Alexandersmap

    Category: Learning

    • Expanding Our “Life Force”

      “When we breathe, we expand our life force.” – James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

      I finished James Nestor’s book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art in quick order. Its unnerving when someone highlights something you’ve largely done unconsciously but inefficiently for most of your life and tells you why it’s essential that you change. This is one if those books that will be transformative to the open reader. I found it an informative, quick read. But for those looking for the Cliff notes version, here you go: Get in the habit of inhaling much more through your nose and exhale through your mouth, and then focus on optimizing the timing of your breathing:

      “The perfect breath is this: Breathe in for about 5.5 seconds, then exhale for 5.5 seconds. That’s 5.5 breaths a minute for a total of about 5.5 liters of air.”

      Of course, there’s so much more to the book, starting with the science behind breathing, the impact of soft foods on the modern human’s ability to breath properly, the importance of carbon dioxide in the body, and the incredible possibility in what the human body is capable of through controlled breathing. A worthy investment in time that will make you think about how you do something that’s largely an unconscious and automatic function.

      Regarding carbon dioxide, I’ve always thought of it as a waste product and that less of it would be better for the overall health of our bodies. Nestor turns that belief on its head:

      “When we breathe too much, we expel too much carbon dioxide, and our blood pH rises to become more alkaline; when we breathe slower and hold in more carbon dioxide, pH lowers and blood becomes more acidic. Almost all cellular functions in the body take place at a blood pH of 7.4, our sweet spot between alkaline and acid.”

      And consider the compounding impact of softer foods on the overall health of generations of humans:

      “The more we gnaw, the more stem cells release, the more bone density and growth we’ll trigger, the younger we’ll look and the better we’ll breathe.”

      Chapter 10, Fast, Slow And Not At All is the one that resonated most for me. For if everything in the universe is made up of matter, what does it mean for something to be “alive”? Nestor offers insight here as well:

      “Everything around us is composed of molecules, which are composed of atoms, which are composed of subatomic bits called protons (which have a positive charge), neutrons (no charge), and electrons (negative charge). All matter is, at its most basic level, energy.”

      “What distinguishes inanimate objects like rocks from birds and bees and leaves is the level of energy, or the “excitability” of electrons within those atoms that make up the molecules in matter. The more easily and often electrons can be transferred between molecules, the more “desaturated” matter becomes, the more alive it is.”

      “The best way to keep tissues in the body healthy was to mimic the reactions that evolved in early aerobic life on Earth—specifically, to flood our bodies with a constant presence of that “strong electron acceptor”: oxygen. Breathing slow, less, and through the nose balances the levels of respiratory gases in the body and sends the maximum amount of oxygen to the maximum amount of tissues so that our cells have the maximum amount of electron reactivity.”

      Optimizing our overall health and vibrancy through measured, considered breathwork isn’t new, but we seem to have forgotten many of the lessons. Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art was an eye-opener, prompting me to think about how I’m breathing and what I’m chewing on, to be more concerned about waking up with a dry mouth, to consider a pallet expander for the first time since I was a teenager and counting to 5 1/2 as I inhale through my nose and again as I exhale through my mouth. Perhaps a small step towards a greater life force? One can hope.

    • Really Only Words

      “All things are really only words
      in a tongue of endless gobbledygook
      that someone or something is writing in a book
      that is the history of the world. In herds,

      you, I, everyone, Carthage, Rome travel,
      and my unfathomable life too, and this stigma
      of having been an accident, a cipher, an enigma,
      of being all the unmelodious dialects of Babel.

      But behind every name is what has no name.
      Today, I felt its shadow flicker and take aim
      in the blue compass needle, lucid and light,

      that points far away across seas that gleam,
      something like a timepiece glimpsed in a dream,
      or the stirring of a bird in the middle of the night.”
      – Jorge Luis Borges, The Compass

      This poem was originally written in Spanish, and I’ve read two versions of it that are completely different from each other, depending on the translation to English.  And such is the challenge of interpreting both language and poetry.  Words mean different things to different people, and I wonder sometimes at the words I’ve read that were interpreted by another and how close to the truth those words truly are.  The better path would be to invest the time to learn to speak Spanish fluently and read the poem as Borges intended.  Instead I rely on the interpretation of others.

      Isn’t that the way it is with the news?  We rely on the interpretation of facts by writers who put their own spin on it, often to feed people what they want to hear.  I’ve stopped watching the news so that I can hear my own voice instead.  And what of hearsay?  You hear a story about someone else from the viewpoint of the speaker and make up your mind about them based on what someone else said about them.  The question is how much do you trust the source of your information?

      The gist of this poem is the mystery of who we are, and our path to figuring that out.  Finding our true north in a jumble of lives and words and interpretation.  And that makes the different versions of this poem somehow appropriate, I suppose.  Brian Doyle called Borges one of the greatest writers in history, but with a limited grasp of Spanish, Borges’ brilliance is largely lost to me as I rely on others to provide meaning to his work.  If ever there was a reason to learn languages its to truly understand and to be understood by others.  I’m just scratching the surface with a writer like Borges in reading an English translation, and you could say the same thing about Homer or Nietzsche or Marcus Aurelius for that matter.  They’re really only words, but the way you put those words together matters.

      Doyle pointed me to Borges, who’s work is frustratingly just out of reach for me in its original form.  I have the same frustration with bird calls and plants in the forest and other such things I can’t figure out given the scope of my current knowledge.  But its all part of the journey, isn’t it?  The unknown is either a roadblock or a welcome sign, depending on your own interpretation.  And there’s that word again.  All forks in the road that lead us down the next path towards a greater understanding of the world and our place in it, should we be so bold as to keep moving forward.

    • Change of State: Crickets & Krummholz

      In late July the crickets start chirping again, announcing the height of summer in New Hampshire. Early mornings just feel different month-to-month.  Sure, temperatures and the progress of the garden are a consideration, but beyond that the soundtrack at 5:30 is completely different in late July than it was in May or June.  Its all different really, beginning with those crickets.  But I’ve been here before, and know the seasons and the changes that will come over the next few months.  Changes come, but its all familiar change.

      Saturday, as I began my ascent above treeline, I took a few breaths of Balsam Fir-scented air and thought of Christmas.  When you get up in between the boreal and alpine zones where the 4000 footers dance in the windblown snow and ice, the trees are stunted and twisted and tough as nails.  Trees in this zone are called Krummholz, regardless of the species, and sometimes the term Krummholz describes this in-between zone too.  At treeline they’re typically Black Spruce and Balsam Firs and a few adventurous others like an occasional birch looking for a way out of the madness it rooted itself to.  Spruce are stoic but don’t flavor the air with aroma.  Firs make you feel like its Christmas in July.  Both struggle for footing and survival in the acidic, hard ground.  I’m a guest in their home, and silently offer gratitude for allowing me a visit.

      Hiking reinforces for me what I don’t know.  I can sit in my backyard in New Hampshire and pick out different trees and birds and bugs and generally know what they are because I live with them every day.  I can feel or hear the changes in seasons just by hearing some crickets announcing they’re back.  But my visits to the mountains are infrequent in comparison, and I’m less familiar with the migration patterns of birds and the trees themselves across the northern forest.  I heard a few bird calls on my last few hikes that are unfamiliar.  I looked at the forest and sedges and rushes and Mountain Cranberries and recognize that I don’t really know them all that well and couldn’t tell you one from the other.  I scanned the peaks on a clear day and recognize the famous Presidents, but not many of the others.  I was in the same state (New Hampshire), but in a completely different state (uncertainty).

      I’m feeling restless in the familiar lately – a sure sign that I need to get out and see more.  A few hours in a different zone reminded me that the unfamiliar isn’t all that far away.  And I’m reminded again of something Pico Iyer wrote that I quoted a few posts ago: “ecstasy” (“ex-stasis”) tells us that our highest moments come when we’re not stationary”.  To honor the restless spirit inside of us and just get out there to find our highest moments.  It seems a noble pursuit on this random Monday.  The crickets have announced that time is indeed moving along, and the Krummholz remind us that life isn’t always easy but if you hold on you might just survive long enough to see a few things.  Surely a good reminder for this crazy year when the familiar isn’t all that familiar and we’re all a bit restless.

    • Breathe

      I admit I didn’t think much about breathing until recently when my son strongly recommended a book for the family.  After some due diligence in listening to the author interviewed on a Joe Rogan podcast I was convinced I needed to read the book myself and quietly slid the stack of real and virtual books aside to read Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art before anything else. I’m well into it now, and can tell its one of those transformative books that influences the way you think about many things. And so it was that I hiked two 4000 footers yesterday with these thoughts in my head:

      “In a single breath, more molecules of air will pass through your nose than all the grains of sand on all the world’s beaches—trillions and trillions of them.”

      “Nasal breathing alone can boost nitric oxide sixfold, which is one of the reasons we can absorb about 18 percent more oxygen than by just breathing through the mouth.”

      “The greatest indicator of life span wasn’t genetics, diet, or the amount of daily exercise, as many had suspected. It was lung capacity.”

      “Moderate exercise like walking or cycling has been shown to boost lung size by up to 15 percent.”

      “The most important aspect of breathing wasn’t just to take in air through the nose. Inhaling was the easy part. The key to breathing, lung expansion, and the long life that came with it was on the other end of respiration. It was in the transformative power of a full exhalation.”

      With apologies to author James Nestor, I wasn’t going to fully commit to nasal breathing hiking up Crawford Path yesterday. I gave it a try a few times but didn’t feel like I was getting enough air. Something to work on for sure, but I opted for the more familiar mouth breathing for the steepest stretches of the path and reserved the nasal breathing for the descent from Mount Eisenhower. I can tell I’ve got my work cut out for me, but anything worthwhile deserves putting the work in. What’s more worthwhile than breathing?

    • To Visit All the Celebrated Places

      “Now is the time to visit all the celebrated places in the country, and fill our heads with what we have seen, so that when we become old and bald we will have something to talk about over the teacups.” – Jippensha Ikku

      Credit to Smithsonian Magazine for the Ikku quote, for it made me smile when I read it.  Ikku lived in Japan during a fairly important period in American history (1766-1831) so its easy to overlook what might have been happening in other places in the world.  The quote reminds me that our feelings about travel and aging are timeless.  We all hope to see the world while we’re young and full of vigor, that we might have epic stories to tell over a favorite beverage when we’re older and less mobile.

      The travel list of celebrated places is ready, and all earnest travelers wait for the starting gun to set us free to explore once again.  We’re all rooting for a vaccine and some level of herd immunity, some measure of personal responsibility from society at large and perhaps stronger political leadership to set policy that makes sense.  May we see it sooner than later.  But in the meantime, I’m traveling as Thoreau traveled: exploring the place where I am in ways that I hadn’t before.  Walking fully aware in the woods, or the mountains and shores of New Hampshire, stopping at local landmarks previously unknown to me, and exploring space  while looking up at the stars to pick out planets and constellations.  For the adventurous spirit, there’s no shortage of opportunities to explore, even in a pandemic.

      “Travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit.

      All [great travel writers]… believed in “being moved” as one of the points of taking trips, and “being transported” by private as well as public means; all saw that “ecstasy” (“ex-stasis”) tells us that our highest moments come when we’re not stationary, and that epiphany can follow movement as much as it precipitates it.

      Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back is — and has to be — an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what’s really there and what’s only in him.” – Pico Iyer, Why We Travel

      While nice on the surface, I chafe when spending too much time at resorts because I’m not looking for pampering or losing myself in a cartoon world.  Travel at its best isn’t distraction, but exploration.  It isn’t running away from ourselves, but finding ourselves.  And that can happen anywhere if we let it.  Our highest moments come when we’re not stationary…  and so we hear the call to explore.  I’m conspiring to travel locally over the next couple of weeks to places near, while foregoing far.  At least for now.  For there’s so much to see right in our own backyards that we rarely celebrate.  Over the next few weeks I’ll explore some of those places in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.  And as you might expect having read any of this blog, explore hidden inward passages too.

    • Collecting Daily Microadventures

      I heard a Rolf Potts podcast interview with Alastair Humphreys during a long walk around town.  I listen to podcasts when walking on loud roads because I can never fully immerse myself in nature when heavy objects traveling at terminal velocity are close enough to know the deodorant of choice of the driver.  Of course, I always keep an eye on the driver and the relative distance between their passenger mirror and my rib cage.  But a podcast gives me something else to think about during this regular dance on the narrow shoulders of New Hampshire roads.

      Potts and Humphreys captured my imagination during my dance with the drivers with a discussion of microadventures.  Microadventures is Humphreys’ term, but the pursuit of adventures isn’t a new concept.  I’ve been doing many of the things he lists on his site already, and think of them as exclamation points on a day of living on this planet.  But impressively he does take it to another level.  This well-made video explains the concept, or do a deeper dive on his web site (I felt a bit of web site envy visiting his site, and it once again prompted me to up my alexandersmap.com game.  You can see my ongoing progress on the site).  There are many microadventures available for the able and willing, I could get in my car and drive to the White Mountains for a hike, or drive to a waterfall for a shower under bracingly cold water, or camp out on a sleepy beach for sunrise.  But I wanted something close to home and on a somewhat smaller scale as a nod to the spirit of microadventuring.

      And so it was that I found myself getting in my car with a camera and tripod and driving a couple of miles away from home to an entirely different world: the soccer fields my kids once competed on, which last night transformed into a dark and mysterious upside down world with vaguely familiar fences and sheds providing anchors of bearing.  I was challenged by three separate people to go out and see the Comet Neowise, dancing just below the Big Dipper just after sunset.  It seems people have noticed my affinity for the stars over the years.  I’ve silently been plotting a viewing all along, but the weather proved frustratingly unreliable for comet gazing.  Last night was a micro adventure of comet hunting, confirming that my Nikon Coolpix B500 camera wasn’t up to the task (or more likely its owner), and learning from the experience.  Perhaps I’ll get that evasive picture tonight or in the next few days before Neowise travels on for another thousand generations, or maybe I’ll just bring the binoculars out and just view it.  Plenty of better photographers are taking stunning photos of Neowise already.   My micro adventure wasn’t for a picture anyway, but for the experience of trying something new right in my own town.  It was me alone in a dark field, strange noises in the forest beyond, constellations and planets spinning above and satellites zipping past.  Memorable even without a digital image to post on social media.

      Here’s the thing: we get caught up in the big bucket list stuff.  Hiking the Appalachian Trail, sailing across the ocean, hiking to Machu Picchu, visits to Amsterdam, Paris, London and a hundred other great cities.  Heck, even hiking the 48 NH 4000 footers in my home state requires time investment and planning on a larger scale than a simple microadventure.  Life should be full of the great exclamation points that a bucket list offers, but lifetimes are made up of a collection of days.  Why not downsize the scale of the adventure and do something interesting today?  So when someone asks you tomorrow what you did last night, you aren’t replaying the same old soundtrack of streaming Netflix series or watching YouTube videos of other people’s adventures.  Yesterday, in between the traditional fare of a random Wednesday, I began my day with a plunge in the pool at 6 AM and ended it with a hunt for Comet Neowise until past my bedtime.  So a memorable yesterday, if only for the endcaps.  So what shall today bring?

       

    • Everything Flows

      Everything Flows

      “Wu-wei is the understanding that energy is gravity, and thus that brush writing, or dancing, or judo, or sailing, or pottery, or even sculpture is following patterns in the flow of liquid.”
      “Panta rhei—everything flows, and therefore the understanding of water is the understanding of life. Fire is water falling upwards.”
      – Alan Watts, Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

      I’m a novice when it comes to Chinese philosophy – Taoism – and perhaps I should have spent more time previously in pursuit of a better understanding.  But in a way I was following my own flow in a different direction.  Or better put, I was following a parallel stream with gardening, hiking and time on the water.  Eventually experience leads you to the same conclusions, even if you don’t understand Chinese characters and the rituals that lead you to the stream.  I’m not sure yet how deeply I’ll be swimming into this stream, but find it familiar and natural.  I believe that’s the whole point.

      Google the term “go with the flow” and you’ll see various points of origin, from Marcus Aurelius to William Shakespeare.  I wrote a post a while back about the river as an analogy of timelessness.  So to now tap into the stream of consciousness that is Alan Watts and dipping a toe into the waters of Taoism isn’t unnatural.  Unnatural is commuting to the same place every day, sliding into a cubicle and staring at a screen for hours, working through lunch to prove you’re a team player and willing to pay the price to get ahead.  Intuitively I knew I had to get out of that world as soon as possible and delighted in the exit strategy provided by my employer at the time.  I used a phrase back in my rowing days to describe the lifestyle I’d found myself in with coaching and doing odd jobs to sustain my pursuits: It was an “attractive rut”.  Enjoyable enough to keep doing it indefinitely, but limiting enough to recognize that you needed to do more in life.  Attractive rut also summed up my time working 50 hours per week in an office environment.  Great money, but soul-crushing in the end.

      Career shifts, sabbaticals, graduations, divorce, moving across borders to new places and the like are all forms of state changes. Fire is water falling upwards.  Transformation of our former self into something new, as dried wood transforms to fuel for fire then ash and finally back to the earth to begin again as something entirely different.  But transformation happens in every moment along the way from birth to death.  The question for each of us is how true to our path we remain along the way (I’m reminded of splitting wood, and how some pieces are all knotted and stubbornly resist the swing of the axe.  Difficult and unnatural, but they’re consumed by the flame just the same in the end).  This concept of transformation isn’t exclusive to Taoism:

      “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” — Genesis 3:19

      We’re inherently different people day-by-day as experience molds us and events steer us just as water swirls around rocks in a stream.  We’re watching the world around us swirl around the pandemic and social unrest and transform who we are and will be downstream, and I recognize that I’m also transforming.  And so it is.  Life is a dance, and we’re all finding our way across the page one way or another, following patterns in the flow of liquid and making our small ripple in the endless stream of time.  There’s nothing unnatural about Tao, for it is inherently the natural path of life.  What’s unnatural is resisting the flow and diverting yourself towards pursuits that don’t align with who you are.  One of the beautiful things about life is discovering your own flow and releasing the resistance to following it.

       

    • Missing Poultry and Other Such Thoughts

      I woke up thinking about missing turkeys.  This isn’t a normal occurrence.  I dwelled on the question; Where do the turkeys go in summer?  They made a point of being very present for winter and spring, but seemingly go on vacation all summer.  Sure you might still see one now and then on the side of the road, but it seems lost and disgruntled, wondering where the rest of the family went without her.  There’s always that one oddball in the family.  But then again, some just might view me that way (I hope so: “normal” is boring).

      When the mind is alive and vibrant and most of all open the world pours willingly in.  It might have been trying all along, but sometimes your senses are too dulled to pay much attention.  I’m paying attention.  Perhaps too much attention.  Almost certainly too much attention.  Wondering about such abstract, random things as where the poultry that swarmed the neighborhood went, and what might have prompted them to go there.  Clearly turkey have their own version of The Great Wildebeest Migration that happens in Tanzania, or the Monarch butterfly migration across North America to hang out in Mexico for the winter.  And let’s not forget the Humpback Whale migration in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans as they swim from the colder waters of the north to the Caribbean or Hawaiian waters, respectively.  There are many more examples, often driven by the search for food and water and of course mating (There’s always mating involved when you go to the tropics).

      So what’s the deal with turkeys?

      According to the National Wild Turkey Federation (who knew?) “the annual home range of wild turkeys varies from 370 to 1,360 acres”.  The county I live in has approximately 695 square miles of land, which equates to almost 445,000 acres of land for roaming turkeys.  And that’s assuming they don’t all cross over into bordering Massachusetts.  That’s a lot of alula room for a flock of turkeys.  All I’m sure of is that they aren’t in my neighborhood at the moment.  And I guess I’m good with that.  Just let them know I was thinking of them.  Enough that I had to look up alula.

      All of this turkey talk is just my vibrant mind (no really, stick with me on this) wondering at the world around me.  I view getting out of your own head as a good thing, and thinking of things other than yourself as a noble path.  And so it is that I’m spending time this Tuesday talking turkey.  Which brings me to alliteration… 

       

    • What’s a More Soulful Way to Live?

      “What’s a more soulful way to live?  What’s a way that I can benefit from the dynamism and prosperity of American society without having to play by these rules that keep us in a holding pattern?” – Rolf Potts, from his Deviate podcast

      Leave it to Rolf Potts to ask the question.  The question that drives much of what I write about, and seek in travel and reading and gardening and hiking and in lingering solitude in the early light of dawn and the spaces in between notes and in the eyes of kindred spirits.  What’s a more soulful way to live?  And this is the path I live my life on.  Travel might not be as readily available in this moment, but it will return in time.  In the meantime there’s this living thing to do, and why not make it a dance instead of a holding pattern?

       The world is alive around us. I see it in the trees as the wind swirls the leaves and branches bounce in delightful prances. In the leaves and flower buds earnestly unfolding and reaching for the light. I hear it in the birdsong and buzz of pollinators and I feel it in the dampness of the earth after a night of rain. And we are alive as well, at least for now. Shouldn’t we dance while the music’s still playing?

      I’m very good at creating to-do lists. Projects to complete, places to go, bucket lists of experiences and other such compilations. The question, what’s a more soulful way to live? is a useful lens for planning the future, but I find it as valuable as an earnest sounding board for the moment. How do I highlight this moment in time soulfully? How do I fill my remaining days with a more soulful life? Both questions have value. Life is best lived in the moment, but with a realistic eye on where you’ll be tomorrow, should it arrive.

      Collectively it feels like we’re all in a holding pattern, but that doesn’t mean we can’t live more deeply. Thoreau showed you don’t have to travel far to explore soulfully. And so it is that the trees dance, the dappled light sparkles on lingering droplets and the world wakes up around me. I find myself a witness in the moment but also a willing participant, alive and grateful for the opportunity at hand.

    • Seeing Our Soul in Things

      Weeks just fly by, we remain in a pandemic, but the writing continues.  The writing must continue.  Some days the words come to me immediately, some days it’s a struggle, but I always attempt to get about 400 words into a legible and hopefully enjoyable blog post.  Prior to writing today I read 10-11 pages of thoughts from long-dead souls before turning back to my own thoughts.  When traveling is limited, there are always books to take you places.  So I went back to 1850’s Switzerland with Amiel’s Journal and 1910 Russia with Leo Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom.  I know what you’re thinking: this guy must be a lot of fun at parties.  But there’s tremendous wealth to be mined from the masters, and these books largely stand the test of time:

      “Common sense is the measure of the possible, it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.” – Henri Frédéric Amiel

      “We are all visionaries, and what we see is our soul in things.” – Henri Frédéric Amiel

      “Do not fear the lack of knowledge, fear false knowledge.  All evil in this world comes from false knowledge.  Knowledge born in argument and discussion is to be doubted.” – Leo Tolstoy

      So these guys, language and cultural barriers aside, might be interesting at a party after all.  I could see myself diving deep into a discussion on the use of common sense in measuring the possible with Amiel, or the rise in false knowledge with Tolstoy.  These guys might not recognize the players of 2020, but they’d surely recognize the character of the players.  Just as we recognize the character of historical figures from the past.  The more things change the more they stay the same.

      Like most books, I didn’t just fall upon Amiel’s Journal and Calendar of Wisdom.  Each was referenced multiple times by other writers I’ve read.  When someone you’ve mined for knowledge and timeless wisdom points you to the source of their own development of thoughts, doesn’t it make sense to go check out that source?  And so it is that reading leads to more reading, which influences my writing, which drives an appetite for more knowledge, which brings us right to this cocktail party with Amiel and Tolstoy and me trying to keep up my end of the conversation.  But the long-dead have infinite patience with rakish amateurs like me (thanks gents).

      So if there’s a take-away from all of this, it’s to do interesting things, and read interesting things, and it will in turn make you more interesting in your writing and at random cocktail parties with dead people.  But seriously, we’re all just participating in the Great Conversation, and skipping from source-to-source collecting a wealth of information and insight that we might, if we’re lucky, develop into a philosophy of our own. Do not fear the lack of knowledge, fear false knowledge.  Go find the truth in that which you observe.  We’re all visionaries, after all, and what we see is our soul in things like the truth.  You’ll know it when you see it.