Alexandersmap

    Category: Personal Growth

    • Making Full Use of the Decade

      “Don’t try to be young. Just open your mind. Stay interested in stuff. There are so many things I won’t live long enough to find out about, but I’m still curious about them. You know people who are already saying, ‘I’m going to be 30—oh, what am I going to do?’ Well, use that decade! Use them all!”
 — Betty White

      If life is a series of time buckets, we ought to be making the most of each bucket we happen to reside in at this particular stage of our life. My entire life transformed from 10 to 20, and again from 20 to 30, and so on to now. The decade I’m in has been revelatory for the transformation it has brought to my life and for the speed with which it’s going by. It all flies by, we just have to make full use of the time.

      Each decade is a climb, and climbs are filled with setbacks, false summits, detours and exhausting ascents that seem to go on forever without relief. Alternatively, we might look at the decade as meandering through a maze, encountering all sorts of interesting or even terrifying paths, with a series of dead ends we must back away from, before we reach the other side. Whatever life means to us, it ought to be exhilarating and interesting as we begin each day, for this stage of our lives is rapidly coming to an end, and the next is just around the corner.

      The key is staying interested, as Betty White pointed out, and with our interest sparked getting fired up for the next. To explore what lies just beyond where we’ve been thus far is a lifetime adventure which we can all subscribe to. Be bold! This next decade will fly by too, and what will our memories be then? We must exploit each leap into the unknown for all it offers in order to live a full life.

    • 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.

    • The Beautiful Present

      “Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find the right road.” ― Dag Hammarskjold

      Oh Lord, how shining and festive is your gift to us, if we
      only look, and see.
      — Mary Oliver, Look and See

      For all my talk of stopping to smell the roses, I barely noticed a beautiful sugar maple turning towards peak foliage as we drove by it yesterday. Had my bride not commented on it, I’d have missed it entirely. There’s something to be said for being focused when driving a two-ton automobile, but there’s also something to not rushing through life with blinders on. The point is, we may still get from here to there while enjoying the passage of time.

      When I write about the necessity of savoring each moment I do so as a reminder to myself as much as any reader who stumbles upon this blog (Welcome, nonetheless. Or rather, especially). We ought to begin with the end in mind, as Covey once said, while still enjoying the things we chance upon as we march through our small piece of history. Hammarskjold is absolutely correct in pointing out that we ought to be aware of that far horizon, but the poet in me rejects the idea of never looking at your next step. Our next step is all we have. Have a look at all that is beautiful in it, while still glimpsing the future horizon that we may not lose our way. Put another way, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

      I’m aware of the passing of time, and look towards that horizon with keen interest in how far down the path I might go before I tire and settle into an armchair to tell the same familiar stories to anyone who will listen again and again. But those stories are created today, with full awareness of all that happens in the now. We ought to savor the beautiful present flashing before our eyes instead of fixating on the next intersection. The journey will be all the more enjoyable. We’ll get there either way.

    • Icarus Also Flew

      Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
      It’s the same when love comes to an end,
      or the marriage fails and people say
      they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
      said it would never work. That she was
      old enough to know better. But anything
      worth doing is worth doing badly.
      Like being there by that summer ocean
      on the other side of the island while
      love was fading out of her, the stars
      burning so extravagantly those nights that
      anyone could tell you they would never last.
      Every morning she was asleep in my bed
      like a visitation, the gentleness in her
      like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
      Each afternoon I watched her coming back
      through the hot stony field after swimming,
      the sea light behind her and the huge sky
      on the other side of that. Listened to her
      while we ate lunch. How can they say
      the marriage failed? Like the people who
      came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
      and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
      I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
      but just coming to the end of his triumph.
      — Jack Gilbert, Failing and Flying

      We all have our seasons of triumph and tragedy, hope and despair, but we tend to dwell on the end of things too much instead of celebrating all that was when we never thought we’d touch the ground. In a lifetime we repeatedly rise from the ashes of who we once were to fly again. Icarus, like Sisyphus, is seen as a tragic figure in mythology. And yet he flew. Sisyphus, pushing his rock up that hill, might have caught a glimpse of Icarus from the top as he followed the rock back down to start his next defiant act.

      I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m ready to do something different. It’s a familiar feeling, having been here so many times before in my life. Some people settle into an identity and never leave it, cozy as it feels wrapped around their shoulders. Some people are nomads, shifting with the seasons, restless when change is in the air. Deep down we know who we are. In quiet moments we hear the whisper of change calling for us. No wonder so many reach for distraction rather than face the plunge into the unforgiving sea—the unknown next.

      No, we are not gods, and sometimes our audacity is punished by fate. Still, we must rise to meet the season when life brings change. For life is nothing but change, and we may dare the gods again with our boldness.

    • Developing a Voice

      “The voice which a poet forms is not any more something that a poet creates than it is something, over the years, that creates the poet. Throughout my life, unquestionably, I have made decisions one way or the other based on the influence of this inner voice—this authority with which I most intensely and willingly live.” —Mary Oliver, The Poet’s Voice

      Writing a blog is not the same as writing a novel, but it’s writing just the same. And as such, it ought to get one’s best effort. For otherwise, why do it at all? Isn’t life already too full of half-hearted pursuits? We can’t quiet-quit on our personal pursuits too and hope to have any reason to carry on in this world. We must do our best with the time and talent we have in the moment and allow it to carry us to the divine.

      Whatever the world thinks about blogging doesn’t matter a lick to me. I write to develop my voice, and once developed, refine it over and over again until it flows out of me like a Boston accent in unguarded moments. When I ask myself why I begin each day this way instead of simply taking a walk with the dog like a normal person, it often comes down to knowing I have something to say and finding a way to express it consistently, if not always eloquently.

      But what do we then do with a voice, once developed? Write more blog posts? Make the shift to long form essays and Substack? Or something <gasp> more? We can’t very well stuff our voice into the back row of the choir with the mimers, can we? We must sing our verse with passion and the skill honed through those ten thousand hours of chipping away at the marble. What emerges may just be magical. But magic doesn’t just appear out of thin air, it only seems that way to the casual observer.

      An acquaintance of mine wrote a few novels and published them as e-books just to give his children an example of doing what he said he was going to do. He’s also an active and talented podcaster with a silky smooth voice and the insightful questions that betray active intelligence. His voice may have been there all along but the full package took time and effort to develop. Whatever his motive for writing the novels and doing the podcast, the point is that he’s doing it. And so are we, at least if we have the inclination to see what emerges from that once quiet voice whispering to us in the back row.