Alexandersmap

    Category: Personal Growth

    • How Was Your Experience?

      I received the same question from my dentist and my automobile service team recently—How was your experience? It turns out both left me a bit disappointed this time around, where I’d come to expect excellence. Perhaps that expectation led me there, or maybe they simply didn’t measure up to their own standards. Either way it was the same result.

      We ought to ask ourselves this question every day with an ever-higher standard for our own behavior, execution on goals, and an ever more refined philosophy for how a life should be lived. What gets measured gets managed, as Peter Drucker supposedly said. Each day offers an opportunity to ask ourselves, how’s it really going? What needs to change? How do we become a better version of ourselves than we were yesterday? It starts with the right questions and follows with an honest answer.

    • The Making of It

      “The place where you belong will not exist until you create it.” — James Baldwin

      There are days when we forget that we are the actors in our own play. It feels sometimes like the world is imposing itself on us (surely it will), yet we still have a verse. We see that those who boldly push their own will on the world often find themselves further along than those who accept the impositions. The lesson for us is to know where we want to go and keep working to get there, because we’re all going somewhere anyway and we might as well make it the place we want to be.

      So it is that lately I’ve been imagining what’s next. Write the book? Buy the boat? Build the house? Or maybe forget all that and immerse myself in a Caldeirada in some sleepy seaside town in Portugal. We can’t have it all, but we may determine some small part of our future with a steady accent to that summit in our dreams. Indeed, life is what we make of it.

      To see the truth in Baldwin’s statement, we only need to look around at our present state and follow the breadcrumbs from who we once were to this place we are now. We may blame fate or the will of some higher power for dropping us where we are now, with the circle of people influencing every aspect of our lives, but deep down we know we brought ourselves here too. That’s either cause for celebration or a catalyst for massive change, but our role in our current situation is undeniable. So why not look ahead to what’s next and create the future version of us? It’s coming either way.

    • 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.

    • The Route of the Routine

      “Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.” — Pablo Picasso

      To have a plan is to have a route. A route transformed into a daily routine is what carries us from who we have been to who we aspire to become. Who we are today represents a single step on the journey, but it’s often what we fixate on the most. So it is that we get frustrated with performance standards on any given task, workout or event we’re in the middle of at the moment. We measure ourselves against there, when we are still here. Never a fair comparison.

      It’s good to focus on small wins while gently pushing to a higher standard. Yesterday was a good day of work but not a good day of working out. Today offers an opportunity to turn that around. Seeing the forest for the trees, it’s may become clear that the routine is the same, even when the steps along the route change. Just keep following that desired compass heading.

      As Picasso pointed out, the trick is to vigorously act on our goals. Otherwise they’re nothing but dreams. Daydreamers don’t get very far, do they? Once we know the route, we must get to it already.

    • 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.

    • Beyond the Same Old

      “The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it’s the same problem you had last year.” — John Foster Dulles

      I first encountered this Dulles quote 25 years ago. I know this because I wrote the date in pencil right next to it. I was a different person then in countless ways, and exactly the same in others. Some positive, transformative growth has happened in that time, and some stubborn habits that hold me back still have a hold of me even now. We all have things that carry us forward or hold us back in our lives, and mostly that’s between our ears.

      If I were to track broken promises to myself over that time, I’d see the same ones appear over and over. We can focus on such things and beat ourselves up, or celebrate the ways in which we’ve grown into a better human. If life has taught me anything, it’s to identify the positive systems, habits and routines that make us incrementally better and do more of those things. There will always be problems and challenges in our lives, the question is whether we’re just repeating ourselves or actually evolving into a person who is more adaptive, resilient and wiser than the person we were before. If so, our problems and challenges will evolve into different ones, indicating progress.

      The alternative to new and greater challenges is having the same ones. That’s as clear an indication of stagnation and being in a rut as any. When we’re in a rut we ought to climb out as soon as possible before it becomes our grave. Countless people go to their graves wishing they’d done something transformative in their lives. We should live our days with Henry David Thoreau’s warning from Walden in mind:

      “Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously course labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.” Which led to his most famous observation, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

      So what occupies us? What are our own factitious and superfluous labors distracting us from moving past the problems that have nagged us over and over again? We must live creative, bold lives that we may break from the rut altogether and transform ourselves for the better. To be successful, deep down in our own minds, is to transcend who we once were to become something greater.

      The thing is, we know all of this, and yet we still stall out here and there. Our epitaph ought to be more than “steady but unremarkable”. Progress towards remarkable is measured in the value and contribution we bring to the world; to be useful to others and ourselves, and to move that investment ever higher. What is our verse? What is our dent in the universe? What ripple will carry well after we’ve checked out? Do more of that to move beyond the same old problems.

    • The Linen of Words

      All day I work
      with the linen of words

      and the pins of punctuation
      all day I hang out
      over the desk

      grinding my teeth
      staring.
      Then I sleep.
      — Mary Oliver, Work

      Life is change, and our why pivots with it. We may channel this into creative work and find out something about ourselves in the process. One more day blessed with the opportunity to dance with our why to produce a what before we sleep.

      I track the journey from here to there and publish it free for all to see. Some days our journey takes us to faraway, sometimes the journey has us turning inward from a familiar place. We have the luxury of time some days, and the urgency of just a few minutes to spare other days. They all add up to the catalog of work published—our contribution to the Great Conversation.

      This blog post feels incomplete to me, like there’s far more to wrestle with before it’s fully fleshed out. And yet I’m about to publish it anyway. In a way that’s a good metaphor for our lives. We’re all just incomplete souls trying to reach some conclusion that makes sense before we reach ship this work and move on to the next.

      The work will end one day, but [apparently] not today. This linen of words is strung together in a streak of days; breadcrumbs of a life. Words are the glue that holds our collective history together, binding you and I together just as surely as it binds the generations before and after us. That feels more salient than just another blog post.

    • To Be Where I Have Been

      Oh, let the sun beat down upon my face
      And stars fill my dream
      I’m a traveler of both time and space
      To be where I have been
      — Led Zeppelin, Kashmir

      We walk on familiar ground most days. Even the avid travelers tend to cross their wake more often than one would expect. I’ve gone through the same security line countless times at the airport on journeys to faraway places, just as sailors note the mouth of the river as the beginning of their next passage. The destinations change, just as we do, yet that which we’ve seen before sends us off or welcomes us back.

      Each day at home is a routine of familiarity. This may be seen as reprovisioning the body and soul (and wallet) before the next voyage, or a welcome embrace back to where we feel we belong. I plot my next trip even now, yet still grow a garden. We nomads are complicated creatures.

      There are voyages to places, and voyages in our personal development. We need both to feel complete on the journey. Perhaps at our final destination we’ll finally feel satiated, but I believe we just get tired. Growth is our ongoing mission, start to finish, wherever that ends up being. We may have hopes and dreams and a clear path to take us there and still never arrive at any of it. Then again, we may just stumble upon it and realize we’ve arrived sooner than expected.