Alexandersmap

    Category: Lifestyle

    • Measuring Growth

      “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” — Joan Didion

      “You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.” ― Thomas Merton

      The gift of writing is not as much about putting all that you want to say on paper or on a screen for the world to read, although that is a motivation of sorts. No, the gift is in the sorting out of what you encounter in the world and finding a way to articulate it better than we might have yesterday. One doesn’t place a Didion or Merton quote just ahead of one’s own thoughts, let alone both, without recognizing that measuring up becomes ridiculous. But this is how we grow.

      Growth is measured against whatever it is we’re reaching for. Slowly chipping away at the French language for years now, I’ve picked up enough to know I’ve made measurable progress, but not enough that I’m not lost when a rapid-fire conversation amongst native speakers surrounds me. But at least I can tell them my name and ask where the toilettes are. Progress, and a clear indicator that more immersion is in order to grow into the language I too casually aspire to master.

      The meaning in the moment is derived from accumulated experience. If our experience is limited, we might not pick up the nuance in a conversation, know the double entendre, the obscure reference or an inside joke that is derived from being out there in the world and just knowing. The trick in living is to put ourselves out there in the mix, and sort things out as best we can. Writing is active processing, documented. Hopefully edited well enough to make it interesting.

      The thing is, we learn to recognize the darkness in the world, but also the light. The tenuous line between the two is where active living takes place. We become more resilient, more informed, more street-smart as we grow, and bring that to new places where we quickly discover how we measure up. The alternative to growth is stasis and atrophy. It’s more fun to grow. Plus we finally get the jokes we missed when we were someone else.

    • Kindred Contributors of Light

      Kindred comes from a combination of kin and the Old English word ræden (“condition”), which itself comes from the verb rædan, meaning “to advise.” — Merriam-Webster Dictionary

      Talking to a friend about poetry, I mentioned a poem by Li-Young Lee, and paused our phone conversation while she read it, waiting for the payoff when one reacts to great poetry. We do this now and then; find some magic in the world and bring it to light for others to see. We each find our fellow torchbearers by the light they bring to the world. We learn, don’t we, that our light alone is not enough in the darkness? But just as the stars bring light and meaning to the infinite void of the universe, kindred spirits bring hope to us back on earth.

      Another poem, discovered in the infinite darkness of social media, drew me to Lee, and I in turn put his work out there that others may see:

      So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I
      make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
      we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
      measuring by eye as it falls into allignment
      between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky,
      she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.

      One day we’ll lie down and not get up.
      One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

      Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize
      what we love, and what it takes
      to tend what isn’t for our having.
      So often, fear has led me
      to abandon what I know I must relinquish
      in time. But for the moment,
      I’ll listen to her dream,
      and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
      more and more detail into the light
      of a joint and fragile keeping.
      — Li-Young Lee, To Hold

      We are co-conspirators, you and I, each kindred contributors of light to the universe. We wrestle with the why, make the most of the how, and reconcile our when. It’s a fragile grip we have on our moment, but our hold feels more secure when the load is shared. Eventually we all must release our hold, but think of the light we might pass along before our torch burns out.

      But let’s not talk about fare-thee-wells now
      The night is a starry dome
      — Joni Mitchell, Carey

      Thanks Joni. Yes of course, there’s more: Hope. Meaning. Dreams realized. To be a contributor of light in the face of infinite darkness is to illuminate possibility. To live a full and wonderful life requires the friction of active engagement with all that this world offers us. We must wrestle with thoughts and ideas and opinion and find a greater truth than the myths we were taught to calm us in our moments of doubt. Friction creates a spark that, nurtured, brings light. Here we may warm ourselves in the glow of our potential, realized in this, our moment of fragile keeping.

    • Raw Ingredients, Transformed

      It dawned on me in the shower just the other day that I’ve chopped countless onions in my lifetime. For me, the process is meditative, and the resulting transformation of the raw ingredient is integral to whatever it happens to be I’m cooking at that moment. Inevitably, and no matter how much I wash my hands after the act, the shower I take after chopping onions, even a day later, results in the smell of onions in the shower. This naturally made me think of onions once again, and the virtual stack of chopped onion bits one can pile up in a lifetime. Funny, the thoughts a nose triggers.

      Perhaps you’ve had the same experience with onions, or with wood smoke after a campfire. These are things, like memories and moments, that linger with us well after the occasion. Within the family we still swear we can smell a sailboat we’ve long since parted from, but to be fair that sailboat’s smell was uniquely pervasive. Even writing about it I shudder at the hours spent attempting to wash that aroma away. Yet I smile when I think of that boat; how it changed me.

      We pick up things from the world. Some, like onions and memories, resonate longer in our senses than others. As fragile beings in an indifferent universe, things that resonate tend to be special things indeed. We remember certain moments always and forever, and forget other things that ought to seem important, like where we placed our wallet. Just what makes one thing echo through time and the other a cymbal choke? The weight we place on it in the moment.

      A certain song or smell often bring us back to a memory, a moment long forgotten. Our senses combine to remind us of our identity, or who we are, of who we were once. Some things aren’t us anymore, some will always be us, but it all brought us here.

      “I am pieces of all the places I have been, and the people I have loved. I’ve been stitched together by song lyrics, book quotes, adventure, late night conversations, moonlight, and the smell of coffee.” — Brooke Hampton

      What resonates within us begins with the act of being present in the moment. Moments, in turn, are the building blocks of our life, lifting us up from the earth one experience at a time, elevating our perspective and making us more whole in our time. We aren’t some pile of onions waiting for a pot to sauté in, we’re more than that. Still, those onions make a case that they’re part of us too. Each moment in our lifetime is the raw ingredient transformed into our whole. Into whom we’re becoming.

    • Sipping Coffee, Reading Poetry

      He is seated in the first darkness
      of his body sitting in the lighter dark
      of the room,

      the greater light of day behind him,
      beyond the windows, where
      Time is the country.

      His body throws two shadows:
      One onto the table
      and the piece of paper before him,
      and one onto his mind.

      One makes it difficult for him to see
      the words he’s written and crossed out
      on the paper. The other
      keeps him from recognizing
      another master than Death. He squints.
      He reads: Does the first light hide
      inside the first dark?

      He reads: While all bodies share
      the same fate, all voices do not.
      — Li-Young Lee, In His Own Shadow

      Feeling reclusive lately, too reclusive for the part played in this life, I’ve grown weary of online planning meetings and year’s end introspection. I’ve begun to reach out to the world again in earnest, just to be sure it’s still there. I’m a social being trapped in an introvert’s mind, or is it the other way around? We humans are complex creatures.

      Amongst the pile of books crying for attention was a book of poetry, purchased eagerly, stacked deliberately, shuffled downward reluctantly. We prioritize finishing what we started, after all, and then some other pretty thing catches our attention, and soon that work of enchantment is put aside for weeks on end, biding its time while we squander our own. Until the moment of reckoning when it surfaces again.

      Sitting in the morning darkness, quietly shuffling with a fresh cup of coffee back to a reading chair, my mind rebelled against the non-fiction staples demanding my attention. Mind craving sustenance of a different kind, like vitamin A to help my vision, I find what’s been calling to me all along. In the growing ambient light of morning, sipping coffee and focusing my mind for the cadence of poetry, I’m quietly floored by a simple stack of words, set just so. And forgot I’d had coffee at all.

      While all bodies share the same fate, all voices do not. The spell cast upon us through poetry is in the way it slays you in these moments of truth, a mirror of words reflecting back at you. Recovering my senses, I set about finding my own voice again, knowing the steepness of the climb before me, feeling my own shadow and the lesson to the core.

    • Plant the Good Days

      “Don’t plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me. Choke those little bad days. Choke ’em down to nothin’. They’re your days. Choke ’em.” — Tom Waits

      We look up sometimes and wonder where the time goes. Times flies for all of us, good days and bad. It’s guaranteed until the very end. The trick is to work on our days—to string together as many days as we can full of joyful nuggets and fanciful moments. This requires active participation and an inclination to change things up when we see a trend in the wrong direction. We can’t control everything, but we can do something today to make it better than it might have been.

      When we have a few bad days, do we plant them and let them grow? We ought to let them wither, never gone but not sustained. And what of the good days? Shouldn’t these be nurtured and brought to light? Plant the good stuff and watch it grow.

    • We Are Shaped

      “We, I would venture to guess, are the books we have read, the paintings we have seen, the music we have heard and forgotten, the streets we have walked. We are our childhood, our family, some friends, a few loves, more than a few disappointments. A sum reduced by infinite subtractions. We are shaped by different times, hobbies, and creeds.” — Sergio Pitol, The Art of Flight

      What we experience matters a great deal in our lives, for these are the building blocks to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us. What we experience defines us, making us more inclined to learn more, which in turn prompts us to leap into another unknown. That accumulation of experiences is our sum. Our sum is us at this moment, with more to come.

      What shapes us is most interesting in the context of omission. For what we miss also shapes us. Perhaps explaining why FOMO (fear of missing out) is such a common experience, but more likely just leaving us not fully fleshed out in an area where we sense we don’t have the full picture. We all wonder at what might have been at times, thinking about pursuits cut short, excuses we made about time or money or priorities that created a void of omission that nags us still. Friends offering a quarter berth any time I want to visit their sailboat is a tantalizing draw even as I write this, wondering if the opportunity will ever present itself again. Omission haunts us, even as life fills in around us.

      “We must resist the temptation to drift along, reacting to whatever happens to us next, and deliberately select targets, from activities to relationships, that are worthy of our finite supplies of time and attention.” — Winifred Gallagher, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

      The trick is to avoid the drift. Put aside the insignificant distractions that relentlessly steal our time and attention and decide what will shape us. Life is short enough, we ought to set our sails in the direction we want to go in, and accumulate the experiences that will define our identity for the rest of our days.

      As our accumulation of experiences grows it naturally builds momentum. It makes us more interesting at cocktail parties, perhaps, but it mostly puts wind in our sails. We become more confident in our ability to handle the unknown, to make it known, and in turn make it part of who we are. When done well, we become deliberate in what those experiences will be. In this way we create our identity while we define our lives. That’s something to aspire to, don’t you think? For it leaves us wanting more, which is a great way to begin each day.

    • 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.