Alexandersmap

    Category: Lifestyle

    • We Begin Again

      You always have two options.
      You can push harder.
      You can remove friction.
      — Greg McKeown

      We all know where we should push harder in our lives to reach personal goals. We also ought to think more about elimination. Shedding ourselves of artificial expectations and dreams that don’t resonate. Moving away from habits, tasks, people or careers that create tremendous friction in our path to a better life. Sometimes we can’t see the gaps because our way is jammed with trivial distractions. We must clear the gap to see how far we must leap.

      So it is that we begin again, reconciling accumulation (bad habits, weight, things, acquaintances, etc.) and the gap between where we are and where we wish to be. This shouldn’t be a once-a-year exercise, it should be a daily reflection. We have our stack of days ahead of us, and the gift of each should be measured and contemplated just the same. But how?

      Intentions are nothing, action is everything. Incremental improvement trumps grand plans, and each day, each bite or sip, each step, each page read, each meaningful conversation and each written word bring us closer to whatever compass heading we’ve set for ourselves. Alternatively, we can incrementally drift off course to a point where major changes are forced upon us. Don’t we owe it to ourselves to make the choice for ourselves instead of having it imposed on us?

      Tell me, what is it you plan to do
      with your one wild and precious life?
      —Mary Oliver, The Summer Day

      Mary Oliver’s words inspire bold dreams, and there’s nothing wrong with dreaming big. But to be attained we must break those dreams down into bite-sized habits. Today, like many of you, I will assess where things are, make a course adjustment and begin again. I won’t do this with bold, unattainable goals with unrealistic timeframes but with a few incremental changes I can track daily. I’ll take the shiny new calendar and map out the big trips and events that should be highlights for the year and identify time to add micro-adventures and brief flings with bolder living.

      Sailors have their log book, and so too should we. Log each day and reflect on it. My personal favorite is the line per day journal, which boils down each day into whatever notable thing you choose to write down. I’ve been doing this for a few years now and strongly recommend it. In fact I just gave each of my kids a LEUCHTTURM1917 Some Lines A Day 5 Year Memory Notebook to begin this habit themselves, but you don’t have to spend much to seed a habit — a simple notebook will do. The point is to begin doing it and never break the streak. Magic ensues.

      This year I’m doubling down on my line per day by adding a picture per day, using an iPhone and an album dedicated just to this. Combined, these habits should be fascinating for me (if perhaps exceedingly dull for the rest of the world). If nothing else, each forces us to add a spark to the moment at hand and wonder to our lives.

      If we don’t step out on the dance floor we’ll forever be wallflowers. You know what’s more fun than stepping out onto the dance floor? Dancing to the dance floor. Remove friction, work hard on what matters most and track progress. Find your groove thing and let it loose. That, friends, will make the New Year meaningful in the end.

    • Here it Comes

      Another year already? With so much left undone?! So many good and bad days, rolled into twelve months. It’s been a great year. It’s been a horrible year. And now it’s over. And so it all begins again tomorrow.

      If we’ve learned anything from our stack of years, it’s that time flies, and 2023 will go just as quickly as 2022 did, and 2021 before that. We ought to feel that urgency and apply it to our days. I hope we do.

      Ready or not, here it comes. Beginning with today and tomorrow and each precious nugget of living. May we use it wisely.

      Happy New Year!

    • Diligent Awareness (Life as a Poem)

      “The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem.”
      ― Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart

      “Imagine that you’re unwell and in a foul mood, and they’re taking you through some lovely countryside. The landscape is beautiful but you’re not in the mood to see anything. A few days later you pass the same place and you say, “Good heavens, where was I that I didn’t notice all of this?” Everything becomes beautiful when you change.” — Anthony De Mello, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality

      It’s easy to say we should live with awareness, but harder in practice. This business of living demands attention, or rather, distracts our attention from much of the things we’d be focused on if we weren’t so damned busy with that other thing. We forget, sometimes, that life is merely what we pay attention to and everything becomes beautiful when we change. Most of us won’t change or become fully aware, but isn’t it pretty to think so?

      Most don’t want to change, they want to live with what they have, while wishing for more, and do it again tomorrow. When someone does we wonder at their boldness, but don’t connect the dots to doing it ourselves. If we are what we repeatedly do (Aristotle), then doing something completely different strikes at our very identity. No wonder so many refuse to cross that line in the sand.

      “How many people do you know who are obsessed with their work, who are type A or have stress related diseases and who can’t slow down? They can’t slow down because they use their routine to distract themselves, to reduce life to only its practical considerations. And they do this to avoid recalling how uncertain they are about why they live.” ― James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy

      The thing is, awareness isn’t about turning our lives upside down, it’s being fully present in the moment. Being open to everything that surrounds us, not just those practical considerations. We aren’t quitting our jobs and living like a hermit in a hot tent when we’re aware, we’re simply inviting more of the universe into our present moment. It seems if we want a more fulfilling life then we ought to fill more of our life with beautiful things.

      I was once a closed young man who thought of poetry as frivolous. Something was missing within me that took years to fill. When you close yourself up the world simply cannot find its way in to fill you. Over time my awareness pendulum has swung wide open. Not coincidently, I write more, listen more, seek more and linger more with the world. When we realize the world exists as a poem, we’re more inclined to dance with its verse.

      “Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive—that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily.” — Mary Oliver, Upstream

      We expand into the world we create for ourselves through diligent awareness. Knowing what we are, and who we are, is the job of a lifetime. When we open ourselves to everything, we discover more, and we live a bigger life.

    • Tossing Aside the Blindfold

      “In the eighteenth century, when educated European tourists visited the Alps, they deliberately blindfolded their eyes to shield themselves from the evidence of the earth’s horrid irregularity. It is hard to say if this was not merely affectation, for today, newborn infants, who have not yet been taught our ideas of beauty, repeatedly show in tests that they prefer complex to simple designs. At any rate, after the Romantic Revolution, and after Darwin, I might add, our conscious notions of beauty changed. Were the earth as smooth as a ball bearing, it might be beautiful seen from another planet, as the rings of Saturn are. But here we live and move; we wander up and down the banks of the creek, we ride a railway through the Alps, and the landscape shifts and changes. Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture, and lapse into a dreamless sleep. Because we are living people, and because we are on the receiving end of beauty, another element necessarily enters the question. The texture of space is a condition of time. Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurtling shuttle. Did those eighteenth-century people think they were immortal? Or were their carriages stalled to rigidity, so that they knew they would never move again, and, panicked, they reached for their blindfolds?” — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

      I think the point of Dillard’s quote, and the reason I chose it, was to highlight the imperfect nature of our time here, and the extraordinary capacity to receive and embrace beauty despite, or perhaps because of our awareness of the duration of the ride. We are active receivers of the ugly truth and the beautiful realization that life is a brief dance with wonder. Our version of modern blindfolds is of course a mobile phone with its infinite distractions flashing pretty images in our face. Do we truly see the rugged imperfections surrounding us when we’re a click away from something with ten million views just waiting for ours?

      A man died of exposure on a trail I’m very familiar with over the Christmas weekend. The details haven’t fully been released but it appears he was unprepared for the elements, trusted his phone to guide him and light his way when it got dark, and perished when he lost the trail and his battery faded away with his life force. Friends or relatives on the other side of the planet alerted emergency personnel, who found him too late to save him. That mobile phone might connect us to the world, but it isn’t active connection to other people, just the illusion of it. Life is a fragile dance with beauty, and (it seems) his ended when he got too comfortable with that illusion in a cold and unforgiving place.

      The thing is, that trail is one of the most beautiful and popular trails in the White Mountains. It’s easy to understand why he chose it. The tragic irony is that he received the beauty he sought in his climb, but his blindfold killed him in the end. It’s unfair to judge the hiker who perished, for at least he was out there trying to make the most of his moment (if tragically unprepared).

      There’s a lesson for every hiker in his story. But isn’t there another lesson hidden in plain sight? For shouldn’t we wonder, how many others are slowly wasting their lives staring into their own blindfolds? We must be actively engaged in our lives to see the imperfect beauty surrounding us.

    • Change Agent

      “It is necessary to uproot oneself. To cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it every day.” — Simone Weil

      It begins in earnest now, doesn’t it? We each become change agents in our own lives, advocating for the elimination of bad habits, the acquisition of new routines, and the wholesale disruption of the things central to our identity that we would rather see cancelled outright. Naturally this is a heavy lift in practice, but it sure is easy to write down as our ideal self.

      And so it is that resolutions fall by the wayside so quickly. Big, bold plans aren’t meant to be achieved easily. They’re meant to be broken down into bite-sized bits of habitualized change. So dream the dream, but simplify the steps that get you there. It’s not a mystery, it’s a process.

      Change is itself a habit we ought to embrace. When you look at the pace of change in the world, it’s essential to get comfortable with rapid changes in the way we consume media, filter information, pay for things, communicate with one another and earn a living. We don’t have to be early adopters, but we need to be prepared for whatever is coming next. This is called situational awareness, or simply knowing the environment you’re in or about to step into.

      We might get knocked over by the wave of change or surf it until it peters out. Either way they’ll be another wave arriving soon that we ought to be aware of. The trick in life is to avoid drowning long enough that we find our footing again. But in the confusion of the moment, isn’t it funny that we sometimes forget that we know how to swim? We must condition ourselves to being change agents, aware of our strengths and weaknesses, and forever adapting to find buoyancy in an unpredictable world.

      Life informs, we adapt and grow, then do it all over again. For the art of living is navigating and even embracing that continuous uprooting. We must carry whatever life throws at us, but that load makes us stronger and more resilient. It doesn’t get easier, we simply grow into the people who can manage such things.

      So as we look towards the New Year, we ought to view ourselves as change agents with an eye towards resiliency and growth. Life will keep throwing challenges at us—how do we thrive in such moments? Getting stronger, smarter and more comfortable with rapid change are thus goals worthy of our resolute focus.

    • Sharing Moments, After

      “I’ve never taken a photograph of someone and created a persona, I’ve just discovered what was already there.” ― Anthony Farrimond

      I’ve been known to take a few pictures in my time. As with writing, it helps me focus on the things around me in a way I might not otherwise. I have friends that send me pictures of sunsets that they’re not putting on social media as a reminder that I tend to put a lot of such pictures on social media. I celebrate the ribbing, for it means I’m doing my part to share a bit of beauty and positivity in a world full of people inclined to share ugly and negative. That’s not us, friends. We’re here to light the world during our shift.

      During occasions when family and friends come together, my attention shifts from pictures of nature’s beauty to the beautiful souls around me. There’s a fine line between being a part of the party and being apart from the party, and I try to stay in the moment while capturing some of it. Stopping a conversation for a picture can be disruptive, but if done well it might enhance and draw people together. When done well it captures the illusive and fragile moments we have together. Looking back on pictures from the last few years, it’s striking how many people are no longer with us. We can’t control fate, but we can capture moments before it intervenes.

      At a Christmas Eve party just last night I was talking to someone about some of the settings in an iPhone. They shared a few tips that I immediately started trying. In portrait mode you can tap on someone’s face and everything in the background blurs, highlighting the face or faces you’ve chosen to focus on. It’s a nice trick that brings a measure of professional photography to the amateur. Perhaps my favorite thing about it is that focus. As in an intimate conversation, you’re drawn completely into the world of the person you’re focused on. In such moments we capture something more than the moment, we capture a glimpse into their soul.

      I’m not a great photographer (I know too many great photographers to claim such mastery for myself), but I take enough pictures that I get a few good ones worth sharing. The way I look at it, that picture is a time machine, shared after the moment, carrying life force from one moment to another. That after moment might be turning the image around to show those you’ve just taken a picture of what it looks like, or it might be our great-grandchildren feeling the love through the eyes of a long-lost ancestor. This is the nature of photography, it tends to outlast us.

      As the photographer in such moments, as with writing, one hopes for mastery, but accepts the best we can deliver in the present. Don’t we owe it to each other to capture our best moments together? Having captured an image, it becomes a gift for others in moments after.

    • Making a List, Checking it Twice

      “There are good checklists and bad…. Bad checklists are vague and imprecise. They are too long; they are hard to use; they are impractical. They are made by desk jockeys with no awareness of the situations in which they are to be deployed. They treat the people using the tools as dumb and try to spell out every single step. They turn people’s brains off rather than turn them on. Good checklists, on the other hand, are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything—a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps—the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.” — Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

      The pandemic messed up a lot of us in different ways, and for me it was inconsistency in following through on commitments I’d made to myself. Row 5000 meters one day, then miss several days in a row. Hike in earnest for several months, then take several months off from it entirely. Write on that first draft for a few weeks and then miss a few. Work suffered similarly from such lapses. This level of inconsistency simply wouldn’t do.

      At some point my scattered brain returned to Bullet Journals as the way to organize my days. The simple checklist of things that must be done, and the joy of putting an X through that bullet, became a system I could stick with. Checklists work for me by adding focus and structure. If you put an X through every bullet you’re far more likely to get the result you’re seeking. The secret is in having the right bullets.

      Checklists solve the problem of inconsistency. We’re all familiar with the process of goal-setting. We begin with identifying a big goal, then break it down into measurable steps and then take these steps and break them down into tasks. Tasks live their best lives on a checklist. When you leave them roaming about on their own they cause trouble.

      If your big goal is to visit Paris in 2023, you might have steps that include saving money for the trip, improving your conversational French, and locking in the trip with reservations. The tasks might be setting up automatic deductions from your paycheck to a dedicated savings account, completing an hour of Duolingo lessons each day and scheduling your lunch hour to research and book flights, hotels and activities in Paris. These tasks all become bullets in the Bullet Journal.

      It should be more complicated than that, but really, most of life is showing up and doing the work. The trick is to work on what matters most. The trap that many of us fall into is feeling so self-confident that we begin to wing it. This is where critical steps are missed. We can all think of incidents big and small where some forgotten step led to problems later. Making a list, checking it twice eliminates the forgotten step. Remember that old idiom: the devil is in the details.

      As I write this it’s Christmas Eve in chilly New Hampshire. I’ve reviewed my checklists, and feel comfortable that everyone who was nice will be taken care of tomorrow. The process of using checklists ensures that all the details in my control are covered. That in itself is quite nice.

    • Avoiding Popular

      Google most popular restaurant in the United States and you’ll find McDonalds holding the top spot, followed by Starbucks. One might ask, what is the criteria for being called a restaurant? Apparently it’s merely serving food. If one were to ponder this a bit longer, one might then ask, what’s it mean to be popular anyway?

      Beware what you seek. Being popular is a trap set for adolescents, celebrities and politicians. Most of us grow out of it, while some remain forever trapped in the amber of opinion. It’s an empty promise that they’ll love you forever, and it’s a fickle love. The viable alternative is to go your own way. That’s where the most interesting people dance with the universe. And interesting makes for a better life than popular ever could.

    • December Bay

      Sunsets must be earned in winter. There are no casual seaside deck conversations with a few pictures between sips of rum. No, you must seek out December sunsets by going to where it falls into the bay while bracing against biting cold winds galloping towards you in a stampede of frothy fury. Still, it makes a pretty picture and another memory.

      Micro-adventures and stolen moments of dancing with life count just the same as big trips and scheduled events. Life is our collection of all such experiences. We ought to sprinkle a bit more salt on our days to make them savory. For our best days are savored, aren’t they?

      Not as warm as it looks

    • Listen Carefully, Spend Wisely

      Colm Doherty: I just have this tremendous sense of time slipping away from me, Pádraic. And I think I need to spend the time I have left thinking and composing. Just trying not to listen to any more of the dull things that you have to say for yourself.
      Pádraic Súlleabhain: Are you dying?
      Colm Doherty: No, I’m not dying.
      Pádraic Súlleabhain: But then you’ve loads of time.
      Colm Doherty: For chatting?
      Pádraic Súlleabhain: Aye.
      Colm Doherty: For aimless chatting?
      Pádraic Súlleabhain: Not for aimless chatting. For good, normal chatting.
      Colm Doherty: So, we’ll keep aimlessly chatting, and me life’ll keep dwindling. And in twelve years, I’ll die with nothing to show for it, bar the chats I’ve had with a limited man, is that it?
      — Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin

      There’s a darkness in this film that is borne of desperation. The characters react to the bleak reality of their lives in different ways. Colm and Pádraic’s sister, Siobhan Súilleabháin, desperately seek something beyond their relentlessly trivial existence. Pádraic sees nothing at all wrong with living out his days one exactly the same as the one before. And this raises the central question of the film, one we all faced at the height of the pandemic: what are we actually doing with our time? Is this all there is for us, or might we create something meaningful that lives beyond us before we pass? These are questions many of us wrestle with, while others contentedly choose more of the same. We each reconcile our brief dance with the world in our own way.

      These questions are timeless, even if we aren’t. Indeed, this temporary shelf life drives us to find answers. Our old friend Thoreau famously observed in the beginning pages of Walden that “the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation”. We bear the weight of these questions still, amplified by that realization that time is slipping away. Memento mori, friends. Carpe diem.

      The thing is, we shouldn’t despair at the thought. There ought to be freedom in that realization. We have an opportunity to amplify our living, and make it resonate in our time. We have the opportunity to create something that lives beyond ourselves, something that ripples. Alternatively, we might simply live. Neither choice is wrong, unless we’re quietly telling ourselves it is. The answer for each of us is to listen carefully, and spend wisely.