Alexandersmap

    Category: Learning

    • Where Our Heart Takes Us

      “I am proud of my heart alone, it is the sole source of everything, all our strength, happiness and misery. All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

      I was thinking about Goethe after my traveling companion asked me why I was so happy to come across a statue erected in his honor in Vienna. I suppose this quote offers some insight. Goethe distinguished himself as a deep thinker in a city jammed full of them. We all seek knowledge in our quest to become something more, but our heart points the way and determines how far we actually go. Our knowledge quest isn’t unique to us, many of us seek amelioration. The heart ultimately tips the scales for how rich and fulfilling our lives will be.

      Absorbing knowledge is helpful when we do something with it. The homeless man asking me for money in the park easily pivoted from German to English when I responded with my basic skills in his native language. Which of us has more knowledge? Which of us can read Goethe without translation? We are what we either seek or ignore. Knowledge is but a starting point for becoming what we might be.

      Traveling, reading, learning a language, and trying to capture experiences in words are each forms of seeking knowledge. Goethe’s hard stare and his translated words remind me that I have work to do. Do I have the heart to get it done?

    • Vienna, At Last

      Slow down, you crazy child
      And take the phone off the hook and disappear for awhile
      It’s all right, you can afford to lose a day or two
      When will you realize, Vienna waits for you?

      — Billy Joel, Vienna

      A traveler seeks magic in places big and small, and in mountains and cities alike. Two weeks of trains, planes and automobiles carried us to some of the most beautiful places in the region, but we had to come to Vienna before we felt our trip was complete. Maybe it was Billy Joel’s reminder that the city—the world— is out there waiting for us to stop the madness and seek out the magic that inspired a visit, or maybe it was a voice inside. Vienna, like Paris or Budapest or Prague remains a myth until you reach out and meet it.

      The first impression a visitor may have of Vienna is that the city is far bigger than one might expect. The larger city looks and feels like the working city it is. Cranes all over the horizon indicate it’s still growing, and quickly. But for all its bigness the Old City itself is very walkable.

      Where do you go first when you visit Vienna? For me the choice was obvious: St Stephen’s Cathedral. Seeing the massive and ornate structure of the church itself was a goal, but climbing the 343 steps up the South Tower for the incredible views of the city was my underlying goal.

      Having seen the city from a high vantage point, it was time to find the details that make Vienna unique. One must walk an old city and find that which hides from casual visitors. This city offers something around every corner.

      When you’ve heard about Vienna your whole life don’t just skip across its surface like a stone, sink in! One should visit the palaces and museums and cafés to know Vienna, but you should also seek out the nooks and crannies where the place reveals its magic. Those who built this place leave a bit of themselves for us to discover, should we only look for it.

    • Go, Deeply

      “Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.” — Richard P. Feynman

      Each day is an opportunity to discover—inching further along on our search for more insight into who we are. We may never find the true meaning of life, but why do we even dwell on such things? Meaning comes from action. We ought to live deliberately and stack the building blocks into whatever form suits us in our brief dance with the world.

      The world unfolds for us one moment at a time. What do we do with that experience? Shouldn’t we layer it into our identity, not in arrogant claims of global box-checking, but in accumulated bits of flavor and influence? What makes us interesting is our passionate interest in the complex dynamics playing out around us, be that human tendencies or the larger forces in the universe. Immersive travel, reading, listening and education are where we serve our apprenticeship in being citizens of the universe.

      So just when do we transcend apprenticeship? Can we ever, really? We reach closer to mastery when we venture more deeply into the act of living. Boldly layering experience and accumulated knowledge into a rich, meaningful life. And maybe that’s just enough.

    • Silencing Voices

      “If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” — Vincent van Gogh

      When we figure out the truth in van Gogh’s words dictates exactly how creative we’ll be at any given stage of life. He didn’t achieve “success” until he’d left this world, for us the world spends little time worrying about our feelings on the matter. The truth is we have but precious little time to silence our own voices and chase dreams. Why wait?

      The problem we have is we see what the masters do in any field, and compare our work to that. We have difficulty reconciling our incremental step towards mastery with the brilliant work of others before us, without ever considering the stumbles they took on their path. The work evolves when the mind puts aside resistance and gets to it.

      We’ve already made our mark on the world, subtle as it might seem. Our splash ripples even as we contemplate our next dive into the unknown. Knowing this, why not stretch our limits a bit on this next one? Silence our doubters one small step at a time.

    • The Magic in Emergent Knowledge

      “Call it what you want. Call it belief, faith… stepping out and making a commitment without necessarily knowing what the outcome is going to be. But really leaning into it in good faith. And then you’re along for this beautiful journey of emergent possibilities and learning things and deepening your knowledge of another person and being known in a deeper way than you’ve ever been known before… The fruits and the benefits have been totally different than I thought they would have been before I did it, and I only know them because I did it. So there’s emergent knowledge… that relied on a decision. How often is that the case, where we have to make one decision in order to learn the next thing, or even the benefits of that thing?” — Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire [The Knowledge Project Ep. #138]

      This journey of transformation that we’re all on begins with a decision. We choose our path in subtle and profound ways that we don’t fully realize when we decide. Burgis’s description of a beautiful journey of emergent possibilities is a lovely way of phrasing what happens when we finally decide what to be and begin to be it.

      A decision is the cornerstone of the bridge we build to our future in an instant of resolve. That bridge crosses a gap in our knowledge that we aren’t fully aware of in the moment. Isn’t there magic in a decision, and doesn’t that set the table for all the subsequent enlightening moments that follow?

      We gain immeasurably through our decisions—the good ones and the bad. Good decisions reveal themselves in marvelous moments of discovery. Bad decisions aren’t usually so bad that we can’t pivot towards something better. Knowing this, why do we let ourselves be paralyzed about making a decision? There’s something to be said for visualizing the worst case scenario, for it places us in a position to embolden ourselves when we recognize that the worst ain’t all that bad.

      We all ought to unfold the emergent knowledge that comes with acting on bold choices. We all ought to opt for more. For the magic lies between here and there.

    • Our Lifetime Knowledge Quest

      “Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.” — Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle

      Thoreau’s Life Without Principle is a quick read, but well worth the hour or so it takes to digest it. As with anything in life, the question is, what do we want to prioritize in our brief time? The essay is itself a flash of light that opens the mind to a lot of questions we often push aside. Isn’t that what reading should do for us? Isn’t that what we aspire to in our very best writing?

      “I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day’s devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.…
      Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself- an hypaethral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods?
      … We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention.” — Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle

      Thoreau wrote this for a lecture he gave in 1855, but doesn’t it remain timeless? Why do we dwell on the gossip of our own day and defer the very best ideas for another? Most media is junk food for the mind. We snack way too much on empty calories in our information diet, leaving our souls starving for nutrition.

      We must make knowledge our quest in our short time. If the best way to learn something is to teach it, it follows that we must tackle the deepest ideas in our own writing and conversations too. To participate in the Great Conversation and aspire to enlighten others as we become enlightened ourselves.

      We become what we focus on the most. So it follows, we ought to continue to raise the bar on our own development. To realize a full and rich life, we ought to make our lives a knowledge quest. Each day offers its own wealth to mine. And an opportunity to be a philanthropist with that knowledge.

    • Facing Reality

      “Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.” – Søren Kierkegaard

      There’s no doubt that, for most of us, reality is a handy place to anchor. We all must face the reality of living in a world that doesn’t go out of its way to cater to us. And yet, we all know people who anchor themselves to delusional stories instead of reality.

      We ought to fully experience all that life has to offer, but we all see things we’d rather not include in our lives. Mass shootings (welcome to America!), war, racism, toxic television… who wants any of that crap to be part of our reality? Still, we must face it just the same if we’re ever going to transcend it.

      We have a hand in the reality we live in. We don’t have to accept all that we experience, but we must acknowledge it and choose how we react. Life has its problems, but it also has its fair share of wonder.

      I wonder, what do we dwell on?

    • How Much Alive

      “It matters not where or how far you travel—the farther commonly the worse—but how much alive you are.” — Henry David Thoreau

      Sitting outside, listening to birdsong in the magic hour before the world shook the cobwebs off, I watched a couple of large birds fluttering tree-to-tree. I wondered at them, thinking perhaps pileated woodpeckers who tend to behave this way, or maybe a couple of young turkeys waking up from their roost. Definitely not hawks on the hunt. Black and white with a bit of duck-like appearance to them, I quickly exhausted my list of possibilities and remained mystified. The binoculars and camera remained safely in the house where they offered the least amount of help in the moment. So I quietly thanked them for their visit and released them from my attention as they worked their way away from my own perch. I may find out yet who my visitors were, but it wasn’t our moment for a proper introduction.

      We aren’t meant to know everything, but we ought to be curious. We all seek answers in this world. We climb to high summits, fly to faraway places, seek solace in the new. Shouldn’t we celebrate the world as it comes to us? Why do we feel compelled to fly across the globe? Because we know it’s out there, and like those birds, once we’re aware of that fact we want to know a bit more about it.

      Thoreau traveled too, he just wasn’t collecting frequent flyer miles or navigating security lines. He sought faraway places relative to his time and place, traveling to Cape Cod and Maine and paddling down the Concord and then up the Merrimack Rivers. He sought what was just out of reach just as we do. Credit the pace of travel if you will, but he didn’t postpone his aliveness for when he arrived at his destination, he encountered it in each moment along the way. Shouldn’t we do the same?

    • To Learn and Grow and Discover

      “There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.” ― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

      We have an opportunity to learn and grow and discover until our very last days. On the other hand, we might consign ourselves to the corner of closed up people waiting to die. What kind of life is that? Life isn’t easy, but why turn off the lights years before last call?

      Lifelong learning is well beyond our formal education. I actively rebelled against a good chunk of that formal education, by some miracle earning both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree. Admittedly, I might have gone further along the arc of human potential if I’d just followed that formal education a bit more stringently. Maybe I’d have gone to Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard. But that wasn’t meant to be my arc. Maybe it wasn’t yours either. Each of us runs the race of maximizing our personal potential at our own pace.

      Formal education teaches you rules others want you to live by. Those who master it early enough get a strong lead and a key position in the pack. What some of us realized in navigating that formal education is we didn’t really want to be part of the pack anyway. Sometimes we confuse indifference for incompetence. The first time I tacked Calculus I thought I was incompetent. It turns out I just didn’t care about it enough to try. When I did care enough the experience was wholly different.

      Lifelong learning is a personal quest for understanding, but it ought to sparkle and pop and illuminate for the thrill of it all. For it is a thrill to remove the “un” from aware or familiar. It’s a thrill to master a simple phrase in a foreign language or to try to cook something that seemed outside your skillset before. That excitement can build on itself for the rest of our lives.

      Who says we have to be bored and lonely and used up at the end of our days? We get to reinvent ourselves every day, if we don’t squander the opportunity to learn and grow and discover. There’s enchantment in that moment when we finally realize what we’d been missing all this time. Who says we can’t carry that sense of enchantment to the end of our time? Sounds like a hell of a ride.

    • Seeing the World Wherever You Are

      “The wise man knows that it is better to sit on the banks of a remote mountain stream than to be emperor of the whole world.” ― Zhuang Zhou

      We anticipate what we believe we’ll find in the world, when we get out there to meet it. There’s a level of understanding that comes with experiencing first-hand the grandeur of this planet. We humans have our quietly persistent bucket lists that range from Paris to Machu Picchu to the Grand Canyon to the Appalachian Trail. We hear that siren question us: When will we listen and finally go?

      I may sound like a one-trick pony at times, writing about such things as wanderlust and the urgency of now. But I’m just as content walking in an old forest nearby, walking across landscapes that have changed or stubbornly remained the same with the history of this continent. There is an entire world to see within throwing distance of wherever we are at this moment.

      Restlessness may be the soul telling us we haven’t arrived quite yet. Then again, it may mean that we haven’t seen what is right in front of us yet. To fully savor life we must learn to pause and see the richness of the world wherever we are. That doesn’t mean we’ve arrived where we are meant to go, but we’ll never fully immerse ourselves in this business of living if we are constantly planning our escape.

      That doesn’t mean we ought to wrap ourselves in a blanket of comfortably familiar routine. Life demands that we go out and meet it, comfort be damned. But let’s not rush past every mountain stream on our climb to the pinnacle. If hiking teaches us anything, it’s that the highlight real isn’t always the summit, but what we’ve encountered along the way.

      Life isn’t that highlight real of places we’ve been, but the person we became in each step. The world is out there, but also right here. Waiting for us to see it. Our world is this next step.