Alexandersmap

    Category: Learning

    • Framing the Day

      Come, read to me some poem,
      Some simple and heartfelt lay,
      That shall soothe this restless feeling,
      And banish the thoughts of day.
      — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day is Done

      This blog may ultimately stand for something, or perhaps it will simply be a lifetime of favorite poetry, lyrics and prose quoted as prompts for the words that follow. We all write for our own reasons. To share it at all is the audacious act. The words, cherished while embraced, are simply allowed to float away into infinity, where we will one day join them.

      I’ve grown weary of debate. It doesn’t matter a lick when each side is dug in and unwilling to consider common ground. To reach across the aisle is considered weak. So we learn to ignore each other’s radical ideas. And we are collectively the lesser for closing the door on each other’s most passionate pleas. Instead we get bland exchanges about the weather. How lonely is a life devoid of meaningful engagement with the larger world?

      I may have it all backwards. I begin my day with hopefulness and close it with resignation that the work didn’t change much of anything. That’s no way to end the day. We must bookend our days with aspiration and hope. The trivial thoughts of the day will not be remembered—they will dissolve as all the rest have before them. It is only the way we frame our days that will have the structural resilience to hold together the story of a lifetime. Choosing the right material for that frame thus becomes a critical affair.

      And so I build my frame of poetry and song. I glue it together with philosophy. I make it rigid through engagement with the world, beginning in the garden and venturing outward as far as the travel budget allows. All of this living means something, I’ve come to understand, mostly to me. But that doesn’t make the frame any less solid. Or any less a part of someone else’s frame for having shared at all.

    • One Pebble

      “I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.” — Aldous Huxley

      This week has been stressful, because there were no pleasing leaps forward, only a steady slog through the frenzy of a busy life. None of that frenzy matters as much as the act of taking the next step forward in our essential work, and then (if we don’t stumble into the abyss) the next step after that. We must learn to stop skipping ahead to that dark place of overwhelm. To try to move a mountain all in one shove will only leave us gasping in a puddle of failure. Try one pebble at a time and soon we’re making progress.

      We know this and yet we still feel the scale of the larger goal pressing down upon us. In the middle of a long row I thought to myself momentarily, can I sustain this pace for the entire time I’ve committed to? I saw my split waiver for a stroke or two, while I reminded myself that the only thing that mattered was the next stroke, not the one 40 minutes from now. I ended up with a PR for the year just by staying out of my own head one stroke at a time. When we stop playing mind games with ourselves about the future and our place in it, we get back to the essential work of now.

      Progress is uncomfortable. We feel the discomfort in our own change as we make it, and we feel discomfort when we feel we’re falling behind the changes around us, prodding us to move faster in our own development. The only thing to do is accept the discomfort as a necessary tax of forward motion. We know that change can be infuriatingly incremental. Stop looking so far ahead and we won’t get tripped up by the task right in front of us. This next task is all that really matters anyway. One pebble at a time.

    • See What Unfolds

      The Barred Owls have returned. There is a mating pair that moves through the trees, hooting it up to check in on each other while they each hunted in different places in the woods surrounding us. I’m told that Barred Owls hunt independent of each other, eat what they eat and catch up again later. “So how was work today?” “Fine, had hoped for a baby bunny but only caught a field mouse.” Romantic stuff.

      Also developing in the neighborhood, a large beaver has moved in to the stream, wading about just after dusk above the bridge. It’s been a few years since I’d seen a beaver in the stream, and I’m wondering if the drought had dried up its previous nest. Beaver will move on when their food source is used up, not unlike the owls. We’ve all got to eat. While the owls are big talkers, the beaver works in silence most of the time.

      We’re seeing yet another bumper crop of acorns this year, which explains the abundance of animals that feed on them moving back into the neighborhood (along with the animals that feed on the feeding animals). It’s been a hot dry summer after a wet spring. I wonder what that means for the fall foliage this autumn, but I don’t wonder enough to look it up. We all have the world at our fingertips, don’t we? We ought to let a few things simply unfold before us just to keep the magic in our lives.

      I’m finally reading a paperback version of Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen, based entirely on the recommendation of Rainer Maria Rilke, mind you. I’m at a point in my life when I look around and find most talking heads haven’t got much to add to the conversation, so I dig deeper. Don’t just stop with the work of an author or poet or artist—seek out the works that influenced them. What challenges and transforms us, collectively?

      Today’s world is unfolding exactly as I anticipated when the elections went the way they went a year ago. We are where we are because people believe what they want to believe, and feel emboldened to behave the way they behave because others do it so it must be okay. We too may choose how to react in such times. How do we want to navigate this world that we live in?

      My advice, since you’ve read this far, is to seek out the timeless over the trend whenever possible. Things will come and go in a lifetime. We mustn’t forget that the lifetime in question is ours. We must do the best we can with what unfolds before us. There is more to this world than the madness swirling noisily on the platforms of choice. Go deeper and see what unfolds.

    • Our Box of Stories

      I spent a few minutes scanning the Substack of a clever hipster with far more subscribers than I have on that platform and really all of my platforms combined. She stated that blogging is long dead, and Substack was getting there itself. And I smiled to myself, knowing just how uncool I’ve become for still calling it a blog. Why not simply call it writing? Or a daily newsletter? Or the complicated ramblings of a self-absorbed passenger on this ship of fools we call now? It’s all just the great conversation, in whatever way we dare to put it out there. The rest is positioning ourselves as close to relevance as we can get, if we choose to. Some of us forgo influence for deeper, calmer waters. It all matters, and none of it matters, all at once. We do the best we can where we are, with what we have.

      Our box of stories is that which surrounds us, holding us in place so we don’t stray too far into reckless places. My story is telling me to be responsible today and go to work after writing this [whatever we want to call it] and doing a few chores around the homestead so it’s still in one piece when I eventually return. There’s more to the story than that, but why bog down your story by going long with mine? Let’s keep it real, and really concise.

      The thing is, we know we ought to re-write our stories now and then, just to change the box we find ourselves trapped in. We’re all running out of time to experience all that lies outside our box. That’s the underlying story, no matter how we write it. We don’t have to ruin all our stories, but we ought to stretch the box beyond the limits those stories have given us. Today is as good a day to try something new as any. What are we currently writing? Make it fresh and a little bolder than the box can contain.

    • Solid and Perfected

      “I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected. Such trees continue to expand with nearly equal rapidity to an extreme old age.” — Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry David Thoreau

      Some people hit the ground running. They learn and adapt quickly, show promise and then exceed expectations with every step. They make those lists of rising stars and show exactly why they got there. I appreciate the relentless drive they show each day to reach for excellence.

      That wasn’t my path. Forget about being the smartest person in the room, I hadn’t earned a ticket to enter it in the first place. So began a quest to fill in gaps through formal and self-education. Forever a work in progress, we grow closer to our potential through consistent action.

      We are where we are, most of us arriving here through a series of events largely out of our control, the very occasional good choice made at the right time, and a healthy dose of dumb luck. We may not have been labeled a rising star or have the pedigree of the elite, but we’ve all hit the lottery anyway, didn’t we? Arriving here, largely intact despite some poor choices along the way. Lucky us.

      This moment in our life is always and forever our beginning. From here we rise to meet our future. To become more resilient, stronger and wiser is a choice. So is the choice to coast into (or remain in) something easier. Beginning again today, with the skills, knowledge and fitness level that yesterday’s choices earned us, we get to choose based on who we wish to become. Our growth depends on our being rooted in aspirations higher than our current position: To grow into someone solid and perfected.

    • That Fierce Embrace

      It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
      or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel
      abandoned.
      If you know despair or can see it in others.
      I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world
      with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back
      with firm eyes saying this is where I stand. I want to know
      if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living
      falling toward the centre of your longing. I want to know
      if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequences of love
      and the bitter
      unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have been told, in that fierce embrace, even
      the gods speak of God.

      — David Whyte, Self Portrait

      To be ourself in a world that expects acceptance, or at the very least acquiescence, is audacious. Mothers, wanting the very best for their babies, might call it reckless. Best to fall in line, get a proper degree, leading to a proper job, offering a proper life. ‘Tis proper, we’re trained to believe, to focus on the score. Grades and status and titles and the right zip code.

      The score is memento mori. The score is tempus fugit. If we are to melt into that fierce heat of living, we must go against the grain more often than our tribe may be comfortable with. They only want the best for us. We know this, and we must learn to be bold anyway. A lifetime is far too short for all that we want for ourselves, let alone all that our tribe expects of us.

      The real question, the one we’ve avoided all along in this tribal dance, is why won’t we simply embrace it?

    • A Shared Experience

      “The Scripture rule, “Unto him that hath shall be given,” is true of composition. The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands.” — Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry David Thoreau

      Give and it shall be given. A bit of Luke for the casual Bible reader. The more we give of ourselves, the more flows through us. Generosity is an infinite game, derived out of an abundance mentality. Over and over again, we learn that we get what we give (You’ve got the music in you).

      A friend invited me back to Substack with a gift subscription. I appreciate the generosity, but I’m in a place where I favor analog over digital consumption, and am thus keeping most digital content at arms length. Is it ironic that I blog daily, thus creating the very digital content that I’m currently attempting to trim from my unrelentingly large information diet? Perhaps. But our hand is more complex and nuanced than the up card that is showing. This paragraph is not who I am, just who I was in the moment I wrote it. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

      When the words flow with abundance, all sorts of things come out. We either filter vigorously, knowing our spouse and mother and daughter will read it, or we simply accept the consequences of an open dialog and write what comes to us. But we become what we focus on, and this blog, scattered as it may seem at times, focuses on the fine art of becoming what’s next. Life is a shared experience, and what is a blog but the sharing of where we’ve been and what we’ve seen?

      Thought breeds thought. We are here to write our story, made rich by the vigorous application of full days. Do more, experience more, learn from it and see where it takes us next. Then share it with others. Life grows in abundance to the level with which we engage with the world.

    • Release the Dancers

      “He was weary of himself, of cold thoughts and intellectual dreams. Life a poem! Not when you perpetually went around inventing your life instead of living it. How meaningless it was, empty, empty, empty. This hunting for yourself, slyly observing your own tracks—in a circle, of course; this pretending to throw yourself into the stream of life and then at the same time sitting and angling for yourself and fishing yourself up in some peculiar disguise! If only it would seize him: life, love, passion—so that he wouldn’t be able to invent it, but so that it would invent him.”
      — Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

      There’s a fine line between imagination and invention. We dream big dreams, or perhaps simply a wee wish or two, and they each dance about happily in our imagination until we do the work to realize them or eventually get sick of being teased by the dancers and find something else with which to fancy for awhile. Life isn’t meant to be a dream, it’s meant to be a gradual realization of our potential. It’s a matter of turning imagination into reality through deliberate and purposeful work. That line is crossed through action.

      “Decide what to be and go be it.”… —The Avett Brothers lyric that lives rent free in my head.

      Incremental experience—the experience that Jacobsen’s character Niels is pining for—in turn forever reinvents us. The person we’ve become is far more capable of doing this next thing than the person we were then. We imagine possibilities we couldn’t imagine from our previous vantage point, and we move along a timeline of steady progression.

      It’s natural to chafe at the limitations of our current level of experience. This discomfort is a catalyst for change—if we allow it to be anyway. Unless we’re forever paralyzed by inaction and low agency. We must develop our voice over time and learn to use it to realize possibility:

      Alas for those that never sing,
      But die with all their music in them!
      — Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Voiceless

      We are forever inventing ourselves or settling into the stasis of an under-developed character. We must raise our voice and sing! This life is flying along with or without our active participation. By all means, step away from the mirage of dreams and do something with this day. Release the dancers!

    • The Wave

      We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we
      change.
      Congratulations, if
      you have changed.
      — Mary Oliver, To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

      Anyone who survives a day at the beach learns quickly that waves are meant to be faced one at a time—fully present with the one we’re in, but aware of what’s coming next. The one that has just washed over us is has already receded as undertow as the next rises to meet us. We learn not to dwell on what has come and gone when there’s another wave rising before us. To dwell on the undertow of what’s already receding serves no purpose but to fill our bottom with grit.

      We are nothing more than the routine with which we wrap our days in, and we become nothing more than the changes we embrace for ourselves. We know that change is constant. We accept that it’s often unpredictable. And we grow at the pace with which we adapt to it and learn to seek it for ourselves.

      Indeed, we’re grittier than we once were, and built to face what’s coming next. Life is always the next wave, and if we survive it, the one after that. Learn from all that is receding, but focus on what’s rising to meet us. We are changed, and we are changing more still.

    • Marking the Path of Being

      “All the bright precious things fade so fast, and they don’t come back.” — from F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

      I love a rainy day with nothing much to do. I find there haven’t been all that many of either rainy days or days without much to do this summer, so savoring the sensation feels right. Let tomorrow bring the crush; today is for too precious to concede to busy.

      The tricky thing about being busy is that we lose the capacity to savor when we’re trying desperately not to drown. There’s no floating with stillness when the waves are choppy and filled with sharks and other drowning people. An angry sea is no place to be. We must seek stillness in our lives if we are to find awareness and peace.

      When we get busy things tend to slip away with time. We focus on the important and urgent instead of the essential few. If it’s important we ought to focus on it, right? I mean, it’s important. And if it’s urgent we don’t have time to debate, we just do. This mindset makes us feel productive, but it forever kicks the essential down the curb.

      “How many pages will be left empty because your process was dampened by doubt and deliberation?” — Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

      We must develop and nurture our non-negotiables in life. Mine include time to exercise, read, sleep, and yes: to write. If I get enough of these four, then even the stormiest day feels manageable. Writing every day coaxes the busy mind into awareness. To dabble in the essential for an hour, or a few hours, before the angry sea attempts to wash over us is a gift we give to ourselves. What do we make of this accumulation of blog posts and pages written? Will it take us anywhere in the end? It’s taken us this far already, friend.

      A lifetime is an empty and hollow thing indeed if we don’t fill each day with something more than we began it with. What is accumulated is a growing awareness and the willingness to experience and do the things that may come to us if we would only be open to them. These words are simply marking the path of being. How many pages may we fill in a lifetime of deliberate being? There is a hint of an answer revealed here and now.