Alexandersmap

    Category: Learning

    • Before the Noise

      Well, those drifters days are past me now
      I’ve got so much more to think about
      Deadlines and commitments
      What to leave in
      What to leave out
      — Bob Seger, Against the Wind

      Count me in as a proponent of productive mornings. I get far more done in the first three hours of the day than I do the rest of the day. We all have our time of peak energy and focus, and for me it’s between the moment I wake up and the moment the world throws its first curveball my way. Every day offers new twists and turns, and all we can truly count on is that short amount of time that is ours before the noise.

      Before is the trick, I think. Before everyone else’s agenda becomes ours. Before the distraction machine between our ears has robbed us of our focus and mental energy to do anything of consequence this day. Before is everything for the early bird.

      This post is out late because I prioritized a long mileage workout over writing. Normally I do it the other way around, but alas, the workouts don’t always survive intact after the noise. With deadlines and commitments, we’re always weighing what to leave in and what to leave out in our lives. A song like Against the Wind is more meaningful with a few miles on the soul than it was as a kid.

      Priorities change as we do. And we aren’t drifting at this point in our lives, are we? No, we’re living with purpose and trying to fit as much in as a day will give us. The lesson always seems to come back to starting early and not beating ourselves up for leaving a few things out.

    • Building Blocks

      “Life’s like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.” ― Jim Henson

      I’m thinking a lot about blocks lately. Probably because I’ve encountered a few more than usual recently in my life. Nothing extraordinary, just life’s jumble of obstacles stacking up between where I am and where I’d like to be. Still, they’re clearly blocks to be dealt with.

      Writer’s block doesn’t just get in the way of writers and poets, it gets in the way of anyone trying to break away from the path more traveled on. Life can be a trap, setting us in the role we’ve become accustomed to and not letting us go off and do the crazy things we dreamed once of doing. At least that’s the way the block forms in our mind. The trick is to see this for what it is and just keep on writing the chapter we want for ourselves despite that internal dialogue.

      Blocks are best used as sprinters use them—as something solid from which to launch ourselves into full speed without slipping backwards. A sprinter has no momentum yet, and the block becomes a fixed point from which to begin again. Reinventing the blocks in our life to become something useful seems a better way to live a creative life. Thinking of blocks as something to launch from, or something to build upon, transforms the block from a barrier to our success to a key element of it.

      The thing is, we must continue to be provocative in our lives. Push boundaries beyond comfortable and see what a bit of discomfort does for our story. Every hero’s journey has blocks along the way, and so too must our journey. Each offers something to build on to reach our happily ever after.

    • Happily Ever Afters

      He said, “Don’t you know I love you, oh, so much
      And lay my heart at the foot of your dress?”
      She said, “Don’t you know that storybook loves
      Always have a happy ending”?
      Then he swooped her up just like in the books
      And on his stallion they rode away
      — Mark Knopfler & Willy Deville, Storybook Love

      A few days ago I took all the serious books I’ve committed myself to finishing and stacked them gently to the side in favor of the delightful, beautifully-illustrated gem The Princess Bride by William Goldman. If you’ve seen the movie and memorized the lines, the book will be as comfortable as watching it just one more time. And yet the book is mesmerizingly wonderful and transformative on its own. You can’t help but visualize scenes and the actors who say the lines, but there’s so much more to delight in than the movie could possibly offer in 98 minutes, which is the official length of Rob Reiner’s masterful tribute to the book. And it reminds us that books are one of humanity’s greatest contributions to the greater good.

      God knows we could use more greater good. And that’s where you and I come in. We may rise above the dismal Fire Swamp we find ourselves forced to march through and ride off on our own white horse with our friends, to a brighter future together. Looking around at the world today, it surely feels sometimes like we’re deep in a dismal swamp we may never get out of. It’s fair to wonder sometimes, just how the hell do we carry on? Happily ever afters are never guaranteed in this lifetime, but we must live with the hope of a brighter tomorrow to manage the lift we’ve been assigned today.

      And that’s the lesson we’re all learning, isn’t it? Some pages are magical, some quite horrible, but most days lie somewhere in between—a steady march to hope. To face each day with love in our heart and a bit of courage is the way through the dark days to that brighter tomorrow. The irony is that chasing happiness often leads to misery, but following our heart to something greater within ourselves usually leads us to the place we dreamed of being all along.

    • The New Way

      “If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.” ― Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

      This week has brought me to a new destination from the one that I departed just a few days ago. Everything is different, once again, because we all change all the time. When we encounter those close to us after these changes, we influence them as they do us. The ripples may be profound or undetectable (but they are surely there).

      Writing telegraphs the changes in me before I reunite with some of my close circle, and if they read the blog, they absorb the changes and react to each themselves. That’s the thing about blogging—you’re constantly telling the people around you who you are today with a deferred reaction from them. It’s that “I know something about you that you don’t know that I know” moment of awkward acknowledgement. Usually that’s not even who we are now, just who we were when we wrote that thing they’re reacting to. But it’s the bed we make for ourselves when we move beyond anonymous and continue to push beyond who we once were.

      We each arrive, look around, and see if the world will join us or if they’ve already moved well past us. Some people are forever anchored to that character they were long ago. I’d like to think I’ve moved beyond that old character myself. I’m under no illusion that I’m ahead of the pack, for I feel my adult life has been forever playing catch-up for the choices I made when I was a younger version of myself. We must bury our former self with each arrival at a new us. So it goes.

      Everything changes and so too must we. There’s no doubt I look at things differently today than I did just a few days ago, and that’s how our lives progress. Sometimes progress is revealed as a leap, sometimes it’s disguised as a setback, but in every case it’s a new way that we must adapt to before everything changes once again.

    • How Was Your Experience?

      I received the same question from my dentist and my automobile service team recently—How was your experience? It turns out both left me a bit disappointed this time around, where I’d come to expect excellence. Perhaps that expectation led me there, or maybe they simply didn’t measure up to their own standards. Either way it was the same result.

      We ought to ask ourselves this question every day with an ever-higher standard for our own behavior, execution on goals, and an ever more refined philosophy for how a life should be lived. What gets measured gets managed, as Peter Drucker supposedly said. Each day offers an opportunity to ask ourselves, how’s it really going? What needs to change? How do we become a better version of ourselves than we were yesterday? It starts with the right questions and follows with an honest answer.

    • Adding Surprise

      “If you keep experiencing the same things, your mind keeps its same patterns. Same inputs, same responses. Your brain, which was once curious and growing, gets fixed into
      deep habits. Your values and opinions harden and resist change.
      You really learn only when you’re surprised. If you’re not surprised, then everything is fitting into your existing thought patterns. So to get smarter, you need to get surprised, think in new ways, and deeply understand different perspectives.” ― Derek Sivers, Hell Yeah or No: What’s Worth Doing

      We know this, don’t we? To learn is to grow. To experience new and diverse things in our lives offers this learning experience for each of us. So it follows that we ought to get outside of our own small box and leap into the new and surprising. It’s here where we may just find delightful insight.

      Ah, but can’t we find delight in our everyday routines? Isn’t that why we’ve landed here? I may walk out into the garden and delight in new blooms, the smell of fresh basil, the song of a cardinal overhead. I can sit in a familiar chair practically molded to my form and read a favorite book again and again, drawing out something new from it every time. Indeed, there are advocates for immersing ourselves ever deeper into the familiar that we may one day master it. We can’t reach mastery if we’re always frittering from one thing to the next.

      There is of course a happy medium. We may go out and seek new perspectives and return to the familiar with them as a more experience-rich person. we collect memories and insights into the ways of the world and bring them back to build a bigger, more expansive and more open box. And like a bird nest we may fly away and return in the proper season. Life is about balancing the familiar with the surprisingly new. The trick is what to prioritize when in our lives.

    • Foundations

      “Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.” ― Carl Jung

      Navigating years as they unfold may make us more intelligent, or less so, depending on the lessons learned along the way. I’m shocked at the distinct lack of intelligence displayed in some people my age or well past it. I’m impressed with the brilliance and maturity of some people much younger than me. I’m sure I shock them at times too by what I don’t know at my own age. Such is the journey through time for each individual.

      We all ought to make more mistakes along the way if only to figure out that we should take another path to becoming. Fear of mistakes is what keeps us from going anywhere at all. There are times in our life when we debate whether to take a hard left instead of staying on a familiar course. Both are deeply impactful, but which elevates our experience the most? Life is full of such forks, and most follow the path well-travelled. And that makes a difference too.

      We don’t learn and grow by staying the same. We must challenge ourselves in new ways, that we may build a stronger foundation from which to see the world differently. Our lifetime of learning and experience, reflected and acted upon, carries us to a greater and more profound identity. It’s right here in front of us, where we might ask once again, what next?

    • No Time for Fog

      “Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all.”
      ― Vincent Van Gogh

      Some days the enchantment of living boils down to how well you slept the night before. I’m blessed with more restful nights than restless, which I suppose leads to more awareness and, it follows, enchantment with the universe. For those other days? There’s always coffee or a plunge into cold water. If we are otherwise healthy, we must approach our days with urgency and the belief that we have no time to waste wandering around in a fog.

      I’m quite aware that I’m falling behind on the journey to personal excellence (arete). That’s not an indictment on the generally good person I try to be, more an acknowledgement that we humans have a long hill to climb and I started paying attention late in the game. We ought to be born feeling the urgency, but most of us figure it out after enough trips around the sun.

      The thing is, we can’t walk around all day with our head in the clouds. There’s no time for fog when we wish to visit the stars in our brief dance. So when we encounter it we ought to strive to rise above it. That requires a steady climb to a higher plane with the dogged attitude that we must do something in our time. Arete is reserved for the gods, of course, not us humans. All we can do is strive to meet our potential and find enchantment on the climb.

    • Momentum in the Moments

      “We should tell ourselves, once and for all, that it is the first duty of the soul to become as happy, complete, independent, and great as lies in its power. Herein is no egoism, or pride. To become effectually generous and sincerely humble there must be within us a confident, tranquil, and clear comprehension of all that we owe to ourselves.” ― Maurice Maeterlinck, Wisdom and Destiny

      We must first reach for our own potential, that we might fully lend it to others. Put another way, we must become increasingly necessary to those around us through the value we bring. Value is our accumulated skills, knowledge and presence applied to contribution. To make a greater contribution, we must build up our value.

      When I look at my career, the times when I’ve been happiest are when I’ve been able to contribute something substantial to the overall cause. The times when I’ve been most miserable in my work are almost always when I feel like I’m not contributing my full value and I’ve lost my way. The thing is, these feelings come well after the work that it took to arrive there, for momentum is built in the moments leading to it.

      This is most obvious in how we feel about our fitness level. If we’re feeling fit, it’s generally because of all the work that led us to physical fitness. Working out can be tedious when we view it as something we have to do. When it becomes part of our identity it’s simply part of our days. And this applies to everything else we do in life: reading and learning, writing and artistic expression, connection to the people in our lives, and our continual development in the self.

      Excellence is a habit. But so is laziness, sloth and a bankrupt soul. Both ends of the spectrum are paths built on the moments that precede our arrival there. We must choose how we spend our days accordingly and build momentum in the right things. So it is that nothing is more important in a brief life than our self development, that we may be more valuable to ourselves and others in the moments to come.

    • Start Again

      The birds they sang
      At the break of day
      Start again
      I heard them say
      Don’t dwell on what has passed away
      Or what is yet to be
      Ah, the wars they will be fought again
      The holy dove, she will be caught again
      Bought and sold, and bought again
      The dove is never free
      Ring the bells that still can ring
      Forget your perfect offering
      There is a crack, a crack in everything
      That’s how the light gets in
      — Leonard Cohen, Anthem

      For all the madness and imperfection in the world, this is our time in it. We may still let the light in and find our way again. This theme has snuck into my awareness a few times in the last few days, in social media posts, in video clips from commencement speeches, and engraved on a bench overlooking Rockland harbor in Maine. It seems everyone is reaching for something, and whispering to those who follow how to find their way. When we open ourselves to the universe, it will tell us all we need to hear.

      We know the world is imperfect just as we know that we too are imperfect. We ought to stop counting our flaws and focus on the things we’re doing right. Work on the good things, let the rest fall away like bad relationships. And aren’t the imperfections we focus on nothing but a bad relationship that we can’t break away from? Let it go already. Start again with the clean slate of a fresh outlook.

      Imperfections are beliefs about the things we don’t have in our lives. None of us are born whole, we each have something within us that is imperfect. My own list is uncomfortably long—but so what? Focusing on what we don’t have in our lives is the surest path to misery. Discomfort is good when we apply it to changes we can influence, but undermines us when applied to focusing on who we’ll never be. That person doesn’t exist and probably shouldn’t—they’re just a character in the story we tell ourselves about our place in this world.

      “When you cut water, the water doesn’t get hurt; when you cut something solid, it breaks. You’ve got solid attitudes inside you; you’ve got solid illusions inside you; that’s what bumps against nature, that’s where you get hurt, that’s where the pain comes from.” — Anthony de Mello, Awareness

      The trick, it seems, is to be more fluid in our perception of ourselves. Joyfulness is found in awareness and acceptance. Being aware of our imperfections and the gaps between who we are and who we wish to be is healthy and may lead to positive change. So is accepting that sometimes the gap is just there to show us who we aren’t meant to be. Ring the bells that still can ring.