Alexandersmap

    Category: Learning

    • Singlemindedness

      “To follow without halt, one aim; there is the secret of success. And success? What is it? I do not find it in the applause of the theater. It lies rather in the satisfaction of accomplishment.” — Anna Pavlova

      Single-mindedness is a superpower. With it we focus on our top priority at the expense of all others. Without it, we are a jack of all trades. We may become good at many things, but as the expression goes, we master none. We simply cannot reach mastery without single-mindedness.

      The real question is, what should we say yes to that would make all else a no? Is it best to live an abundance of yeses or a highly restricted life of many no’s? Does mastery trump the pursuit of a life of many passions?

      Naturally the world couldn’t care a lick what we wish to focus on. There are many important things on our to-do list and an infinite number of distractions available to pull our attention away from the essential. We must wrestle with these questions as we progress through life, with each stage bringing a different perspective. But throughout our entirety, we must protect our focus as if our lives depend on it. Surely it does.

    • Realizing Growth

      “You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.” — Alan Watts

      “The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.”— Mortimer Adler

      I finished a second book this year, a good pace if you look at how early in the year we are, but these were stubborn books that didn’t want to finish with me in the prior year. Everything has it’s time, and certainly this rings true with books. Looking at my highlights and notes from each, I’ve made a couple of incremental steps forward this year. Let’s call that a win in a year that has otherwise started out in concerning ways.

      We know that we’re all (sometimes reluctantly) connected, but we must remain focused on our own development over the trends of humanity, and then use our growth as a catalyst for change. Knowledge isn’t something to hoard like a greedy billionaire’s money, it’s something we share with others as we navigate the world together. This blog is written to share what I pick up along the way, but so is a conversation with a random stranger sharing the same space in a café. We never really know how far our ripple will carry, only that this is our time to turn our accumulated experience and learning into a bigger splash.

      The aim isn’t to be an influencer, but to be influenced by the experiences and knowledge we gather along the way. Shouldn’t we all calculate our lives, not by time alive on this planet, but by our accumulation of experience in our living years? As a tree with it’s rings marking seasons, some years are growth years and some are survival years, but there’s a ring either way.

      It’s no coincidence that ripples from a stone dropped in a still pond resemble the rings of a tree (we might take this analogy all the way out to the universe itself—naturally we aren’t the center of it, no matter what our mother’s told us, but surely our energy and matter are an integral part of it). At the core of each of us is identity, focused either on growth or survival (holding on to what we have already). What will this year be for us? We must act on our intentions if we wish to realize growth.

    • Using Words Well

      “A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

      I’ve had a song stuck in my head for a week that is so profoundly beautiful it changed my perspective on how I want to spend my days. We’ve all had those experiences with art that change us in unforeseen ways. When we encounter prose, poetry or lyrics that awe us with truth, we are inadvertently rising to meet a higher plane of understanding about ourselves and our place in this brief shining moment. We know that the game has changed, and must rise to meet a new personal standard by mining deeper with our own work.

      So many writers tell us that to write better we must read better, and really this goes for all art. But to write better we must also learn to live better, be more present and aware, and through heightened awareness, move closer to personal excellence (arete). Some characters and places are formative, and lead us to places unanticipated before we ascend to that vista. We experience the thrill in discovery in the immediate, and the assurance of familiarity in time. And then it all repeats again with the next encounter.

      The goal is to keep building on the gains made previously. To find new paths worth exploring, to learn something new today, to use that as a stepping stone for something more tomorrow. Writing has brought me farther faster than I would have gone otherwise, but more, it brings creativity to my days that may be applied to other aspects of my life. This creates a snowball effect as each act builds upon the other, as each day builds upon the previous, to create an exponentially greater soul than the one who started this journey.

    • Silence, Exile, and Cunning

      “I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.” ― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

      We’re in a strange new world, full of people believing unbelievable things. Or maybe the world has always been strange and unbelievable, and I’ve just risen above the din to finally see it all myself. These are days we’ll remember, at least if we survive long enough and the victors are on the right side of history.

      Belief is a funny thing, carrying us to places we may never have imagined we’d go to, simply because we believed the story that pulled us there. This can serve us well, when used for snuffing out imposter syndrome and such things for productive work. The day I stepped away from anonymous blogging to having friends and family fully aware of what I’m writing (if at all inclined) was a notable moment in my development as a writer. There are other notable moments to come this year on the writing front (I believe this to be true).

      Belief can also be used to control the masses. The world is a far more dangerous place because of shared beliefs of “us versus them”. It leads to mass indifference at the separation of families at borders and the bombing of hospitals and schools, all to keep them from threatening us. We all know the world is a complicated place with no easy answers, but when someone loudly starts pointing their fat finger at another group and screaming “Them!” it’s usually time to back slowly away to look for the real story. But who tells real stories anymore?

      There is no them
      There’s only us
      — U2, Invisible

      The thing I tell people who dare to ask me what I think is that we must build resilience into our lives. Some people believe resilience is hoarding guns, food and toilet paper. There’s a whole economy built around those folks. My own form of resilience lies in creating more diversity in my diet. Better nutrition for the mind and body through selective consumption. More books, poetry and song, less curated social media and billionaire-run mass media. And, as James Joyce suggested, the use of silence, exile and cunning to build a mote between the zealots and all that I know to be true in this world.

      There’s nothing silent about a blog post. It’s a stamp of stated beliefs marking this moment in time. A betrayal that I’m still trying to change the world for the better. We may choose to be a voice for reason and acceptance, after all. At least until things really go to hell and they ship us all to Greenland to mine precious metals for the next generation of self-driving cars, weaponized drones and phones that tell us what to believe next (I digress).

      We may be selectively silent when it suits our purposes, just as we may exile ourselves from the zealots who would have us fall in line. Both tools have limitations in a small world with big reach. That leaves us with cunning. We must be smarter than the average bear, to stay one step ahead of what they want to tell us is true. This is the ultimate resilience, and it begins and ends with our audacity to think differently.

    • Like Wind Blowing

      “Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

      It is and we are. What matters is we’re a part. We need not make sense of it all, for who can possibly know? What matters is that we are playing our part in the universe in our time.

      This echoes of Walt Whitman’s famous answer in O Me! O Life! which will always be read with the voice of Robin Williams in my head:

      “That you are here—that life exists and identity,
      That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”

      Some of us forever dwell on the why. Some descend into nihilism, as if a why matters a lick, for existence itself is folly. And some simply get straight to work, believing action creates a why. The only thing we control is our reaction to the world we find ourselves dropped into. What do we find when we break down the word reaction? Google AI to the podium:

      “The Latin word reāctiō is the origin of both the Old French and Middle English words, which comes from the verb reagō. Reagō is made up of the prefix re- meaning ‘again’ and the word agō meaning ‘to act’.”

      To act again. Like wind blowing through the grass, we stir meaning out of the inanimate and create a life for ourselves. This is what it means to be alive. To play a part infers action, for which we must boldly embrace our agency. Life has purpose or it’s meaningless—we play a part in determining which it will be. Who says we can’t make our part a thrilling page-turner?

    • Our Opportunity of a Lifetime

      We know what we are, but not what we may be.”
      — William Shakespeare, Hamlet

      The final day of the year offers us a clear idea of who we are, and tantalizes us with the mystery of what we may be in the next year. So here we are again, friend. What have we become? What will we become? All the weight of identity placed on a turn of the calendar. But every day offers these questions that only we may answer. To be or not to be, that is the question: every single day.

      This year coming to an end offers us the answer. We have become both in what we have consumed (food, media, books, feedback, time) and what we have produced (art, presence in the lives of others, our chosen professional work, our acceptance of or anger at our fellow humans to the sum of each in the world). We are the sum of our consumption and production to this point. We either like who we’ve become or we may reset the compass and go in a new direction entirely. That’s the beauty of a new day and the New Year: reinvention.

      It always comes back to what we say yes and no to. Today’s post completes a promise I made to myself a year ago to write every day. Regular readers know that I considered stopping to focus on other things, but pushed through the no to arrive back at yes. I’m inclined to say yes to this promise again in the next year, knowing that there will be hurdles once again. We all have those things that set our day in motion, don’t we? Writing is my motion setter.

      We may take that concept of setting things in motion to tomorrow, today. Whatever that audacious resolution may be, today offers an opportunity to set the stage. What we may be remains our unique opportunity of a lifetime. Why wait another day to get started on the path to becoming?

    • Adapting to the Alpha Dog

      “Without the spur of competition we’d loaf out our life.” — Arnold Glasow

      We invited another dog into our home for the holidays, to help out a nephew who is away for a few days. The holidays are an interesting time to get to know a new dog, but she’s been a sweet pup in most every way. She is most definitely an alpha, and quickly established herself as such with our own pup. Our pup in turn learned to eat her meal immediately or risk losing it altogether to the other. We feed them in different rooms, but a girl only has to see her food eaten by another once or twice to hammer home the lesson. Live with urgency when your world turns competitive.

      I joined a new company a couple of months ago and have received phishing emails and texts from someone posing as the CEO a couple of times per week ever since. It’s easy to let our guard down in such circumstances, but we must always be vigilant. Those who would take all we’ve earned grow more sophisticated every day, and so we ourselves must learn and grow as well. A simple check with IT confirmed what I knew already: it was a phishing attack. The real CEO can still reach me if he wants to chat.

      We know that our true aim is personal excellence, but we still must keep an eye on the world around us. This world has always been competitive, and will be long after our last day in it. There’s always someone who wants what we want, so we must work harder to earn what we want for ourselves. And there’s always someone who wants what we have, so we must grow ever more resilient to protect what we’ve earned.

      It’s easy to get comfortable when we reach a certain place in our lives. The world in 2025 will surely be different from the years preceding it. We can’t just loaf our way through the changes, we must keep reinventing ourselves to survive, and maybe even to thrive. All of this reinvention may feel exhausting at times, but it’s simply personal growth hidden as work.

      That alpha dog visitor is still with us for a few more days. She’s been wonderful, but goodness she’s brought some changes to our home. It’s good to remember that our visitor is adapting to the challenge of living in a strange new home for a few days, full of creatures she doesn’t know all that well, and absent the people she’s grown to trust the most. We aren’t the only ones adapting to change. So reminding her that we’re equally invested in making it work is a good first step to growing together.

    • It’s the Zombies Who Burned the Witches

      “All empty souls tend to extreme opinion. It is only in those who have built up a rich world of memories and habits of thought that extreme opinions affront the sense of probability. Propositions, for instance, which set all the truth upon one side can only enter rich minds to dislocate and strain, if they can enter at all, and sooner or later the mind expels them by instinct.” — William Butler Yeats

      I stumbled upon the social media rantings of an old college friend recently. I was shocked by the conspiracy theories being spouted, and recoiled at the gap that has developed between her worldview and my own. I’d tried to debate her before on her accuracy, but alas, she wouldn’t budge. Another college friend reminded me of the line they use when logic isn’t working: If you only knew what I knew. Right. If only…

      I understand better how people once burned witches. They were simply too devoid of experience to understand the things happening to them. When we know how to prevent smallpox or the plague, or to mitigate infant mortality or crop failure, we stop blaming the neighbor’s daughter who looked at us funny. We’ve entered a time when extreme opinions are paralyzing our progress, and it’s a direct result of the poverty of experience in the daily diet of so many. We’re all in danger of being burned at the stake as we look at these people who once seemed normal spiral into conspiracy theories fueled by an over-reliance on “Internet facts”.

      Have you noticed that all of the people living in the world’s intellectual centers perish in the zombie apocalypse movies? The survivors all move to remote walled villages with high walls and guns that somehow kill already dead people. In the real world, the zombies are the people building walls that close out contrary opinions and buying guns to fend off those who would dare cross them. We all agree that we must not become zombies, we just don’t agree on what a zombie actually is.

      In truth, I am conspiring—to keep hope alive. To help people find informational nutrition, and with it, to form better opinions. To seek experience beyond the walls, where insight lives. That pendulum has to swing back to consensus and shared beliefs some day, right? The alternative is to build our own walls, and doesn’t the world have enough of those already?

    • Becoming Better at Seeing

      I was talking to one of my in-law’s neighbors while walking the pup on their street. The neighbor has reached a place where you might call her elderly and frail, but was out shoveling her driveway because her grandson hadn’t shown up to do it. We’re all so busy this time of year… the grandson surely wouldn’t have let his grandmother shovel her driveway alone on a frigid day, but he wasn’t there to witness it and step in. My daughter and I were, and finished her driveway, cleared off her car and asked her if she wanted to come over to join us at the holiday party we were having. She politely declined and thanked us for the invitation.

      We become comfortable in our routines, even when those routines don’t make sense for us anymore. In a perfect world the tribe would revere and support the tribal elders. We live in a world where we’re tapped out and stretched thin, and sometimes we don’t get around to making the call or stopping by to see how those tribal elders are doing. Often they’re holding on by a thread, doing the best they can. A burst of snow quickly freezing into concrete has the potential to put someone over the edge without a lifeline.

      When we slow down a beat and stop rushing on to the next thing with our blinders on, our peripheral vision improves greatly. There are people moving through this world who easily see gaps and fill them with their full attention. I aspire to be more like them, while knowing I’m one of those people who are often too busy to have that situational awareness. We all want to help, don’t we? We just don’t always see. As we move down our path towards personal excellence, becoming better at seeing and solving is something to aspire to. We’re all in this tribe together, aren’t we?

    • Stepping Into Change

      So let this winter
      of listening
      be enough
      for the new life
      I must call my own.
      — David Whyte, The Winter of Listening

      I met a friend for a pint yesterday. It turned into a small pub crawl between two breweries as the crisp air filled with swirling snow. We talked of the familiar and the forever changing as the snow accumulated and the town roads clogged with drivers uncertain about what to do when the world turns white again. With a nod to the familiar we needed to return to, we cut our reunion short and joined the other drivers while our heads were still clear enough to join the fray.

      Snowflakes melt on the back of my neck as I moved the brush around the truck, feeling my footing on snowy concrete with the anticipation of slippery roads. Like any skill that’s been dormant for some time, walking and driving on icy roads is muscle memory. It all comes back quickly, we just need to take it slowly while the rust clears. We’ve been together before, the winter whispers reassuringly, and sure enough one tentative step brings us to the next and soon we’re safely home again.

      December often hints at changes to come in our lives. Mine is no exception; change has whispered in my ear for months. When the world starts swirling with the forever changing, we may carry the reassurance of having been here before. The landscape may change in disorienting ways, but we’ve developed the skills to navigate this new world safely on our journey of becoming. Keep a clear head and listen for what whispers. Stepping into change is nothing new for us.