Alexandersmap

    Category: Personal Growth

    • Feed the Spark

      “Again, we are daily forced to choose between depression and anxiety. Depression results from the wounding of the individuation imperative; anxiety results from moving forward into the unknown. That path of anxiety is necessary because therein lies the hope of the person to more nearly become an individual. My analyst once said to me, “You must make your fears your agenda.” When we do take on that agenda, for all the anxiety engendered, we feel better because we know we are living in ‘bonne foi’ [good faith] with ourselves. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the perception that some things are more important to us than what we fear.” ― James Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places

      James Hollis challenges the stories we tell ourselves to stay on course. We tell ourselves to stick with the plan, to not deviate into dalliances of adventure and irresponsibility, to do what must be done… but is that living in good faith—bonne foi—with our hopes and dreams? What matters most to us anyway?

      The thing is, we each have the promises we make to ourselves about what we’ll do when we get past whatever responsibility has a hold of us at the present moment. Pretty stories about career path and mortgages and obligations. Les mensonges que nous nous disons de continuer.

      We do a disservice to ourselves by limiting ourselves to what feels comfortable. We know we ought to do more and yet hold ourselves back for reasons that feel just real enough in the moment to justify the safe route. We slowly extinguish our life force for the mundane and routine. What a depressing agenda that is.

      Alternatively, we might choose to feed the spark:

      You, sent out beyond your recall,
      go to the limits of your longing.
      Embody me.
      Flare up like a flame
      and make big shadows I can move in.
      — Rainer Maria Rilke, Go to the Limits of Your Longing

      There’s no time to waste, we must be the arsonist with the deadwood in our soul. We must feel the fear of the unknown and do it anyway. We must embrace the imperative to reach our potential while there’s still time. Some things are more important than what we fear.

    • Wanting Wild

      “I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It’s impossible not to remember wild and want it back.” — Mary Oliver, Green, Green is My Sister’s House

      If we’re lucky, we never really grow up, we just get a bit more creative with our diversions. I used to crave responsibility, now I try to build enough flexibility in my schedule to chase waterfalls. Intense curiosity about the world around us is the key. Life is a quest, after all, adulting be damned. What are we wild things to do but seek adventure where we might find it?

      “In conclusion, it appears that nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in distant countries.” ― Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle

      Adventure is easier when you’re on the road. You see things all the time that stir your soul. It’s much harder when you’re working in an office or sheltered in place at home. If we don’t venture out into the world we’ll never find out what we’ve been missing. Charles Darwin found adventure on the other side of the world, Henry David Thoreau found it a short walk from his bed. Adventure isn’t about how far you go, it’s about getting out of your own shell. What is a shell but a prison of our own making?

      Wild is always stirring about inside of us. We must want it back in our lives enough to seek it. The world will always ask for everything we’ve got. We ought to be the wild thing that rebels against that and turns towards adventure instead.

    • To Feel, and Dream, and Go

      “Books and books and books—some five hundred volumes in all. Books of the sea and books of the land, some of them streaked with salt, collected with love and care over more than twenty-five years.
      Melville, Conrad, London, Stevenson; Gauguin and Loti and Rupert Brooke; Lubbock, Masefield, De Hartog—Slocum and Rockwell Kent; Trelawny and Cook and Bligh; Chapelle and Underhill—Nansen, Frobisher, Villiers and Scott and Louis Becke. Homer, Gerbault, and Tompkins. Hundreds more: all cast in a common mold—blessed with the genius that makes men feel, and dream, and go.
      And a special section of books that deal with the greatest frontier of all—the relationship between men: Marx and Whitman, Thoreau and Henry George, Victor Hugo, Thomas Paine and Jefferson. Lincoln and Emerson, Rousseau, Voltaire and Upton Sinclair, Shaw. Byron, Mark Twain, Roosevelt, Garrison, Jack London again and Shakespeare.”       — Sterling Hayden, Wanderer

      Well, there’s a traveler’s reading list for you. Hayden misses some he ought to have included, Beryl Markham comes to mind, but on the whole he’d built a library of transformation. And so must we. What carries your imagination to new places? What moves you?

      Hayden might have loved Mary Oliver poems. The Summer Day, in which she famously prods us to ask ourselves: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” was published just four years after Hayden passed away, so it’s not one he would have read. But they surely spoke the same language. The feelers, dreams and goers instinctively know when they encounter a kindred spirit.

      And what of us, friend? What are our libraries whispering? Our challenge is to do more than feel and dream. Our challenge is to go. Books stir the imagination and offer a map. It’s up to us to learn what our compass is telling us and chart a course. It’s up to us to weigh anchor and act on our dreams.

    • A Commitment to Transformation

      “A person susceptible to “wanderlust” is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.” ― Pico Iyer

      As I write this a cardinal is singing in the window, driving the cat a bit insane, and distracting me with questions: “What are you doing in your nest? Shouldn’t you be flying?”

      “I’m busy leaving breadcrumbs”, I silently answer the cardinal. And indeed I am. For every post is a mark for where I’ve been at any given moment. A public journal of sorts, documenting what I’m reading, where I’m visiting, who I’m learning from, what I’ve stumbled upon that made my jaw drop.

      You can’t document what you haven’t experienced. Imagination is a lovely thing, and brings so much to the world of humans (Refer to da Vinci’s Saper Vedere), but we’re also students on a quest to learn as much as we can about this life we’re doomed to leave too soon. Experiencing requires getting out in the world and finding it, not just living through someone else’s YouTube or InstaGram feed.

      Those different perspectives we encounter are building blocks that in turn carry us somewhere even richer, snowballing experiences into transformation. Who has gone anywhere in this world and returned the same person? And what is the purpose of living but growth?

      The thing about breadcrumbs is they don’t stick around forever. My trail of transformation is a click away from disappearing forever, sort of like us but with bigger data centers. That’s the way of the world, we’re all just fleeting memories in some future person’s mind. But who says we can’t fly in our time? Who says we can’t offer a small ripple felt imperceptibly on a far shore?

    • Struggle Informs

      “Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.” — Flannery O’Connor

      This is the most vivid description of ego as our enemy that I’ve come across. Whatever your feelings on God, put that aside for a moment and recognize the prayer for what it is—a cry to get out of our own way to do what we know we’re here to do. For there’s nothing more universal than the internal struggle of ego casting a shadow on our true mission.

      Struggle informs. It teaches us where our gaps are. Gaps in knowledge or skill or physical strength. Learning where our gaps are offers us an opportunity to bridge it with effort and help. Alternatively, we might turn from the gap thinking it a chasm we cannot cross. We all make choices on what we might grow into and what we let die. When that dying is a piece of us it feels a bit more personal, doesn’t it?

      And yet we must choose to move forward in our lives. We must decide what to be and go be it. That may sound smug and simplistic on the surface, especially when we so clearly see the gaps and view it as a chasm. But the ask isn’t to take a flying leap, but to begin closing that gap, one step at a time. To gently push ourselves out of the way, just a little, to see what we might become over time, should we take another step after this one.

      What casts a greater shadow over our potential than our own ego? We must learn to get out of our own way. For there’s so much more beyond our current position. Can’t you just see it?

    • Consider Life an Adventure

      “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” ― G.K. Chesterton

      Admittedly, I’m tired writing this. Two weeks of travel and burning the candle at both ends and I’m worn out. But that’s why we dance with coffee, isn’t it? To press ahead just a bit further.

      The thing is, we’ve had a couple of years to reset. We all did the best we could under the circumstances. Getting back to whatever this normal is gives us a chance to stretch our imagination more. To find new adventures just around the corner, and to have the gumption to venture much farther. Not to fill our InstaGram feed or gain subscribers, but to shake loose of the cobwebs of the commonplace and experience the world.

      “Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.” — Henry David Thoreau

      Who ever looks back with pride on a moment when you decided to sleep in instead of dancing with adventure? We ought to consider life an adventure and do more with that notion. We ought to rise and seek more from our days, for we only have so many to work with. We’ve spent time with people on their deathbed who literally can’t go outside to see the stars, who are we to complain about stepping out into the world? Dance with the gift of freedom. Be part of something livelier.

      “Who can guess the luna’s sadness who lives so briefly? Who can guess the impatience of stone longing to be ground down, to be part again of something livelier? Who can imagine in what heaviness the rivers remember their original clarity?
      Strange questions, yet I have spent worthwhile time with them. And I suggest them to you also, that your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life be richer than it is, that you bow to the earth as you feel how it actually is, that we—so clever, and ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained— are only one design of the moving, the vivacious many.”       — Mary Oliver, The Moth, The Mountains, The Rivers

      We all have our shackles of responsibility and routine. We can bend our days to find adventure while still honoring our core responsibilities. And we should question our routines when they hold our rambunctious spirit in place. Consider, for a moment, that convenience is a shackle disguised as a mindset.

    • Incremental Awareness

      As the days grow longer in the Northern Hemisphere we detect the changes around us. The changes were happening anyway, but it seems to accelerate. Just this morning I watched the sun rise through a window where I haven’t seen the sun rise since last autumn. A mix of travel and weather conditions made it a complete surprise when it happened.

      And what of the changes we take ourselves through? We exercise, eat the right food, read and write every day and nothing seems to come of it. And one day we catch ourselves in surprise at who we’ve become without realizing it. Hey, that’s me! The light dawns on Marblehead, as they say in Boston when you’re the last to know. We know we’re changing, but don’t often see it in ourselves.

      Until we do.

      Why don’t we have more incremental awareness? Why don’t we see the smallest of changes in ourselves as we’re making them? Are we lacking self-awareness or are we just not giving ourselves the credit we deserve for doing the work? It’s as if we’re trained not to notice that we got up and worked out for three days in a row, we have to wait until we have washboard abs to be allowed to celebrate.

      The only way to be incrementally aware is to track ourselves. To write it down. To draw a big X through another day on the calendar (especially when you didn’t really feel like doing X that day). It’s not about the washboard abs or the number on the scale or the published novel, it’s about the process — saying we’re going to do something and following through on it. And then doing it all again tomorrow. Incremental action isn’t suddenly seeing the sunrise after your first day, it adds up over time and reveals itself slowly.

      When it will suddenly dawn on you.

    • Discipline, Daily

      Watch the man beating a rug.
      He is not mad at it.
      He wants to loosen the layers of dirt.

      Ego accumulations are not loosened with one swat.
      Continual work is necessary, disciplines.
      — Rumi

      We’re all on our journey of becoming. We’re all working to grow in our chosen work, to experience life more richly, to continually refine and reinvent ourselves, to reach our potential. But we can’t grow in a box. The journey requires some space and momentum, which necessitates cleaning out some old beliefs and habits acquired along the way. Sometimes cleaning up the old is easy because it was never really a part of our core, but sometimes the old is so embedded in who we are that we’ve got to beat it out.

      I have some old beliefs and habits I’m not particularly willing to carry around with me anymore. I don’t give them any light to grow, but ugly beliefs and bad habits don’t need a lot of light to fester. The process of clearing them out requires a lifetime of consistent effort.

      Discipline is derived from the Latin disciplina, which means “to learn”. But any dance with the dictionary will indicate that discipline also has another meaning: “to chastise or scold.” Discipline thus has both a positive and negative connotation. No wonder people shrink away from discipline! So what are we to make of it?

      We’re all works in progress. Old habits are like old friends that remind us of what we once were. Sometimes that’s a delight. But often we shake our head at who we used to be. To live in the present is to acknowledge that former self and see who we are today. Every day is a reset, a chance to move forward or to slide back. Every day we get to decide what to be and go be it.

    • Create Evidence

      “Belief in yourself is overrated. Generate evidence.” — Ryan Holiday

      What does your personal scorecard look like as we crossed off the first 100 days of 2022 earlier this week? What were your highlights? What hasn’t met your expectations when we began the year?

      Doesn’t that inform us of what needs to change immediately?

    • Developing Identity

      At what point on the line of consistent routine does a habit accelerate from a regular part of your life to a major part of your identity? Put another way, if we are what we repeatedly do, at what moment does what we do become us? It may be that moment when you can’t imagine doing anything else but this habit now and forever. But I think it’s a notch beyond that: when others see you as that character you’ve developed into and that habit is reinforced and self-perpetuates.

      Consider a friend who has only been consistently hiking for maybe ten years. Her identity developed around hiking and she’s gained hundreds of followers on her InstaGram account because people associate an activity they want to do more of with her. Or consider my bride, who has run consistently since she was a teenager. Half the town knows her as that lady that’s always out running. Heck, I sometimes think of her as that lady too. Consistent routine develops identity. Identity becomes the essence of who we are.

      But both of these women began with a first awkward step out into the unknown. Both learned what worked for them and what definitely was not going to work. The essence of who we are is derived from what is essential for us. The rest is marketing. You either inform the world of who you’ve become or wait for them to see it for themselves.

      Like a river carving its deepest channel on its truest route, what we say yes and no to as we favor our chosen path becomes the deepest part of our channel. In a river oxbows gather silt and are eventually cut off altogether in favor of the channel. Likewise, some things that were so very much a part of our identity peter out and die from lack of attention. I once fancied myself a sailor, yet I don’t currently have a boat. A friend also fancied himself a sailor and purposefully accelerated and reinforced that identity by trading up to bigger and bigger boats and forgoing career advancement for a log book full of hopes and dreams realized. Who’s the sailor?

      I’m about to click publish on this blog, as I’ve done every day for a few years running now. Does that make me a writer? The answer is what you want it to be. Decide what to be and go be it. And then inform the world (and yourself) with your consistency.