Alexandersmap

    Category: Personal Growth

    • Make the Ordinary Come Alive

      Do not ask your children
      to strive for extraordinary lives.
      Such striving may seem admirable,
      but it is the way of foolishness.
      Help them instead to find the wonder
      and the marvel of an ordinary life.
      Show them the joy of tasting
      tomatoes, apples and pears.
      Show them how to cry
      when pets and people die.
      Show them the infinite pleasure
      in the touch of a hand.
      And make the ordinary come alive for them.
      The extraordinary will take care of itself.
      William Martin, Do not ask your children to strive

      Sleet and freezing rain tap against the windows. It’s not a day to be outside in the elements, and yet I consider the consequences of a walk. We take the world as it comes to us, make of it what we can, celebrate the ordinary and find the magic where we may.

      Celebrating ordinary isn’t what the world highlights. Everyone is hyper-focused on placing themselves in the most extraordinary places, doing the most extraordinary things, living their “best life” (whatever that means when you stop to think about it). Perhaps our focus should be on the moment at hand, wherever we might be.

      I celebrate waking up this morning, hearing that tap, tap, tap of the rain and sleet and the roof over my head that makes it all seem so far away. I celebrate the conversations I’ve had with those I love, listening to how their day went, and celebrating with them the moments that made their ordinary more alive. I celebrate the quiet in an often chaotic world, removing myself from the noise but listening for the voice of those in need.

      Life is infinite pleasure when you focus on the small joys. Life is more realized when we wrestle with our pain and loss and setbacks. Each moment informs, when we are taught to see. Learning to savor our ordinary vitality is the path to a magical life. A life worthy of our short dose of days.

    • Strategic, Interested Experiencing

      “When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life. And when people start believing in progress—in the idea that history is headed toward an ever more perfect future—they feel far more acutely the pain of their own little lifespan, which condemns them to missing out on almost all of that future. And so they try to quell their anxieties by cramming their lives with experience.” — Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

      Burkeman’s statement isn’t something you just fly by without contemplation. I have people in my life who would be indignant about the very idea of there being no afterlife. You might say I’m more open to the concept. But no matter what your belief about what happens next, most would agree in the concept of the infinite unknown. It was here before we were conceived and began our march through borrowed time, and it will envelope us again sooner than we’re comfortable with thinking about. Really, it’s all around us, we’re just stubbornly alive beings bumping up against infinity every day until we rejoin it. Giddy-Up.

      We get busy in life, marching through our days and obligations. I was just thinking to myself that I’m a bit short on micro-adventures lately. Blame it on my day job running parallel to this blog. I have a few friends that question my sanity for trading so many of my four thousand weeks for a career. But life is more than chasing waterfalls and sunsets. You’ve got to make something of your time, don’t you? Or do you need to do something in your time? Can you do both? Can we really have it all?

      Burkeman recommends “strategic underachievement”, which is simply “nominating in advance whole areas of life in which you won’t expect excellence of yourself” to mitigate the underlying stress of living for both commitments and experience. Focus on what you want to excel in, and gently put the rest aside on the priority list—placing the not-so-important stuff into tomorrow is a gentle way of punting what doesn’t really matter in this brash act of living life on our own terms.

      “Tomorrow is for the lazy mind, the sluggish mind, the mind that is not interested” — Jiddu Krishnamurti

      The answer, I believe, is to focus on the things that make you feel most alive, things that put you right in the mix of a fulfilling, satisfying life. That might be a sunset in the tropics or washing the dishes with your favorite song playing louder than it should. Embracing the mundane and the remarkable as it comes, but prioritizing that which places you squarely where you might maximize these experiences. We ought to decide what we want to savor most, and what to let fall away.

      Let’s face it, passively waiting for life experiences to come your way leads to a whole lot of waiting. Strategic underachievement in one area of your life means you’ve got to proactively work to strategically overachieve in other areas. Be interested in this business of living! Get up off your passive expectations about living and go out and meet the things you most want to achieve, be and do in this short life. Not so much “cramming experience”, but rather, strategic, and interested, experiencing. Wherever we might be.

    • Be Yourself

      To be nobody but
      yourself in a world
      which is doing its best day and night to make you like
      everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
      which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
      ― e e cummings

      “Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.”
      ― e e cummings

      Delighting in a blizzard, I forgo the endless news telling you what’s right in front of you and instead read poetry and sip espresso. Were the snow deeper I might slip on the snowshoes and fly. Give it time, I think, and it will catch up to where my dreams are. Who doesn’t become a child again when hunkered down in a snowstorm?

      There’s a spirit in a blizzard that calls me outside. Swirling snow globe bliss, shaken again and again until it spins madly about. The landscape is cloaked and the familiar appears foreign. I suppose it’s the adventure of being immersed in a storm that draws me outside, or maybe it’s the thought of doing what most people would tell me not to do. A blizzard is a rebellion against the norm. It turns our expectations upside down and does its own thing, and I find it reassuring and a bit thrilling.

      “The snow doesn’t give a soft white damn whom it touches.” — e e cummings

      The ego is the enemy, the Stoics and Ryan Holiday would suggest, and this week my ego experienced a generous portion of highs and a healthy dose of lows. I put it all aside and focus on who I’d like to be instead. There’s no use living your life for the approval of others, for they only see the world through their own filter. You’ve got to be yourself, and find out who you are with every new experience, every new thrill and setback and odd twist of fate.

      The wind picks up, and billions of snowflakes surf the breeze to beach themselves where they may, transforming the landscape in their huddled masses. Packed in together in swirling madness, most land where the wind takes them. But the funny part of a blizzard is that where the snow lands isn’t always where it might stay. The wind can easily lift snow up again, to land in an entirely different place.

      The world is similarly mad. The masses land where they’re carried by the wind currents of place and expectation and obligation. Yet we might still surf the breeze and find our own landing place. Should we choose to get out there and fly.

    • Stop Gulping Life Like a Power Lunch and Savor It

      “What else is going on right this minute while ground water creeps under my feet? The galaxy is careening in a slow, muffled widening. If a million solar systems are born every hour, then surely hundreds burst into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow. The sun’s surface is now exploding; other stars implode and vanish, heavy and black, out of sight. Meteorites are arcing to earth invisibly all day long. On the planet the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades. Somewhere, someone under full sail is becalmed, in the horse latitudes, in the doldrums; in the northland, a trapper is maddened, crazed, by the eerie scent of the chinook, the sweater, a wind that can melt two feet of snow in a day. The pampero blows, and the tramontane, and the Boro, sirocco, levanter, mistral. Lick a finger: feel the now.” — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

      The universe swirls about madly all around us, and we, living in our small circle of sensory awareness, trust in it blindly. When you feel the breeze on your skin, do you wonder where it’s calling to you from? Do you ever look up at the stars and wonder at the infinity in between each? So many feel trapped in their human construct, as if any of our petty human thoughts matters to the universe. What is a construct but a story we tell ourselves? A fabrication of the moment?

      Our awareness of this moment is a celebration of being alive. If that sounds rather New Age crazy, well, I get that. That’s the frenzied mind talking, the part of us that thinks we don’t have time for such mad thoughts. We have things to do, places to be, ideas to bring to the table, transactions to make… Sure. But what else do we have but this instant with infinity lurking all around us?

      So why then do we grind away in jobs, sheltered from the elements, sipping coffee to power through another day? Why do anything disciplined and proactive at all when the universe stares back with blank ambivalence? Because our small circle reverberates. We touch others through our deliberate engagement with the world. Steve Jobs might have thought he was putting a dent in the universe, but really it was a ripple through humanity. Our ripple might not change an industry, but it can reverberate in the now. We’re here to be in the mix: a part of each other’s lives as we each sort out the implications of all that swirls around us.

      Be who you are. Become who you might be. But maybe just savor a bit more. Why do we gulp life down like a power lunch? Pause between the big gulps of living and taste the moment. Feel the now.

    • Dancing with the Gloriously Possible

      “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible—the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.” — Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

      Every now and then you read a book that becomes an instant frame of reference for how you see the world and your place in it for the rest of your days. Walden, Awareness, Meditations, and Atomic Habits are some of the books that changed me profoundly. I can comfortably place Four Thousand Weeks on that short list. This is a mesmerizingly insightful look at the fragile dance we’re all in the middle of, and how we think and react to our realization that life is impossibly short. It reinforces many of the things I’ve written about in this blog, and turned a few working theories upside down and dumped them on the scrapheap. It’s a book I’ll be processing for awhile.

      “Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life... what we think of as “distractions” aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.“

      Confronting our limitation, and how we process that by either living in the moment or distracting ourselves with ritual, busyness, by deferring to the future (all the way to “afterlife”) or skimming along in the shallow pond of the unimportant are all very human reactions to figuring out what the hell to do with this short time before we rejoin infinity. Heady stuff, stuff that demands contemplation. But it can be overwhelming to think about such things. Who wants to be the Debbie Downer in their own life party?

      Burkeman points to the possibility of accepting life for the brief dance it is so you can focus on what you can and cannot achieve. Decide what you’ll focus on, and importantly, what you’ll let fall away. We can’t excel in everything, so why burden ourselves with those things on our to-do list? We know what’s most important already. Be honest with yourself about what is going to fall off and celebrate the unburdening of releasing it for our essential contribution.

      All those books listed above, in one way or another all come down to the idea of making the most of our short time. Since we all know the ship is sinking from the moment we reach awareness, shouldn’t we be conscious about how we react to it? Isn’t it liberating, in a way, to release the burden of the shortness of time and seize this moment? Think about the Titanic in her last moments —would you rather be in the band playing tunes to the end or the fool who jumps into the icy water screaming in denial to the last? Even the people who made it to the life boats gained but a short time more. I’d like to think they used it well.

      And so should we! Since we all meet our fate in the end, shouldn’t we make the most of our brief lives? What will you do with this focused time?

    • Living Like Sidney Poitier

      I had no way of knowing that there was madness in what I was trying to do.” — Sidney Poitier

      That quote was from an interview that Sidney Poitier did with Lesley Stahl in 2013 that was broadcast a day or so after his passing last week. He reveals the bold, you might say reckless, leap into acting for a man with a strong Bahamian accent who couldn’t read at the time. It would telegraph the boldness and courage with which he would live his life and manage his career.

      I didn’t want to let too much time pass between the passing of Sidney Poitier and my writing about him. He was a favorite actor, not because I’ve seen every movie that he’s done (I’ve only seen three) or because I was star struck by his screen presence, but because of the elegant, dignified way that he lived his life. There’s a lesson there for all of us.

      “I did not go into the film business to be symbolized as someone else’s vision of me. If the screen does not make room for me in the structure of their screenplay, I’d step back. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it… I live by a certain code. I have to have a certain amount of decency in my behavior or pattern. I have to have that.”

      At the end of the interview, Lesley Stahl was asking Poitier about a book he’d just written. His words were equally revealing about how he identified himself. As someone who chips away at this writing thing, I found his words compelling and relatable:

      Poitier: “I was not intending to make an impression. I was finding release for myself within myself. I was looking for who I am at this point in my life.”
      Stahl: “Did you find out?”
      Poitier: “Somewhat, yeah.”
      Stahl: “Who are you?“
      Poitier: “I’m a good person”

      During this interview he reminded me, in his quietly elegant way, of my favorite Navy pilot, my step-father who passed away last year. Maybe that’s why I found him such a compelling guy. I think it was more a passing similarity based on the interview. More to the point, it came down to his decision to live his life by a code of honor, similar to what a Navy pilot might have, and the way that he exemplified it to the end.

      Shouldn’t we all aspire to live our lives in this way?

    • Silent Companions in the Wind

      Look at the flowers, so faithful to what is earthly,
      to whom we lend fate from the very border of fate.
      And if they are sad about how they must wither and die,
      perhaps it is our vocation to be their regret.

      All Things want to fly. Only we are weighed down by desire,
      caught in ourselves and enthralled with our heaviness.
      Oh what consuming, negative teachers we are
      for them, while eternal childhood fills them with grace.

      If someone were to fall into intimate slumber, and slept
      deeply with Things—: how easily he would come
      to a different day, out of the mutual depth.

      Or perhaps he would stay there; and they would blossom and
      praise
      their newest convert, who now is like one of them,
      all those silent companions in the wind of the meadows.
      — Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 14

      I caught glimpses of the sunrise, spectacular and flamboyant, dancing with clouds and still water, on the train from Boston to New York. I lamented the missed opportunity for an Instagram-worthy photo while stifling the urge to pull out my camera phone to give it an attempt. No picture from an iPhone through dirty chatter-proof glass flying across the landscape at 50 miles per hour was going to capture the magic of the moment. So I let it pass, like so many moments, into memory.

      I don’t come often enough to Rilke, who spun his own magic a century ago. I may visit with him more often this year, hopefully not with the overindulgence I’ve displayed with Mary Oliver poems, but… enough. This is a year for magic and becoming reacquainted with the world. For venturing forth and rekindling our eternal childhood.

      We all want to fly. What holds us back but fear and heaviness? Shouldn’t we reach for the sky and dance with our silent companions in the wind? Fragility doesn’t stop nature, though everything has its time. Knowing this, but choosing not to be paralyzed by it, shouldn’t we all climb out of this mutual depth and make these different days?

    • The Forest Knows

      Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
      Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
      And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
      Must ask permission to know it and be known.
      The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
      I have made this place around you.
      If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
      No two trees are the same to Raven.
      No two branches are the same to Wren.
      If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
      You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
      Where you are. You must let it find you.
      — David Wagoner, Lost

      Walk out into the woods in silence, listening to the trees around you, and you’ll know the truth. Climb up high into the mountains, well above the trees, and hear the whisper in the wind. You’ll hear it up there too. Sail out beyond the sight of land, out where the swells make you feel small and inadequate. Hear the swish of water under the hull, the waves curl and splash away in salty celebration as you see your place in this world. The answers are out there, waiting for you to listen.

      We surround ourselves with the buzz of distraction, the white noise of modern life, to avoid hearing the silent call that urges us to follow. It’s a tempting mistress, this Siren, and drives so many to the rocks of conformity. Fall in line! Do your job! Stay on point! Bide your time!

      Time is irrelevant in the universe. Trees and mountains and the sea don’t mark time, they dance with infinity. Don’t you think, should we be so bold, that we should too?

    • To Be a Philosopher

      “You must be one man, either good or bad. You must cultivate either your own ruling faculty or externals, and apply yourself either to things within or without you; that is, be either a philosopher, or one of the vulgar.” — Epictetus, The Enchiridion

      Do you ever wonder why the Stoics are more popular than ever? Why would Epictetus, who died in 135 A.D. be relevant today? Why would Marcus Aurelius, who died in 180 A.D. be so revered? Or Seneca, who died in 65 A.D.? I believe it comes down to a few key reasons: First and foremost, they wrote from a very human perspective that is still relatable no matter what millennium you’re passing your time in. Second; if it weren’t relevant it would have long ago been vanquished to the trash heap like the lesser work of millions before and after them. And finally, you might also say they gain a lot of momentum as the great men and women who followed them referred to them for wisdom and inspiration. And if it worked for them, why not us?

      On our journey from the vulgar, callow juvenile inside each of us to the refined, philosophical sage we may wish to become, we learn to cultivate discipline. Discipline draws us deeper into our true selves, structures our lives in such a way that we might accomplish a few things and bring us closer to becoming who we want to be. To stop looking from one shiny object to the next and focus on what means the most, now, and when we reach that stepping stone find the next.

      Will our own work become timeless, or vanquished with the lesser work of millions? We’re dealt an unfair hand trying to measure up with the greatest thinkers of the past. That’s not stoicism, that’s upward comparison. Comparing yourself to others leads to unfocused misery. It’s better to compare yourself with the person you used to be instead. Stoicism is a quest to become the best person you can be in your short time on earth. Ultimately everything we do shows the way for those who follow us. Just as those great Stoics did. If it’s transcendently great it might become timeless. But it’s not for us to decide such things.

      Our only purpose is to maximize our potential in the time we’re given. To cultivate our own ruling faculty and apply ourselves to becoming what we might. While we may.

    • The Incremental Path

      What might we accomplish in our brief time here should we apply ourselves towards it? Is accomplishing itself a worthy pursuit, or is experiencing the better path to walk down? I believe in fully experiencing life, but without setting a course and working diligently towards a calling who are we but sheep waiting to be sheared?

      I wrote about this of reaching for excellence recently, and perhaps write about it too frequently. But a blog is a sorting place of ideas and observations, shared experiences and insights. Since that post, I’ve added some additional habits to the daily accountability list in my pursuit of my own personal brand of Arete. I’m incrementally further along in that time, yet the path to excellence is long. Who says how far down the path I can reach? Does it doesn’t matter as long as we’re progressing down the one that matters most to us?

      Ars longa, vita brevis (Art is long, life is short)

      Don’t look now, but we’re already 2.5% through the year. What was it we wrote down as our resolution for the year? How’s that going for you? Isn’t it fair to ask? Creating that cadence of accountability is the only way to stay on the path. There are few big leaps forward on the journey to excellence, the path is incremental. And what we do next matters more than what we did yesterday.

      Looking back on what I’d set as milestones for this year, I can see that the milestones have mattered in my daily action. Maybe you don’t always feel like brushing your teeth but chances are you do it every day anyway. We know what matters most, but most beat themselves up if they break a streak of working out or don’t lose ten pounds in the first week of a diet. Would you stop brushing your teeth if you missed a day? No! You’d brush them as soon as you got up the next morning! Similarly, getting back on track is all that matters on this incremental path to excellence.

      Even the masters fall short of excellence. Who are we to expect it of ourselves? But when you turn around and see how far you’ve come, you recognize that the path takes you so much further than you’d have come otherwise. And the experiences you have along the way are richer for the pursuit.