Alexandersmap

    Category: Discovery

    • Just Passing By

      “Hoping to live days of greater happiness, I forget that days of less happiness are passing by.” — Elizabeth Bishop

      The lilacs are almost past. A couple of unusually hot days sent them on their way. They’re on the path to just a memory, like all of us, really. Were it only possible that we all smelled as good in our dance with daylight. Alas, we each bloom in our own way.

      Every word I type delays the inevitable. There’s yard work to be done, and looking around, there aren’t a lot of volunteers lined up for it. It looks like I’m at the front of the line. In fact, I am the line. The fact of the matter is, I like to work even as I grumble about it sometimes.

      It’s not just the work—there’s living to be done while doing it. Dreams of a better tomorrow waste the ripe potential of today. We’re all just passing by the moments one after the other. So have a look around, and don’t forget to smell the lilacs.

    • Full of Firsts

      We shall not cease from exploration
      And the end of all our exploring
      Will be to arrive where we started
      And know the place for the first time.
      — T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding      “, Four Quartets

      There’s something in the air again (besides pollen). It stirs about and stirs within. The inclination to wander and discover what has not been experienced before grows. Spring is leading us to summer. Summer leads us to look beyond the familiar garden to the world beyond.

      This time of year has long carried the feeling of change in the air. School years are ending. University students are wrapping up finals and fleeing for faraway places schemed up in study halls. We may never pass this way again, but we surely won’t pass those other ways until we go there. Do go there—while we are young… or young enough.

      Looking back on previous adventures, we know we returned transformed. Go to Vienna or Rome or Edinburgh you cannot help but change. I listen to family and friends talk of adventures they’ve had on their own travels and see the place bubble up in their memories, energizing and provoking passion. I feel it within myself when I reflect on places I’ve been. The world is out there, ready to dance with us in our time. If we crawl out of our shell and get moving.

      Just what are we going to do with this opportunity to roam? Just what are we waiting for anyway? The world is full of firsts awaiting our arrival. This season, be bold and go to meet them.

    • Nobody but Yourself

      A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

      This may sound easy. It isn’t.

      A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

      Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

      To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
      — e.e. cummings, “A Poet’s Advice to Students”

      To be ourself in a world that wants us to fall in line isn’t easy. After all, we are part of the tribe, the community, and the history of humanity. All that we see and encounter draws something out of us that we may not have felt otherwise. Just where is that line where the average of everyone else get crossed to simply, “ourself”? Remember in such moments this line in the quote above, “whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.”

      To feel is the thing. Nobody else feels what we feel. Nobody else brings the whole of their experience together, stirs it about in their soul and exudes the identity that is us. Nobody but us. So it follows that we ought to be aware of what we’re feeling, not just what we’re hearing and seeing and reading. What we feel hints at who we are. Give that room to breathe and grow.

      Most of us don’t fancy ourselves poets. Yet we may live a poetic life full of heightened awareness of the self and all that surrounds and influences us. Poetry is feeling. To “squeeze the marrow out of life” as Henry David Thoreau put it, we must be fully aware and alive. Give life a squeeze. See how it feels. Learn and grow and become nobody else but yourself.

    • Do It

      “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” — Pablo Picasso

      We grow into ourselves by stretches and the occasional leap. Now some people leap all the time, and become known as either bold or reckless, depending on how they land. Most of us test the waters a bit, see if it makes sense to move in this new direction, and work our way there gradually. A few never leave the nest at all, choosing familiarity and comfort over reaching for their own potential.

      So what do we do with habits that work for us, when we know that to grow we must break patterns and try new things? Delay? Dabble? Dive right in? We’re each unique in our willingness to try new things by letting familiar old things go.

      I think the moment we ask ourselves if we ought to try something new, we ought to take the first step towards that new. And then the next. Venturing more and more into the unknown to discover something about it and ourselves that we felt was possible all along. As that character Yoda put it, “Do or do not. There is no try.” Learn as we go. Do it.

    • The Steady Ascent

      “The main reason to produce something every day is that you must throw away a lot of good work to reach the good stuff. To let it all go easily, you need to be convinced that there is ‘more where that came from’. You get that in steady production.”
      — Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living

      Amusement parks may have Lightning Pass lanes, and tourist attractions may have a “Skip the Line” scheme (there’s always a line, it’s just a little shorter), but the work that we produce in a lifetime has no such option. Getting to the good stuff isn’t accomplished without putting in the time.

      Sure, I hear the call of Artificial Intelligence (AI) filling the gap between apprenticeship and mastery. Maybe research and first drafts don’t have to be so tedious. But there are lessons in the grind, and the willing student reaches wisdom not found in AI efficiency.

      The Mona Lisa wasn’t painted in a couple of days. Leonardo da Vinci carried that portrait with him for the rest of his life, adding touches, refining the work, ignoring it and coming back to it. It was never really completed before he passed, it simply reached its final state of being. That state happens to be masterful; A pet project that became the most famous painting in the world.

      Writing every day is sometimes a grind, but it teaches and informs the writer. We may publish regularly or be forever polishing our master work. Unlike our friend da Vinci, we ought to ship our work regularly, that we may move on to something else. The good stuff is earned daily. The great stuff is just over the next rise, awaiting our ascent. If we keep climbing.

    • Be Luminous

      May the 4th be with you. I won’t attempt to top Seth Godin’s blog post today, but I will endorse his call to equanimity and a bias towards action. True leadership begins with control of the self. The best examples of this are hiding in plain sight in quiet leaders, no matter their title, doing what needs to be done.

      “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” — Yoda

      Today, of all days, feed the spark within. Give it oxygen and space to grow. We may be measured and earnest in our bias towards action. Countless possibilities await our next move. Be luminous.

    • Collecting Evidence

      “I don’t know what that means. To truly live.’
      Kongo paused again, his eyes wandering to the walls of the cave, to the blackness at the far end.
      ‘To find work that you love, and work harder than other men. To learn the languages of the earth, and love the sounds of the words and the things they describe. To love food and music and drink. Fully love them. To love weather, and storms, and the smell of rain. To love heat. To love cold. To love sleep and dreams. To love the newness of each day.”
      ― Pete Hamill, Forever

      If you’ve never read Forever by Pete Hamill, consider it worthy of your time. I wander back to it now and then, when I think of Cormac and Thunder leaping towards their destiny in the New World. I have no business re-reading it now, with so many books awaiting my attention, and yet it found me again anyway.

      How do we live? The proof will unfold daily, in our choices. It’s in who we reach out to and how we react to our awareness of the world’s general indifference to us. We are here to master the self, not the universe. Personal excellence, that old friend Arete, will always be just over that next rise in the hill. Never fully realized. And yet we may live and grow and become something more profound than who we’ve started our day with.

      Indeed, this day is entirely new. And ours to perhaps fully embrace or maybe waste in our usual offhand way. “The proof will be in your living”, Kongo later says in that enchanting chapter of that magical novel that I keep returning to now and again. And indeed, life unfolds thusly. What will we look back on one day, thinking of today’s climb? May the newness of this day provoke us to collect evidence of a worthy ascent.

    • Call It Inspiration

      “The composer does not sit around and wait for an inspiration to walk up and introduce itself…Making music is actually little else than a matter of invention aided and abetted by emotion. In composing we combine what we know of music with what we feel.” — George Gershwin

      I once wrestled with time. Once I called it time management, and then productivity, and maybe a few other names along the way. The way itself is time, and within it, we produce something or we do not. It was never really time at all, it was how we use our lives. And how we use our lives is who we are, and who we will become, and how we will be remembered one day.

      That’s a lot of wrestling.

      Perhaps that effort is better applied towards discovery. I write every day to discover what will stroll into the room next. We go back and forth a bit, I takes notes as quickly as I can, and the muse exits once again. Who saw that coming? And thanks for the, uh, time.

      Yesterday I finished a delightful book I’d never have read but for the fact that I said yes to it at the exclusion of a lot of great options I said no to. And then I immediately started reading another. The more books we read, the less we’re staring at a screen. That seems like a great trade-off to me. What does that have to do with productivity? Everything. And nothing at all.

      All that we do in our lives is derived from the experiences we make for ourselves. Writing, reading, travel, work, coexisting with these characters in our lives… it all accumulates into something larger than where we began this journey. And growth is where it’s at, friend. We are alive, and life is forever growing into something more than we started as. Just keep heading towards the light, wherever it takes us. Call it inspiration if it helps.

    • Difference Awaits

      “Normality is a paved road: it’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.” — Vincent Van Gogh

      What do you dream about? Who knows? Some people seem to remember all of their dreams. For some of us, the world of dreams is slammed shut upon waking. Is there a metaphor in there somewhere about waking up to finally begin living one’s dreams? Wouldn’t that be the obvious path to take right about now?

      My own dreams, such that they are, usually end with me waking up trying to figure a way out of some maze I’d wandered into, or to find a solution to some problem that doesn’t exist in reality. Ah, you dream interpreters, there’s nothing to see here! We’re all figuring things out as we go. Every day is a winding road.

      We may choose to wander off the beaten path any time we want to, for it’s our story to write. That beaten path laying up ahead is beaten for a reason. It’s tried and true, and won’t make our mothers lie awake at night in worry. Taking the road less traveled makes all the difference, right? Ask a poet:

      Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
      I took the one less traveled by,
      And that has made all the difference.
      — Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

      The thing is, most of us aren’t choosing poetry or painting as a career path. We’re figuring things out as we go, not wandering off into the wilderness. Maybe that means fewer flowers, but it also helps pay the mortgage. And so paths less traveled by remain in our dreams.

      Then again, we may opt to stray further and further from the beaten path each day, returning to pay the bills and such, but building those wandering muscles and stretching our inclinations in new directions. Our path is simply where we are heading at the moment. Perhaps it’s paved, perhaps it’s full of wildflowers or thistle or perilous beasts that make us break into a cold sweat for the terror of it all.

      Fear not! Our path is meant to be figured out. Like an Andy Weir novel, there’s always a way out of the maze. We just need to wake up to see it. And having seen it, to take that path to where difference awaits.

    • All We Have

      What if you suddenly saw that the silver of water was brighter than the silver of money?
      —Mary Oliver, How Would You Live Then?

      The time does fly by, doesn’t it? Tempus fugit. Does our time grow shorter, or does our experience grows greater with the years? Isn’t it in how we look at things? It always was and always will be about what we focus on. Are we living in a time of scarcity or abundance? We have as much of each as we wish to see.

      The answer may be to stop listening to those who would tell us otherwise. Knowing that sometimes we are our own worst false prophet—sowing discontent with the status quo for the love of more. Never grow blind to all that is and will be if we just stay the course with all we have.

      We are blessed in life when we are finally aware of all that surrounds us. We find that we don’t want to miss this opportunity at hand chasing dreams of better all the time. What’s better than the dreams we are realizing now? If we wish to savor time, we ought to stop throwing it away chasing better. Better isn’t discovered by chasing it—better is something we grow into with time.