Alexandersmap

    Category: Lifestyle

    • 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.

    • To Live a Life That’s Full

      “It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.” ― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

      And now the end is here
      And so I face that final curtain
      My friend I’ll make it clear
      I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain
      I’ve lived a life that’s full
      I traveled each and every highway
      And more, much more
      I did it, I did it my way
      — Frank Sinatra, My Way

      At a holiday party not very far from Times Square, New York, a few of us found ourselves in conversation with a large man with a large ego. He was rattling off his successes in life, his conquests in love, his options for the future. He would be the one singing My Way and believing it all applied to him. And maybe it does.

      I happen to love Sinatra’s song, My Way. We used to put it on the juke box at the Worthen in Lowell, Massachusetts late in the night (back when they had a juke box) and serenade each other in youthful optimism. We believed we were already living life our way and were poised to launch ourselves into life to do big My Way things. Life teaches you compromise and concession and sometimes knocks you down a peg or two. When things inevitably go awry, does this mean we aren’t living a full life?

      To live a life that’s full means to steer purposefully towards the dreams that stir our soul while adjusting our course and the set of our sails as life reminds us that we don’t live in a controlled environment. Highs and lows and the occasional nasty storm are going to have their way with us, stall our progress, pull us well off course now and then, and generally take that My Way bravado and throw it out the window. But still we may persist.

      The question to ask ourselves every day on our journey to live a life that’s full is, full of what? To be meaningful, our lives must be filled with purpose and progression, contribution and growth. We grow into a full life, not by traveling a straight line from here to there, but by navigating the hazards of living. Sometimes we choose wisely, and sometimes we find ourselves on the rocks. It is nothing to die, but surely it’s frightful not to live. The only viable choice is to patch ourselves up as best we can and keep going.

      But going where? That which seemed so very important in one stage of life seems less so later. Conversely, things we once never considered seem more important now. Life is change and adaptation. If status and a list of conquests are especially important to one person, for another it might be achieving mastery of playing an instrument or in writing. It may simply mean being there for others from now until the end.

      Sometimes, we have some say in the matter. Mostly, our lives are ours alone to live, yet we aren’t living solely for ourselves. Nobody said it would be easy, friend. But with reflection and purpose we might just find we live our days well enough that we can say with relative confidence and more than a little irony that we did indeed, despite it all, do it our way. That shouldn’t be frightening but, just maybe, a little thrilling.

    • Reacting to Outside Influences

      If we’re lucky, we place ourselves in environments that cater to our best life. We surround ourselves with trees and wildlife and safe places to walk with our thoughts. If we’re lucky, we gently place ourselves far from ambient noise and light. Traffic and leaf blowers and well-meaning spotlights shining bright beams into nothingness all grab our attention when we aren’t conditioned to ignore these things.

      Now and then I find myself in a hotel next to a highway, and listen to the steady escalation as the world awakens and drives from place-to-place. This should be unremarkable, and yet I just remarked on it simply because it’s different for me. Had I simply gotten a room on the other side of the hotel perhaps I wouldn’t have noticed at all. But since that isn’t the case, I make peace with the noise and celebrate the temporary nature of it. It’s not my noise forever, only for a couple of days.

      The thing is, we are as much a product of our environments as we are of our internal dialogue. What we experience builds us, teaches us love or hatred, tolerance or bias, acceptance or impatience. Living in a frictionless state sounds blissful to some, and like slow death to others. We choose how we react, and that reaction informs us about our future state. Funny, the way it is. Each reaction sets up the next interaction, when we react yet again in whatever way we do.

      Life is a series of reactions to outside influences. We chafe at some, embrace others, and build a life out of a chain of reactions and decisions along the way. Does this place us in a joyful state or a state of misery? And how will we handle the answer? We are what we repeatedly do, this is true, but we’re also what we decide not to do or accept as our fate in the moment. We each have the opportunity to choose wisely and to learn from previous mistakes. Like staying on the back side of the hotel, facing the highway, we learn lessons that might be applied in the future.

    • Paddling Our Own Canoe

      “As one goes through life, one learns that if you don’t paddle your own canoe, you don’t move.” — Katharine Hepburn

      “We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers – but never blame yourself. It’s never your fault. But it’s always your fault, because if you wanted to change you’re the one who has got to change.” — Katharine Hepburn

      This is a powerful combination of punches landed by Hepburn, isn’t it? You can almost hear her voice speak as she points out what we all ought to hear now and then. Life is what we make of it, and the buck stops here. Simple, yet so many stew in the miserable broth of low agency salted in blaming others. Do we want to have a better life? Put down the blame salt. Begin by looking in the mirror.

      I’m looking out the window at freshly fallen snow. Just enough to coat everything, not enough to be particularly consumed with clearing it off the driveway. But I’ll likely clear it anyway. To be effective in our lives, we must face the world squarely as it presents itself to us and decide what to do, given the circumstances. Identity plays a part in this moment. When you identify yourself as someone who gets things done, you get the snow off the driveway. When you identify yourself as someone who delegates, you push the problem to others. Which is correct? It depends on the circumstances, of course, but in general subscribing to the paddling your own canoe philosophy does wonders for our quality of life.

      I know, I know: Time is money, and it’s not worth our precious time to do menial tasks that are better delegated to others. Maybe, if you’ve got the money and inclination, hiring a personal assistant, or a landscaper, a chef, or a maid is your answer so you aren’t squandering time on the trivial tasks. Maybe this helps you focus on the important task. But the underlying question must always be, to what end? What are we living for? Is chopping our own wood intrinsically valuable? Isn’t it? How about pushing a light coating of snow off the driveway? Just what is the stuff of life anyway?

      The answer is that the stuff of life is what we make it out to be. We derive meaning and purpose out of whatever the heck we choose to derive it from. For me, clearing a bit of snow off the driveway is a cheap form of meditation, a moderate form of exercise, and a chance to assess where I am in my life this crisp morning. I take stock of where I’ve done well, and where I’ve strayed off course in my objectives. This is where the shovel hits the road, if you will, and where I decide just what I’m going to be today so that I might get straight away to being it.

      Change begins with introspection in space. We must give ourselves the room to find the answers to our questions. And in the answer lies the action: Goals are broken down into projects, which in turn are broken down into tasks. Celebrate the tasks for the direction they carry you. This, friends, is paddling our own canoe.

    • Begin Today With the End in Mind

      Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
      Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
      When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
      Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

      When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
      When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
      No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
      When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

      Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
      And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
      Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
      When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.
      — Mark Strand, The End

      When you think about the little joys in life, what comes immediately to mind? Are those joys as vivid as Strand describes in The End? As a collector of sunsets and stories told in clouds, and an avid gardener who coexists with felines, I confess this poem resonated with me. Or maybe it’s just the stoic in me. For we must collect our joyful bits begins today, always with the end in mind.

      Surely, life isn’t all joyful bits. We know this all too well, don’t we? But as Viktor Frankl said reflecting on days much darker than most of us will face, we choose how to react to the stimulus we encounter. We are what we focus on next. We ought to acknowledge the darkness but celebrate the light. Be the mirror that reflects beauty and generosity back at the world. We might just illuminate the life of someone else floundering in the dark.

      Knowing we reach the end one day ought to compel us to do more with this day. Be active with the day we’ve got. See and be engaged in the scene. And dance until the end.