Alexandersmap

    Category: Lifestyle

    • Active Influence

      “You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.” — Jim Rohn

      If we operate with a high level of agency, we are active influencers in our days. When we operate with low agency, conversely, we feel we have no control over what happens to us. Extraordinary events aside, we each have more control than we might believe. We each have a say in how our lives go. But it always begins with reflection and a clear idea of who we want to be. Decide what to be and go be it, as the song goes. This is a high agency attitude, and must be followed with an action chaser. For if not now, then when?

      We must choose to be active participants. We must choose high agency. To relinquish control of our lives to others would be an individual tragedy. The world doesn’t need another person with no direction, no purpose, no zest for life. The world needs active influencers building positive outcomes.

    • Playing the Right Game

      “The person who gets 1 shot needs everything to go right.
      The person who gets 1000 shots is going to score at some point.
      Find a way to play the game that ensures you get a lot of shots.”
      — @JamesClear

      “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” — Wayne Gretzky

      Too many of us won’t take the shot. We settle for the pass instead. There’s nothing wrong with a pass now and then, for sometimes it’s just not the right shot to take in the moment. But action and inaction are both habits. We must learn to act boldly when we see our shot.

      It’s easy to talk of action, but tougher to summon up the courage to act. At least in the beginning, until we become accustomed to boldness. The trick is to put ourselves in the right game, with the right players, where action is both accepted and expected. When we look around at the players around us, in the game we’re currently playing, we ought to ask ourselves, is this the right game for me?

      The answer to that question is a prompt for action. Be bold in that moment. Take the shot. Or find another game. There is no overtime.

    • The Call of the Wild

      “Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.”
      ― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

      Finishing my first cup of coffee, I heard the distinctive honk of a skein of geese. Quickly removing myself from the comfort of the moment, I caught the geese circling back around the woods and turn towards a local pond. The rising sun caught them in flight, illuminating their bodies in the red light of dawn. They soon disappeared behind the roofline and the honks faded away as I walked back into the warmth of the nest.

      We know deep down whether we were meant to be wild things or creatures of comfort. The world wants very much for us to seek comfort, to leave those crazy dreams well enough alone and celebrate the nest—to turn back towards the fire. Maybe a little part of us feels this too. So why are we so drawn to wild things? What is it that we seek?

      I believe it’s vitality. Vitality bursts out of us, it isn’t buried in the mundane. It is not another cup of coffee to get through the hour, or a nightcap to wash away the day. To be fully alive we must step out of ourselves and be uncomfortable. Test limits and stretch to new places. To do otherwise is to avoid a full and vibrant life.

      “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” — Virginia Woolf

      Will we be drawn to the Siren’s call to the rocks or to the call of the wild? One calls us to accept what always was until our end, the other calls us to fly. We ought to ask ourselves, is inertia comfort in disguise, and vitality masked by the judgement of imprudence? We are, each of us, on a hero’s journey, listening for our calling. What call will we turn towards?

    • The Book Stack

      “A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

      “The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity…” — A. Edward Newton

      I wrestle with books. I love reading, and stack more books than I ought to into my life. Settling down with a great book is one of my favorite activities, so why do I pile on more than I can possibly get to? The stack of books taunt me. Even as I write this I can see them in the periphery, mocking my use of time when it doesn’t involve them.

      We live in a time where we’re blessed with abundance in everything around us, and cursed with the same scarcity of time. We must be prudent in what we add to the pile, and what we edit out. Reading is just another experience in a brief life that contributes to its richness and meaning. The rules of good nutrition apply. Beyond the required reading of a formal education, we get to choose our information diet. But we also then live with the consequences. When we use our reading time wisely we enhance living substantially.

      Imagine my delight when my Twitter feed offered up the two quotes above within a few days of one another to perfectly summarize my… situation. We live an impossibly short life for the sheer number of books available for us to read, and then pile on the distractions of life (like Twitter), and how are we ever to get to everything we want to read? The very act of writing this blog is stealing time from reading, even as writing fuels my hunger to read more. Which experience is more valuable in the moment? Isn’t life a quest to find balance between what we do and what we consume?

      And therein lies the answer; reading is just another form of collecting experiences that build a life. As with other experiences, we are what we prioritize. We can’t do everything, but we can certainly do the most important things. So it is with reading. It’s not just a stack of books and an infinite jumble of words, it’s the building blocks carrying us higher and higher towards a richer perspective and broader potential. It’s ours to realize, or to leave on the shelf.

    • Bury Regret

      “I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.” — D. H. Lawrence

      D. H. Lawrence, his hand forced by a society that wasn’t quite ready for what he had to say, was a traveler. One could safely say he had an adventurous spirit. That his ashes were eventually scattered in the sea to freely roam the world seems poetic in the end.

      Recently I’ve opted out of two adventures that didn’t seem prudent at the time. I wonder, even now, what the return shall be on my investment in practicality? A stack of still more practical days thereafter? I should think a collection of passport stamps, photographs and memories would be the more sound investment.

      D.H. died at 44, a young man still, not so very full of an old man’s regrets. The lesson, from he and all who came before us, remains starkly clear. The graveyard is full of unresolved regret. We the living, must clear our minds of all that we might regret later by living a full life today. Never nihilism, for meaning and purpose are our pursuit, but surely embracing richer experience. We regret that which remains unfulfilled. Bury regret in favor of a full life today.

    • Everywhere

      “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” ― Susan Sontag

      What’s next? Where to? These are things the earnest world traveller considers in between days. Just back from one country, scheming the next, what meets the strict budget of time and money? The world is calling, and life is so very short. Yet we simply can’t be everywhere.

      What of here? Don’t we give place short shrift when we look to the world with wanderlust? Life is presence. Life is right here, wherever we find ourselves, not everywhere all at once. We are what we pay attention to.

      The thing is, we each reconcile the possible with the probable. We see the time flying by, see people around us passing away or saddled with restrictive illness, and we wonder why we aren’t out there meeting the universe while there’s time. What are we to do?

      Distraction is merely comparison run amuck. It’s what the Buddhists call the monkey mind. We live in a noisy world, full of distraction and the temptation of what might be next. We fixate on what we don’t have instead of celebrating what we are blessed with. Our lives are right here, right now. It’s the universe offering us the moment. We dishonor the gift when we reject it for the next one.

      Celebrate here and now. Plan for there and then. Everywhere may arrive in time, in its time. Here is where it’s at, for now.

    • Something Amazing

      “Life is never what one dreams. It is seldom what one desires, but for the vital spirit and the eager mind, the future will always hold the search for buried treasure and the possibility of high adventure.” — Ellen Glasgow

      The very idea of l’élan vital, the vital spirit, of living each moment with rapt attention and the eager anticipation of what comes next is a bold, some might say extravagant, way of moving through our days. But what is the alternative? Practical living? Skating our lane to the last? Give me something amazing, thank you. Give me adventure and the search for buried treasure hidden in the moments to come. Give me joie de vivre. Give me l’élan vital.

      But Glasgow also pointed out that this vitality has a shelf life in the moment:

      “No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.” — Ellen Glasgow

      The thing is, an active, vital life isn’t meant to be a singular moment, but singular moments stacked one upon the other, lifting us to a higher level of engagement with the world. What’s done is surely done, but something of it remains within us, a hint of something betrayed in the sparkle in our eye. Those who acquire enough of it emanate a magnetic energy that attracts others. We’re all walking swarms of electrons looking to dance with life.

      I’ve surely lost the physicists with my blog today, but nonetheless, there’s something to being actively engaged in living that increases our vitality. The hunt for the buried treasure in the next moment is a mindset. It reveals a zest for life and a reach for boldness. Aspiring for something amazing in our next moment isn’t setting us up for disappointment, it’s setting us up to find more of what we seek.

    • Little Things

      Elle est retrouvée!
      Quoi? -l’Éternité.
      C’est la mer allée
      Avec le soleil.

      She is found!
      What? -Eternity.
      It’s the sea gone
      With the sun. — Arthur Rimbaud

      Sunsets are routine, often ritualized. Little things, really, repeated daily. I’ve been known for carrying on about such things as the position of the sun relative to where it was in warmer days. Most people, it seems, could care less about where the tilt of the earth is. We are what we focus on.

      “Little things in life, which afford what [Daniel] Kahneman calls “experiences that you think about when you’re having them,” provide a great deal of everyday enjoyment. Because you’re apt to pay more attention to your remembering than your experiencing self, however, it’s all too easy to forget to indulge yourself in these small but important pleasures on a daily basis, thus depriving yourself of much joy.” — Winifred Gallagher, Rapt

      I should think life would be less enjoyable the very moment one forgot to savor the little things. We get used to things that once delighted us, looking for the next big thing to replace that feeling, always chasing. Never really savoring.

      Most writers have an eye for details, and linger in them longer than the average bear, seeking a deeper understanding. There’s pleasure to be derived from digging deeply into what seems trivial. Consider Rimbauld’s twelve words, arranged just so, that draw so much out of what someone else might think of as just another sunset. Poetry itself might be thought a little thing. Ah, but what things they are, sunsets and poems! I think I’ll stick with little things, thank you.

    • The Practice of Living More

      I’ve become known in some circles as an avid traveler, but don’t think of myself that way. That’s comparison at work, both theirs and mine, fogging the lens of perspective. Wiping it clear, it’s more that I’m an aspiring traveler immersed in a busy life. That’s not quite the same thing, but better for me at this point in my life. Travel is a choice, and so is building a strong sense of place and contribution. We can have a healthy measure of each applying a little balance and flexibility, but we can’t have it all. What will we choose, knowing this?

      “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. — Aristotle

      Aristotle may have also observed that mediocrity is also built on repeatedly doing. We each get our stack of days to work with. Some choices are taken from us, some choices are hidden from us, but most of us in the modern western world have the agency to do with the bulk of our time what we would. Habitualizing excellence seems a prudent use of that time.

      The trick in living a life closer to excellence is in the repeatedly doing part. Arete, or excellence in life, is something to aspire to through our daily action. We pay penance to the gods we serve through our habits and applied effort. Put another way, through our practice:

      “When an activity becomes a practice, it shifts from something that you are doing at a point in time to an ongoing process of becoming.” — Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness

      The practice of daily living is ongoing, but with an expiration date we either reconcile ourselves with or distract ourselves from. Stoicism is holding on to that realization that this all ends one day and making the most of the time. How we live matters a great deal when we feel the urgency of an expiration date. Continuous improvement and living with intent are a prudent use of that urgency. The practice of living more means working to realize the things we aspire to, while savoring the life we’ve already built for ourselves.

    • A Visit to Reykjavik

      Reykjavik is the capital city of Iceland and the northernmost capital city in the world. As with any great city it has a strong foundation of history, culture and character. For the most part it’s highly walkable with a vibrant and diverse food and bar scene, friendly and interesting people. The trick is navigating the ice and wind in winter. They deal with ice by heating some of the main sidewalks, utilizing their abundance of geothermal heat. The wind you just learn to deal with. This blog post is a postcard from a city I’ve quickly grown to love.

      Hallgrímskirkja Lutheran Church
      Leif Erikson Statue, given to Iceland by the United States in 1930 to commemorate the 1000th anniversary of his discovery of America
      Parliament Building
      Harpa Music Hall