Alexandersmap

    Category: Lifestyle

    • Making the Sun Run

      But at my back I always hear
      Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
      And yonder all before us lie
      Deserts of vast eternity…

      Let us roll all our strength and all
      Our sweetness up into one ball,
      And tear our pleasures with rough strife
      Through the iron gates of life:
      Thus, though we cannot make our sun
      Stand still, yet we will make him run.
      – Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress

      Spending time ought to come with a warning label. I’m revisiting this poem from Marvell. I’d first written about it before the pandemic, when the world seemed quite normal, if maddeningly out of sorts. Since then, well, we all know how things have gone.

      So what do we do with this hard-won knowledge? We have our own time’s winged chariot hurrying near. Maybe we have a few years more or less than the average, but what’s it worth to you anyway? Another trip around the sun and vast eternity ahead for every last one of us. Make the most of life now, while there’s still some of that time for you.

      Today is the day before the promise of another year more. I’m getting a second dose of the Pfizer vaccine with a hopeful eye towards the future. A future where we might run with the sun, chasing every day to its extraordinary end. Sporting while we may. The sun doesn’t stand still. And neither should we.

    • Good Fences

      There where it is we do not need the wall:
      He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
      My apple trees will never get across
      And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
      He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
      Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
      If I could put a notion in his head:
      ‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
      Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
      Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
      What I was walling in or walling out,
      And to whom I was like to give offense.
      – Robert Frost, Mending Wall

      It happened once, and it seemed awkward at the time. The neighbor walked between his fence and my fence to retrieve golf balls he’d been chipping beyond his fence. He quietly picked them up, we waved at each other and the moment ended. Except that it didn’t really end. The neighbor now works from home in a pandemic on conference calls all day, head set on, chipping golf balls back and forth in his yard. And so this scene is repeated several times a day.

      You might be wondering why there are two fences up. Well, that’s a good question with a reasonable answer. The folks that originally put up the neighbor’s fence put it up four feet inside the property line, and had it curved slightly to follow the tree line. A few years later we got a black lab who liked to explore the neighborhood on his terms. We installed a black chain link fence around the perimeter of our yard to discourage this, thinking it blended in with the woods beyond. The dog was mostly contained, the trees between the fences obscured the unusual nature of two fences running parallel to each other. Mission accomplished! Who thinks of Arnold Palmer straying into your personal space at moments like that?

      Fast forward fifteen years and the brush and small trees are cleared out. The neighbors have changed over twice. The dog has since passed. All that remains is the cold reality of a pair of fences quietly marking time. And the frequent moments of the golfer gathering his golf balls while on his conference calls on the edge of our back yard. A back yard that for twenty years offered the illusion of privacy with the woods beyond.

      It’s my own fault, really. I mentioned in passing one day that the land between was his, and Kilroy has since taken great pains to stake his claim to it with errant golf balls and purposeful walks to scoop them up. It seems passive aggressive to me, like running a lawn tractor in your driveway when your neighbor is having a birthday party. Wait, that’s him too…

      If this seems like a justification for building a taller fence, well, it may be. Wouldn’t that be something, two privacy fences running parallel to each other along the yard? Frost’s old neighbor would say good fences make good neighbors. And Frost would rightly question, just what are we walling in and walling out?

    • Reaching Beyond Yourself

      Just beyond
      yourself.

      It’s where
      you need
      to be.

      Half a step
      into
      self-forgetting
      and the rest
      restored
      by what
      you’ll meet.
      – David Whyte, Just Beyond Yourself

      Reaching beyond yourself can be frustrating, humbling and sometimes humiliating. The ego wants to be in a happier place, warmly wrapped up in comfortable self-talk and stretching just far enough… but not too far. But that’s not where the growth is. That’s not where you’ll find your limits.

      If there’s a phrase that seems to be common amongst the overachieving set in this world, it’s “leaning in”. You don’t lean in when you’re just standing there – you’ll fall right over. You lean in when you encounter some resistance. Resistance appears when we challenge other people’s ideas about what is far enough beyond themselves, but more often than not it’s our own ideas on the matter. Why challenge the status quo? Where you are is pretty good, right?

      This will be posted on a Monday morning. Monday’s serve as a threshold of sorts – an entry into another work week. And another day we’re all blessed with the gift of living on the planet. Leaning in to the work ahead, the task at hand, will soon fill us with plenty of resistance to lean in on. But are you leaning in the right direction or simply being pushed a certain way? Just where do you need to be anyway?

      Setting your course implies moving beyond your current location – moving beyond yourself. Moving beyond implies self-forgetting who you once were and meeting your new self as you progress towards this new place. How many successful people tackle imposter syndrome? All but the most narcissistic and delusional. It’s normal to question where you’re going.

      Most of us rarely think in terms of self-forgetting, but we encounter it all the time. How many jobs seem to dead-end because your coworkers thought of you as whatever you were when you began working with them instead of what you would become? Sometimes you have to leave a company or an industry to get beyond the stalled beliefs others have of who you are to grow. But what of our own self-beliefs?

      Becoming whatever you’ll be, just beyond yourself, begins with leaning in to the resistance inside yourself and moving in that direction you know in your gut you ought to be moving in. The wonder lies in the transformation of who you believe you are as you move beyond that resistance. A move into something entirely different. Towards your new self.

    • A Meaningful Walk

      If you’re counting walking as a workout, at what point does it really count? When you reach 10,000 steps? By how many flights of stairs it equates to? Or is simply getting out and walking enough to count? It depends, doesn’t it? It depends on fitness level, on injuries or disabilities you’re working with, and on state of mind. Every walk counts for something. Every walk can be meaningful.

      Any walk of substance, whether hiking a mountain or a long walk on a bike path, could be called a workout. And a walk with the stars or a dog curious about the world can be especially meaningful. A walk filled with an abundance of steps and curiosity can be both. I think the point is to get out there and do something. To experience the world on her terms.

      This month I’m in a challenge to do 25 workouts in the month of April. Given my fitness level, which is decent but not Olympian, I count a walk as a workout when I hit 10,000 steps (5 miles), and the walk itself is brisk. Sometimes I don’t have the time to do 5 miles in one walk and I’ll walk again at night to finish the steps. It’s my workout, these are the rules I put in place.

      Walking as a workout isn’t the most efficient use of your time. I can row 5000 meters in half the time that I can walk 10,000 steps. If I broke that 10K into meters I could have a killer workout of 5x2K or 10x1K. And I can quickly raise my heart rate swinging a kettle bell, and mix in those workouts too for the pure intensity they offer. But sometimes you don’t care about efficiency. Sometimes you just want to walk.

      I’m doing the math on those 25 workouts in the month challenge and figure I need to do a few double sessions this coming week to make the total. I’m having my second vaccine on the 27th and would like to be done by then just in case I have side effects. I haven’t done double sessions in some time, but I’m drawn to the idea. A mix of rowing, kettle bell swinging but especially those brisk walks. A micro burst of meaningful workouts to get across the finish line. And a burst into spring.

    • Living That Last Word

      See with every turning day,
      how each season wants to make a child
      of you again, wants you to become
      a seeker after rainfall and birdsong,
      watch now, how it weathers you to a
      testing
      in the tried and true, tells you
      with each falling leaf, to leave and slip
      away,
      even from that branch that held you,
      to go when you need to, to be courageous,
      to be like that last word you’d want to say
      before you leave the world.
      – David Whyte, Coleman’s Bed

      We all move through the world at our pace, seeing things as our mind opens our eyes to them. I could never have read this poem ten years ago and seen it the way I do today. I wonder at who I might be in another ten years, should I be so bold as to expect the time.

      We all transform over time and place, in each conversation and with every realization. We get consumed with thoughts of whether we do enough or become enough, we reach a point where we gently push such self-talk away or let it eat us alive. But the question isn’t whether we’ve done enough at all. It’s simply, have we lived enough?

      When you’re lying on your death bed someday 50 years from now or maybe tonight, what will your last word in this earth be? What are the last thoughts racing through your fading mind? Will you smile in your last breath or will a tear form in your eye? That person in that last moment wants you to be courageous today.

    • Moving through Liminal Space

      If 2020 was a year of transformation forced upon all of us by a pandemic and political and social unrest, then what is 2021? A continuation of the same or something different entirely? We see the light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re still very much in the tunnel. Are we in limbo, or is it something else?

      I don’t know what life will show me
      But I know what I’ve seen
      I can’t see where life will lead me
      But I know where I’ve been
      – Jimmy Cliff, Sitting Here in Limbo

      “Limbo” originally was the region on the border between Heaven and Hell, now commonly thought of as being stalled in a period of transition. Plenty of us felt like 2020 was Limbo. But you can make a case for it to be something more.

      This place of transformation between one place or phase and the other is also known as “liminal space”. I’d first heard the phrase from Richard Rohr, who points to Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process as the origin. Rituals seem straightforward: sweet sixteen parties, bar mitzvahs, commencement ceremonies and funerals are all rites of passage signaling a change. But what of the passage itself? Passage is motion, not stalling. And that’s where liminality comes in.

      “Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold” is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite’s liminal stage, participants “stand at the threshold” between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which completing the rite establishes.” – Wikipedia

      The passage through “liminal space” infers movement between phases of life. This seems a more focused use of the time, don’t you think? Passage is high agency, decide what to be and go be it liminality. Stalled is low agency, waiting for things to happen to us limbo. You see this in how people use their time during the pandemic. Some bought and used bicycles and hiking boots, others hoarded toilet paper and literally waited for shit to happen.

      Life is about transformation and passage. If we’re all in this transition between one place and another, are we using this liminal space to proactively move into a better place or are we simply waiting for things to open up again? The thing about passages is you have some measure of control over the direction you’re going in. We ought to have something to say about which threshold we cross on the other side, don’t you think?

    • Incrementally Better

      “A mistake repeated more than once is a decision” – Paulo Coelho

      “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” – Richard Rohr

      When you live long enough you start to lose some of the hard edge that once defined you. That sarcasm you voice to others was nothing like the self-talk you once gave yourself. Quite simply, you stop worrying about the chase for perfection and start living with who you are.

      The Coelho quote above once tortured me for the patterns of decisions I’d made over time that didn’t help me. Eating the wrong food, opting out of exercise, not making the call you know you needed to make, not following through when you should have, and then not following through the next time either. Decisions made, not mistakes. This quote can eat you alive if you let it.

      And then I stumbled upon the Rohr quote, and recognized the incremental improvement in myself over time. When things aren’t going well in some area that self-talk amplifies the worst traits, making it more of who you are. Once you’ve recognized and completely own past decisions, what do you do with them now?

      You work to reduce their impact in your life. You get better each day at the things you once avoided. Slowly, surely, you incrementally grow better and the bad shrinks to memories of the way you once were. Still a part of you, always, but not who you are.

      Freud would rightly point to the Id, Ego and Superego at this point in the game. As you get a couple of years older you recognize each for what they are inside you. When you’re young and wild you run with one voice (Id) and just eat the chips with abandon. A bit later another voice (Ego) will start pointing towards the weight loss goals on your list and tell you to stop eating those chips. The Superego makes you feel guilty for eating the chips or proud for not eating them and working out. (This moment of pop-psychology brought to you by Pringles).

      Today, I’m just trying to be a bit better than I was yesterday so that tomorrow I’m proud of the progress made. It’s not that the Superego cuts me more slack, more that I choose not to wallow in self-criticism. The best way to diminish that critical voice is to show it progress towards the person you’re trying to become. Because that identity you’re aiming for is impressive. And even if you don’t reach it, “close enough” is still pretty good.

    • The Eternal Makes You Urgent

      “Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfillment. The eternal makes you urgent.” – John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

      O’Donohue picked the name of his book with purpose. “Anam cara”, or “soul mate”, suggests that the timeless wisdom buried within might offer the kind of guidance you would get from a cherished friend or spouse. Google it and you’ll find coffee mugs and spiritual retreats and other such things. It would also be a great boat name. And it stirs something in you whether you have one or long for one.

      This idea of the soul awakening isn’t new to us. If this awakening happens at all, it might not be thought of as soul, but as passion or purpose or calling. Some of us steer clear of words like soul. It almost feels intrusive for me to be writing about such things. Not skating my lane, you might say. But I understand eternity, and urgency, and this idea that the things that matter most to us require immediate attention. For our time in eternity isn’t the moments on this side of the turf.

      My own urgency started burning inside of me when I started writing again. It served as a catalyst for exploration and deeper thinking. And when you have it yourself you quickly see the urgency in others. Hikers hiking every available moment, landlocked sailors scrambling to be ready for the warmer days ahead, small business owners pouring every bit of available energy into standing up something special, artists creating brilliant mirrors that reflect back on the rest of us. Urgency senses its kind out in the wild.

      The trick is finding and awakening that soul. And you only find it by trying and doing, tossing aside and finding something else to do. If you’re lucky you find it quickly and embrace it. Or you see it and follow a different path, only to have it pull at you until you finally listen or die embittered at the path you took instead. That’s no way to begin eternity. Is it?

    • Discharging The Loyal Soldier

      “Odysseus is a loyal soldier for the entire Odyssey, rowing his boat as only a hero can—until the blind prophet tells him there is more, and to put down his oar.” – Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

      Richard Rohr planted this seed of discharging the loyal soldier in my mind. He described the ritual used with Japanese soldiers returning from World War II being thanked for their service and discharged to focus on the next stage of their lives – to be productive members of society. I’ve read a fair amount of history of that war and know the fanatical intensity of the typical Japanese soldier, so to shed that character and assume some level of normalcy on a mass scale is itself impressive and instructive. If your only path was total victory or death, how do you process defeat and going back home? So ritualistic discharging saved what was left of a generation of soldiers to rebuild Japan from the ashes.

      “This kind of closure is much needed for most of us at the end of all major transitions in life. Because we have lost any sense of the need for such rites of passage, most of our people have no clear crossover to the second half of their own lives.” – Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

      We’re at a time in our collective lives where we need this ritual for society. Thank you for your social isolation, for your mask-wearing and countless hours trying to keep people alive. Thank you for your passionate political opinions and protests on both sides. Thank you for voicing your opinions so forcefully on social media. You’ve done your service for society. It’s time to focus on rebuilding now, for the world needs you for another mission. To save the planet and humanity.

      I recognize the transition happening in my son’s life – graduated from college, finished with organized sports, and now what? With the pandemic they didn’t even have a graduation ceremony, let alone a discharging of loyal soldiers. Here’s your diploma, mailed without pomp or circumstance. Good luck! No wonder this generation is looking around and saying “What next?” You learn that they aren’t ready to hear everything yet, as you weren’t. But they’re definitely ready to hear the message that they’ve done well fulfilling the first mission – we’re proud of you, now go forth and find the next mission.

      I’m in my own transition, of course, with the responsibilities of parenting shifting to sage advice strategically inserted whenever a teaching moment arrives – sometimes validating, sometimes contradicting the advice from the other parent. But what of us? We’re stepping into the second half of life when we start filling the proverbial container we built in the first half of life. So what do you fill it with?

      “Discharging your loyal soldier will be necessary to finding authentic inner authority,,, When you first discharge your loyal soldier, it will feel like a loss of faith or loss of self. But it is only the death of the false self, and is often the very birth of the soul. Instead of being ego driven, you will begin to be soul drawn.” – Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

      Discharge that loyal soldier and become “soul drawn“? That’s a bumper sticker or a name for an IPA if I ever saw one! The coolest cat surfing life, dispelling timeless wisdom in clever soul drops as you serve your new guiding light.

      We’ve all been in a period of forced transition, timed for some of us in a period of natural transition. It’s time to focus on what comes next, and do the work you were honed to do during the previous you. Time to put the oar down and follow through on that next mission. That soul drawn and fulfilling mission.

    • The Familiar and the Habitual

      “The familiar and the habitual are so falsely reassuring, and most of us make our homes there permanently.” – Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

      We all find comfort in the familiar, whether a favorite chair to sit in or your morning coffee routine, the people we hang our with or the way we greet them. We embrace it and make it our own, and rarely deviate from it. This is the nature of the familiar and the habitual.

      How many of us stick with things just because it’s the way we’ve always done them? Familiar is strangely comforting, even if it doesn’t benefit us. This is the way we’ve always done it. Humans evolved by mitigating risk by sticking to tried, true and trusted. Those who were foolhardy didn’t survive to dilute the gene pool. When the risk is deeply programmed into your identity, it doesn’t matter if it’s bad for you or not – it’s falsely reassuring and part of you. We all know smoking and overeating are bad for you, but how many do it subconsciously, risk and viable alternatives ignored?

      With everyone’s routine disrupted over the last year, it’s interesting to see how people react to going back to the way things used to be. Do you want to commute to a cubicle farm chipping away at your tasks, all while trying to ignore the screams inside you again? Return to the same old ways, or pivot to something new? How resilient were some of those routines and rituals in the face of a pandemic?

      It’s easy to embrace anchors in our lives – homes, relationships, jobs, and routines, and hard to question that which we’ve always known to be true. But ultimately the only true anchor is our self. None of this is permanent. Forget anchors: embrace sails. Embrace change. For change happens around us whether we want it to or not.