Alexandersmap

    Category: Lifestyle

    • The Worthwhile Endeavors

      “Optimism makes you less likely to walk away while not actually increasing your chances of success. That means that being overly optimistic will make you stick to things longer that aren’t worthwhile. Better to be well calibrated. Life’s too short to spend your time on opportunities that are no longer worthwhile.” — Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

      In all honesty, last night I was planning to make this my last blog post. To end with a bang on the 4th of July seemed poetic. I’ve thought this before, but talked myself into sticking with it for a round number or a date with particular meaning for me. The 4th has particular meaning for me and so it felt appropriate to roll out the Annie Duke quote and wrap this thing up.

      Naturally, this is why I write in the morning, with a fresh mind not yet beaten down by the realities of the world. This is why I read poetry and listen to music with the ear of a philosopher. This is why I travel to places that leave me gobsmacked. And this is why I favor quiet conversation with the smallest of circles, that we may each be heard. The well was empty last night, it’s not quite so this morning.

      No, I’m not ready to stop writing just yet. But the thought was a red flag for me that I must pursue other worthwhile endeavors to ignite the kindling before it floats away in the winds of time. There’s a whole world out there awaiting our graceful experience with it. So frequently asking ourselves whether we should stick with things opens up the possibility that maybe we shouldn’t. Recalibrate. And in the absence of obligation to that thing other opportunities may open up before us.

    • Green Grass and Long Conversation

      There’s an old response to the expression “the grass is greener on the other side” that points out that “the grass is greener where you water it.” Being a collector of quotes and poetry, the expression seems to pop in my feed now and then. Today was one of those days, and just before I started to write this blog post. Apparently the student was ready to see it again.

      I begin most summer mornings with a plunge into the pool and a cup of coffee in an Adirondack chair. I know this is a luxury of circumstance and celebrate it for the blessing it is. But I also know that a lot of watering went into this particular grass. To be born at the right time and place is a gift, to use that time and place in such a way that your life is incrementally better each year is a plan well-executed, with a nod to luck and fate for the blessing they’ve bestowed. But it’s simply my moment with these things, nothing more. We must remember that for all it represents.

      Yesterday I took a long walk with my bride and our pup through old neighborhoods she grew up in. The entire four miles was a walking conversation about what was, what is, and what will be. This year marks three decades of such conversations, and we’ve noted the changes in ourselves as much as the people and things around us. Life is change and a bit of selective watering, that we may enjoy our moment in the sun a little more before it’s time to concede it to the next. Memento mori and carpe diem, friends.

      Sitting in that chair, the air a bit cool, I watched the steam drift out of the mug and drift up into the morning sunbeam over my shoulder. The water vapors caught the sunbeam just right and sparkled like fireworks before drifting away to infinity. The days are already getting shorter even as the peak of summer is ahead of us. We may know the fragility of the moment and still look ahead with anticipation. A beautiful life is built on the things that are most fragile, like time and seasons and the people who grace us with this dance.

    • The Immediate Concern

      “A bad goal makes you say, ‘I want to do that some day.’ A great goal makes you take action immediately.” ― Derek Sivers

      I type this a little sore. All over sore, the kind that makes you move a little slower and assess your choices in life. Still, it’s a good sore of layered exercise expressing change in the body. We all ought to embrace such positive change in our lives. At least that’s what I’m telling myself, knowing I have work to do today to keep that momentum going in the right direction. And so I appreciate what Sivers is talking about when he assesses a good goal.

      The immediate concern is sustaining positive momentum towards the goal of completing a lot of mileage in a relatively short amount of time. To average 6.5 miles a day is a reckless goal at this stage of my professional life, but calculated to force me to row more often. I’m already feeling the effects of this, and I’m energized by the goal despite the fatigue it brings to me. We are made to move, not just sit staring at a variety of screens all day.

      When the summer is over, I’ll have kept my commitment to myself by keeping the goal alive to completion. Plenty of other things will keep me busy in that timeframe, but some things will be sacrificed for the greater good of finishing the goal. Life is full of tradeoffs, isn’t it? Why trade a good fitness level for comfortable distraction?

      At this very moment there’s a creeping urgency to stop writing about it and get back to stacking miles on top of what’s already been done. What doesn’t get done in July will have to be done in August, and frankly, I’ve got enough on my plate already in August. Great goals make you question your sanity while you’re making them come true. And yet, it makes you feel more alive than a less worthy goal ever would. It’s literally putting bold words into action. What’s more transformative than that?

    • What Emerges

      “To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don’t recognise inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost.
      But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.” ― Heidi Priebe

      I’ve been thinking about relationships lately. I’m in a 30-year relationship myself, which is a jumble of highs and lows and left turns made right, but generally going about as good as one could hope for when we envision a lifetime coexisting with any one person. The part they don’t tell you is that it isn’t one person at all, but a person who is changing all the time, just as we are. The trick to a long term relationship is waiting out the parts of each other that aren’t delighting us in anticipation of the person we see them becoming. Hopefully they’re doing that with us.

      The thing is, that couple who were so enthralled with each other once upon a time is still around, just weighed down by all the things that life throws at us along the way. We like to think that we’ll always be at the same place in life, but we learn quickly that each of us goes at our own pace. Sometimes we’re ahead, sometimes behind, but always committed for the long haul. Perhaps our wedding song showed us the way, all those years ago:

      Now everyone dreams of a love lasting and true
      But you and I know what this world can do
      So let’s make our steps clear that the other may see
      And I’ll wait for you
      If I should fall behind
      Wait for me
      — Bruce Springsteen, If I Should Fall Behind

      We all need to live a little before we’re really prepared for something as impactful as finding our partner for life, because life will surely wash over both people over and over again. We meet a few people along the way who may feel like the right one, only to develop into absolutely not the right one. I find myself grateful for having gotten it right, when we see so many that go wrong. What emerges from a rich life is the perspective to see that life partners are human, with all the complexity that comes with it. To find the right one, and then to grow together is to live a profoundly more meaningful life.

    • The New Way

      “If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.” ― Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

      This week has brought me to a new destination from the one that I departed just a few days ago. Everything is different, once again, because we all change all the time. When we encounter those close to us after these changes, we influence them as they do us. The ripples may be profound or undetectable (but they are surely there).

      Writing telegraphs the changes in me before I reunite with some of my close circle, and if they read the blog, they absorb the changes and react to each themselves. That’s the thing about blogging—you’re constantly telling the people around you who you are today with a deferred reaction from them. It’s that “I know something about you that you don’t know that I know” moment of awkward acknowledgement. Usually that’s not even who we are now, just who we were when we wrote that thing they’re reacting to. But it’s the bed we make for ourselves when we move beyond anonymous and continue to push beyond who we once were.

      We each arrive, look around, and see if the world will join us or if they’ve already moved well past us. Some people are forever anchored to that character they were long ago. I’d like to think I’ve moved beyond that old character myself. I’m under no illusion that I’m ahead of the pack, for I feel my adult life has been forever playing catch-up for the choices I made when I was a younger version of myself. We must bury our former self with each arrival at a new us. So it goes.

      Everything changes and so too must we. There’s no doubt I look at things differently today than I did just a few days ago, and that’s how our lives progress. Sometimes progress is revealed as a leap, sometimes it’s disguised as a setback, but in every case it’s a new way that we must adapt to before everything changes once again.

    • Energy and Time

      “Energy, Not Time, Is Our Most Precious Resource.” — Jim Loehr, The Power of Full Engagement

      We often say we don’t have the time to do something we know is important, when in reality we have the time but nowhere near enough mental energy to take the initiative. Sure, time is limited, but how often do we find ourselves watching television or mindlessly scrolling social media videos instead of getting up and getting to it? More than we’d like to admit.

      Lately I’ve surprised myself with productivity gains. It’s not that I hadn’t been there before, it’s that I’ve been too unfocused on some essential habits and my effectiveness slipped away. Put more focus on energy management and suddenly I feel like a better version of myself.

      There’s no secret to energy: when we fill the tank we have more to burn. But the tank needs to be filled with the good stuff, like exercise, nutritious foods, hydration, proper rest and a positive and encouraging circle of influence around us. When we align these restorative forces behind us we can be propelled into higher performance.

      The question is always, what do we want to get out of life? We ought to follow that up with two more questions: what kind of energy will I need to burn to get there and do I have the right support system built to supply it? When we align all of these forces behind us, we might be surprised at how much energy we have, and how much more we can do with time.

    • How Was Your Experience?

      I received the same question from my dentist and my automobile service team recently—How was your experience? It turns out both left me a bit disappointed this time around, where I’d come to expect excellence. Perhaps that expectation led me there, or maybe they simply didn’t measure up to their own standards. Either way it was the same result.

      We ought to ask ourselves this question every day with an ever-higher standard for our own behavior, execution on goals, and an ever more refined philosophy for how a life should be lived. What gets measured gets managed, as Peter Drucker supposedly said. Each day offers an opportunity to ask ourselves, how’s it really going? What needs to change? How do we become a better version of ourselves than we were yesterday? It starts with the right questions and follows with an honest answer.

    • The Making of It

      “The place where you belong will not exist until you create it.” — James Baldwin

      There are days when we forget that we are the actors in our own play. It feels sometimes like the world is imposing itself on us (surely it will), yet we still have a verse. We see that those who boldly push their own will on the world often find themselves further along than those who accept the impositions. The lesson for us is to know where we want to go and keep working to get there, because we’re all going somewhere anyway and we might as well make it the place we want to be.

      So it is that lately I’ve been imagining what’s next. Write the book? Buy the boat? Build the house? Or maybe forget all that and immerse myself in a Caldeirada in some sleepy seaside town in Portugal. We can’t have it all, but we may determine some small part of our future with a steady accent to that summit in our dreams. Indeed, life is what we make of it.

      To see the truth in Baldwin’s statement, we only need to look around at our present state and follow the breadcrumbs from who we once were to this place we are now. We may blame fate or the will of some higher power for dropping us where we are now, with the circle of people influencing every aspect of our lives, but deep down we know we brought ourselves here too. That’s either cause for celebration or a catalyst for massive change, but our role in our current situation is undeniable. So why not look ahead to what’s next and create the future version of us? It’s coming either way.

    • Adding Surprise

      “If you keep experiencing the same things, your mind keeps its same patterns. Same inputs, same responses. Your brain, which was once curious and growing, gets fixed into
      deep habits. Your values and opinions harden and resist change.
      You really learn only when you’re surprised. If you’re not surprised, then everything is fitting into your existing thought patterns. So to get smarter, you need to get surprised, think in new ways, and deeply understand different perspectives.” ― Derek Sivers, Hell Yeah or No: What’s Worth Doing

      We know this, don’t we? To learn is to grow. To experience new and diverse things in our lives offers this learning experience for each of us. So it follows that we ought to get outside of our own small box and leap into the new and surprising. It’s here where we may just find delightful insight.

      Ah, but can’t we find delight in our everyday routines? Isn’t that why we’ve landed here? I may walk out into the garden and delight in new blooms, the smell of fresh basil, the song of a cardinal overhead. I can sit in a familiar chair practically molded to my form and read a favorite book again and again, drawing out something new from it every time. Indeed, there are advocates for immersing ourselves ever deeper into the familiar that we may one day master it. We can’t reach mastery if we’re always frittering from one thing to the next.

      There is of course a happy medium. We may go out and seek new perspectives and return to the familiar with them as a more experience-rich person. we collect memories and insights into the ways of the world and bring them back to build a bigger, more expansive and more open box. And like a bird nest we may fly away and return in the proper season. Life is about balancing the familiar with the surprisingly new. The trick is what to prioritize when in our lives.

    • Time in the Sun

      There’s a dark and a troubled side of life
      There’s a bright and a sunny side too
      Though we meet with the darkness and strife
      The sunny side we also may view
      Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side
      Keep on the sunny side of life
      It will help us every day, it will brighten all the way
      If we keep on the sunny side of life
      — The Carter Family, Keep on the Sunny Side

      “There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it,’ said my mother. ‘Put yourself in the way of beauty.” ― Cheryl Strayed, Wild

      It occurred to me while driving to Connecticut the other day that the process of driving down that particular road has never been a pleasant experience for me. I’ve been driving on that Interstate for my entire life, and it’s always a grind of either traffic or boredom. The only time I recall enjoying it was when I first got my driving permit and my father let me drive from Cape Cod to our home and I distinctly remember the feeling of newness and potential that road offered on that day. Since then? Nothing but a familiar tedious task to complete before getting from here to there. That’s no way to go through life, friend.

      The thing is, each day offers us a path to new potential or tedious pain. We often (not always) get to choose which path to take. I’d like to say that I choose never to take that particular Interstate highway again, but I know deep down I’ll be on it Monday morning unless the world turns upside down for me in the interim. Given the choice, I’ll take the highway, thank you. But not forever. Our goal should be elimination of the ugly for the embrace of beautiful. Instead of commuting down that Interstate yet again, maybe meandering through some hiking trail or ancient cobblestone street is a better journey. Life shouldn’t always be about our means to an end. We forget that that means ought to matter a great deal to us as it’s the stuff of life. It’s quite literally our passage through our time in the sun.