Alexandersmap

    Category: Discovery

    • Savor the Circle

      “Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life.” ― Anton Chekhov, The Portable Chekhov

      I hit the 20 mile mark yesterday in combined mileage between cycling and walking. This may not seem all that impressive, but it was a busy and hot day and that milestone was very much in doubt for much of the day. I finished just after 10 PM, when I’m usually in bed reading. To celebrate I took a late night solo swim—just me and the stars and satellites in a dark pool of water on the edge of the woods. And I felt completely alive and present floating there.

      The older I get the less I seek meaning in everything I do. I’m simply enjoying it all. Washing dishes never felt so fulfilling. Dead-heading the flowers is meditative. Cleaning up after the pets? Not so delightful, but not something I avoid or resent as I’m doing it. It’s just part of the deal. Life is a series of chores and commitments we make to each other before we carve out a bit of time for ourselves to savor the circle we’ve surrounded ourselves with.

      The scale is telling me that I’m roughly the same character I was a month ago, but what does a scale know? I’m more fit, more active, seeing more and feeling the momentum of consistency. We know when we’re fully alive and when we’re fooling ourselves. Activity pays dividends beyond numbers on a scale.

      These are days we’ll remember. At least they will be if we place ourselves squarely in the moment and fill each with things that make us feel vital and healthy. As we move into the height of summer, what will we take from this time? The satisfying snip of a spent bloom? The smell of tomato vines and twine? Light shining in north-facing windows that rarely catch such beams but for the longest days of the year? Or bubbles running up your back as you rise to meet the July sky? The answer is to delight in it all.

    • Pressing the Essence

      “I would like to do whatever it is that presses the essence from the hour.” — Mary Oliver, Pen and Paper and a Breath of Air

      Grabbing the moment was the goal well before this blog began, but the writing emphatically reminds me to seize the bloody day already. Some hours are seized, others are burned frivolously and quickly forgotten like all the rest of our lost time. We ought to remind ourselves to look for the essence in every hour and give it our full attention before it slips away to the infinite.

      Paying attention helps. What are we experiencing right now? Where will it lead us next? How can we put an exclamation point on this moment? This level of curiosity and focus wrings joie de vivre out of ordinary. Whoever we will become surely begins right here and now, wherever we find ourselves. We may write a hell of a story launched from this hour or give it to the average like all the rest, the choice is ours. It always begins with where we focus our attention.

      Perhaps that’s my why for this blog. The thing that keeps it going instead of all the other things I might do instead of this with this particular hour. Then again, maybe there’s something more hiding just below the surface in this hour that is even more essential for you and I to discover. We won’t know if we don’t seek it out.

    • Life’s Good Runs

      “Life is like skiing. Just like skiing, the goal is not to get to the bottom of the hill. It’s to have a bunch of good runs before the sun sets.” — Seth Godin

      We each go through distinct seasons in our lives, not just age-based but in what we are focused on. We look back on them fondly or maybe not so fondly, but we can see exactly who we were at the time and know it brought us to who we are today. School days, sports played, people encountered and cherished for awhile, books read and discussed, career rungs climbed, places visited that seep into our souls—these are all good runs that we remember for the rest of our days. A lifetime may itself be a good run, made up of a series of other runs played by the distinct characters we were at the time.

      I still identify as a rower even though my rowing days on water are far in my past. Millions of meters on a machine in my basement aren’t quite the same, but the feeling of the catch made perfectly resonates across time and place. How many great catches did I have? Who’s to say but we know one when we feel it. Either way, that stroke ends and we recover for the next. Like skiing and life phases the goal is to put together as many good ones as you can in the time allotted.

      At the moment, I’m on quite a run of blog posts, but just last week I was wondering if this particular run was over for me. Not quite yet, but we’ll see how life unfolds. We each have good days and bad days, and with each morning a chance to begin anew. There’s a certain thrill in publishing something just when I thought I’d had enough to say and found some new plot twist to unpack.

      We recognize when we’re in the midst of a good run, just as we feel when a good run is ending. We’ll look with trepidation at the next run wondering whether we’ll enjoy that part of the ride, knowing that there are some things we most definitely won’t enjoy at all. We can’t rush through the bad parts to get to the good parts to come any more than we can hold on to the good parts forever. Life unfolds and we adapt to it and grow. What comes next is important too, but let’s not forget the thrill of the run we’re currently on.

    • To Live Is to Fly

      To live is to fly low and high
      so shake the dust off of your wings
      and the sleep out of your eyes
      — Cowboy Junkies, To Live Is to Fly

      I think that maybe stagnation is our greatest adversary. It kills any momentum in our lives and hastens our demise. We must move while we can. Stillness will claim us one day soon, but not just yet.

      Yes, I think that movement is the key. We must keep moving to fully live. Even trees, forever rooted to place, are constantly reaching up and outward to embrace the light, and dance in the breeze together. So it is with us, even when rooted, we must keep moving.

      Yesterday I rolled out the bicycle for a long ride along a rail trail. Cycling is the low form of flying, but a delightful way to traverse time and place. I wondered, why don’t I ride more often? No answer was apparent, just a resolution to take flight again soon. Life is a series of self-discoveries with the occasional memory jog reminding us that there are moments from our past worthy of a moment of reacquaintance. A bicycle deserves a better fate than to hang forever in a garage gathering dust. So too do we.

      What else is gathering dust, awaiting our return? Hiking boots? Books? Passports? First drafts? What might we put into motion again, that it may take off full of life? We must shake the dust off and flap these wings. To live is to fly, low and high.

    • Happily Ever Afters

      He said, “Don’t you know I love you, oh, so much
      And lay my heart at the foot of your dress?”
      She said, “Don’t you know that storybook loves
      Always have a happy ending”?
      Then he swooped her up just like in the books
      And on his stallion they rode away
      — Mark Knopfler & Willy Deville, Storybook Love

      A few days ago I took all the serious books I’ve committed myself to finishing and stacked them gently to the side in favor of the delightful, beautifully-illustrated gem The Princess Bride by William Goldman. If you’ve seen the movie and memorized the lines, the book will be as comfortable as watching it just one more time. And yet the book is mesmerizingly wonderful and transformative on its own. You can’t help but visualize scenes and the actors who say the lines, but there’s so much more to delight in than the movie could possibly offer in 98 minutes, which is the official length of Rob Reiner’s masterful tribute to the book. And it reminds us that books are one of humanity’s greatest contributions to the greater good.

      God knows we could use more greater good. And that’s where you and I come in. We may rise above the dismal Fire Swamp we find ourselves forced to march through and ride off on our own white horse with our friends, to a brighter future together. Looking around at the world today, it surely feels sometimes like we’re deep in a dismal swamp we may never get out of. It’s fair to wonder sometimes, just how the hell do we carry on? Happily ever afters are never guaranteed in this lifetime, but we must live with the hope of a brighter tomorrow to manage the lift we’ve been assigned today.

      And that’s the lesson we’re all learning, isn’t it? Some pages are magical, some quite horrible, but most days lie somewhere in between—a steady march to hope. To face each day with love in our heart and a bit of courage is the way through the dark days to that brighter tomorrow. The irony is that chasing happiness often leads to misery, but following our heart to something greater within ourselves usually leads us to the place we dreamed of being all along.

    • The New Way

      “If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.” ― Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

      This week has brought me to a new destination from the one that I departed just a few days ago. Everything is different, once again, because we all change all the time. When we encounter those close to us after these changes, we influence them as they do us. The ripples may be profound or undetectable (but they are surely there).

      Writing telegraphs the changes in me before I reunite with some of my close circle, and if they read the blog, they absorb the changes and react to each themselves. That’s the thing about blogging—you’re constantly telling the people around you who you are today with a deferred reaction from them. It’s that “I know something about you that you don’t know that I know” moment of awkward acknowledgement. Usually that’s not even who we are now, just who we were when we wrote that thing they’re reacting to. But it’s the bed we make for ourselves when we move beyond anonymous and continue to push beyond who we once were.

      We each arrive, look around, and see if the world will join us or if they’ve already moved well past us. Some people are forever anchored to that character they were long ago. I’d like to think I’ve moved beyond that old character myself. I’m under no illusion that I’m ahead of the pack, for I feel my adult life has been forever playing catch-up for the choices I made when I was a younger version of myself. We must bury our former self with each arrival at a new us. So it goes.

      Everything changes and so too must we. There’s no doubt I look at things differently today than I did just a few days ago, and that’s how our lives progress. Sometimes progress is revealed as a leap, sometimes it’s disguised as a setback, but in every case it’s a new way that we must adapt to before everything changes once again.

    • Adding Surprise

      “If you keep experiencing the same things, your mind keeps its same patterns. Same inputs, same responses. Your brain, which was once curious and growing, gets fixed into
      deep habits. Your values and opinions harden and resist change.
      You really learn only when you’re surprised. If you’re not surprised, then everything is fitting into your existing thought patterns. So to get smarter, you need to get surprised, think in new ways, and deeply understand different perspectives.” ― Derek Sivers, Hell Yeah or No: What’s Worth Doing

      We know this, don’t we? To learn is to grow. To experience new and diverse things in our lives offers this learning experience for each of us. So it follows that we ought to get outside of our own small box and leap into the new and surprising. It’s here where we may just find delightful insight.

      Ah, but can’t we find delight in our everyday routines? Isn’t that why we’ve landed here? I may walk out into the garden and delight in new blooms, the smell of fresh basil, the song of a cardinal overhead. I can sit in a familiar chair practically molded to my form and read a favorite book again and again, drawing out something new from it every time. Indeed, there are advocates for immersing ourselves ever deeper into the familiar that we may one day master it. We can’t reach mastery if we’re always frittering from one thing to the next.

      There is of course a happy medium. We may go out and seek new perspectives and return to the familiar with them as a more experience-rich person. we collect memories and insights into the ways of the world and bring them back to build a bigger, more expansive and more open box. And like a bird nest we may fly away and return in the proper season. Life is about balancing the familiar with the surprisingly new. The trick is what to prioritize when in our lives.

    • Time in the Sun

      There’s a dark and a troubled side of life
      There’s a bright and a sunny side too
      Though we meet with the darkness and strife
      The sunny side we also may view
      Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side
      Keep on the sunny side of life
      It will help us every day, it will brighten all the way
      If we keep on the sunny side of life
      — The Carter Family, Keep on the Sunny Side

      “There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it,’ said my mother. ‘Put yourself in the way of beauty.” ― Cheryl Strayed, Wild

      It occurred to me while driving to Connecticut the other day that the process of driving down that particular road has never been a pleasant experience for me. I’ve been driving on that Interstate for my entire life, and it’s always a grind of either traffic or boredom. The only time I recall enjoying it was when I first got my driving permit and my father let me drive from Cape Cod to our home and I distinctly remember the feeling of newness and potential that road offered on that day. Since then? Nothing but a familiar tedious task to complete before getting from here to there. That’s no way to go through life, friend.

      The thing is, each day offers us a path to new potential or tedious pain. We often (not always) get to choose which path to take. I’d like to say that I choose never to take that particular Interstate highway again, but I know deep down I’ll be on it Monday morning unless the world turns upside down for me in the interim. Given the choice, I’ll take the highway, thank you. But not forever. Our goal should be elimination of the ugly for the embrace of beautiful. Instead of commuting down that Interstate yet again, maybe meandering through some hiking trail or ancient cobblestone street is a better journey. Life shouldn’t always be about our means to an end. We forget that that means ought to matter a great deal to us as it’s the stuff of life. It’s quite literally our passage through our time in the sun.

    • Coloring Beyond

      “Live life to the fullest. You have to color outside the lines once in a while if you want to make your life a masterpiece. Laugh some every day, keep growing, keep dreaming, keep following your heart. The important thing is not to stop questioning.” — Albert Einstein

      I’m usually suspicious of quotes attributed to famous people but can’t find anything that contradicts the source, so thanks for the advice, uh, Albert. He seemed like the kind of guy who might have actually said it anyway. But I digress…

      I was always a meticulous “color within the lines” kind of wanna-be artist. The lines were there for a reason, weren’t they? Don’t stray beyond, I’d tell myself. It wasn’t until I was older that I started figuring out that the lines were just someone else’s interpretation of where they should be. And I started straying beyond and finding out that that’s where the magic is. So I’d stray a bit farther still.

      When you color outside the lines you begin to notice the other people who color beyond the lines. There’s a whole community of outside the lines people fully enjoying their lives while the inside the lines people grind through their days. Coloring beyond is invigorating and a bit audacious. Following other people’s rules is constricting and subservient. Who do we really want to be, ourselves or someone else’s version of who we ought to be?

      Monday mornings feel a bit different when you stray outside the lines. At the moment, I’m thinking I ought to stray a bit further to see just how audacious I can be today. We can’t make our own masterpiece following someone else’s plan, can we? Carpe diem, friend.

    • Lifestyle Choices

      “You’re a ghost driving a meat-coated skeleton made from stardust; what do you have to be scared of?” — @rat_sandwich

      Funny quote, and doesn’t it resonate? Each of us knows that it’s now or never. We must live while there’s time to do things. That the only answer is to be bold in our lifestyle choices. Do what resonates and forget the rest. Yes, we know this to be true, but are we following through? We’ve got to feel the urgency to fly.

      The thing is, it’s an easy thing to tell ourselves to be bold, it’s a harder thing to be it. But bolder may be reached in a big leap or through increasing our audacity incrementally every day. Before we know it, we’re actually bold, or at the very least, bolder than we once were. This is how we begin to live properly.

      “Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly. What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

      Bold doesn’t mean to run away from everything, not to me anyway. We may live a larger life without being reckless with all that we hold dear. Bold is a lifestyle choice realized in all of our moments. It takes courage to look our eventual death in the face and choose to dance, now, while we can.

      All that matters are the choices we make today. Yesterday’s me is dead, and today everything changes. This is the only way to grow out of who we once were into who we are meant to be. Who is that person, and what’s the first step to meeting them? Together, we’re writing one hell of a story.