Alexandersmap

    Category: Learning

    • Something Bigger Than Yourself

      “This idea of ‘just follow your passion’, I don’t even have an understanding of what that means. Even though my whole life I have been very clear about the way I wanted to create change, and for whom, it wasn’t this out of the box understanding that we were going to use different forms of capital and support it with the right kind of talent to work a system to create real change …. I would say just start.

      Don’t start by asking ‘what is my purpose’, what is my passion? Start by asking what are the problems that need to be solved? Which ones attract me? And take a step towards that. Take one step and the work will teach you where you need to take the next step. Build tools in your toolbox. If you still don’t know what your passion or your purpose is after you take those steps, follow a leader and learn from that leader. There’s something so powerful… in apprenticing. I would say I apprenticed for fifteen years. And… skipping steps, particularly because life is shorter than we think it is and it’s longer than we think it is, it doesn’t serve the world and it doesn’t serve you.

      Just commit to something. This we don’t tell young people, or even old people. We don’t expect that enough. I think the cult of the individual is also the cult of optionality. And the secret is that when you commit to something, particularly something bigger than yourself, it will set you free. And suddenly you will find a freedom and layering of life that you never understood you had.” – Jacqueline Novagratz, from The Tim Ferriss Show

      The funny thing about Commencement speeches is that they’re full of grand visions and language and guidance for the graduating class. Yet few ever act on the very best advice they hear that day. The quotes above offer some of the best advice I’ve come across for people stepping out into the unknown world of their “career path”: Build tools in your toolbox. Take one step towards solving the problems that need solving, and then another. See where it takes you. When you’re unsure, find a leader worth following and learn from them.

      The thing is, this isn’t just timely advice for the Class of 2021 (or the frustrated Class of 2020 for that matter). It’s great advice for any of us from someone who has walked the path, tripped a few times along the way and risen to greater heights as a result. For all the talk of changing the world most people profess in unguarded moments of truth, the vast majority of us walk the path of career growth and embrace the cult of the individual (living my best life!). There’s nothing wrong with individualism, it just doesn’t do much to change the world.

      Deeper in the interview, Novagratz speaks of tackling problems that won’t be solved in our lifetime. There are plenty to choose from: poverty, racial equality, fixing the climate change mess and a hundred other problems that warrant solutions but are too big for one person to tackle. It’s a funny thing, thinking about taking on a project that you won’t live to see solved. But aren’t we all working to create things that will outlive us? Raising children, building a business, making art, writing… all are beyond ourselves. And so is meaningful change.

      When I hear someone like Novagratz speak, I recognize the small thinking I’ve been guilty of in my own lifetime. Thinking about things bigger than yourself is a path towards immortality, in a way. It’s creating something that will outlive you. Shouldn’t it be something that positively alters the course of humanity? If that seems too bold, well, maybe we aren’t giving ourselves enough credit for what we might accomplish. If we’d just commit and do the work. The work of our lifetime.

    • There’s a Tool for That

      Tool collections speak to me. You know what someone has done when they’ve got shelves full of well-used tools. If you’re observant, you can tell when they picked up a certain skill along the way too. I walked into the basement of an older gentleman I know who doesn’t get around much now to change out his dehumidifier. His tool collection was accumulated in the 1950’s through the 1970’s. And it could still do the job today.

      My own collection of tools grows with every to-do list. It took off when I began working construction jobs during college breaks. And then started rigging boats, maintained a temperamental F-150, pulled network cable and finally as a homeowner a few times over. I added an angle grinder last weekend because it’s the only good way to cut vinyl siding. How I’d gone so long without one is a mystery to me, but now it’s handy for the next odd project that requires that certain tool.

      There are some tools you buy in case you need it later. Those tend to grow lonely and still look new years later. Tools shouldn’t be bought on speculation. A tool is best acquired when you’re in need of it. The immediacy of the task demands a quick learning curve, and a lifetime of working towards mastery. Tools patiently wait for you to develop the skills to use it to its potential.

      I don’t ever worry about working, because I could leave my dress clothes behind today and start a small construction business. Or simply work for someone else. There’s always work in the trades, and never enough people willing to roll up their sleeves, grab their tools and get to it. What’s more permanent, the forecast I’m contemplating or the brick patio I laid down in 2006?

      A guy I worked for a long time ago once told me that there was nothing to any profession but learning the tricks of the trade. Every trick is now easily found on YouTube. Mastery is a different story, but you can make that up with time and patience (and a few do-overs). Those projects just need a willing apprentice to tackle them. And, of course, the right tool.

    • Memories, Like Sunsets

      “You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play. I tell you Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

      The subtleties of memory drawn out from the senses alerting us to moments linked forever to that certain smell or that certain song lies dormant in all of us, awaiting the awakening. We never know when something might trigger an old memory. I was listening to a podcast while driving yesterday and the person being interviewed mentioned one moment from his life that triggered a memory of a similar moment in my own life, and the rest of the drive was down memory lane.

      I try to live in the present, with an eye towards the future. Living in the past does us no good. Lingering memories draw you into a different version of yourself, seen through the lens of who you are now. There are parts of the old me that I’m not particularly fond of, and other parts I reflect back on fondly. All of those parts built who I am today, and the me I might be tomorrow.

      Memories aren’t such a bad thing. They keep alive the people and places from our past that might not be with us anymore. They draw a smile out of us in quiet moments of reflection, or poke at us for the foolish behavior we don’t ever want to try again. Memories serve.

      “Loss brings pain. Yes. But pain triggers memory. And memory is a kind of new birth, within each of us. And it is that new birth after long pain, that resurrection – in memory – that, to our surprise, perhaps, comforts us.” – Sue Miller

      So I guess the answer is to live in the present, but embrace the memories when they’re triggered awake by the senses. Memories can be like the lingering glow after the sun sets. Sometimes the afterglow is better than the event itself, but sometimes it’s a continuation of something pretty spectacular. Memories, like sunsets, ought to be celebrated. Even as we look ahead to a new and different future.

    • The Glories of the Journey

      “We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.” – John Hope Franklin

      “On a personal level, [the pandemic is] reminding me that, “Boy, life is short.” Life is precious. And, if you’re dreaming about doing something, there’s no better time than right now, if you can pull it off.” – Rick Steves

      The world is slowly opening up, even as COVID is declaring it’s not quite done with us yet. So where do we go when the world and we are ready? In the United States, the National Parks are already almost fully booked. Everyone is thinking the same way; we must get out there! The next few years are going to be the flood of the masses making up for lost time. Knowing that, where do you find your quiet little corner of Paradise?

      Personally, my vote is the most remote and obscure of destinations. Places where the RV’s can’t reach. Places where exercise and inconvenience are a toll many refuse to pay. The glories of the journey aren’t found elbow to elbow at the railing of the South Rim. They’re found when you hike deep down into the canyon to the silent reverence. When you wake up early and watch the sunlight dance on the canyon walls.

      Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy that there are folks jamming into National Parks in record numbers. The more people who see and experience the wonders of the world, the more people will care enough to protect it for future generations. Pack ’em in. Buy the magnets and stickers and t-shirts. When I visit those places I do it too. Just try to peel back the onion a layer or two deeper while you’re there. Find the secret places hiding just around the corner.

      The world has stories to tell us. It’s waiting for the change it will bring to you in that moment of connection between the ancient truth and your current state. Those moments that you’ll bring back to the rest of the world in stories of your own. For we travel out to reach within.

    • Picking Up the Pieces

      Sometimes it takes darkness and the
      sweet
      confinement of your aloneness
      to learn
      anything and anyone
      that does not bring you alive

      is too small for you.
      – David Whyte, Sweet Darkness

      I woke up in the middle of the night thinking of Todd Rundgren’s Hello It’s Me and hearing it anew in my head. It’s always been a breakup song, that part is easy. But what I didn’t hear, not really hear, is the background singers rising chorus of “think of me” as Rundgren stops singing and the band reaches a crescendo accompanying the singing. At the end all that’s left is the band abruptly stopping, and all that’s left is a quiet, uncertain “think of me“.

      And then I understood grief and loss a bit better than I had before.

      It’s always been there, lingering behind the brave front and the moving on and the figuring things out. The feeling of abandonment in breaking up with someone, or losing someone who had a gravitational pull that compelled you to orbit them for what seemed a blissful forever. That person literally brought you alive and changed you forever. Until the spell was broken in loss. Until your identity was shattered in a moment.

      I heard it in my mother’s voice and in my own anger when a repaired grandfather clock broke apart again, betraying us and our memories in its fragility. I saw it in my wife’s welling eyes when a song that reminds her of her sister comes up on the playlist. I’ve heard it in countless voices over the last year. I’ve seen it in eyes locked in on my own above masks that hide everything but the reality of what is missing. Now and forever.

      Son sometimes it may seem dark
      But the absence of the light is a necessary part
      Just know, that you’re never alone
      You can always come back home
      – Jason Mraz, 93 Million Miles

      I grieve for the grief of others while holding my own close to the vest, where it leaks out in unguarded moments. Forever moving on, without really getting away from the missing part. Now and then it catches you in a broken grandfather clock and you know you can’t pick up all the pieces. All you can do is try to put it together again as best you can.

      And know that you’re never alone.

    • Quicksand and Tasks of Consequence

      “Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self.” Toby Litt

      “The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” – Cyril Connolly

      The time we spend, these moments slipping through the hourglass, are either consequential or quicksand. And so the tasks filling those moments are loaded with questions – is this the right use of this brief moment in time or might there be a better place to spend the grains of sand? Is this a task of consequence, or is it a love poem to the self, mere folly?

      You know when you’ve stepped in quicksand. Maybe not immediately, but soon enough you recognize the stickiness of a habit and the sinking feeling that you’re not making any forward progress. Quicksand is tricky stuff. The one thing you don’t want to do when you’re in it is flail in place.

      Writing a blog every day might not be a masterpiece, but is it folly? The act of writing is pouring your grains of sand into a jumble of words and placing them just so. With a picture in your mind of what they might be if you could just get it right.

      The ultimate measure of tasks is whether you’re flailing in place or going somewhere consequential. What might you otherwise be doing with those grains of sand? The answer isn’t what are you doing now. Not really. It’s what are you becoming? That is what really matters. For what will your masterpiece be, in the end?

      Work towards that.

    • What is Precious

      What is precious
      inside us does not
      care to be known
      by the mind
      in ways that diminish
      its presence.
      -David Whyte, The Winter of Listening

      A storm pivots around New England, sideways rain one minute, bright sunshine the next. Cold wind pushing the swirling mix about, demanding attention. I step outside and look for the rainbow that must be out there somewhere. Nothing but icy rain greets me. I quickly abort the mission and hustle back inside.

      Some days rainbows appear out of seemingly nowhere. Some days conditions diminish the very possibility. Likewise, bold ideas come to us when we’re quietly resolved and ready to hear them. Our most precious and colorful thoughts are sometimes evasive. Maybe it just isn’t their time. Or maybe it isn’t ours.

      When the student is ready the master will appear. If we are open to hearing the call. If we open our minds to possibility. The funny thing about rainbows is that they always appear directly opposite of the sun.

    • Moving through Liminal Space

      If 2020 was a year of transformation forced upon all of us by a pandemic and political and social unrest, then what is 2021? A continuation of the same or something different entirely? We see the light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re still very much in the tunnel. Are we in limbo, or is it something else?

      I don’t know what life will show me
      But I know what I’ve seen
      I can’t see where life will lead me
      But I know where I’ve been
      – Jimmy Cliff, Sitting Here in Limbo

      “Limbo” originally was the region on the border between Heaven and Hell, now commonly thought of as being stalled in a period of transition. Plenty of us felt like 2020 was Limbo. But you can make a case for it to be something more.

      This place of transformation between one place or phase and the other is also known as “liminal space”. I’d first heard the phrase from Richard Rohr, who points to Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process as the origin. Rituals seem straightforward: sweet sixteen parties, bar mitzvahs, commencement ceremonies and funerals are all rites of passage signaling a change. But what of the passage itself? Passage is motion, not stalling. And that’s where liminality comes in.

      “Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold” is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite’s liminal stage, participants “stand at the threshold” between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which completing the rite establishes.” – Wikipedia

      The passage through “liminal space” infers movement between phases of life. This seems a more focused use of the time, don’t you think? Passage is high agency, decide what to be and go be it liminality. Stalled is low agency, waiting for things to happen to us limbo. You see this in how people use their time during the pandemic. Some bought and used bicycles and hiking boots, others hoarded toilet paper and literally waited for shit to happen.

      Life is about transformation and passage. If we’re all in this transition between one place and another, are we using this liminal space to proactively move into a better place or are we simply waiting for things to open up again? The thing about passages is you have some measure of control over the direction you’re going in. We ought to have something to say about which threshold we cross on the other side, don’t you think?

    • Friends with the Sky

      “One of the many ways we have made ourselves lonely without gaining the deeper nourishment and intimacies of true aloneness, is the way we have lost the greater supporting circle of friendship available to us in the created, natural world: to be friends with the sky, the rain, the changing light of a given day and the horizon always leading us beyond the circle we have drawn too readily for ourselves.” – David Whyte, from the forward of Essentials

      I’ve often wondered at loneliness. I’m rarely lonely, but I’m often alone. I think the root of it lies in Whyte’s observation about the greater supporting circle – a connection to the world around you and with your own inner voice. Nothing awakens your relationship with the world like lingering with it on its terms.

      One of the things I miss about having a dog is that forced connection with the outside, no matter the weather. It’s easy to just stay inside when it’s raining sideways or bitter cold. But having a dog forces your hand – they’ve gotta go, and you must connect them with the place they go. Letting them out is a cop-out. You must walk as a true offering to the pet gods.

      This connection to the outdoors doesn’t require a dog, I’ve had similar connection with hiking, rowing and sailing where you’re forced to deal with nature as it comes to you. When you’re a small part of the natural world you tend to see it differently than you might looking at a screen from the comfort of a favorite chair. Nature demands that we meet it with respect and reverence, and in return we awaken something deeper in us.

      I suppose a circle drawn around us feels like a hug or the blankets you pull over yourself on the coldest nights. The problem with a tight circle is that it’s inherently limiting. Getting out under the open sky and feeling the elements, you recognize that you’re alone, yet a part of something bigger than yourself. When you see the world outside that old circle, you’re never quite the same.

      Loneliness is a state of isolation derived from looking inward. Connection is looking outward, and beyond yourself. Stepping outside the circle is a courageous act if you haven’t spent much time there, but it leads to a world that is alive with wonder. A sensory world of conversations in many dimensions. A world where we can become more than whatever it was you were when contained in that circle. That’s where you’ll find larger possibility. You’ll never be lonely outside your comfort zone.

    • What Shape Waits in the Seed of You?

      Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
      toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
      what urgency calls you to your one love?
      What shape waits in the seed of you
      to grow and spread its branches
      against a future sky?
      Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
      In the trees beyond the house?
      In the life you can imagine for yourself?
      In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?
      – David Whyte      , ‘What to Remember When Waking‘

      We get lost in the person we told ourselves we’d be today when we were someone else yesterday. To-do lists and created obligations conspire to hold you to what your scheduled to be. There’s a future you being created in that schedule that should make you burst out of bed with excitement. But waiting a beat or two to listen to the calling informs.

      I’ve mentioned before that I do a one line per day entry at the end of the day. I sometimes wake up thinking about it, contemplating how I might make the line worthy of the ink. Worthy of the day crossed off the short list of days we have on this earth.

      Morning writing forces the hand, you might say. It forces you to reconcile the whispers before getting to those other things. I highly recommend it for anyone looking to figure out what that voice is actually saying in your ear. And when you hear it, what then? Does it chafe against that which you’ve planned for yourself?

      The beginning of the day sets our course based on the conditions and circumstances we find ourselves in. We know where we’d like to go, but must reconcile it with our current reality. With our previous expectations for ourselves, set on the calendar. The question is whether we’ve left ourselves the room to grow into that future sky. The answer, like the question, lingers in that quiet, solitary moment.