quietly make to yourself. You want to be a writer? Then write, no matter how you feel, and post that work every day, no matter what. Keep that commitment to yourself today. And tomorrow too. As James Clear puts it, every action you take becomes a vote for the type of person you wish to become. Your blog is a stack of votes for your identity. So craft them as best you can and set them free for the world.

      So there we are: 1000 blog posts. As I mulled over this one the last few days, I found myself in a corner of New England I don’t visit enough and chanced upon a couple of roadside wonders I might never have seen had I not set out for an old grave I wanted to visit. And just like that I’ve got three more blog posts in my mind. The world is funny that way – it opens up for the curious observers. I can’t wait to see where the next 1000 take me.

    • The Familiar and the Habitual

      “The familiar and the habitual are so falsely reassuring, and most of us make our homes there permanently.” – Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

      We all find comfort in the familiar, whether a favorite chair to sit in or your morning coffee routine, the people we hang our with or the way we greet them. We embrace it and make it our own, and rarely deviate from it. This is the nature of the familiar and the habitual.

      How many of us stick with things just because it’s the way we’ve always done them? Familiar is strangely comforting, even if it doesn’t benefit us. This is the way we’ve always done it. Humans evolved by mitigating risk by sticking to tried, true and trusted. Those who were foolhardy didn’t survive to dilute the gene pool. When the risk is deeply programmed into your identity, it doesn’t matter if it’s bad for you or not – it’s falsely reassuring and part of you. We all know smoking and overeating are bad for you, but how many do it subconsciously, risk and viable alternatives ignored?

      With everyone’s routine disrupted over the last year, it’s interesting to see how people react to going back to the way things used to be. Do you want to commute to a cubicle farm chipping away at your tasks, all while trying to ignore the screams inside you again? Return to the same old ways, or pivot to something new? How resilient were some of those routines and rituals in the face of a pandemic?

      It’s easy to embrace anchors in our lives – homes, relationships, jobs, and routines, and hard to question that which we’ve always known to be true. But ultimately the only true anchor is our self. None of this is permanent. Forget anchors: embrace sails. Embrace change. For change happens around us whether we want it to or not.

    • Good Soreness and Paying Dues

      This morning I stepped to the floor awash in good soreness after re-introducing kettle bell swings into my workouts. The workout started with a 5000 meter row, three sets of alternating two and one arm kettle bell swings, dead lifts and some dynamic stretching. Then a long, brisk walk on soft beach sand to really emphasize the legs workout.

      You know when your body needs a break, or at least you should know if you’re listening to it. Living with pain is a good indicator, signaling a need for adjustment to either your body or your routine. Pain is generally bad. But what do we make of sore? Exercise-induced soreness is the good kind of sore. It signals your body is adapting to change, flushing out lactic acid and repairing muscle fibers. And it signals dues paid towards a more vibrant tomorrow.

      Changing up exercise is a great way to keep the body guessing. Adding good stress to your body flushes out the bad stress, keeping that stack of organs and muscle you walk around with healthy. We intuitively know this, but most of us sit around too much anyway. If we know that sitting around too much is bad for the brain and the body, then we ought to get up and get moving more often, right? I tell this to myself all the time, but don’t always listen enough. I’ll present a convincing (if misguided) argument that I’ll get to it later. But later is just deferring our well-being. The body doesn’t care about your next meeting, it needs to move more often.

      “The more you move yourself by your own muscle power, no matter what form that movement takes, the surer you will be of the result.” – John Jerome, The Elements of Effort

      Jerome points towards the confidence that builds up inside of us when we do the work to build our better selves. Sports and nutrition guru Chris Carmichael calls people who are fit and vibrant as they age the defiant minority. We all know where we’re heading, but why not be fully alive when we get there? Adding a rigorous program of weight lifting or kettle bell swings to surprise the body offers day-after soreness but for-a-lifetime benefits. So embrace the soreness.

      “People who lead a physically active life have a lower risk of cognitive decline, and research is now emerging to show that greater fitness is correlated with maintaining better processing skills in aging brains.” – Sanjay Gupta, MD, Keep Sharp

      As I was finishing my workout yesterday I thought about the similarity between the kettle bell swing and a rock scramble in the White Mountains. The strength, endurance and mental toughness built through a workout like kettle bell swings translates well to other activities like hiking, offering yet another reason to add them to your routine. That soreness you feel the morning after a workout will translate well towards doing more, with less soreness, in those other activities you’ll do later. Pay me now or pay me later.

      And that pay me now or pay me later rule is really the point, isn’t it? If we continually defer our health and fitness through undisciplined exercise and nutrition choices now, we’ll pay for it with a shorter window of cognitive and physical well-being later. We’ll accomplish less in the time we have than we would if we’d simply invested in ourselves with exercise and disciplined consumption today.

      That soreness is yesterday’s glow of accomplishment. But today is a new day, requiring its own payment of dues. Keep the streak alive, pay today’s dues. Tomorrow will thank you.

    • Gratuitous Exercise

      “Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.” – William James

      “All weakness is a weakness of will.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

      There’s no getting around it, I’ve been getting weaker – lacking the willpower to get on the erg or pick up the weights. This correlates exactly with work getting busier: more responsibility, more follow-up, and more sitting in front of a computer. That, friends, is no way to live a long and vibrant life. The science supports us: we must move to have a healthy mind and body.

      Don’t get me wrong, I’m hiking and snowshoeing and generally trying to be active on the edges of the day. But you know when you’re working hard and when you’re hardly working. A walk in the woods does the mind and body good, but you’ve got to supplement it with threshold-testing workouts. Through focused effort and honoring commitments to ourselves through exercise.

      I’ve been here before, of course. Burpees were kicking my ass until I started having serious shoulder pain. Rowing on an erg kicked my ass so much in college and CRASH-B’s that I have PTSD and have a hard time doing anything but steady-state on the thing. So what do you do when your worst enemy is yourself? You simplify and establish lifetime habits that brush aside the resistance with routine. It simply must be so.

      And so I’m returning to a workout program that doesn’t require spotters and doesn’t tolerate excuses. I’m returning to the kettle bell and dynamic stretching, and rowing on the erg to round out the challenge. You can take a kettle bell with you when you travel, you can break away from your computer for a simple workout that kicks your ass in minutes. And you can eliminate the excuse of time: Those optimistic long steady-state workouts written on the calendar that fall aside in the crush of work days. Habits build on themselves over time. Simply showing up starts the ball rolling.

      “No matter how strong you are, there will always be someone stronger than you. Using only a number as the litmus test of whether you are strong or not is self-defeating. You will get older. You will not be able to continue to set personal all-time bests forever. But you can continue to get stronger mentally. You can adjust to whatever the environment is and challenge yourself to push past wherever you are at the moment, in any way you can, and feel good knowing you just made yourself a better man or woman.” – Pavel Tsatsouline, Kettlebell Simple & Sinister

      Fitness is the ultimate objective, of course, but the why is to get stronger mentally. To build up your brain and push through excuses. To thrive on the faculty of effort and make yourself a better person. And this translates into everything else you do. If you’re making excuses on something as essential as your fitness, what else are you making excuses about? Mastery doesn’t happen overnight. But it begins with showing up and doing the work.

      “To master your mind is to master your life. There is no more worthwhile pursuit.” – Sir John Hargrave, Mind Hacking

      Gratuitous exercise implies frivolous or unnecessary. But there’s another definition for gratuitous, and that’s doing something free of charge. To exercise free from the burden of feeling like you have to do something and instead to exercise simply because it’s a part of who you are. Something you want to do. To simply do for the love of where it takes you.