Alexandersmap

    Category: Lifestyle

    • All of It

      “Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it.” — Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

      To expect answers is to assume that there’s order in the universe. That’s a wide lens that comes in handy when the world embraces chaos and throws order on the bonfires. To discuss the matter with the agents of chaos is futile. They only want heated debates, mic drop dismissals and wild conspiracy theories. There is no peace or consensus in their world, only outrage. Nor is there peace amongst those outraged by those being outrageous. Shared resolve, possibly, but there is no stillness when the pot is constantly being stirred.

      And so we must find quiet resolve in the company of timeless ideas and principles. Nature and the classics, poetry and song, and the rituals of routine that quiet the mind and clarify our purpose. We’ll be the better for having walked away from the loud talkers. When they run out of reasonable people to debate they’ll simply turn on each other. To find stillness, steer clear of all of it. The quiet resolve that develops within will be more essential than ever soon enough.

    • Light, Sand, Wind and Water

      The wind is howling today, and the pup and I duck our heads to protect against the beach sand hurling through space at 50 knots looking for a hard landing. I’m tired of words today, and so we risk the sandblasting beach in search of magical light. This will do.

    • Let the Thunder Rumble

      “Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played. Grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, which will never become English bay. Let the thunder rumble; what if it threaten ruin to farmers’ crops? That is not its errand to thee. Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds. Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.”
      — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      In a free society, living like a serf is mostly a lifestyle choice. It’s falling in line, or being outraged by those who sip the Kool-Aid. It’s getting trapped in a bad routine, with habits that whittle away our time and quietly strangle us. It’s living in an echo chamber of like-minded outrage while life slips away and opportunities are lost. It’s giving up our agency to move our lives in the direction we want to go in because it never seems like the right time, with all that’s happening right now. We must know that it’s never going to be the right time.

      The current state of the world suggests chaos, and surely there is plenty of chaos in the world, but mostly it’s abrupt and ugly change and the reaction to that change. This hyper-focused echo chamber isn’t helping us get through our days in productive, compelling ways, even if it feels essential that we react to every damned thing the news cycle and our spun up circle of family and friends throw at us. We must learn to focus only on what we can control, and more, to be bold with our days.

      “Shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just going to live in it, versus embrace it. Change it. Improve it. Make your mark upon it.” — Steve Jobs, from the 1994 Santa Clara Valley Historical Association interview

      I had some bold plans for 2025. Started down the path, excitement growing, and then things went south and I found myself with cancelled plans and a closet full of adventure gear. The thing is, it wasn’t anything I hadn’t fully expected, because plans blow in the wind. We can either shrug and give up when the world has other plans or we can move on to other plans within our control.

      Identity is honed by experience. Experiences build upon each other and give us the confidence to be bolder still. Don’t simply live this life based on what other people expect of us; fully embrace it. Let the thunder rumble. Live the kind of life that others aspire to live themselves.

    • Accepting the Path

      Before I′m pushin’ up daisies
      Give me a long, heady summer
      With arms open wide
      I won′t take this world for granted
      I’ll become what I′ve been askin’
      I′ll accept the path that lays before my eyes
      — Sam Fender, Nostalgia’s Lie

      In order to chase the dream, we must first decide to launch ourselves in that direction. The launch is nothing but the first step in a series of steps, and anyone wondering what happened to their New Years resolutions knows the score on first steps. It’s the ones after the first that really count, because we’re gradually trying on a new identity, one step at a time, accepting the path that we’ve determined for ourselves as ours.

      Decide what to be and go be it, as the Avett Brothers song demands of us, and surely it must be so for us to reach our creative potential, for us to get closer to our version of personal excellence, to realize the dream. Don’t be that person on their death bed wondering what happened. What happened was forever deferring the path in favor of the maze. Once we step into a maze the path is no longer clear, and what feels like progress is often nothing but a dead end.

      We don’t always know a maze until we’re in it, but hit enough dead ends and it becomes evident eventually. The answer, of course, is to get the hell out of the maze and back on the path. To become what we’ve been asking of ourselves. Where each step makes the path clearer than it was before. Knowing deep down that whatever the path, the clock is ticking.

    • What Carries the Day

      I went on a lunch date with my bride Saturday. We didn’t talk politics, we talked about new dinner plates and the house and things like that. Sometimes the present is both beautiful and awful, and the only thing that determines which wins the moment is what we choose to focus on.

      There are plenty of reasons to feel down about the state of the world. There are plenty of reasons to feel joyful. As reasonable people, it’s possible to feel both at the same time. But we ought to be asking ourselves, which carry the day? A poem by Charles Bukowski, formatted in that Charles Bukowski way, comes to mind:

      some people
      grind away
      making their
      unhappiness
      the ultimate
      factor
      of their
      existence
      until
      finally
      they are
      just
      automatically
      unhappy,
      their
      suspicious
      upset
      snarling
      selves
      gringing

      on
      and
      at
      and
      for
      and
      through

      their only
      relief
      being

      to meet
      another
      unhappy
      person

      or
      to
      create
      one.
      — Charles Bukowski, downers

      When we get so distracted by the state of things, we sometimes forget to do the joyful things that make living an event worthy of our time. We can create a wake of misery behind us, or we can leave a ripple of joy. We should ask, just how do we want to be remembered? But let’s get right to the heart of the matter: just how do we want to move through this one go at life?

    • Breaking the Mirror

      “I wanted to act, but I’d always been convinced that actors had to be handsome. That came from the days when Errol Flynn was my idol. I’d come out of a theater and be startled when I looked in a mirror because I didn’t look like Flynn. I felt like him.” — Gene Hackman

      Gene Hackman passed away yesterday. Hearing about people who have always been there in our timeline passing away isn’t like losing a loved one, it’s more like seeing a tree we always admired knocked down in a storm, or a favorite restaurant closing. It’s a part of us, but it’s a peripheral part of our identity, not our core. And when that thing goes away, well, we realize things won’t be the same anymore. There’s a lot of that feeling going around right now.

      What is it within us that makes us believe we can do anything? What stirs within, inspiring us to rise up and slog through the early drafts of who we are towards who we might become? It’s some spark that needs fuel to ignite into something more, and then more still. But fires don’t burn in a downpour. The people we surround ourselves with either smother our dreams or feed them, and so we must be very careful about who those people are. But our worst enemy is the person in the mirror saying we don’t look like someone who can do that.

      It takes time to break that mirror. Some never do. As we grow, who we once were becomes ever more peripheral to who we are now. We climb away from that mirror and grow into a new identity, and hopefully grow further still for the rest of our days. But it all starts with believing that we can be more than the person looking back at us. The trick is to stop lingering at the mirror and get to work on who we might be next.

    • The Finest of Impulses

      “Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.” — Henry Miller

      Tempus fugit: time flies. And every night I slip into bed feeling like I’d just done it an instant ago. We become what we repeatedly do, as Aristotle reminded us. I remind myself of that every morning and wonder every night, “have I done enough today?” The answer lies in another question: “what is enough for what I want out of life?”

      We might act on our finest impulses today, or not. We might get swept up in the madness in the world. It’s what those creating the madness would like for us, isn’t it? To get swept up makes it easier for us to be swept away. Time is doing that quickly enough, thank you. To navigate life soundly one must have a level head, grit and resolve. So don’t let the bastards grind you down. And to make something out of our time here we must add awareness, focus and an inclination to act on the things we’re focused on. So get to it already.

      If we are derived similarly, it stands to reason that the thing that differentiate one life from another is what we do with the time. To make something glorious, or to tear down everything savagely is just the same in one way only: they both acted on their impulses. What makes one fine and another less so but the judgement of humanity for ever more? If we value those around us and those who would come after us, we ought to be thinking beyond ourselves with the things we produce. To contribute, not to take away. But hey, that’s me talking.

      Anyway, have a nice day. It may be all we’ve got, or a step on our path to personal excellence a series of days from now, but it remains our miracle of the moment. What is one to do with a miracle but make the most of it? And perhaps that’s our call to action with this one. The only thing certain is that it will go quickly. So act on the finest of impulses today.

    • Loving the Art

      “Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art” — Konstantin Stanislavski

      I’m a creature of habit. I try to write at the same time every morning, I make a point of reading something that stretches the stubborn, immovable part of me every day, and I walk every night for as long as my energy level allows (the pup insists I maintain this habit). There are other habits that make up a day, but these are the cornerstones. And I’ve grown to love this routine, even on days when I don’t feel up to the task.

      When the task is interrupted by life, I’ve begun to learn to accept that the living of life is the whole point anyway. Rigidly sticking with routine is restrictive and closed, even as it gets things done. And so I do my best to stick with the routine without getting too spun up when it goes south. Life happens, persistently: Just pick back up where we left off and everything will be fine.

      Writing is a path I choose to explore every day. When it becomes self-indulgent or egocentric I’ll know it’s time to stop blogging and shift to journaling or some other form of discovery and reflection. Wrestling down ego and focusing on what the work is telling us is the whole point. To love the process of creating art keeps the self at bay and opens us up to what the universe is telling us.

    • The Total of Our Doing

      we are always asked
      to understand the other person’s
      viewpoint
      no matter how
      out-dated
      foolish or
      obnoxious.
      one is asked
      to view
      their total error
      their life-waste
      with
      kindliness,
      especially if they are
      aged.
      but age
      is the total of
      our doing.
      they have aged
      badly
      because they have
      lived
      out of focus,
      they have refused to
      see.
      not their fault?
      whose fault?
      mine?
      I am asked to hide
      my viewpoint
      from them
      or fear of their
      fear.
      age is no crime
      but the shame
      of a deliberately
      wasted
      life
      among so many
      deliberately
      wasted
      lives
      is.
      — Charles Bukowski, Be Kind

      We have all lived out of focus at times. Sometimes the good days make up for the bad. Sometimes. Like pulling an all-nighter to finish a paper we’ve procrastinated on, sometimes we pull focus out just in the nick of time to move the chains forward in our lives. But sometimes we wait a beat too long and the opportunity is lost forever. The lesson of course is to focus, but instead we blame it on fate or bad luck or the immigrants who moved in down the street who got straight to work.

      The answer has always been in focus. What kind of a life do we want to have? Why are we distracting ourselves with all of these things that pull us away from focusing on achieving that? What small, measurable step might we take right now to move us closer to the dream?

      The total of our doing keeps pace with wherever we are in this moment. How does it look so far? Stop being so outraged at the state of the world and do the things in our control. Look around and focus on the essential. To do otherwise is to waste more of this life that is already flying by so very quickly.

    • Calibrating for Greatness

      “If you make the choice of reading classic literature every day for a year, rather than reading the news, by the end of that time period you’ll have a more honed sensitivity for recognizing greatness from the books than from the media.
      This applies to every choice we make. Not just with art, but with the friends we choose, the conversations we have, even the thoughts we reflect on. All of these aspects affect our ability to distinguish good from very good, very good from great. They help us determine what’s worthy of our time and attention…
      The objective is not to learn to mimic greatness, but to calibrate our internal meter for greatness. So we can better make the thousands of choices that might ultimately lead to our own great work.” — Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

      We have the opportunity to do something with our lives. We may reach closer to personal excellence (arete) and achieve that which we’d only imagined. Arete looks different for each of us, but we know when we see a glimmer of it in those who rise to meet it. And it stands to reason that if we wish to get closer to personal excellence ourselves, we must also rise to meet greatness where it resides. We must climb beyond where we’ve been and work towards it.

      I have some exceptional people in my life who are currently outraged by the things happening in the United States. I grow quiet when they talk about it, not because I’m not also outraged, but because focusing on the worst in others takes our focus away from our own climb to greater things. It recalibrates us for outrage.

      The point isn’t to ignore it all and just let it fester, it’s to grow into one’s own potential. We are what we focus on the most. We mustn’t be dragged down by putrefaction and the strategic dismantling of our higher collective vision. We are builders of greatness—don’t ever lose sight of that. We must take to the heights, now more than ever.

      The heights by great men reached and kept
      Were not attained by sudden flight,
      But they, while their companions slept,
      Were toiling upward in the night.
      — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Ladder of St. Augustine

      This is a time in our lives when we may achieve greatly, whatever that means for us. The world is more frustrating than ever, but it’s always been so. In our darkest days of human history, those who would reach for personal excellence found a way to climb. And so too must we in our time.

      Climbing requires energy and a level of focus that comes from inspiration. We are what we repeatedly do, and surely we are also what we repeatedly consume. To actualize excellence, to bring it into existence within ourselves and our work, we must develop a taste for it. Nurture a deep hunger to do more with our brief time before it all goes away. We may find excellence throughout human history, including today. There it all is, hiding in plain sight: we must simply lift our gaze to find it. Having seen it in others and in their contribution, we may then climb to meet it ourselves.