Alexandersmap

    Category: Habits

    • A Beautiful Reluctance

      We were born saying goodbye
      to what we love,
      we were born
      in a beautiful reluctance
      to be here,
      not quite ready
      to breathe in this new world
      – David Whyte, Cleave

      I understand this reluctance. I wrestle with it myself. And tackle the moments as they wash over me and undermine my footing like a relentless surf. We’re never quite ready for what the world throws at us, but with a subtle shift and a will to persevere we find a way to keep our footing.

      For all the harshness in the world we learn that, more often than not, the waves come from within. The demons aren’t out there marching towards you in waves, they whisper in your ear. The distractions and busywork and perceived obligations squander our moments and precious minutes. The reluctance pulls at our sleeve, back towards what we are comfortable with, back towards the safe and predictable and indistinct.

      Each step is uncertain, but slowly we move forward. The farther we venture, the harder it is to hear the call to come back. And in the growing quiet we might hear something just out of reach. Just ahead. And we continue towards those who call us, towards the Muse, towards our boldest dreams. One moment, and one breath at a time.

      But it begins, as it must, with goodbye.

    • Falling Buildings and a Changing World

      We don’t know all the details about that building collapse in Florida as I write this, but what is trickling out in the news indicates that they’ve known there was a problem and they’ve been battling internally to correct it for at least a few years. I imagine a few thought the problem was urgent, a few thought it was overblown, and the vast majority were somewhere in the middle, just trying to figure out what it’ll cost them to fix the problem and make it go away. And then the building answered the question of “how urgent is this?” for them.

      Habits and momentum tend to dominate the conversation we have in our heads about what we do next. If things seem fine, then we keep doing the same thing again tomorrow. But what if that thing is slowly killing us? People quit smoking or drinking all the time because they recognize that these habits, whether in excess or moderation, are part of an identity they no longer want to embrace as theirs.

      The evidence indicates that the world is spiraling down into ecological turmoil , yet humanity doesn’t appear to be doing nearly enough to change it. So when does it shift from an intellectual question to an existential crisis? When it’s your tap that runs dry? When it’s your own home burning? Or when the rebar and concrete holding it all together is crumbling underneath you? If we can’t get people to reach consensus on climate change or the power of a vaccine or the obvious corrosion of your building’s foundation, what chance do we have?

      That old expression be the change you want to see in the world is exemplified in people recycling or maybe driving an electric car or putting solar panels on the roof. You do things like getting vaccinated when it’s your turn and vote for positive change when elections come along. You even buy local produce and pasture-raised meat from a farmer near you. And maybe you even join the condo association board to tackle once and for all the problem with the building you live in.

      But then you feel the resistance to change. The perceived cost of change. You might look around and feel your efforts are cancelled out by the ignorance or bad behavior of others. And maybe you start to wonder whether any of it makes a difference at all. Why fight the fight at all when so many don’t choose to listen?

      If that building collapse tells us anything, it’s that it all makes a difference. That building didn’t care which side of the debate you were on about fixing the foundation, it swallowed them all up just the same. Maybe we can’t fix everything, but collectively we can try. And maybe, if we’re lucky, we aren’t too late. The urgency of now has never been more apparent.

    • The New Clumsiness of Travel

      What happens when, having spend your adult life mastering the art of traveling, you pause said travel for months at a time? Other than one memorable trip to Ohio last fall I haven’t traveled since March 2020. So I eagerly packed my bag for a brief regional trip Monday morning, wondering what the road might offer me this time.

      This one was supposed to be simple. Drive four hours south to New Jersey, spend a night and meet with some folks on Tuesday, then drive up to Connecticut for some other meetings. But I noticed the rustiness right away. It started with leaving my laptop at home. I realized it at a gas station just down the road – no harm, no foul. Just time counted against me. Time that would stack up as traffic built in front of me, adding proposed route changes and a distinct feeling that the drive would be much longer than anticipated.

      Welcome back! Connecticut said, throwing orange greeting cones up for me in celebration at my return. And I embraced the lane closure as a stoic ought to. Such is fate. This used to grind me to dust, now it’s a reminder of what I’d gained during the pandemic: time and perspective. I watched the angry desperation of drivers cutting ahead of three cars just to feel some measure of control over the situation and turned the air vent back towards me for the breeze. No, none of this was all that important.

      The rules are ambiguous. Signage states to wear a mask in some places, and I slip it on as I walk in the door only to see half the people inside not wearing a mask. I keep it on anyway, respecting the sign on the door, or more specifically, the person who left it up. Not very hard, this mask thing, but so bloody divisive for a population that can’t handle anything remotely inconvenient in their march towards oblivion. What’s a mask but a sign of regard for our fellow humans?

      The tavern I choose for dinner is empty and anticipating company that never comes. A help wanted sign waves in the hot breeze outside, trying in vain to get people to embrace working for a living once again. The bartender fumbles for her mask when I walked in, I told her not to worry about it with a simple word: “vaccinated”. And this is where we are in the world, uncertain greetings and understaffed small businesses trying to scrape survival out of the days after COVID.

      I return to my hotel room, largely alone on the entire floor but for a family on the far end who will use the hallway as a daycare until well into the evening. I might have been bothered by this two years ago, but it’s nice just to hear signs of life in this quiet hotel. They might be at 20% capacity, based on the cars in the lot.

      Dozing off thinking about an early start, celebrating the awkwardness of being back on the road again, I’m jolted awake by what I believe to be the fire alarms going off. It turns out to be a tornado warning pushed to both of my phones simultaneously. Turning one off, I acknowledge the other and open the blinds for some of the most brilliant lightning streaks I’ve ever seen dancing across the sky for the next hour. Thankfully no tornadoes touching down at the Doubletree.

      Do you know that old cliché about never forgetting how to ride a bicycle? Travel now feels this way. You just plug yourself back into the travel routine, brush off the rustiness and go. The routine is largely the same, only traveler has changed.

    • Swimming Season

      New Hampshire has a short swimming season. This is the toll we pay up here in the north country. Since I’m not one to pay for a membership at a gym just to swim laps, every year around this time my body gets reacquainted with the aches and pains unique to swimming. Body parts pushing through the friction of water get tested in ways you don’t test them when you’re doing land-based workouts. These are muscles I haven’t used in months and I feel it the next morning. When I do it all over again.

      Full body soreness is a signal. This signal is telling me “congratulations, you’ve done some work. Now keep it going.” And so I get back at it. Lap after lap back and forth in the pool, slowly relearning the joy of swimming for fitness. Out of breath at first, until my lungs figure out the pace and I settle into a rhythm.

      It’s purely coincidence that the Olympic Swimming Trials are being televised at the same time I’m back in the pool. I’m not at the level that these Olympic athletes are at, swimming to realize their dream or see it dashed by the slimmest of margins. I’m awed by these men and women working for years to a peak of physical excellence, but I don’t jump in the pool and swim laps to be like them. They sacrifice far more in their pursuit than I’m willing to sacrifice (the fact that I’m as old as their parents aside). I’m not that delusional anymore.

      We all sacrifice something. I’m not chasing excellence in the pool as I swim alone back and forth like a ping pong ball bouncing off walls. No, I’m not chasing anything at all. Just a return to the joy of swimming for swimming’s sake. No triathlons or swim meets in my future, just more of the same push against the fluid friction of water. The pool mostly, with a few days in salty Buzzards Bay and the dark, silty waters of my favorite New Hampshire pond mixed in before the days grow cold again.

      Early morning swims remind us of the shortness of the season. The air is brisk at 6 AM, steam rises off the pool and dewy surfaces as the sun reaches for them. Laps in a pool are like the cycle of the seasons; ’round and ’round we go, back to where we once were only to turn around when we get there. This might seem repetitive and mundane, but if we pay attention we find we’re not the same person on our return. Something in us changes, one lap at a time. One season at a time.

    • Pulling Dietary Levers

      “I guess I just encourage people to be much more attuned to all of the tools, right? So caloric restriction, dietary restriction, time restriction, right? You’ve probably heard me go on and on about my framework, the three levers; always pull one, sometimes pull two, occasionally pull three, never pull none.

      So time restriction… restricting when you eat, but otherwise not restricting how much or what. Dietary restriction is restricting some of the content in what you eat. So not eating carbs, not eating wheat, not eating meat… not eating sugar. Those are all forms of dietary restriction. And then caloric restriction is restricting the amount.

      And so if you are never pulling one of those levers, which means you are eating anything you want, any time, how much, whatever, that’s called the Standard American Diet (SAD)…. We’ve been running a very good natural experiment on that for the last fifty years and the data are in. So it turns out that less than… 10% of the population are genetically robust enough to tolerate the SAD… But for the rest of us the 90% of us schmucks… the SAD is lethal. And so you’ve got to come up with a way to escape the gravitational pull of the SAD.” – Dr. Peter Attia, on The Tim Ferriss Show

      We all know this at a certain level, don’t we? We’ve all seen what the standard American diet does to those who eat it. But escaping the gravitational pull of it is the trick. What I love about this statement by Attia is how he lays it all out there, simplifying it to three basic levers. Always pull at least one, sometimes two or all three. And never none.

      Chart your food consumption over the last week and ask yourself, how many days did I pull none of the levers? For most of us, it’s most days. Notice there’s nothing in here about exercise either. We tend to think that exercising cancels out the crap we eat. That might help burn off the calories, but doesn’t account for whatever that crap is doing to your body as it circulates through your system.

      When it comes to things like diet I like simplicity. Doing a no carb diet is a pain in the ass when you travel a lot, so maybe you don’t pull that particular lever and opt for intermittent fasting or limiting the number of calories you consume that day is the better way. Pull one to three levers in a day and see how it transforms your body over time. With discipline and work we might just reach escape velocity. Pull a couple of levers and get in at least an hour of moving to drop the SAD from your days. I’m happy just thinking about that.

    • Living Ratios

      “The secret to living well and longer is: eat half, walk double, laugh triple and love without measure.” -Tibetan Proverb

      “We’ve become conditioned to breathe too much, just as we’ve been conditioned to eat too much. With some effort and training, however, breathing less can become an unconscious habit.” – James Nestor, Breath

      My three taco dinner informed. Overindulgence in meals, especially dinner, leaves us sluggish. I literally felt like a slug lying in bed trying to get to sleep with a full stomach. Who needs that? My reaction was to eat less the next day. I skipped two meals, breakfast and lunch, and ate moderately at dinner the next night.

      Like many people, I’ve wrestled with consistently applying the commonly accepted ratios for a better life: Spend less, save more. Eat less, exercise more. Awake 16 hours, asleep for 8. The logic is easy to grasp for each principle, if hard to execute without discipline. Still, we all agree that these are ratios to aspire to. But breathe less? It seems counterintuitive. Until you consider resting heart rate:

      “Mammals with the lowest resting heart rates live the longest. And it’s no coincidence that these are consistently the same mammals that breathe the slowest. The only way to retain a slow resting heart rate is with slow breaths.” – James Nestor, Breath

      We all have the opportunity to fully embrace change in our lives. To (cue the buzzword) pivot towards something more sustainable. Training the mind and body to accept the natural order of things. And with this in mind I’m working on my ratios. Portion control, if you will, for the core life functions of eating, exercise, rest, breathing, laughter, learning and interactions with others.

      Control is an important modifier here. Not jumping into reckless exercise that creates injury, nor eliminating things from your life that are essential. Living well is not an all or nothing affair, it’s structuring your life around foundational behaviors. We won’t live forever, but we can live better, healthier and more (cue the next buzzword) vibrant lives, and hopefully for a bit longer than the norm.

      I know preaching about exercise and fitness principles and dropping a couple of buzzwords into a blog post don’t create meaningful change. Consistent action applied over time creates meaningful change. But all change begins somewhere. Sometimes it’s triggered by something as simple as a Tibetan quote and one too many tacos.

    • Breaking from the Routine

      “If you wanna fly you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” – Toni Morrison

      It’s simple, really. You decide what to be and go be it. But then the excuses begin. The commitments. The stuff to do. The comfortable routines that drag you back to reality (the reality you choose) and keep you right where you were yesterday and where you’ll be tomorrow.

      Habits are a path to fitness, wealth, knowledge and power. But habits are also a path to sloth, financial stress, mindless binge watching and low agency. The choice, friends, is ours.

      Do you really want to fly? Then break away from the things that hold you down (Morrison put it more succinctly). That might be stuff, mortgages, and relationships, or it might simply be habits. More likely it’s a combination of both.

      There are very legitimate reasons for not traveling right now. But no reason not to explore. To get up early and ride or walk to places nearby that you’ve never seen before. Burning calories and firing up the imagination.

      The pandemic either jolted you free of the routines that held you back or boxed you more tightly in. The fitness world exploded last year even as it imploded. You couldn’t get a bike or kayak or pair of snowshoes to save your life. But you could walk out the door and keep walking until you reached your goal. You don’t need stuff to fly. You need courage to break away.

      I picked up one of the barbell plates stacked neatly on the weight rack and walked around with it for a while. It was exactly the weight that I wanted to lose. Exactly what I was already carrying around with me with the excuses for not losing it. It was a wake-up call. A reminder of what I’ve drifted away from lately. Of what I’d drifted to.

      If you want to fly, you can’t be weighed down with shit. This applies equally well to anything that matters: reaching peak fitness, accumulating knowledge, reaching peak earning power, and efficiently exploring the world.

      I put that weight plate back on the rack and then walked around without it, looking at the accumulation of stuff in the house, thinking about the accumulation of obligations… and recognized that the routine was quietly killing me. Something had to change. Someone has to change. And I took the first small step.

    • Adding Extra to Ordinary

      “A master is in control. A master has a system. A master turns the ordinary into the sacred.”
      – Ryan Holiday

      “The primary math of the real world is one and one equals two. The layman (as, often, do I) swings that every day. He goes to the job, does his work, pays his bills and comes home. One plus one equals two. It keeps the world spinning. But artists, musicians, con men, poets, mystics and such are paid to turn that math on its head, to rub two sticks together and bring forth fire. Everybody performs this alchemy somewhere in their life, but it’s hard to hold on to and easy to forget. People don’t come to rock shows to learn something. They come to be reminded of something they already know and feel deep down in their gut. That when the world is at its best, when we are at our best, when life feels fullest, one and one equals three. It’s the essential equation of love, art, rock ’n’ roll and rock ’n’ roll bands. It’s the reason the universe will never be fully comprehensible, love will continue to be ecstatic, confounding, and true rock ’n’ roll will never die.” – Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

      I’m beginning to understand the art of weaving magic. I am by no means a master, but each turn in the blog, each tangle with words in other work I’m developing, leads me closer to the sacred. The blog is my apprenticeship, never fully realized because I ship the work daily whether the magic is sprinkled on yet or not. This is a turn of the ordinary, and a march towards something more.

      Routines infer ordinary. We have our habits and generally stick with them, and we feel out of sorts when the routine is broken by happenstance or travel. But routines are where you find the magic, hidden deeply in layers of repetition and persistence. You don’t pull magic out of your ass, you work for it.

      You know it when you see it. Moments crackle with excitement. And one plus one does, for a brief moment, equal three. The greatest artists and performers regularly dance with the extraordinary. But hidden from that brilliant moment of now are the buried hours of falling flat, picking yourself up and trying something else then. You don’t add extra to ordinary without sacrifice.

      I’m well aware of where I am with my own work, and I also know where I’m going. Towards the sacred. Towards three. Towards the incomprehensible and magic and the extraordinary. I hope someday to share that with you.

    • The Navigator’s Station

      “The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.” – Edward Gibbon

      Some days everything clicks, and some days it pours stress over you like an ice bucket challenge run amuck. In general we try to steer our lives in the right direction, even when we drift off course now and then. The trick is to know where you want to be go and how to change course to get there. That often starts with sitting in your navigation station and sorting through where you are, where you’re going and what needs to happen to bring you there.

      The writing desk is my navigation station. I normally write at the same time every day, and I’m out of sorts if I don’t do it at that time. The last two days I’ve been out of sorts, writing late in the afternoon instead of with my first mug of coffee for the day. And that makes me feel largely off course for the entire day. This is the combined power of routine and the state change achieved through the flow of writing.

      Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to be challenging that routine trying new habits out for size. I’m also beginning to get out of the house and feeling out the new normal of work away from a computer screen. These forces are already disrupting my state, and I can feel the need to spend a bit more time at the old navigation station to fully absorb the changes.

      Changes are inevitable in life. Really, life is change. Life isn’t all about blind luck and chance encounters, there’s a healthy dose of magic when it’s done well. And that requires execution at a high level and embracing the role of navigator instead of merely being a passenger along for the ride.

      Where do you go from here? Have a seat and sort it out. Invest time where it will help the most – at the navigator’s station.

    • Worthy of Good

      “Isn’t it more appropriate for us humans to endure and be strong? We understand, after all, that we suffer for the sake of something good, either to help our friends, to aid our city, to fight on behalf of women or children, or for the most important and weighty reason of all, to be good and just and self-controlled. No one achieves this without pain. And so I conclude that because we humans acquire all good things by pain, the person who is himself unwilling to endure pain all but condemns himself to being worthy of nothing good.” – Musonius Rufus

      Looking back on the last year I wonder at the person I was a year ago, optimistic yet unsure about the pandemic. Working from home all the time was new; different and unfamiliar. A year later, the work is once again taking over. But we’re different, aren’t we? And so is the nature of the work.

      Ultimately, we either do the work or become masters at hiding from it. In general, and over time, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy for us. Do the work that matters, harden the softness that threatens your effectiveness and eventually good things will come your way.

      The days fly by when you’re deep in productive and rewarding work. Over the last year there were plenty of days that felt both unproductive and unrewarding. Sometimes you feel that things will never get back to normal. But the rewards are there for those who push through the pain and frustration and loss. Which makes me wonder, have I done enough to be worthy of those rewards? Are we doing enough now?

      If we know we can do more, shouldn’t we?