Alexandersmap

    Category: Lifestyle

    • Reminiscing

      Friday night, it was late, I was walking you home
      We got down to the gate and I was dreaming of the night
      Would it turn out right
      Now as the years roll on
      Each time we hear our favorite song
      The memories come along
      Older times we’re missing
      Spending the hours reminiscing
      Hurry, don’t be late, I can hardly wait
      I said to myself when we’re old
      We’ll go dancing in the dark
      Walking through the park and reminiscing

      — Little River Band, Reminiscing

      I may write about it now and then, but I’m generally too busy living in the present to dwell on the past. That doesn’t mean I don’t fondly reminisce about the best days, while cringing now and then at the worst days. Life lessons, each and every moment along the way.

      The benefit of a journal, let alone a daily blog, is seeing just who you were then. Who had those dreams and aspirations, doubts and fears? How did it turn out in the end? How have we turned out, this work in progress marching through time?

      Reminiscing isn’t simply living in the past, it’s rewinding ourselves to another version of us and seeing what we’ve learned through our experiences since then. It’s not so much dancing in the dark as putting a spotlight on progress made. Though dancing in the dark to the right music sounds lovely too, don’t you think? What tune are we singing lately? Will we reminisce about it as fondly?

    • Eyes Open

      “There seemed to be endless obstacles preventing me from living with my eyes open, but as I gradually followed up clue after clue it seemed that the root cause of them all was fear.”
      ― Marion Milner, A Life of One’s Own

      When we think about it, most everything we imagine to be the worst case scenario is never going to come true. For every tragedy in the news, there’s a million ordinary days unfolding at the same time. For every unfortunate accident on the path to adventure there’s a thousand souls transcending their limiting beliefs. To live in fear is to handcuff ourselves to a previous version of ourself that will never experience everything the world could offer. Choose to be more audacious.

      The thing is, we all keep paying our dues, deferring the audacious for one more day of ordinary. The end game is we’ll run out of time if we don’t do it while we’re healthy and bold enough to try. In the end, that’s what we ought to fear: running out of time to finally live that un-lived life. While there’s still time. We must open our eyes and see the truth in those old Stoic guideposts: Tempus fugit. Memento mori… Carpe diem.

      There’s still plenty of ordinary in my days, and in moderation that’s okay too, but we ought to listen to that voice inside us calling for more and step to it more often. Friends and fellow bloggers Fayaway once posted an image that speaks to this wrestling match between the ears. I’ve kept this as a reminder to myself to push aside timidity more often in favor of boldness. To live a full life we must learn to fully live life:

    • Skating vs. Swimming

      I was thinking about Duolingo as I reviewed the years-long streak I’m currently on of using the app every day. It seems I’m on a streak of days going back more than 3 1/2 years. Yet I’m completely lost in a conversation in rapid-fire French or German. All I can do is tell people what my name is and ask where the toilets are. Perhaps that’s enough to find the bathroom, but deep down you know you’re missing all the fun. I felt this most profoundly riding the electric passenger launch on Lake Königssee in Bavaria with the entire boat of passengers laughing at the jokes the guide was telling. I smiled and nodded and recognized that I had a long way to go.

      We skate across the surface on most things, doing just enough: It’s the Cliff Notes version of studying to pass the exam but forgetting the material immediately afterwards. It’s reading the slide deck verbatim instead of reaching out to the audience. It’s buying the expensive hiking boots and only wearing them to shovel snow. It’s using a heart emoji to note someone’s deeply personal post on social media but not immediately calling them to see how they’re really doing. These are examples of checking boxes, not immersion.

      Swimming is immersion. Diving deeply into the subject matter to understand it. Getting pulled by the rip current and finding our way out of it. It’s going to another country where we barely speak the language and figuring things out one phrase at a time. It’s re-reading the book a second and third time to truly understand what we missed the first time. It’s taking a long walk with an old friend to chat about what is going on in their world that has them so withdrawn from ours. This is immersion, not checking boxes.

      We tend to do both if we’re honest about it. We can’t swim through everything. We must skate across some surfaces just to get to the other side. Life is full of things we could immerse ourselves in, but soon we find ourselves drowning in it all. It’s better to skate over the trivial and swim through the essential. The trick is knowing which is which. A long term, healthy marriage involves a great deal of swimming. To skate is to invite trouble. We’ve all encountered plenty of people with troubled marriages. Some things in life simply can’t be skated over. We break the surface willingly or unwillingly and learn to swim lest we drown.

      Skating may feel faster, but we find we reach the other side barely familiar with everything we’ve just crossed. That’s no way to live a lifetime. Swimming isn’t always efficient, but we become more engaged with the world when we get beyond simply treading water. To have a strong marriage, we must navigate deep and sometimes turbulent waters. To engage with an audience we must reach a level of mastery and rapport strong enough to close the gap between the podium and the last row. To reach the summit we’ve got to strap on those boots and start walking uphill. And to learn a language we must immerse ourselves in it enough that eventually we get the jokes.

      An exceptional life requires less skating and more swimming.

    • The Process

      “Your essence is who you are. Your expression is how you show up in the world. Your essence is your calling, and your expression is how you take that call. My ancestors had another word for essence. They called it Sukha.” — Suneel Gupta, Everyday Dharma

      “The yoga term sukha means ‘happy, good, joyful, delightful, easy, agreeable, gentle, mild, and virtuous.’ The literal meaning is ‘good space,’ from the root words su (good) and kha (space). The term originally described the kind of smooth ride one would experience in a cart or a chariot whose axle holes were well centered in the wheels. This image implies that the production of sukha is a dynamic process.” — Robert Svoboda, “Sthira and Sukha: Steadiness and Ease”, Yoga International

      I’m not well-versed in dharma and would immediately recommend anyone seeking wisdom to find a master elsewhere. I’m simply a student of life who steps off the beaten path whenever possible to go find a waterfall or scenic vista hidden from those who stay the course. Dharma is like a waterfall in this way, but the path is inward.

      When one comes across a sign suggesting a view off the main path, one must choose. Sukha was just such a sign, pointing to a larger understanding of the word itself, but more importantly, the process of becoming well-centered in life. When the world feels a little too frenzied, when we feel overbooked and overwhelmed, it helps to stop focusing on how we’re expressing ourselves in the world and get back to the essence of why we’re here in the first place. Life is a process of becoming who we might be. Deciding what to be and setting out to go be it will be a lot easier on the soul if the what is centered on a compelling why, and the journey is in line with the essence of who we are.

      It’s fair to ask ourselves now and then if we’re in a good space. When the answer isn’t what we’d like it to be, corrective action is needed. When our course is not following the compass heading, we ought to change our course. This isn’t usually a dramatic jibe, but a subtle pull on the tiller. A few degrees of course correction can make all the difference in how we feel about our place in the world and where we’re going in it. The thing is, we forget sometimes in our quest for expression to refer back to our essence.

      Life is a series of interconnected paths on our journey from beginning to end. That journey is far more interesting if we take those side paths to check out the view now and then. The process of becoming demands forward motion, but we determine the pace and how strict we are with our heading. Life isn’t about how it ends, but how beautiful it may be along the way.

    • Earning the Warmth

      Through the window
      we could see how far away it was to the gates of April.
      Let the fire now
      put on its red hat
      and sing to us.
      — Mary Oliver, November

      November comes to an end, and just like that, December is at our doorstep. The ambient light of incandescent and LED bulbs make total darkness an impossibility in most cities and suburbia now. The decorations of Christmas have exploded onto the scene, to grow exponentially over the coming weeks. When we get beyond the constant advertisements for last-chance(!) savings on gifts from every retailer on the planet, we’re left with short, crisp days and long, cold nights.

      Some of us thrive in the cold. We have layers upon layers at the ready, lightly dusted from months of being ignored but feeling just right when we slip them on once again. The stakes are driven into the edges of pavement, awaiting their role as traffic cops or road kill for errant plow drivers. Snow? It’s nothing but a possibility for most of us. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll see snow soon enough. The thrill of the crunch! The hiding of all the brown landscape in a crystal blanket. Snow would make it feel like December has arrived. If not, well, we must seek it out in higher elevations as the hikers and skiers do.

      If November is a time for thankfulness and gatherings (and beards and hastily-written first drafts), December is a time for giving and hustling to find the perfect gift for someone before we give up and give them a gift card to use in seven months when they stumble upon it in the drawer dedicated to such plastic tokens of love. We want to celebrate our love for someone with the perfect gift, and somehow it ends up feeling like a concession to just give them the money. My feeling on such things is that the person who gave the card should be a part of the experience of using the card. Experiences are always best shared with those who wish it for you.

      I’m seeking more poetry in my long nights. More warming fires with conversation and a pet snuggled up close. More time reading the books that evaded me in sunshine. More cold walks around the block with a dog that’s come to expect something new on every stroll. We learn what we are unaware of from a dog on a night walk. I’d forgotten the thrill of the sky changing from step to step, the pull of the leash as the dog sees a rabbit, and the sounds of coyotes, fox and fisher cats crying in the night. I’d forgotten the welcoming warmth of that first step into the kitchen after a brisk walk telling me; “Welcome back”. Indeed.

      The days are still getting shorter for a few more weeks. We must embrace the long, cold nights for all that is hidden in them. For we are alive, and nothing makes you feel that like getting out into it, even for a little while. It’s easy to be warm in the tropics. Up north we must earn it. And in the work we find we love it all the more.

    • Choices

      A friend asked me which five songs I would choose if I could listen to no other song but those five for the rest of my life. An impossible task, really. Beyond your wedding song, if you truly loved it, what do you choose? Hard rock? Dance music? Introspective music? Singalong songs? Jazz? Classical? Death metal? Do you go with the first five you think of? The five most played on your phone? Or do you mine a little deeper, knowing that this is for keeps and there’s no time for casual affairs?

      When I put the initial list together in my mind and reviewed it, I noticed that my two favorite bands weren’t represented. Yet I could do the same five song exercise with either band and have a hard time deciding what to leave off. Another friend of mine once asked me to rank the best albums of a band we both love from best to worst. The worst is easy, but what do you choose as the best? It depends on your mood at the time. It’s the same with ranking songs, isn’t it?

      Imagine putting a list together like this, not as an ice-breaker, but as truly the only five songs you’ll ever hear again. Imagine the pressure, the last minute switches. The forgotten gem that you’ll regret excluding forever. Having to choose when the stakes are real sucks. The hard part is always what you must leave behind when you choose that other thing.

      The exercise should lead us to gratitude. We ought to be grateful that we don’t have to choose. We ought to be grateful that our days are filled with an abundance of choice on what we eat, what we read or watch, where we live, and yes, what we listen to. It’s truly an embarrassment of riches for most of us.

      It should also lead us to evaluate what our choices have been thus far in the game. We aren’t here for all that long, yet we remain frivolous with what we do with our time. I’m well aware that I’m choosing to write this blog at this moment instead of taking a long walk in the woods. Which is better for me in the moment? We must choose wisely, but then accept the choice that we’ve made if it’s working for us. Happiness is not found in constantly changing our mind about what we want.

      Life can never be about having everything. Just enough of some things. Things like beauty and love, engagement with the universe and the active pursuit of better. That’s the soundtrack to a great life. Something we can dance to.

    • Rooted in Happiness

      “People have often been happy here and the walls have absorbed some of that delight.” — Adam Nicholson, Sea Room

      It’s happened once again. The house transformed over a day from one holiday theme to the next. “Halloween” quickly flipped to “Thanksgiving”, “Thanksgiving” to “Christmas”. These are the days of rapid-fire theme decorating, supported by basement shelves full of every season of the year. In this house you don’t need a calendar to know what time of year it is, just look at the wreath du jour. You could build another house with the number of screws and nails holding up wreaths in the basement, just waiting for their season. I’m grateful there are only 12 months in a year, or we’d have to build a storage shed for the overflow.

      This home has known delight. The walls echo with memories built on joyful moments. The backyard is a place where dogs and now-grown children sprint to for the happy memories they’re drawn to just out the door. I’ve returned aching from the grind of business travel and soothed myself in the comfort of place as well. To be present in a place where so much positive energy reverberates off the hardscape is delightful—and I would argue, essential to our well-being. We must know places like this to stand up and face the world again tomorrow.

      My adult daughter informs me that we are never allowed to sell the home she grew up in, for the memories of place are so overwhelmingly part of her identity that to change it would crush her. I have known many such places in my lifetime, and have yet to be crushed by moving on. A sense of place is one thing, but permanence is entirely another. Nothing is permanent, even home. But we aren’t going anywhere just yet.

      That familiar feeling of a place you’ve spent some of your happiest days is comforting in a world that is so desperate to be unhappy. Why choose to be unhappy when you may be happy? Is it a choice at all or a steady diet of misery and fear doled out on the doom loop? Fear of missing out, pressure to keep up with the Jones, crisis news 24/7, and politicians telling us how horrible the world is without them leading us out of it all create a soundtrack of unhappy. Yet here we are; happy anyway.

      They say home is where the heart is. I say home is what you put your heart into. Happiness isn’t a place, but it is built into our lives with deliberate purpose. We invest in a home, but also in the people we surround ourselves with and the time we spend with them. Home is either a labor of love built for a lifetime or a nest people fly away from to free themselves emotionally. Roots must grow in fertile soil, and in their growth, they stabilize that ground. Seasons and houses and people are always changing, but they may be rooted in happiness when we invest our time well.

    • A Serious and Omnivorous Reader

      “I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike- intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits.” ― Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar

      I’m determined to read 5-6 more books before the calendar year ends. This necessitates lifestyle choices, of course, but that’s par for the course with a reader. We who read often absorb the judgement of both those who choose to watch, and those who choose to do. As if reading as an alternative to watching a movie or a game or going out on the town is such a poor choice. The only poor choice is lethargy and sloth. There’s nothing lethargic or slothful about an active brain engaged in reading.

      The thing is, there are only so many books we can read in a lifetime. There are only so many movies one can watch, only so many walks we can take or bars we can close out, only so many dogs you can bring into your life, only so many stamps we’ll ever have in our passport, and so on. Whatever the lifestyle choice we make for ourselves, we must recognize that it’s inherently limited, because we are.

      When the year ends, I’ll have read about 25 books. That includes some pretty heavy lifts, but a few page-turners as well. This is down from a year ago, when I cleared 30 books leaning more heavily into fast fiction reads. Reading is also heavily dependent on how we travel, how we engage with the rest of the world, and whether we choose to write a blog every day during prime reading hours. With a full house this summer, I read much less than I might have with an empty nest. The trade-off was naturally worth it, but the unread books mock me nonetheless. And then there’s Goodreads, which only tracks the new books we’ve read, not the total including old favorites that we return to again and again. Shouldn’t it count when you re-read Walden or Awareness or Meditations for the umpteenth time? Of course it matters a great deal, but why are we counting anyway?

      Somewhere over the last year I’ve stopped worrying so much about the count and began focusing on what I absorb in my reading. I linger with a quirky set of authors who bring all manner of perspective to the universe. Why do we rush off to read the next big thing instead of revisiting that thing that’s whispering in the back of our mind? That person who read Slaughterhouse Five in high school is nowhere near the person who re-read it this summer. What have you re-read with an entirely different perspective?

      There’s a popular conversation starter that begins with the question, which albums would you bring to a deserted island with you—which ten albums would you listen to over everything else that’s out there, should you be destined to spend the rest of your life listening to no other music? It’s an impossible ask, really, but reveals a lot about the people around the table, should they be truthful. Music is always a deeply personal choice, influenced by our environment. So it is with books. So taking that question from music to literature, what books would you bring with you? If you were told to leave the planet on a trip to Mars, never to return and not having the Internet to constantly refresh your feed what would you want to read again and again to the end of days? A serious and omnivorous reader could tackle that list readily, with the natural regret of the large stack of books left behind.

      My own list would include the Thoreau, de Mello and Marcus Aurelius books listed above, along with some history, some poetry, and some fiction. None of the books I’ve read thus far this year—even the books I’ve rated as five stars—would make the list. Does that make this year a failure in not elevating my library, or a validation of that which I’ve already danced with? The answer lies within us, doesn’t it?

      Returning to the inherent limitation of how many books we can read in a lifetime, shouldn’t we be very deliberate in what we choose? I believe we should read as much and as widely as we can, that we may gain perspectives otherwise untapped. Particularly in a world that wants more than ever to control the conversation, we owe it to ourselves to go well beyond the populist fare to find voices that otherwise get drowned out in all that shouting and posturing. In the end, it’s the well-read who bring perspective and stability to an otherwise reactionary world.

    • The Steady Climb

      “People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’ There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron… If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.” — George Mallory, Climbing Everest: The Complete Writings of George Mallory

      For all the valleys in a lifetime, there are plenty of peaks as well. If we build in enough positive, healthy and productive habits, and surround ourself with enough supportive, engaged and proactive people we may establish a steady climb in our life. How high we climb is mostly a matter of persistence and proximity. Those who climb higher are uniquely focused on it, and almost always have placed themselves amongst a supporting cast who enables such audacity as climbing higher than they themselves might climb.

      We all start from different places—some blessed with a pretty high base camp from which to climb higher, while some start in a desert of despair and low agency, a place where those high mountain peaks seem so distant. Often, you’ve got to walk for many miles away from the desert before you can begin a climb at all. Life isn’t fair in this way, but starting points are only a beginning. It’s always about the climb.

      The aim of that climb ought to be joy. What is the purpose of any endeavor but joy? We climb a corporate ladder to collect enough coins to pay for joy. We fight wars or vote to ensure someone else isn’t taking our joy from us or our future generations. Clearly, joy is an essential measure of a beautiful life. The question is, is the climb to reach it bringing us closer to sheer joy or drawing us away from a beautiful life? Can they be one and the same?

      We should know when to stop climbing and simply enjoy who we are, with what we have. We should be aware of the path we’ve taken on the climb and seek another if we start trading a beautiful life for the possibility of joy. But can we have our cake and eat it too? Shouldn’t we feel compelled to try? Perhaps the answer isn’t to stop climbing, but to start looking around at the scenery a bit more, lest we climb past the true beauty in our life for a peak that may be socked in clouds.

    • Place and Turn

      This time of year, a sense of place may overpower us. A feeling of being home, or yearning to be home, is natural when there are so many memories tied to it. We become rooted to a place, feel it become part of us, and in turn become reluctant to ever part with it. But it remains simply a place.

      When we visit an historical site where something meaningful happened in human history, we feel the sense of place profoundly. Standing in the footsteps of giants makes you feel as if you’re entering their world, if only for a moment. This is the place where it happened, whatever it may be. There is connection in place.

      Turn borrows place for a short time. We have our turn in the airplane seat and the taxi seat to get to a hotel for our turn using a pillow and toilet countless others have used before us. Perhaps even cleaned in between visitors. Countless others will in turn follow us. The very space between here and there are ours for a moment and then vacated for someone else to eventually occupy that space. Place is both temporary and eternal.

      We ought to remember that this is our turn at the table, sharing this place with these people at this time, and be thankful for the opportunity. For place may seem eternal, but it’s simply our turn in it. Dance with that.