Alexandersmap

    Category: Personal Growth

    • To Learn and Grow and Discover

      “There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.” ― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

      We have an opportunity to learn and grow and discover until our very last days. On the other hand, we might consign ourselves to the corner of closed up people waiting to die. What kind of life is that? Life isn’t easy, but why turn off the lights years before last call?

      Lifelong learning is well beyond our formal education. I actively rebelled against a good chunk of that formal education, by some miracle earning both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree. Admittedly, I might have gone further along the arc of human potential if I’d just followed that formal education a bit more stringently. Maybe I’d have gone to Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard. But that wasn’t meant to be my arc. Maybe it wasn’t yours either. Each of us runs the race of maximizing our personal potential at our own pace.

      Formal education teaches you rules others want you to live by. Those who master it early enough get a strong lead and a key position in the pack. What some of us realized in navigating that formal education is we didn’t really want to be part of the pack anyway. Sometimes we confuse indifference for incompetence. The first time I tacked Calculus I thought I was incompetent. It turns out I just didn’t care about it enough to try. When I did care enough the experience was wholly different.

      Lifelong learning is a personal quest for understanding, but it ought to sparkle and pop and illuminate for the thrill of it all. For it is a thrill to remove the “un” from aware or familiar. It’s a thrill to master a simple phrase in a foreign language or to try to cook something that seemed outside your skillset before. That excitement can build on itself for the rest of our lives.

      Who says we have to be bored and lonely and used up at the end of our days? We get to reinvent ourselves every day, if we don’t squander the opportunity to learn and grow and discover. There’s enchantment in that moment when we finally realize what we’d been missing all this time. Who says we can’t carry that sense of enchantment to the end of our time? Sounds like a hell of a ride.

    • Seeing the World Wherever You Are

      “The wise man knows that it is better to sit on the banks of a remote mountain stream than to be emperor of the whole world.” ― Zhuang Zhou

      We anticipate what we believe we’ll find in the world, when we get out there to meet it. There’s a level of understanding that comes with experiencing first-hand the grandeur of this planet. We humans have our quietly persistent bucket lists that range from Paris to Machu Picchu to the Grand Canyon to the Appalachian Trail. We hear that siren question us: When will we listen and finally go?

      I may sound like a one-trick pony at times, writing about such things as wanderlust and the urgency of now. But I’m just as content walking in an old forest nearby, walking across landscapes that have changed or stubbornly remained the same with the history of this continent. There is an entire world to see within throwing distance of wherever we are at this moment.

      Restlessness may be the soul telling us we haven’t arrived quite yet. Then again, it may mean that we haven’t seen what is right in front of us yet. To fully savor life we must learn to pause and see the richness of the world wherever we are. That doesn’t mean we’ve arrived where we are meant to go, but we’ll never fully immerse ourselves in this business of living if we are constantly planning our escape.

      That doesn’t mean we ought to wrap ourselves in a blanket of comfortably familiar routine. Life demands that we go out and meet it, comfort be damned. But let’s not rush past every mountain stream on our climb to the pinnacle. If hiking teaches us anything, it’s that the highlight real isn’t always the summit, but what we’ve encountered along the way.

      Life isn’t that highlight real of places we’ve been, but the person we became in each step. The world is out there, but also right here. Waiting for us to see it. Our world is this next step.

    • No Regrets

      The Regret Minimization Framework is simple.
      The goal is to minimize the number of regrets in life.
      So when faced with a difficult decision:
      (1) Project yourself forward into the future.
      (2) Look back on the decision.
      (3) Ask “Will I regret not doing this?”
      (4) Act accordingly.
      — @SahilBloom

      This Regret Minimization Framework business seems a bit hokey, doesn’t it? Even when you watch the incredible Jeff Bezos video where he admits to being a bit of a nerd with the name. But when you watch it through the lens of perspective in who Bezos has become, and what has become of Amazon, well, it seems less hokey.

      Which brings us back to the question: what will you regret not doing today? Will that spur you to action or will you punt it to tomorrow with some story that you’ll really do it then? Isn’t it better to punt the safe route to the future, and tell ourselves that we can always go back to it if these things we’d regret not doing don’t work out?

      Choose the path of no regrets.

    • Coming to Our Senses

      “Slow down and taste and smell and hear, and let your senses come alive. If you want a royal road to mysticism, sit down quietly and listen to all the sounds around you. You do not focus on any one sound; you try to hear them all. Oh, you’ll see the miracles that happen to you when your senses come unclogged.” — Anthony de Mello, Awareness

      The world wants us to focus on it. It calls to us constantly. Sure, those notifications on our phones and smart watches and other electronics are designed to capture our attention. Our to-do lists grow relentlessly longer. The demand for our attention has never been greater.

      There’s nothing wrong with letting it all drift away.

      Unclogging our senses brings us to them. Focus intently on a task at hand, or nothing at all. Recognize what matters when we get out and listen to nature, or our own voice. Walking is the great sifter of souls, shaking the nagging little things away. Why don’t we walk more?

      We think we’re too busy.

      We have so much noise in our lives that we don’t hear our own voice. We must sift it all away and find what really speaks to us. What is a better use of our time than listening to our own calling and taking meaningful action towards change? We can’t set our compass if we don’t step out into the world and find out where we are right now.

    • The “What’s Our Fire” Exam

      “Proper examination should ruin the life that you’re currently living. It should cause you to leave relationships. It should cause you to reestablish boundaries with family members and with colleagues. It should cause you to quit your job.” — @naval

      We march through our day-to-day life without serious thought about the big picture. What really matters to us, and are we moving towards that? Sometimes examination tells us we’re on the right track, sometimes we find more smoke than fire. But we ought to sort out what’s going on either way.

      Examination doesn’t invite trouble, it offers a lifeline. We get in the habit of saying things that won’t rock the boat. I’d suggest that the boat ought to be rocked now and then. There’s nothing wrong with a spring cleaning for the soul. Purge all those pent-up resentments and simmering anger and give them air to breath. They’ll either ignite into a bonfire or smother for lack of fuel. But we can’t just live every day ignoring the growing inferno without being burned alive from the inside-out.

      Socrates famously said that “The unexamined life is not worth living”. Are we meant to be a torch or merely kindling for someone else’s dreams? Think of the things that we accept in our life that are frivolous and inconsequential on the surface, and worse, distract us from the things that might be life-changing given the chance. The thing that makes Naval’s statement incendiary is that we may find we’ve just been kindling all along. Isn’t it fair to ask, what is our fire, anyway?

    • Chickadee Advice

      In the golden hour before the dawn the black-capped chickadees talked amongst themselves, adding more and more high-pitched “dee-dee-dee’s” to their song the closer I walk to them. I’m the intruding loner early in the morning and this is their warning to each other. I may live here, but this isn’t my backyard—it’s always belonged to the birds since the time of dinosaurs. I’m just the latest affront to their ritual. Knowing my place, I behave and sit still to take stock of the waking world around me, assessing the frenzied week and contemplating the week ahead. A bit of stillness listening to chickadees is welcome.

      We choose what to pay attention to. Away from the din of urgency and outrage we might hear our own voice. We choose how we’ll react to whatever happens in our days. Each quiet morning offers a sabbatical of sorts. We need a bit of stillness now and then. A measure of calm between our storms to set the sails for what comes next. In stillness we decide what to do and be next.

      In the hushed quiet hour before the sunrise, those dee-dee-dee’s say something entirely different to us humans, if we’ll listen carefully to the call we’ll hear our own voice: Decide what you’ll be, be, be! Go on and see, see, see!

    • The Meaningful Routine

      Routine is yet another English word with a couple of meanings. It can work in your favor, a ritual of habits that get you through your day in productive fashion. And it can be used to evoke the commonplace (“Yet another routine day”). As with words like habits and ritual and discipline, your routine is what you make of it. Surely there are a whole lot of self-help gurus who love to dole out healthy portions of advice on routine. But getting beyond the transformational power of routine as a magical shortcut to all of your dreams (ack), what is it to you and me?

      “Perfection is a theory. You cannot be a perfect human being, perfect artist. You cannot be a perfect husband, you cannot be a perfect father probably and probably I am not. But go through your daily routine with hope you will be a little better in all respects, and do something meaningful” — Mikhail Baryshnikov

      I like Baryshnikov’s take on routine. Let’s not make more of it than we should, but recognize that the things we do daily matter in bringing us to somewhere more meaningful than where we began the day. Each day is another step towards better. Each step is part of our routine. Simple, right?

      Routine is on my mind yet again, because some of mine are working really well, but others aren’t getting established to the level that they must. A bit more emphasis on fitness would be beneficial, but it gets lost in the shuffle. Writing the blog is a cornerstone activity, but writing that potentially great novel is more sporadic. If we are what we repeatedly do, then it follows that we won’t become what we consistently aren’t doing.

      All this speaks to the need to assess our routines and make changes to reflect that new compass heading we want to follow. Without getting all self-helpy, routines are both our greatest ally and our greatest enemy. That makes what we do with our routine… meaningful.

    • 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.