Alexandersmap

    Category: Discovery

    • Practiced Reasoning

      “While we naturally understand that writing is a good way to share ideas with others, we under-appreciate just how much good writing helps us think about an idea ourselves. Writing is not only a means of communication, it enables us to practice reasoning.
      Writing forces you to slow down, focus, and think deeply. In a world where attention is fragmented into seconds, thinking becomes more reactive than reasoned. Only when [we] take time to play with our ideas can we hope to think about them substantially. Writing requires sticking with something a little longer and developing a deeper understanding.
      Writing is the process by which we realize we do not understand and the process by which we come to understand.”
      — Shane Parrish, Unspoken Expectations, Brain Food – No. 569 – March 24, 2024

      Until I read Shane Parrish’s latest newsletter, I still had it in my mind—even after a couple of thousand blog posts—that I was writing for others. I had it partially correct. I’ve been writing for myself, to better understand that which I encounter on this dash through the decades, and then to share that processing with you; the reader. I’ve talked of breadcrumbs and the processing of ideas before myself, so the idea isn’t exactly revolutionary, but he hammered it home well enough that I thought I’d practice a bit more reasoning writing about it here.

      The thing about documenting your own reasoning in a blog is that when you publish, you’ve let the world in on a bit of a secret. Deep down, you know more about who I am and how I process information about the world and my experience in it. Sure, I filter out enough that people aren’t guessing my passwords (those simple passwords are long gone anyway) or otherwise hacking my identity, but the bottom line remains clear: unless you’re writing a blog yourself, you know far more about how I think than I know about how you think. Advantage reader?

      Perhaps. But we aren’t adversaries in this game of life, are we? My reasoning, should you choose to follow along, is simply my half of a conversation. And as a writer we ought to view it as such. Otherwise what is it but a dull college lecture or a dad speaking to a table full of people staring at their phones? There are some blog posts that fail to resonate with the world, and it feels a lot like that latter example in such moments of posting into the vacuum of the Internet, but that is exactly the moment to remind myself that this blog post is one human’s humble attempt to reason with the universe and to see what comes from it.

      In a way, writing this blog is similar to playing chess with the computer. The computer always wins, often in frustratingly devious ways (like a cat and the mouse with me always the mouse), but each game is a lesson in strategic thinking for me, even in the loss. When the game is over, was it a waste of time or an incremental step forward towards becoming a better chess player (ie: strategic thinker)? So it is with this blog post and all those that preceded it. Each is an incremental step towards better reasoning, and better writing. And perhaps that’s enough to make me a better human too.

    • Who I Am

      When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful
      A miracle, oh, it was beautiful, magical
      And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily
      Oh, joyfully, oh, playfully watching me
      But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible
      Logical, oh, responsible, practical
      Then they showed me a world where I could be so dependable
      Oh, clinical, oh, intellectual, cynical
      There are times when all the world’s asleep
      The questions run too deep
      For such a simple man
      Won’t you please, please tell me what we’ve learned?
      I know it sounds absurd
      Please tell me who I am
      — Supertramp, The Logical Song

      The beautiful thing about moving through a few decades is rediscovering the soundtrack of your youth well after you rejected it for the waves of more current music that followed. Supertramp was one of those late 1970’s bands that I loved for a time, forgot all about, and delight in all over again when I hear one of their best songs now. How is it a band with as many hits as they had isn’t in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame yet? Because they were surfing the wave instead of creating the next one? Spare me. Music stirs feelings deep within us, and Supertramp created some timeless masterpieces that still ring true. But I digress…

      The other beautiful thing about moving through a few decades is that sense of momentum that comes from focused living. We learn what works for us and what we’re good at. We lean into mastering a few skills that make us uniquely positioned to do well in some niche of life. And if we’re lucky, we collect a few people around us who like us for who we are.

      Who we are…. That’s the real trick, isn’t it? We spend a lifetime figuring it out, finding our way, embracing change for change’s sake, just to keep marching onward and upward. Until one day we hear an old song that makes us remember that part of us that we left behind that still whispers to us in the quiet moments.

      The thing is, most people don’t want to wrestle with such things as who they are, let alone who I am. Generation X kept all this stuff to ourselves, leaving it to these generations that followed us to put it all out there for the world to deal with. I admire that about them even as I roll my eyes at the drama in it all. Be who you are, I’ll do the same, and we’ll both agree to respect each other’s differences. It’s the provocation that irritates. It asks that we not be who we are but to reach across that invisible threshold and become something more. And sure, sometimes we need to do that too. Just meet us halfway.

      I’m not much of a musician, for I was afraid to pursue it for where it might have brought me once. But I know it’s in me still, as untapped energy put into other places. Writing was once like that for me too, but now I regularly dabble in words. The beautiful thing about moving through a few decades is we have the time to let go of the things that were holding us back from ourselves. From who we really are. Less sensible, perhaps, but possibly more wonderful. Beautiful. Magical.

    • The Gift of a Lifetime

      “Just living is not enough,” said the butterfly, “one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.” ― Hans Christian Anderson

      Spring for me begins when the crocuses bloom. Well, they’ve bloomed and continue to dance in the crisp air even as the season tries to figure out who it wants to be. As usually happens in March, we had a taste of spring weather in New England before things got chilly again. This is normal, though winter was anything but normal. The climate has changed, we all feel it, and perhaps we’ll act upon it one day too late.

      I was texting with a business associate yesterday, responding to his complaints about product and service and the miserable state of affairs that is the world we live in. I politely steered him to the bright side of the road, which he found unsatisfying. There is no room for joie de vivre in his life. He’s been this way since his son passed away years ago, leaving him forever hollowed out. Who am I to tell him there’s a bright side to anything? All we can do is show that life may still be beautiful even with shadows.

      The question of a lifetime is always what to do with it. We may roam like a caribou, straying far from home through places fraught with danger. We may root ourselves firmly in place, like a mighty oak that keeps the young saplings from getting ahead of themselves in their rush to find their own light. Life is never perfect and sometimes it’s downright unfair, but we yet exist for more than to be a placeholder for carbon.

      The art of living well is to savor our experiences while we’re dancing with them. Tomorrow may bring a cold front to our doorstep, but today the sun is shining and we would be ungrateful to let it slip away uncelebrated. Each moment has it’s time, and so to do we. To elevate our experiences with our awareness is the ultimate gift we may give to ourselves. It’s the gift of a lifetime, isn’t it?

    • For Discovery

      “We’ve been trained to believe that mediocre obedience is a genetic fact for most of the population, but it’s interesting to note that this trait doesn’t show up until after a few years of schooling.” — Seth Godin, Graceful

      “Fear of living without a map is the main reason people are so insistent that we tell them what to do.” — Seth Godin, Graceful

      A few days ago, Seth Godin offered up his e-book Graceful as a free download. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I downloaded it immediately and read it almost as quickly. It’s a short book jammed with little nuggets of gold like the quotes above. Seth’s best books and blog posts are tiny gems that punch above their weight. Something to aspire to as a writer—perhaps I’ll arrive there myself in a few thousand more blog posts.

      Many of us wing it in certain parts of our lives, but meticulously plan other parts. I write what flows through me when I sit down to write, but feed myself with a steady diet of reading material and life experience to widen the lens. The result is an often eclectic mix of topics that are most certainly not what some sign up for. But who wants to read or write about the same thing every day anyway? Art, learning and living a full life should be a meandering progression.

      There’s something overly formal about mapping out our experiences, but there’s value in the process. I have some travel coming up this spring that I’m particularly excited about. With every trip I take, I do a ton of research and planning to optimize my time in any given place. I leave some room for discovery, but in general I live my life in the fashion the lyrics of an old Seals and Croft song, “We May Never Pass This Way (Again)”. You don’t have to look up the lyrics: that’s it right there in the title. It’s the kind of ear worm song you curse for it’s persistence, but a good reminder to be fully aware in the moment.

      We don’t venture out into the world for predictable. We venture for discovery. When we leave the rigidity and structure of the classroom, we either spiral into indifference or grow into a fascination with the world and our place in it. To be lifetime students of living seems an aspiration worthy of our remaining time, don’t you think? Our growth depends on it.

    • Filling in Holes

      “The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait until that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.” ― Henry David Thoreau

      They say a tired dog doesn’t dig, but I have a dog that never tires. This mild, wet winter has given her ample opportunity to perfect her digging technique. And so the next few days I’ll be spreading enough stone to pay for a trip to Paris. Mulching the beds with stone is meant to act as a natural deterrent for a wonderful (really) dog who wants to dig holes everywhere. It’s a way of telling her, “not here”. With time and some training, eventually she’ll grow out of these teenage years.

      We know when something has shifted within ourselves and it’s time for change. Do we leap at that moment, or live a life of quiet desperation? Thoreau famously suggested most of us do the latter. It’s famous because it resonated with the masses, who fail to act on the wisdom in the observation. We must have the agency to go. To do that we must have the courage to let go of the things that hold us in place.

      Easier said than done. That puppy who has brought so much joy into our lives is also an anchor to a lifestyle. Having the agency to go on a trip is one thing, but the more we layer into our lives the harder it is to simply walk away. Great lifestyle design means layering in the things we want most in our lives and eliminating the things that aren’t as important. The dog stays, and so the trip to Paris may be pushed out yet another year. We can’t have it all, but we can have the things we focus on the most.

      Don’t get me wrong—there will be plenty of travel to come this year, and with it arrangements for dog sitting and lawn mowing and all the things that come with balancing priorities. There’s a price tag for all of this, in time and money and the discipline to see it through. The payoff is a life far richer than it might have been otherwise. Filling in holes was the entire reason we got the dog in the first place.

    • To Live Creatively

      “Many times, in writing I have looked over my own shoulder from beyond the grave, more alive to the reactions of those to come than to those of my contemporaries. A good part of my life has, in a way, been lived in the future. With regard to all that vitally concerns me I am really a dead man, alive only to a very few who, like myself, could not wait for the world to catch up with them. I do not say this out of pride or vanity, but with the humility not untouched with sadness. Sadness is perhaps hardly the right word either, since I neither regret the course I have followed nor desire things to be any different than they are. I know now what the world is like and knowing I accept it, both the good and the evil. To live creatively, I have discovered, means to live more and more unselfishly, to live more and more into the world, identifying oneself with it and thus influencing it at the core, so to speak. Art, like religion, it now seems to me, is only a preparation, an initiation into the way of life. The goal is liberation, freedom, which means assuming greater responsibility. To continue writing beyond the point of self-realization seems futile and arresting. The mastery of any form of expression should lead inevitably to the final expression—mastery of life. In this realm one is absolutely alone, face to face with the very elements of creation. It is an experiment whose outcome nobody can predict.” — Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi

      Another long quote to start this blog, and surely the SEO needs improvement. So be it. I might have doubled the length for all Henry Miller had to say. In fact, stop reading my blog altogether and go pick up the book. We are the people he had in mind when he wrote these words. Can’t you see him looking over his shoulder at us? If Miller was looking to the future with hopefulness that the world would catch up to his way of thinking, well, he may have been sorely disappointed. We all shake our heads at the madness in the world, and the inclination to dumb it all down for the benefit of the power brokers with all the fancy toys. Some things never change.

      To tag along with Miller as he wanders around Greece on the cusp of World War II is fascinating for the historian in me, for we know how the story ends but not always how the world felt about it as things were playing out. Miller found his soul in Greece just before things got truly crazy. What of us?

      Some of us write to reach self-realization and rarely go beyond it to reach for mastery. I talk a good game myself, but my default is to quiet quit on mastery. It takes a level of discipline I’ve learned I don’t want to grind out of myself to be a master craftsman at anything. I can see it in the pursuits I’ve started and let die out. If the price is to exclude everything else to reach mastery, I’ve come to realize that I won’t pay that price. There are precious few who keep going, which is why there are so very few masters of any craft.

      But there’s hope. If the goal of life is Arete and reaching personal excellence, then the journey never truly ends. Perhaps writing for self-realization is part of the journey that eventually we break through to reach for something more. The only certainty is that the creative journey continues, and so long as the blog posts reach you, you’ll know that I’m still pushing through what Steven Pressfield called the Resistance to find out what’s on the other side.

      There’s a reckoning coming. When we keep pushing ahead it’s inevitable that we’ll face more and more resistance. For us to keep going with the work that calls to us is audacious, and some might say self-serving. This too is recognized as resistance. There comes a point in our lives where we tell our quiet-quitting self that the work means more now. We may still end this trivial pursuit and go on to some other distraction. Just not today.

    • People, Pets and Places

      “Don’t be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.” — Bertolt Brecht

      “It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” — Marcus Aurelius

      Recently, a colleague from overseas asked for some advice on where to go and what to do for a weekend in Boston. Answering this question is both easy and challenging. Oftentimes we are so caught up in the familiar routine that we forget to explore the things that make a place special. Go to the museums, take a walk through the Public Garden or the Esplanade, and definitely try the oysters, I told her, but it reminded me that I ought to take my own advice and step off the usual loop more often myself.

      If we crave anything in our average days, it’s more boldness. But to be bold in the face of an abundance of adequate choices a good life throws our way seems ungrateful—when life is good, why be so audacious as to turn it upside down? Does taco Tuesday really ever get old? Only when we question it. At that moment, we realize there can be more to a random weekday than the same thing we had last Tuesday.

      One might think taking the dog for a walk is mundane. I beg to differ! Every walk with a dog is a perspective changing event. Lately we’ve been walking the dog in a new place every weekend. Different beaches, woodland walks, rail trails. Every place is different for the dog, and different for us when viewed through the eyes and nose of an eager pup. In every walk we experience something new ourselves, and expand our lives in the process. It’s why we opted to adopt a rescue dog in the first place, because life is larger when we wrap more people, pets and places around ourselves.

      When viewed through the lens of a brief life, our choices in the everyday feel more essential. We can’t celebrate wine o’clock all day without flushing our vitality down the drain, but we can surely seek out the exclamation point in an otherwise mundane moment. Try a different walk or visit that museum we recommend to others but never seem to get to ourselves. Maybe even skip the tacos for once and try a donburi bowl. Sure, it’s not as alliterative, but it offers a whole new taste for Tuesday. The whole world awaits the adventurous spirits who venture out into it. So be bold in those choices today.

    • Stepping Out of the Box

      Let me ask you this.
      Do you also think that beauty exists for some
      fabulous reason?
      And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—
      your life—
      what would do for you?
      — Mary Oliver, To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

      Plotting our next adventure in a faraway place, we went out for breakfast to dance with the hopefulness of scheduled enchantment. We ran into a woman we know, who once was married and then she wasn’t, but she never accepted that she wasn’t and retreated into herself and the rituals of the church and suddenly twenty years later she’s still the same shell of a person she was then but older and more insulated from the world. She might have gone with us on our adventure, or perhaps one of her own, had she only gotten out of her own way.

      She made me wonder—what rituals of routine are getting in my own way? If the opposite of boredom is engagement and being captivated by the world around us, why do we settle for something less? What lingers just outside the box of our identity? Why is that so frightening? To live in fear of the world is to never be alive.

      As this is published it’s the first Monday in March. March was once the first month of the original Roman calendar. If you think about it, the calendar is arbitrary and nothing but a shared belief that keeps this whole game going. We can’t very well change the calendar and function in a society that works off of it, but we can use it as a reminder to ourselves that we can change things when we find our routine isn’t working for us any more. It’s like adding two months to a year our ancestors thought they had figured out. It turns out the extra two months made it better. Imagine what we can make better if we changed too?

      A few days ago we had a leap day on that 12-month calendar, tacked on to the end of a month that once didn’t exist in the minds of mankind. It was a bonus day and a chance to do something truly different. Most of us went about our lives as we did the day before or the days since. It was sort of like New Year’s Day in this way, where we might think up all sorts of ways we may break out of the box but end up right back in our ritual of routine. Imagining our possibility is easier than actually living it. We forget that we don’t have to leap, we could simply step out of the box and close the door behind us.

    • Shepherds and Poets

      “For the shepherd the poet is too facile, too easily satiated. The poet would say ‘there was… they were…’ But the shepherd says ‘he lives, he is, he does…’ The poet is always a thousand years too late—and blind to boot. The shepherd is eternal, an earth-bound spirit, a renunciator. On these hillsides forever and ever there will be the shepherd with his flock: he will survive everything including the tradition of all that ever was.” — Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi

      “Describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty — describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.”
      — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

      We know great poetry, because it feels as eternal as that earth-bound shepherd. We know bad poetry because it clings to us like tree sap, cursed in it’s stickiness. A bad line of poetry haunts us for a lifetime. Great poetry feels revelatory as we discover some truth about ourselves that seems so obvious after stumbling over it. In the entirety of this blog, I’ve written one poem about a kitten who once thought she was a dog (she’s since become decidedly cat-like). I aspire to write like a poet but I save poetry for those who dare more greatly. You know who you are, and thank you for your audacity.

      For most of my life I’ve fancied myself a shepherd; tending my flock, trying not to step in it and eternally minding the weather. Aspirations of poetry are saved for moments of brevity in writing. Poetry for me is the last holdover of a time when I told myself I wasn’t good enough to be a writer, choosing history instead, where looking backwards seemed safer than facing the truth in the present.

      The thing is, Miller and Rilke were both on to something. The worst shepherds have their heads up in the clouds, paying no attention to the needs of the flock. The worst poets likewise dance in flowery prose, searching for clever instead of truth. Great poetry is earth-bound, with a bit of dirt and manure smudges showing the truth of the matter. We must live in the immediacy of the flock and write as if the wolves were just over the rise.

    • Why This?

      “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. ― Marcel Proust

      Yesterday I wrote of writing every day no matter what. The streak is very much alive and will be until the day it isn’t. The underlying question is why? Why do this at all? No fame or fortune or other such ego stroke. A blogger can’t even state they’re a novelist. Plenty of helpful people in my life would like me to lump a bunch of these blog posts into a series of books. Honestly, once they’ve been released into the world the words aren’t ours anymore. Perhaps that’s why they come so freely? No paywall or subscription necessary. This is just me in the moment, telling friends what I’ve stumbled upon on my journey.

      Writing is discovery. It’s finding something new within ourselves each day and bringing it to the surface. It’s surprising ourselves and others that we’re still at this thing. It’s the occasional comment from someone you hadn’t realized was paying attention at all. Writing is processing the complexities of the world and our place in it and putting a stake in the ground for who we are at this moment in time. I write these words without truly knowing where they’re coming from. We surf in this way with the Muse, along for the ride pretending we have some measure of control.

      Writing leads to an increased power of observation. It leads to new books and podcasts and small corners of the past that most people drive by on their way to someplace else. If awareness is the key to being present, then self-awareness is knowing when to shut the hell up and understand what is happening in the moment. When we write we’ve channeled that awareness into words. Here’s another time stamp of that dance.