Alexandersmap

    Category: Lifestyle

    • Sensory Miracles

      “Slow down and taste and smell and hear, and let your senses come alive. If you want a royal road to mysticism, sit down quietly and listen to all the sounds around you. You do not focus on any one sound; you try to hear them all. Oh, you’ll see the miracles that happen to you when your senses come unclogged.” — Anthony de Mello, Awareness

      I had the opportunity to walk around Mykonos as a guide for a blind man. His wife was eager to shop with mine, so we set them free to go be. We went for a nice walk through the miracles of sensory experience that are the streets of Mykonos. Doing this on my own surely would have been joyful (if you can’t find joy in Mykonos you are truly lost), but my joy was amplified by awareness of things I take for granted—things like variations in terrain, people walking towards me, and the many curbs, shelves and flowering vines protruding from buildings that make Mykonos such a beautiful place to wander about.

      The first thing you notice as a guide is pace. Everything slows down as you guide another person with their hand on your shoulder and your focus expands beyond yourself to what is coming up that may trip them up or bump at them from above. Once pace is established, next comes heightened awareness, that you may describe all that surrounds you both in ways that are hopefully interesting to your blind counterpart. Flowering vines, the grout between paving stones underfoot, the white painted stucco and narrow streets providing naturally cool places to move about, and the miniature cars and trucks navigating those tight streets, often prompting a retreat to doorways and up steps.

      The thing is, I will always remember Mykonos differently for having guided him through its streets in this way for a couple of hours. Having been the one seeing a place both for the first time and in this way for the first time, I can’t help but have a stronger affinity for Mykonos through that experience than if I’d simply wandered about on my own. Perhaps my senses finally unclogged as I was taught to see for the first time. We should all be blessed with such an opportunity.

    • Greek Character

      “Character is a Greek word, but it did not mean to the Greeks what it means to us. To them it stood first for the mark stamped upon the coin, and then for the impress of this or that quality upon a man, as Euripides speaks of the stamp—character—of valor upon Hercules, man the coin, valor the mark imprinted on him. To us a man’s character is that which is peculiarly his own; it distinguishes each one from the rest. To the Greeks it was a man’s share in qualities all men partake of; it united each one to the rest. We are interested in people’s special characteristics, the things in this or that person which are different from the general. The Greeks, on the contrary, thought what was important in a man were precisely the qualities he shared with all mankind. The distinction is a vital one. Our way is to consider each separate thing alone by itself; the Greeks always saw things as parts of a whole, and this habit of mind is stamped upon everything they did.” — Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way

      Greece is a place of rugged beauty, to be sure, but also of rugged character shaped by a sense of timelessness that we simply don’t have in my own country. To walk around a structure built in 444 B.C. is to taste eternity. We are humans of course, and eternity isn’t ours to embrace just yet. But we may reach for the eternal in the form of development of our character.

      Poseidon was one of the Olympians for the Greeks, presiding over such volatile things as the weather. For a Greek sailing off to fish or fight, Poseidon was a big deal, and someone to cater favor with. He also influenced the temperament of horses, and was known as the “earth shaker” for his power to control earthquakes. So building a temple devoted to Poseidon made a lot of sense, and where better for it than on a prominent cliff overlooking the Aegean Sea on Cape Sounion?

      It’s one thing to read history, quite another to stand on the edge of a cliff between the Aegean Sea and a temple erected 2500 years ago as a tribute to the god who controlled both that sea and the ground we stood on. Best to embrace the spirit of the ancients in such moments, rather than incurring the wrath of Poseidon. And that’s the thing about Greece: you feel that you’re trying to measure up instead of trying to stand out. It’s a subtle difference, but it matters a great deal. It’s not that we aren’t special (our mother’s would insist that we are), it’s that we may be integral to something far beyond our time and place. That’s the Greek character.

      The Temple of Poseidon, 444 BC

    • Happy Endings

      “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” — Orson Welles

      Not every story has a happy ending. Some might say that every single one of our stories will end badly. I say life is a series of beginnings and endings, and we may strive to be happy for most of our story. To pursue happy is folly—there’s no depth to it. Depth is found in the lows as much as the highs. We must wade through it all, accepting our story as it unfolds—amor fati. We ought to begin with the end in mind, but focus on making this particular chapter compelling, such that it is.

      Having an impromptu dinner with friends last night, talk went to the number of trips around the sun we’re on. That cast of characters clearly read too many of my blog posts, for they’ve written this one for me. A trip around the sun on this planet is 365 days and change. This is a leap year, which accounts for that loose change. It’s all just numbers and science and passing our days on planet Earth in the best possible way we can muster given the circumstances. Cheers.

      This blog will end one day, just as surely as the soul writing it will. The end is assured. What matters isn’t that it’s a happy ending, simply that we wring the most out of each day. Some fall flat, some resonate, and some are downright terrible, but on the whole, a happy life is attainable when we are fully aware and engaged with a supporting cast of amazing people. We know the story: we are the average of the people we surround ourselves with. So build it and they will come. There’s your happy ending.

    • Breaking Up with Temporality

      “You give yourself to life by leaving temporality behind. Desire for mortal gains and fear of loss hold you back from giving yourself to life.” — Joseph Campbell

      Admittedly, I’ve had a complicated relationship with time. I spent too much of it rushing from one commitment to another, always striving to be early so as not to waste someone else’s time should the universe align itself to create delays. I write this very blog post in a coffee shop having arrived early for a meeting just down the street. Temporality is deeply engrained within me. It’s a hard relationship to break with.

      That doesn’t make it a healthy or enabling relationship. In fact, much of the stress I’ve felt in my lifetime is related to my relationship with time. Productivity calculations in a quarter, splits on a screen as I try to beat some preconceived expectation of how quickly I can complete some workout, or the pressure I put on myself to read or write a certain amount in the time I have available for such things. Time isn’t a great measure of our worth, unless you’re an Olympic athlete or attempting to solve a Rubik’s Cube or some such thing. Tempus fugit, indeed.

      So I’ve promised myself I’d break up with temporality, once and for all. Maybe not today, mind you (for I do have these commitments lined up), surely not tomorrow (I have a flight to catch, after all), but very—very— soon. How soon? Well, maybe time wIll tell? But know this: I’m serious this, uh, time.

    • On Home and Garden

      Ah, yet, ere I descend to the grave
      May I a small house and large garden have;
      And a few friends, and many books, both true,
      Both wise, and both delightful too!
      And since love ne’er will from me flee,
      A Mistress moderately fair,
      And good as guardian angels are,
      Only beloved and loving me.
      ― Abraham Cowley, The Wish

      I keen observer recently challenged me on how much I telegraph desired change in my writing. The perils of writing to an audience that includes people I interact with regularly… We write what we write and things fall out as they may. So forgive the repetition, it’s not dissatisfaction with the current state, it’s a strong focus on becoming better. Sometimes that means habit change, sometimes it means habitat change, but there’s no rush to move to a place faraway. I do kind of like it here.

      Here, of course, is far more interesting when the garden grows and stick season gives way to budding trees soon to leaf out. The garden changes everything. We might pay lip service to the hardscape of winter, but it’s the dance of annuals with perennials in that hardscape that makes the life of a gardener joyful.

      Cowley poetically sums up the simple joys of a good life. I seem to revisit this poem every couple of years just as the season changes. A few good friends, a few great books, a roof over one’s head, a garden to roam about in and someone to cherish it all with. Change will happen, some chosen and some a much a surprise to me as it will be to you. That’s the game we’re all in. But isn’t it more lovely with a bit of sun and color?

    • The Places We Will Be From

      Closing time, you don’t have to go home
      But you can’t stay here
      — Semisonic, Closing Time

      There’s something comfortable about staying in place. Things feel more natural and familiar, after all, and this is where all our friends are. But life is change, and we too must embrace it. Even the farmer, seemingly always in the same place, changes with the seasons. Most of us aren’t farmers, but we ought to listen to the wind and watch the level of the sun and know our place in this world will not be what it once was. We must be change agents for progress to happen.

      Closing time, time for you to go out
      To the places you will be from

      It’s easy to think back about who we were then. It’s harder to imagine who we’ll be in the future, let alone to map the path from here to there very accurately. Surely, there will be unexpected twists and turns along the way. The future is not ours, any more than the past is us today. But we do have the present, such that it is, to do with it what we will. Someday this will be who we used to be too. So we ought to make it a great story.

      Closing time, every new beginning
      Comes from some other beginning’s end

      When one door closes, another is said to open. How many doors have closed already? No matter—not really. What matters is the door opening in front of us, and our willingness to step across the threshold to what’s next. Life is about reinvention, rebirth, renewal. It’s closing time on some older version of ourselves, isn’t it? We can’t stay here forever. But as with any great adventurer, we should develop a strong sense of what’s next.

    • The Precious Few

      “Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.” ― Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

      The older I get, the less I care about the accumulation of things like accolades and titles and possessions. Sure, it’s nice to have that crystal bowl gifted to my bride and I when we got married, but we’ve never touched it, save to dust it off and place it back on the shelf again. So why do we hold on to it anymore? So the shelf won’t be empty?

      The thing is, it’s easier to just leave things in place as we move on to other things. But then we have all these things we don’t really need or want accumulating all around us. What’s the point of it all? It all amounts to nothing but an anchor. We all need an anchor now and then, but it doesn’t need to be so big that we can’t haul it up when we want to move on to the next beautiful place in our lives.

      Lately I’ve been looking at the roles I play in my life, and deciding which to dust off and keep and which to eliminate from my life. The person I once was is nice, but if I’m not that person anymore, why keep doing the same old things I did then? We ought to eliminate the non-essential from our lives that we might linger with the essential that much more.

      When we think of elimination, we ought to consider too the very habits that define who we are now. Is writing this blog every day bringing me to the person I want to become in the future, or is it holding me back from doing something else that would carry me there? You, dear reader, may be asking the same question about visiting this blog regularly, and isn’t it appropriate to do so? All is fair when we decide who we ought to be.

      And that’s the point. We should question everything that holds us to here. Do we have too much anchor to simply haul up and go when we hear the call of that faraway place? It’s fair to ask ourselves such things, but harder to act upon the answers that we arrive at. The one thing that is essential is to find and focus on the precious few, wherever it takes us.

    • Between the Mortal and the Enduring

      “When you are desiring things and fearing things, that’s mortality. The three temptations of the Buddha—desire, fear, and duty—are what hold you in the field of time. When you put the hermetic seal around yourself and, by discriminating between the mortal and the enduring, you find that still place within yourself that does not change, that’s when you’ve achieved nirvāṇa. That still point is the firmly burning flame that is not rippled by any wind.” — Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

      We each wrestle with the three temptations that hold us in place. Surely, it would be irresponsible of us to simply march off deep into the woods amongst the trees, or atop a summit amongst the clouds, or if you like, to sail off into bliss amongst the rolling waves. And yet it is the desire to hold on to what we already have, or the fear of the unknown, or perhaps simply a sense of duty to others that hold us in place. There’s nothing wrong with staying in place, mind you, but we must remember the price: Tempus fugit.

      To see the world as it really is—to reach nirvana—is to see ourselves as we really are. We are skating the line between the mortal and the enduring, but our bodies are decidedly mortal. The fragility of this life is exactly why we wrestle so much with those three temptations in the first place. We might feel we’re running out of time, or fear we’re missing out on true fulfillment, as we plod along in our chosen role as child, spouse, parent, employee, teammate, friend, follower, mentor… whatever. The shackles are ours alone, aren’t they? Enlightenment was never role-dependent. We become who we will be in our time or we leave this world with untapped potential. It’s up to us to choose the next step.

      We know intuitively what endures. This lifetime is a quest for connection and enlightenment, that we may pick up, carry and then pass the torch to those who follow. Of course, the torch is a metaphor, it is the light we carry within ourselves and pass along. We may burn brightly when we shed the things that dampen our spirit.

      The thing is, we don’t have to chase after dreams, we simply have to reach towards awareness. We may still reach for that place within ourselves that does not change. We may still choose something enduring, even as we accept that we ourselves are mortal. Even as we feel the hold of our accumulated obligations, desires and fears, we should realize that we shouldn’t be chasing anything—we are simply becoming something.

    • To See What We See

      “The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
      ― G.K. Chesterton

      I’m curious about the world, and so I wish to venture out into it to see what I might see. It’s the same reason I walk out into the backyard every morning, to see what the sky looks like, to see the progress of the garden, to feel the coolness of the breeze and realize the potential in the day. If I feel this way walking into the backyard, it follows that I’d be equally curious about any other place I might go to, don’t you think? So it is that simply traveling to check boxes is not nearly enough.

      We know the old expression; to live an interesting life, we must be interested. To be curious about the universe spinning around us is the opposite of being self-centered. Looking outward inquisitively draws the universe into our orbit, enriching us all as the walls between fall away. We rise to meet the moment in such interactions, and become something far more than an empty soul.

      In this moment, I’m standing lightly atop a stepping stone, having landed from back-to-back trips and gathering myself to launch into the next trip. By the time I’ve done the laundry I’ll be packing up once again. These are days you’ll remember, I tell myself, even as I look around at this place I’ve landed in (home) with a fresh set of eyes. Every day should offer something to remember, if we remain open to seeing what unfolds before us.

      The best way to savor anything is to realize that it’s all going to fall away one day. We may never pass this way again. So make the most of it when we’re in that moment. That goes for travel as much as parenting or gardening or eating a great meal. There is only now, and this. So what do we see?

    • We Can Only Try

      I have often asked myself the reason for the sadness
      In a world where tears are just a lullaby
      If there’s any answer, maybe love can end the madness
      Maybe not, oh, but we can only try
      — Carol King, Beautiful

      We all know the old expression about the glass being half full or half empty. Are we optimists or pessimists at heart? A stoic might say neither are right, that the glass is simply at the halfway point and we ought to be realistic about that and nothing more. Perhaps. But we all move through this world carrying light or darkness, wearing it on our faces, and the world reacts to us in kind.

      If each step of the journey is the entire point of living, then we ought to find some beauty in the moment. We must learn to carry the light, that we may not stumble into darkness. And brighten the faces of those we encounter along the way. They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If beauty is also a reflection of who we are deep inside, shouldn’t that tell us something about ourselves?

      There are days when I quietly quit the world, feeling it’s not my role to be positive or to contribute to the greater good. I’ve done my part, I think to myself, and now it’s time to be less generous with my goodwill. Eventually I snap out of it, shaking off the narcissistic self-talk and come back to the light. What are we here for, after all, but to contribute a verse? Why squander that? We can only try to make that verse beautiful, that others may see.