Alexandersmap

    Category: Lifestyle

    • 37 Miles

      I’m currently 37 miles from my first appointment in Boston. At the moment Waze tells me it will take me 69 minutes to reach my destination. In reality it’ll be closer to 90 minutes because it makes little sense to arrive at an appointment 90 minutes early, but it’s unacceptable to arrive 5 minutes late. Such is the mental math of a commuter to Boston. If there’s a benefit to my career it’s not having to do this every day. No such mental math occurs in a trip to Maine or Vermont. But Boston, well, that’s a different story. I choose to avoid peak traffic times whenever possible. Today it’s not possible.

      “… the few that make it to the top of their ambition through a thousand indignities realize at the end it’s only for an inscription on their tombstone” – Seneca

      As I write the predicted commute has inched up another ten minutes. Best to get on my way soon… but then I hear a couple of hot air balloons flying nearby and walked out to see where they’re heading. They often land on our street because the power lines are underground here. But it looks like they’re heading to another neighborhood this time. The brief interruption was welcome as it broke my focus on incremental time units for a 37 mile drive. It’s funny what we focus on, and how unimportant most of it turns out to be in the end. But we also have means to an end to consider, and so it’s time to get moving once again.

    • It’s in the Blood

      I’ve been told by the American Red Cross that I’ve donated more than 3 gallons of blood in my lifetime.  That’s both a lot and nowhere near what some people donate.  Considering the average man has 12 pints of blood, that equates to roughly two guy’s worth of A negative blood that’s come out of me and into other folks.  Lately I usually donate “Power Red”, which seem to be particularly helpful because I’m donating 2x the needed red blood cells.  In the process of donating they separate what they need and return the rest along with some saline solution.  It takes a bit longer but nothing too crazy.  Apparently not everyone can donate them, so since I can I do.

      At one point in my life I tried donating platelets, and did it maybe 4 or 5 times.  But the amount of time needed to donate was prohibitive for me, particularly when they closed the place right down the street from me and centralized platelet donations in select locations (Manchester, New Hampshire or Boston, Danvers and Dedham, Massachusetts that surely are convenient for a lot of people but not me.  If there’s a national emergency declared and platelets are urgently needed then call me up – otherwise take my Power Reds and I’ll see you in a few months.

      There’s really nothing to donating blood or Power Reds.  I know there are many people who can’t donate for health reasons or because of lifestyle choices like living in a certain foreign country for more than five years.  Donated blood has a shelf life of 42 days.  Apparently only 37% of the population can donate, and only 10% do it annually.  I’m somewhere in the 3 to 4 times per year range.  So I may not be perfect, but I do bleed and clot well, and have been told I have “good veins”, so I donate when I can.  Perhaps I’ve saved a life or two as the campaigns say, or maybe not and just made it a little easier to save a life.  Either way I’m all in.  How about you?

    • Crows Never Forget a Face

      Sunday morning, while writing yesterday’s blog post, I observed a murder of crows, or four of them anyway, fly into the trees in my yard and start communicating with each other in that caw caw way.  Like a biker gang walking into a Friendly’s, the other birds in the vicinity grew very quiet when the crows announced they were crashing the party.

      The crows split up, with one flying behind me to a tall tree in the front of the house.  Two of them remained on a branch on an oak tree deeper into the woods.  And the fourth ran point and flew onto a branch of an oak tree that reached out over the lawn in the backyard.  I saw right away what he was doing.  There was a birds nest on the branch and he bounced over to it, cawing all the time, head bending side to side as he inspected the nest.  The pair of crows in the woods observed and cawed their feedback.  When point crow reached the nest he started pulling it apart and dropping bits of straw down to the ground, digging into the nest looking for chicks or eggs to eat.  After a couple of minutes he determined there was nothing there worth eating and he flew off, with his mates joining him.

      Crows are both fascinating and annoying creatures.  Like [most] humans, they’re highly intelligent and social, and they’re omnivores.  Crows are symbolic of death in mythology, like vultures, but they’re really just opportunistic hunters and gatherers.  You see them all the time bouncing over to roadkill, but they’re smart enough to gauge the speed of the car coming at them and avoid becoming roadkill themselves.  I read that if a crow is killed, other crows will gather around it to determine what killed it, and then like a lynch mob go after the killer.  Crows apparently never forget a face, so if you go out and chase away a murder of crows or throw rocks at them they’ll mark you as a dangerous character.  Given what they do to crow killers I’d say be on your best behavior with them!  With an average lifespan of 7 – 8 years, they have plenty of time to develop a plan to deal with you.

      There are apparently 30 different species of crows out there, ranging from magpies to ravens.  I know that the crows flying about in the woods of New Hampshire are smaller than the crows flying around on Buzzards Bay, but share similar hunting and communication traits.  I can admire crows but still wish that they’d shut up when I’m trying to sleep in when I’m on the Cape.  They aren’t just bigger down there, they’re also louder and early risers.  Maybe they’re trying to tell me something:  Caw! Get up!  Caw!  Life is short!  Caw!  There’s so much you can do with this day.  Thanks for the reminder.  Best get on with it.

    • Honing a Curious Mind

      I’ve been trying to figure out who is singing in the neighborhood for the last six weeks. I make a point of being outdoors whenever possible in the early morning (New Hampshire summers are very short after all). Some singers are obvious, others are more evasively unfamiliar to me. I regret that my education never included identifying birdsong. But as with many things I’ve made it a point of my adult learning path. I’m currently in the 101 level birdsong classes.

      I tried an app that analyzes bird song, but the bluebirds always sing at the same time as this character and tend to confuse the analytics. It keeps think its a mockingbird when I can hear the differences clearly. Eventually I came to the conclusion that this was a Brown Thrasher. In the process of figuring that out I’ve come to learn the songs of another half dozen birds I’ve heard in the background music but never took the time to learn about. I’m far from an expert on any of this, but the path is more vibrant.

      In the last 18 months I’ve learned about or reacquainted myself with local and world history, stoicism, transcendentalism, world religions, the power of habits, physiology, native trees, horticulture, birds, bugs, the environment and other diverse (eclectic?) side paths on the route from here to, well, there. Side paths lead to other side paths and before you know it maybe you’ve accumulated something meaningful in the old brain. You can’t write about what you don’t know about, and this cajoles me from tangential interest to deeper learning about topics. As a side benefit I’ve become better at writing too… you’ll see it eventually.

      “The discipline of sharing something daily is priceless.” – Seth Godin

    • The Friday Crawl

      Driving south I saw the traffic going northbound. It basically ran for ten or twelve miles, opened up for a short spell, and then clogged again for a few miles. This is one of those moments where I can’t just say good thing I’m not going north. Once I’m done with a lunch meeting I’ll be merging right into that traffic going back to where I came from.

      It’s summer in New England, and the traffic is relentless. Tourists heading to Maine, New Hampshire, or Canada join the normal commuter weekend head-starters. It’s a recipe for frustration if you let it get to you. Today I’ll put on some favorite music and crawl along with the rest of them. No use putting it off any longer, it won’t get better anytime soon. My Friday crawl is about to begin.

    • Karma’s Gonna Get You

      This morning I was inspecting the grapes, which seem to be thriving this year, when I felt  a familiar stinging sensation on my hand.  Looking down quickly I saw the reason, I’d grabbed the fence right at the spot where a hornet had built a nest in the cavity made by the U-shaped metal top rail.  And there was the hornet flying about still annoyed with me.

      Wasps and hornets offer value to the garden, hunting pests that would otherwise damage your plants.  But they also tend to build nests in places inconvenient to humans trying to live in the same space.  I’ve seen a couple of other hornet nests in the fence but this one was a surprise for me.  Unfortunately it’s right next to the gate to the backyard and a safety concern, so I’ll have to spray this one.  I don’t mind coexisting with hornets but not when they endanger my family and guests.  They aren’t my favorite neighbors but they are a sign of a healthy ecosystem.  In a year when the bee population seems to be lower in my garden, I’ll take any positive I can find.

      That said, I view this entire incident as karma, as last night I finally got around to destroying a nest of yellow jackets in my grill.  They built a nest the size of a Nerf football right behind the propane tank.  That would qualify as unacceptable risk for me and anyone else that uses the grill or opens the cabinet door for the grill brush.  Nope, they had to go.  And karma came in the form of a sting this morning.  As I type this the sting still throbs a bit to remind me that it’s best to look carefully before grabbing hold of anything.  Another lesson from the garden…

    • Design Elements

      This morning our backyard is filled with bluebird song. There are 3 to 5 of them up in the trees, flying about and announcing to the world that this is an extraordinary morning. Other birds – cardinals, robins and the like, are playing the rhythm section in the background. Lead guitar is firmly with the bluebirds. And of course it’s by design – keep filling the feeder, put up the birdhouse and they reward you with song. The opposite is true as well. I stopped filling the other feeders in May and the cardinals, jays and finches have receded into the background. This immediately prompts thoughts of the Cherokee story about the two wolves for me (which wolf wins? The one you feed), but in a slightly different way.

      We all design our lives to attract what we desire into it. The work we do, the people we surround ourselves with, the habits we form, and the media we consume are all design elements that move us forward on the path or set us off course.  And design doesn’t equal results.  Sometimes the bluebirds fill the yard with song, sometimes the timing is off or they’re filling someone else’s yard.  My neighbor on the other side of the fence gets the same bluebird song without earning a bit of it (Then again he’s not outside to hear it anyway).  You keep doing the right things and eventually you build the life you’ve wanted for yourself.  And sometimes the rewards you’ve earned benefit others.  I planted daffodil bulbs on the corner of our street with the main street.  Those daffodils rewarded thousands of people driving by, though the majority of those people barely noticed them at all.  I build playlists and fill the house with music with the same intent, and perhaps the same result.  I’ve built an itinerary for Scotland in the fall that I’m especially excited about.  Hopefully the results surpass the design.

      I tend to fill social media with pictures of the kids, the garden, places I’ve travelled to and  generally the positive things about plodding through this life together.  Plenty of people use the same platform for negativity or to point out things they’re angry about, to cry for attention, or to somehow teach the rest of the world that they were right all along about something or other.  Who knows which of us is right, but I do know that’s not for me.  Whenever I post something I’m angry about I feel like I’ve taken a step back in my own development, so I try to filter it out before it lands.  Abraham Lincoln had a drawer full of angry letters to his generals and other people that he never sent.  I’m trying my best to use social media the same way.  What moves us all forward?

      My morning was filled with bluebirds and hummingbirds and the sound of thousands of drops of water hitting the ground as the tree leaves shake off the overnight rain in the breeze.  My evening will be filled with celebration and music and friendship.  In between I’ll so the work that must be done to enable all of that.  Yard work and cooking and building playlists and touching base with family and friends.  In general being actively engaged with life…  and the life you want.  You never know if the bluebirds will come, but you do what you can to attract them anyway.

    • Changing the Perspective

      There’s no place like home, but there’s a lot to be said for changing the view once in awhile. So we picked up and relocated to the Cape for one night in the middle of a work week. I’m back to work today, but with a refreshed mind. We settle into a pattern of familiarity when we do the same thing day-after-day. Routine is powerful, and can be hugely beneficial in earning compound interest over time from daily, positive habits. But sometimes the plaque buildup on our minds needs a cleansing to create new perspective on a project or problem you might be tackling. Nothing changes perspective like a system re-boot like a vacation or a sabbatical.  But those opportunities aren’t always there. Changing scenery does the trick most of the time, even when you can’t take extended time off.

      This morning I’m back to work, but the view out the window has improved, and a quick early morning walk on the beach offered its own rewards. I noticed a burst of energy in my work tasks, and I’ve seen the fog burn off, not just on the bay but in myself as well. I re-read a bit of Atomic Habits this morning as well. Something kept bringing me to this graph that illustrates the conflict between expectations and reality. James Clear calls it the “Valley of Disappointment”. Seth Godin calls it “The Dip”.  It’s the lagging measure of results to actions you’ve taken.  Whenever I start a new sales job I try to gauge the amount of runway I have available to take off.  If you aren’t selling the trendiest stuff out there at commodity prices then you need time to build demand for your product, build a channel, get it specified, wait out budget cycles and finally get it purchased for installation.

      Valleys of disappointment happen, but it’s important to see the forest for the trees.  Perspective is invaluable when you’re in the valley, and just as important when you’ve climbed out of the valley.  A little change of scenery almost always does the trick.  Sometimes that scenery is physical like the beach, sometimes it’s mental, like looking ahead instead of looking back.  Jon Acuff wrote in a recent newsletter about the ten year question.  In short, what will you look back on ten years from now and wish you’d done today?  That is what you should do.  Acuff flips the narrative from looking back with regret to fast forwarding to a future you, and looking back from there.  Fascinating exercise, and a good way to give you perspective on what is important now. So I tackled the day with new energy, new perspective and a new focus, and that was the goal all along.

       

       

    • Salty Swims

      Tonight I went for an evening swim in the bay. It occurred to me that I was way overdue for it. I prefer swimming in the ocean over ponds, pools, rivers and streams. I’ve swum in ’em all, and enjoy most every one of them. But let’s face it; Salt water is better than fresh water. Unless you need a drink anyway. But I’m talking about swimming, so don’t go throwing hydration at me. With swimming nothing beats the ocean. The buoyancy is better, and the salt is better for your skin. Don’t tell me about sharks. I’ll take sharks over alligators. At least with a shark they’ll spit you back out most of the time.

      When you jump in the ocean you become a part of the ocean, which makes you a part of all of the oceans, which makes you a part of the world. You just don’t get that kind of a connection in a pool, no matter how big it is. I’m not really sure if people living in the middle of the country understand the draw of surf, sand and the taste of salt on your tongue. But once you’ve tasted it why would you ever leave?

    • No World for the Penitent and Regretful

      When I was in college we used to hang out at The Old Worthen in Lowell, drinking pitchers of cheap beer and playing tunes on the juke box.  Inevitably we’d play My Way by Frank Sinatra (written by Paul Anka) and sing the lyrics together in the most world-weary, seasoned way you can muster up when you’re only 21 or so and haven’t been knocked down a few times.

      “Regrets, I’ve had a few
      But then again, too few to mention
      I did what I had to do
      And saw it through without exemption”

      Regrets come with living life.  You make trade-offs along the way, like getting married and raising children instead of crewing on some sailboat in the Greek Isles with nothing but a copy of The Odyssey with you.  I may have thought of doing that once or twice around the time I was singing that song in that bar, and I’d blame it on the ghost of Jack Kerouac whispering in my ear.  On the whole I’ll take the trade-off and don’t look back, unless prompted to.  This morning I was prompted when two quotes in succession resonated for me.  First up was a Joan Didion quote pulled from today’s entry in The Daily Stoic.  Inspired, I drew more of it from a Brain Pickings blog after a quick search and offer some of it here:

      “The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others — who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without…  To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves…  Character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

      What jolted me was in Didion’s writing, besides the sheer brilliance of her prose, were two phrases in particular: counting up the sins of commissions and omission…  and …the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness.  Who of us, who’s lived a life of any tenure, not counted up the things we’ve done that we’d rather not have done, the things we didn’t do that we wish we had, and regret not taking the leap into some adventure out of laziness or fear?  The older I get the more I say to myself and anyone who asks, just do it.  If you aren’t betraying trust, breaking promises, or taking foolhardy risks, then just do it.  Live with self-respect, do the right thing, accept responsibility for [your] own life.

      And then minutes later I stumbled on this Thoreau quote, a portion of which I’d once posted in an old social media post from years ago, where he (not surprisingly) reminds himself similarly:

      “There is a season for everything, and we do not notice a given phenomenon except at that season, if, indeed, it can be called the same phenomenon at any other season. There is a time to watch the ripples on Ripple Lake, to look for arrowheads, to study the rocks and lichens, a time to walk on sandy deserts; and the observer of nature must improve these seasons as much as the farmer his. So boys fly kites and play ball or hawkie at particular times all over the State. A wise man will know what game to play to-day, and play it. We must not be governed by rigid rules, as by the almanac, but let the season rule us. The moods and thoughts of man are revolving just as steadily and incessantly as nature’s. Nothing must be postponed. Take time by the forelock. Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this. Where the good husbandman is, there is the good soil. Take any other course, and life will be a succession of regrets. Let us see vessels sailing prosperously before the wind, and not simply stranded barks. There is no world for the penitent and regretful.” – Henry David Thoreau, from his journal on April 24, 1859

      “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” – Marcus Aurelius

      Thoreau wrote that 160 years ago as a reminder to himself, just as Marcus Aurelius wrote his own reminder in Meditations. Didion weighs in with her own message.  By all means, live with character and self-respect, but do make the most of this opportunity you’ve been given. Living in the past is useless.  Living in the future is delusional.  There’s only now.  Today.