Alexandersmap

    Category: Lifestyle

    • The Indispensable Act

      “The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.” — Robert Frost

      They say that fortune favors the bold, and some of us use that belief to provoke ourselves towards greater boldness in our lives. But as Frost observed, things change, and so must our plans. We cannot be so rigid that we break when the situation requires flexibility, nor can we be so fluid that we don’t stand for something when presented with an abundance of options in our lives.

      “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

      In order to live a productive, focused life, we must plan for the future and set a direction for ourselves, then work that plan with urgency and purpose. We all learn that the universe doesn’t care a lick about our plans, and so we must be flexible enough to change and pivot when the universe laughs at us. Planning allows us to build contingencies into our plans for those times when things go awry. The more we are prepared the more we increase our options.

      “Chance favors the prepared mind.”— Louis Pasteur

      Remember, we are working towards a life full of experiences, contribution and purpose. In order to navigate this maddening world, we must build resilience and anti-fragility into our lives, that we may survive the roque waves life will throw at us and pivot towards a safer course. We can’t control everything, but we can develop the ability to navigate a lot of things.

      This year has already been full of change and uncertainty, and it promises to be ever more so. The weather, politics, the markets and the people around us are constantly changing, and with it changing our plans. We can’t rely on anything to be constant but change itself. So it is that planning becomes indispensable, while plans tend to blow apart in the wind.

    • Not to Be Defeated

      “The thing about life is that you must survive. Life is going to be difficult, and dreadful things will happen. What you do is move along, get on with it, and be tough. Not in the sense of being mean to others, but being tough with yourself and making a deadly effort not to be defeated.” ― Katharine Hepburn

      On the face of it, not to be defeated doesn’t feel like a bold act. It feels fatalistic. Shouldn’t the goal be to win? Perhaps in sports this is true. Perhaps even in business or a spelling bee or war. But look closer at each and we learn that the one who wins often is the one who made the fewest mistakes.

      To win feels like we’ve conquered our adversary. But that adversary is temporary. The true adversary of our lifetime is indifference, apathy and nihilism. Those who succumb lose their life force—that which fuels the fire within. The bullies of the world would drain our life force. Just look around and it’s easy to see how they draw us towards the cliff.

      Look back on the characters in history who rose to meet their moment and we may feel compelled to measure up in our own time. Are these times challenging, upsetting, and disheartening? You bet. Is life unfair? It always has been so. This is our time to toughen up! Grow a spine and rise up to meet the moment, like all those characters we admire did in their time. They’ve shown the way if we’ll only look and see it for ourselves.

      “Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves—or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.” — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

      We all know people in our lives with no agency, no direction, no purpose. We may even feel that way ourselves in our lowest moments. To be fully alive and vital is a daily choice of rising to meet our days head-on. Especially these days, we may feel. But these are the ones we’ve been given. They may feel darker and more frustrating to navigate, but they’re miracles just the same.

      When we dream of greatness in our lives, we must necessarily turn our focus to today, for it’s where greatness is made. We defer our greatness at our peril, for there is no tomorrow. Instead of being drawn to the cliff, build a wall between the nihilists and destroyers. Then turn around and begin climbing to meet the moment.

    • Golden and Eternal

      There is no need to say another word
      It will be golden and eternal just like that
      Something good will come of all things yet
      Simple golden eternity blessing all
      These roads don’t move;
      You’re the one that moves.
      — Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar, These Roads Don’t Move

      “Just a golden wash of goodness has spread over all and over all my body and mind — Simple golden eternity blessing all — Something good will come out of all things yet — And it will be golden and eternal just like that — There’s no need to say another word.” — Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

      When I realize that the song These Roads Don’t Move is already sixteen years old, I shake me head in wonder at how fast it all flies by. So much has happened in that time, and continues to at a relentless pace. Is it any wonder that we grow more philosophical and spiritual as we accumulate years behind us?

      When the world feels like it’s failing us, it helps to think in terms of eternity. The world is part of the universe and is thus timeless and indifferent to our hopes and dreams. We will one day join eternity again, once we stop wrestling with the friction of living in a concept of time. This too shall pass… and it will all slip into eternity.

      Returning to great music from our past, or returning to passages from books we once revered, or a poem that still haunts us—these are the return of wonder to our lives from another chapter on the journey. Art captures eternity in the amber of the moment, to borrow Kurt Vonnegut’s magical line, and we carry that moment through our time. Art is eternal, if fragile. We’re the ones that move. We realize the changes in touchstone moments like revisiting the past and understanding just how far we’ve come.

    • I Cannot Miss My Way

      The earth is all before me. With a heart
      Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
      I look about; and should the chosen guide
      Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
      I cannot miss my way. I breathe again!
      ― William Wordsworth, The Prelude

      I aspire to be what Ayn Rand described as “a man with an immense capacity for the enjoyment of existence.” I’m long past apologizing for this aspiration, and I’ve learned not to tolerate those who would suggest that I grow up and be as miserable as the person suggesting it. We cannot have it all, but we must not miss our way in this lifetime, for it is nothing but fleeting.

      We scurry through our days with so much accumulated responsibility. We must ask ourselves, is this my burden to carry? When the day is done, how much of it will be given to the work that whispers to us in the quiet moments? What verse are we writing today that is ours alone to write?

      We must rise above the melancholy of the masses and find our own way through the fog. Too many choose a purposeless existence. Too many settle for a life of subservience to the dreams of others. Look around! We may be poets, should we be so bold. We must not be afraid of our own liberty.

    • Reasonable Times

      “No man can predict the time when others will choose to return to reason.” — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

      We find ourselves in unreasonable times. We know this because reason and logic are shouted down and marginalized by lusty zealots with a thirst for power, and their behavior is celebrated by their followers and enablers. When enough reasonable, logical people are shouted down, the rest learn to keep their mouths shut. That’s no way to climb the mountain of progress, it’s a spiral into chaos.

      Whether the world shifts towards order or towards chaos is largely out of our control, all we can control is how we react to the forces around us. We may choose to be reasonable (to thoughtfully use reason) ourselves. To seek first to understand and then to act in a way consistent with our climb to personal excellence (arete). There’s nothing excellent in shouting down someone we disagree with, nor is there excellence in bowing to the will of a bully or in putting our head in the sand and wishing it would all go away.

      It’s said that the universe favors chaos over order. That doesn’t mean that we should accept riots in the streets, but rather, that change is inevitable. Our own stability lies in toeing the line between chaos and order and learning how to improve our balance. This too shall pass—it always does eventually. If we put ourselves in a position to meet change prepared, antifragile and resilient, we may actually thrive on the changes. So maybe these times seem unreasonable, and really, who am I to argue? But we have agency, we have reason, and we may endeavor to hold the line that favors order in our own lives.

    • For Now

      “Eternal means timeless—no time. The human mind cannot understand that. The human mind can understand time and can deny time. What is timeless is beyond our comprehension. Yet the mystics tell us that eternity is right now. How’s that for good news? It is right now.” — Anthony de Mello, Awareness

      I’ve wrestled with time all of my adult life. I must be on time for the things I’ve scheduled, and on time for me is always early. I’m married to someone with a different idea of time, and the two of us have managed to peacefully coexist for a few decades despite the chasm this represents in my mind. Time matters a great deal in our world, but not in the universe. We can read that statement and know the truth of it while also dismissing it as irrelevant in our daily lives. Both can be true even as we operate in the absolutes of our beliefs.

      January felt like a longer month than its allotted thirty-one days. Blame it on winter and outrage if you’d like, but often it comes down to how present we are with the moment we occupy. When we feel swept up in events, time feels fleeting. We may feel we’re wasting it, or that it’s slipping through our hands. How much of this young year felt beyond our capacity to influence it?

      We know we have no time to waste time. We aren’t eternal ourselves, we merely exist, for now, in eternity. Having an expiration date means we must learn to appreciate the shelf life we’re given. To honor the eternity of this now by doing something with it. Time is ours now. Someday shockingly soon it will be someone else’s time. Eternity marches on indifferently just the same. So we must to do what calls for us—one now at a time.

    • Reverent Listening

      “Good writing as well as good acting will be obedience to conscience. There must not be a particle of will or whim mixed with it. If we can listen, we shall hear. By reverently listening to the inner voice, we may reinstate ourselves on the pinnacle of humanity.” — Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry David Thoreau

      I went through a period of time where I considered whether to stop blogging altogether to give that valuable time to other writing. My most productive time is first thing in the morning, before the world wakes up and tells me what it thinks of my grand plans. Why use that time for a blog when I could use it to write a novel or the works of non-fiction that whisper to me?

      The answer, I think, is that this is my daily reckoning with a particular muse that blesses me with its time. To jilt this one for the hope of meeting another is impertinent. Put another way, everything has its time, and first thing in the morning is taken. We may be more selective with our listening at other times of day and turn off the noise of the world. We may choose to spend, say, lunchtime walking quietly with a new muse, reverently listening to a new perspective.

      Everything we do is habitual and routine. This naturally implies that what we’re doing with that time now ought to change. Our life’s contribution comes down to a series of decisions about what we say yes and no to. Decide what to be and go be it, as the Avett Brothers song suggests. Perhaps our most important decision is what we choose to listen as we navigate our days.

    • The Rise of a Quiet Excitement

      “No matter what night preceded it, she had never known a morning when she did not feel the rise of a quiet excitement that became a tightening energy in her body and a hunger for action in her mind—because this was the beginning of day and it was a day of her life.” — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

      “Rise free from care before the dawn and seek adventures.” — Henry David Thoreau

      How did it feel getting out of bed this morning? Does the day ahead stir the imagination or fill the mind with indifference? We all have bills to pay, we all have obligations that require our attention, but most of us simply let those things steer us where they will. We drift through our days, only feeling excitement for the things that pull us away from our work, like holidays and travel and what we’re doing on the weekend. What if every day offered the thrill of audacity and creative output?

      I know the writing is important to me because I rush right to it. On those mornings when I can’t get to it right away because of a flight or because I have early riser friends staying over, it eats at me until I immerse myself in the creative act. It’s not that those other things aren’t fun or interesting, it’s that I feel the writing brings me closer to a place I want to go.

      When you read that quote from Atlas Shrugged, does it feel like the way you met the day today, or does it read as merely words? We’re either turning excited energy into action or we’re going through the motions in our days, just to get through them. Remember the line from the movie Animal House? “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.” It’s a funny line when we’re kids, but it cuts deeper when we wade through life a bit longer.

      What might we offer to the world that is uniquely ours to give? Does that fill us to bursting with excitement and energy? Then do more of that, whatever the cost. For most of us, it’s a side hustle or a hobby. For the truly blessed, it’s a lifestyle and a career path. Whatever we feel is telling us all we need to know, if we’ll only listen. But more than listening, we must act. This day is ours only this once.

    • Made New Again

      “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

      My bride and I went out to dinner with old friends over the weekend. We hadn’t seen the two couples we met with in some time so there was some catching up to do before we got down to what each is planning for the future. I fancy myself a good listener, and delighted in the company of some exceptional listeners who sought to hear what each party was saying and not simply waiting for a break to jump in with their own take on the world. I delight in a conversation with a person who seeks first to understand, and I do my best to be that person myself.

      Once you’ve raised children together, gone through the succession of jobs and pets and cars and appliances and hobbies that all had their day, we look around and see that the person who’s been there through all of it is still patiently waiting for us to finish stating an opinion they’ve heard us state a hundred times. It may occur to us in such moments that we’ve been every bit as complicated to live with as they have been for us. A long-term relationship is an investment, shared and nurtured equally.

      We put energy into today, that tomorrow we are stronger together. All those fatal flaws that every one of us bring to a relationship are discovered, wrested with and navigated beyond on a course to better. Each day is an encounter with a new version of the person we wanted to spend the rest of our lives with, who’s looking at the latest version of us and deciding what to do with that discovery. Together we grow into something similar, but entirely new.

      The magic is in the rediscovery of that old familiar spark, still burning under the layers of days together. Some days it’s easier to find that spark than other days, but it’s hiding there somewhere, waiting for the fuel and oxygen it needs. So many relationships peter out for neglect, smothered under layers of indifference. Each day is our chance to rekindle and reinvent, to remake and make new. Our future together depends on it.

    • Remember Your Dreams

      Take it all in
      It’s as big as it seems
      Count all your blessings
      Remember your dreams
      — Jimmy Buffett, Jimmy Dreams

      We who try to reason with an unreasonable world can get pulled into distraction before we know it. We know that distraction steals our lives away as quickly as a murderous thief. The time given to distraction will never be returned to us. Focus on the future. Remember your dreams.

      Just writing this, I thought maybe I’d link to a video of Buffett singing the song I quoted, which led me to YouTube, which promptly threw a hundred distracting options at me that could easily have taken this productive moment from me in exchange for trinkets of frivolity. It happens so quickly, so easily, that we hardly notice it anymore. And before we know it our dreams are deferred to a tomorrow that will never come.

      We must be bold to dream big, but then we must be disciplined to realize them. Be present. Be aware. Be alive and vibrantly focused on the things that matter most in this time and place. These are days we’ll remember—the madness in the world assures that, but we must make it our mission to write the script ourselves.

      To be alive and aware of what we’re doing with the time puts us ahead of the masses of minions watching curated videos all day. We may leverage that time advantage to realize a dream or two in our allotment of days. There is no other reasonable alternative but to be bold and leap into life.