Alexandersmap

    Category: Discovery

    • The Only One

      “We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we have only one.” — Confucius

      Blame it on autumn, or maybe the series of life events I’m currently passing through, but it feels like life is starting over again. Every moment we’re fully alive offers that opportunity of course, but stack enough stuff on the scale and the balance tips enough. Enough for what? For whatever is next in this one wild and precious life, as Mary Oliver so vividly put it.

      This is it, last time I checked, so let’s make the most of our time together. Double down on adventure, take calculated risks more frequently, do the “one day” bucket list things in this time bucket while we have the vitality to experience all it might offer. Defer deferral for a [real] change.

      So stop wasting time already! This is all we have left. Practice active savoring in this one and only dance through life. We can be co-conspirators while the rest of the world marches on thinking there will always be a tomorrow. Let’s not waste a second on such illusions. Seize what flees.

    • All the Nerve

      Oh, when you were young
      Did you question all the answers?
      Did you envy all the dancers
      Who had all the nerve?
      Look round you now
      You must go for what you wanted
      Look at all my friends who did and got what they deserved
      — Crosby, Stills & Nash, Wasted On the Way

      Early this morning far from home I turned the corner and my headlights spotlighted two coyotes who quickly scurried off into the woods. I had no business being right there at that moment, but for a series of events that brought me to that encounter. Just a guy putting himself in the way of beauty (thanks to Cheryl Strayed’s mom for the suggestion).

      We know the people who have all the nerve. They’re usually the ones who have few regrets in the end. To be bold is to break out of the boxes we framed around ourselves. We ought to make box-breaking a regular part of our routine. Really, it’s the only way. How else can we grow?

      Rising to meet the day

    • The Roll of the Peculiar

      “There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

      We finally begin to hit our stride when we ignore the expectations of the well-intentioned and follow our own path. For some of us it comes well after our formal education and those earnest early career moves. Momentum isn’t leaping off the cliff, it’s picking up pieces of our identity and adding them on, one after the other, like a snowball rolling down a mountain of fresh, sticky snow. Soon there’s no stopping us.

      The thing is, that momentum applies as much to the wrong slopes as it does the right one. Once we start rolling and picking up habits, stopping becomes very challenging indeed, let alone nudging ourselves over to another slope. We don’t always know which slope is our slope, but we often know which one is not for us. And we know we can’t wait forever to decide: we must eventually roll.

      Some snowballs appear as oddballs. So what? Does the world need yet another compliant commuter making their way to a job they hate? Who want to go through life wedged into a box like that? Find a place where it’s okay to roll the way you want to roll. That which makes us peculiar also makes us unique, and there’s always an audience for someone unique. What is more virtuous than a life spent growing into the purpose we were meant for?

    • Going From, Toward

      “A traveller! I love his title. A traveller is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from —— toward ——; it is the history of every one of us. It takes but little distance to make the hills and even the meadows look blue to-day. That principle which gives the air an azure color is more abundant.”― Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861

      Any hiker is familiar with Thoreau’s description, so too any sailor. Those who venture out into the world are bound to find it. It takes but little distance to make where we’ve been take on a bluish hue. The same can be said for where we’re going, if we look far enough ahead anyway. Life is only abundantly clear when we live in the present. ’tis this day that we must seize.

      Just as Thoreau documented his life through his journal entries and the books he wrote, so we may document our own journey from, toward. These breadcrumbs show where we are as much as where we’ve been. The act of writing every day, then publishing a bit of it, has changed each of us that travel this path. The lingering question isn’t when we’ll stop writing, but why it took us so long to begin? So much of our pre-writing lives will remain entombed within us when we pass one day—isn’t that a pity? The world doesn’t need to know all the details, but there are some tasty breadcrumbs growing stale back there on the trail.

      It’s essential to ask ourselves where we’ve come from to bring us here. So too to look at where we’re going. The act of writing about such things is contemplative and enlightening, states the world ought to linger in more than it currently does. I often get caught up in the excitement of tomorrow, and were it not for the daily ritual of writing I might miss now altogether. Life isn’t meant to be shaded in blue, but lived forthwith—with all the immediacy and urgency that word conveys. What would we write about tomorrow that reflects where we’ve been today? Steer towards that.

    • Holding On To the Precious Few

      “Casting aside other things, hold to the precious few; and besides bear in mind that every man lives only the present, which is an indivisible point, and that all the rest of his life is either past or is uncertain. Brief is man’s life and small the nook of the earth where he lives; brief, too, is the longest posthumous fame, buoyed only by a succession of poor human beings who will very soon die and who know little of themselves, much less of someone who died long ago.”
      ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

      In a lifetime we may encounter thousands of people. If you search the Internet you’ll find that the average person meets about 80,000 people in their lifetime. Some of us have met that many people before the middle of our presumed lifespan. But we aren’t here to compete for the most people met in a lifetime, we’re here to make meaningful connections. As the name implies, connections are those people who come into our lives at just the right time with whom we naturally bond with. These are people who transcend the convenience of place and time and become lifetime associates. They are as invested in our well-being as we are in theirs. They are the precious few.

      What forms that bond? Usually something like shared experience, be it the good, bad or ugly. When you go through something with someone that few others would understand, sometimes you become lifetime friends. Then again, sometimes you drift apart never to speak again. Some of the people I rowed with felt like best friends until the diplomas came and I haven’t seen them since. One or the other of us had moved on, and so it goes. Same with old work connections, or fellow soccer parents, or whomever. Something in the moment brings us together, but once it’s gone the bond is gone too. It’s like the Post-It note of friendships: friends of convenience skating that indivisible point of now but not forever.

      And that’s okay too. We can’t very well have 80,000 best friends, or even close associates. We’d simply never have the time to maintain the connection and get anything else done. Most relationships are transactional, and it’s nothing personal, simply pragmatic. We may remember people fondly from our past lives and catch up with them at a reunion one day, or maybe not even that. The few that stick with us are there because they want to be, just as we want to be. Sometimes it’s as simple as that.

      Coming back to that indivisible point that Marcus Aurelius mentioned, we ought to put our full energy into the connections of now. We can’t very well say to ourselves that we’ve got our precious few and that’s enough for me. That next person we meet on the climb to 80,000+ might just be the one who makes all the difference in our lives, or we in theirs. When we make every encounter a moment of connection, we raise the average of our overall experience on this planet. We also find that our few become even more precious as the investment made by both parties naturally increases to meet the place we’ve arrived at in our lives. It always comes back to this: we get what we put into it.

    • Chopping the Frozen Sea

      “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” ― Franz Kafka

      I’ve been investing in a lifetime of learning that began in earnest right about when I started writing this blog. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t learning before that, but it was learning filled with distraction and ulterior motivation: simply put, I was too busy raising children and building a career to dive deeply into the things I wanted to learn about, and so I deferred much of it until the kids were off to college and the career was somewhat established. This second stage of life is ideal for reinventing ourselves, and so the quest commenced.

      A string of habits occurred all at once. I finally started writing every day instead of telling myself to do it one day. Similar habits began around learning a second language, finding something uniquely interesting about whatever place I happened to be in when traveling and of course reading in earnest. The reading in particular has evolved from heavy fiction with a layering of history to heavier works of philosophy, history, science, etc. We become what we consume, after all. And driving it all is an underlying feeling of having fallen behind that has me striving to accelerate my pursuit of learning to catch up. This hasn’t abated over time.

      That driver shouldn’t be underestimated. To seek knowledge is to acknowledge an emptiness within us that we must fill. Each layer of learning is growth that brings us to a more complete version of our potential, yet also offers a vantage point from which to see all that we’ve missed on our singular pursuit, and so another quest begins, and so on. As the frozen sea is released, we find we may inch closer to a desired place, but the chopping never ends until we do.

      This all comes back to that version of excellence reserved only for the gods—Arete. I’ve known the word since I was an underclassman in college, but that didn’t inspire me to reach for it at the time. I simply wasn’t intellectually or emotionally developed enough to pursue excellence at a level beyond being a big fish in the small pond I swam in then. That pond flowed into a stream that became a river that brought me to the vast ocean, where I looked around and realized I’d better get to work growing.

      The thing is, I don’t aspire to be the biggest fish in the ocean anymore, I simply want to grow closer to my potential. Shouldn’t we all aspire to arete, even knowing we’ll never quite reach it? We must keep chopping away at the things that have locked us in place for far too long. What we learn is that the frozen sea isn’t something external, it’s within us, holding back the universe. Like Michelangelo chipping away at the marble to reveal the sculpture hidden within, we too must chip away to find what was hidden within all along.

    • Time to Step Out

      House on fire
      Leave it all behind you
      Dark as night
      Let the lightning guide you
      Step outside, time to step outside
      Time to step out
      — José González, Step Out

      Yesterday was one of those epic days we’ll remember for the rest of our days. I picked up my daughter from a red eye flight, which meant I was up quite early myself, and capped the evening with the northern lights dancing brilliantly overhead late into the evening. Why does anyone stay inside when the universe wants to play with us just out the door? Just what call are we listening for instead?

      Every other time I’ve chased the aurora borealis I’ve gone somewhere other than home. Most of the time I’ve come up empty. Scotland, Iceland, Maine, and northern New Hampshire have largely mocked me with overcast or a fickle aurora. But there’s something to that Cheryl Strayed quote about putting ourselves in the way of beauty that continues to whisper to me. Step out! Be patient…

      What we seek often comes to us if we simply get out of our own way and put ourselves in the way of it. Last night I opted to stay put and see if Norðurljós wanted to dance. It turned out she did, and what a performance!

      The thing is, we get wrapped up in what we miss, instead of simply stepping out of ourselves to find what is often right in front of us. Something like the northern lights is out of our control most of the time, but what is in our control is a willingness to dance with whatever comes our way. Amor fati: Love of fate. Fate brought my daughter home and a visit from Norðurljós in one memorable day.

      Photo credit to my daughter for this one
      Visible to the naked eye, but incredibly bright in night mode

    • Practicing Radical Amazement

      “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. …get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”
      — Abraham Joshua Heschel

      We get so casual with life. We take things for granted, growing tone deaf to the miracles all around us. When we become self-absorbed and jaded we miss so much that might have become a vital part of us. Sure, a good filter is helpful in a world with its share of ugliness, but we ought to remember to be fully aware of the incredible wonder surrounding us that we might fold it into the layers of our identity.

      Today is a crisp, cool October day in New Hampshire. It’s the kind of day that makes postcards. Right now the foliage seekers are poised for that perfect photograph somewhere beautiful. You know what they say about beauty being where you find it? That’s a lot easier when you live in the midst of natural wonder. Call me a country mouse if you want, but I’ll take a quiet country lane any day over asphalt through a concrete jungle.

      One big reason I write and take gazillions of photographs is to prompt attention towards the immediate and to one day recall the wonder previously experienced. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it and all that. Yes! Of course all that! For what else is there? But how many of us hear that call?

      Maybe we can’t all be poets or artists, but we shouldn’t all be corporate lawyers or middle managers either. It’s never been about what we call ourselves anyway, but what we pay attention to in our corner of the universe. That’s exemplified in the stories we tell ourselves and in the wonder we encounter between the previous moment and the next.

      Why is it radical amazement? Because most people settle into comfortable indifference. So we ought to take heed of Heschel’s suggestion: go be amazed—it’s all just waiting for us to notice.

    • Staying Out of the Clutches

      invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
      don’t swim in the same slough.
      invent yourself and then reinvent yourself
      and
      stay out of the clutches of mediocrity.

      invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
      change your tone and shape so often that they can
      never
      categorize you.

      reinvigorate yourself and
      accept what is
      but only on the terms that you have invented
      and reinvented.

      be self-taught.

      and reinvent your life because you must;
      it is your life and
      its history
      and the present
      belong only to
      you.
      — Charles Bukowski, No Leaders Please

      Rip currents drown those who fight it, while those who choose to swim perpendicular to it often live to see another day. The lesson is to simply stop fighting the current and swim out of it. Quite literally changing direction can save your life.

      There are those who love to float down those lazy rivers, drifting along sipping cocktails and peeing in the water so they can keep that happy haze going all day. I don’t want to swim in other people’s pee, no matter how warm the water is. Swimming in mediocrity is a lot like those lazy rivers: comfortable, but not really going anywhere good. We ought to expect more of ourselves.

      To reinvent oneself is to swim against the rip, to climb out of the lazy river and take a plunge into the bracing cold of a blue ocean. The more comfortable we get in our lives, the less likely we’ll ever be to embrace a path contrary to the norm. If we’re all being swept along like those rubber ducks in the river fundraisers, does the prize really go to the person who gets to the net first, or the one who escapes the current altogether?

      Anyone tracking this blog would see that it’s a documentation of reinvention over time. We all are constantly changing who we are, resistant as we might be to the forces pulling us in different directions than the one we thought we’d be going in when we got up that morning. I’d been swimming against my own rip currents for some time, and found myself swept out to sea. But I haven’t drowned just yet. Panic is the real killer, even before fatigue. Those who keep their wits about them can survive most any crisis. The thing about ocean swimming is you can choose to go in any direction you want.

    • What We Notice

      “Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate. Wandering, where we go matters less than what we notice.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

      After an unsuccessful hunt for the northern lights last night, I walked out into crisp early morning darkness for a just-in-case glance at the heavens. Alas, no aurora, but instead I caught the brilliant Jupiter and a blushing Mars, caught in the act of chasing Jupiter across the sky. Orion stood between them as guardian, forever distracted by the hunt for the bull. As a Taurus myself, I’m always rooting for Orion to miss the mark. It turns out Orion is never inclined to release anyway.

      I find myself uniquely aware of the garden as we wander through it. Some call me a wanderer, distracted by life, never inclined to release the arrow on the hunt for success. Success to me isn’t found in a C-suite, it’s found in a spark of connection between me and another. It’s found in a sliver of hope and direction given to another wanderer, who simply lost their way from here to there. We all do, eventually, lose our way—don’t we? Success is often disguised as a moment of clarity given to another, or found in our own reflection.

      If there is a road at all that we humans travel upon from here to there, it’s a winding road that often doubles back on itself. We are forever wandering through life, figuring out which way to turn next. The only secret adults know that children don’t is that adults are winging it too. We go through life accumulating experiences and apply that knowledge towards whatever we chance upon next. If we’re lucky we choose a path that favors us, if not we stumble eventually, pick ourselves up and figure out the next. It turns out that what we experience on the path matters a great deal more than where we thought we were going in the first place.