Alexandersmap

    Category: Personal Growth

    • Dancing in a State of Solitude

      “The spirit of silence must… pervade the whole of life. That is what matters most of all. It is said sometimes that solitude is the mother of results. Not solitude, but the state of solitude. So much so that we could, strictly speaking, conceive an intellectual life based on two hours’ work per day. But does anyone imagine that having set those two hours aside one may then act as if they did not exist? That would be a grave misconception. Those two hours are given to concentration, but the consecration of the whole life is none the less necessary.” — A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

      Living in a state of solitude sounds lonely, but really it’s just the opposite. Lonely is feeling apart from the world, living with a spirit of silence opens you up to the world, to be a part of it. And this is where the magic happens, or, if you will, the consecration of life. To live sacredly, fully alive, fully aware, and full of possibility. This isn’t derived from background noise and distraction, but from quieting the mind and truly seeing.

      “A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness and that to seek it is perversion”
      — John Graves

      A coworker resigned earlier this week to return to a job he’d previously left, not because the current position wasn’t lucrative and full of growth potential, but because he felt lonely. What he meant by that was he couldn’t drop by to see old industry friends every week in a route, like someone delivering milk. This is a life of the familiar, and there’s comfort in it that we can all understand. The pandemic robbed us of much of this, and even as variants spike people stubbornly hold on to interaction with others because it’s a part of their lives they don’t want to be away from any longer. Who doesn’t understand the draw of the comfortable and familiar?

      A state of solitude turns inward, not to be antisocial or reclusive, but to open up the senses to awareness. Awareness of the inner tension inside of us helps us see that battle others have inside themselves. And this awareness leads to a state of receptiveness—to take in the world as it comes to you. I’m no expert on such things, but I can see that those hours of concentration have brought me closer to it.

      “When someone is anxious about being aware all the time, you can spot the mild anxiety. They want to be awake, to find out if they’re really awake or not. That’s part of asceticism, not awareness. It sounds strange in a culture where we’ve been trained to achieve goals, to get somewhere, but in fact there’s nowhere to go because you’re there already. ” — Anthony De Mello, Awareness

      Do you want to dance in your awareness? Seek solitude, wherever you might be. Walk in the natural world. Breath deep, listen and look at the world buzzing around you, look inside, and see. And you’ll find, in the stillness of that moment, that you’re already dancing with it.

    • Now I Saunter

      “I don’t like either the word [hike] or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains – not ‘hike!’ Do you know the origin of that word saunter? It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the middle ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going they would reply, ‘A la sainte terre’, ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.” — John Muir

      I’ve been absent from the mountains for a long stretch now. A heel injury nags and before that an ankle injury right above it and really, what’s it all but excuses and reluctance to push onward through a bit of pain? I’d been saving this quote for my next saunter up the mountains—to the Holy Land—but I’m done waiting for the moment. For all my enduring love for the mountains, my pilgrimage is with life itself.

      John Muir turned the act of hiking to where it belonged; towards reverence. For who doesn’t encounter reverence deep in the mountains? And what of life? Life can be an unfair grind, filled with misery and pain and setbacks, and maybe we feel a bit of reluctance to be reverent about the slog we feel we’re on. There’s immense suffering in this world, serious challenges to our collective future, and I don’t turn a blind eye to it writing about sauntering merrily through life. But shouldn’t we meet each moment for the ripe potential it offers? Shouldn’t we seek a path that brings us to a better place?

      Once I plodded through life, grinding it out in jobs I didn’t love, invested in relationships that didn’t matter all that much in the end, wasting time on the inconsequential. Humans are very good at frivolously consuming away our time like so many empty calories, until our fingers reach the bottom of the bag and we realize we’re left with emptiness and greasy fingers. I’m not so much like that now. Now I celebrate moments. Now I saunter.

      The world continues to assault our senses. Sauntering is an embrace of the world as it is, taking it on the chin but greeting life as it comes. A move away from consumption in the present towards the mission of the future potential in all of us. Staying on the path with a spirit of aliveness despite the worst hardships life throws at us. Living with reverence for the gift of the pilgrimage.

    • What Living Ben Franklin’s Five Hour Rule Really Tells You

      Google “Ben Franklin’s five hour rule” and you’ll receive page after page of business magazine articles gushing about how you too can transform your career and life using old Ben’s technique. They spin it to current times saying Bill Gates and Elon Musk follow this rule too! Just click and read on… and you get pretty much the same paragraph from every one of them:

      “The five-hour rule is a process first implemented by Benjamin Franklin for constant and deliberate learning. It involves spending one hour a day or five hours a week learning, reflecting and experimenting.”

      I could link to one of those articles, but which one? They all use the same two vanilla sentences. No deep dive into actual Ben Franklin quotes. I’m at a point in my life where this just doesn’t hold up for me anymore. Life is deeper than a Twitter-sized rule for living.

      You know who’s not breathlessly scanning those business articles for that one key rule used by Ben Franklin? Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Because they’ve long since passed that level of reading and shallow thinking in their own lives through consistent, dedicated learning, applied personal growth habits and occasionally taking audacious risks measured against that acquired knowledge.

      And that last bit is the key. Knowing when to take the leap into the unknown isn’t just instinct, it’s detecting patterns and opportunity gleaned from multiple sources of informed learning. Put down the mobile phone and pick up a book, find a quiet corner of your hectic life, and read. Learn something new that brings you to something else new. And as you acquire that wisdom do something with it. Gates and Musk, like Franklin before them, are just people like you and me who take things to a level the rest of us aren’t prepared or willing to go to… but could.

      For the last several years I’ve read every day, sought meaningful encounters wherever I am, stretched my reading to sometimes uncomfortable places, learned a bit of another language every day and firmly established the habit of writing about it right here in this blog. I’m living that Franklin rule without calling it that. I’ve learned that life is more complicated than two sentence rules for living. But the occasional spark of applied audacity has its place too.

    • Crossing the Stream to Deeper

      “If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else….

      The way to discover a terrifying longing is to liberate yourself from the self-censoring labels you began to tell yourself over the course of your mis-education… Focus on the external objects of fascination, not on who you think you are. Find people with overlapping obsessions.

      The information universe tempts you with mildly pleasant but ultimately numbing diversions. The only way to stay fully alive is to dive down to your obsessions six fathoms deep. Down there it’s possible to make progress toward fulfilling your terrifying longing, which is the experience that produces the joy.”
      — David Brooks, “The Art of Focus”, The New York Times

      The tricky thing about discovering “primary source” material is that you’ll uncover that what you believed to be primary source references other primary sources, which infers they aren’t the primary source at all. Such is the Great Conversation, spinning through life one book, interview or article at a time. We leap from one to the other, like stones across a stream, until we reach our destination with delight (and a new stack of reading material).

      Something recently pointed me towards Cal Newport’s Deep Work, which is a how-to book on pushing the shallow work aside to get to the deep work, where we differentiate ourselves and find true meaning in our careers and lives. Newport, in turn, pointed me towards several articles and books that I hadn’t previously been aware of, and a couple that I hadn’t fully absorbed on the first go-around. I’ve pursued them all recently, all in an effort to get meaningful work done. For we all must go deeper if there’s any hope for us to contribute something meaningful. And that requires breaking the spell of distraction:

      “Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.” — Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

      Here’s the thing: In diving into all this material around deep work, I’ve questioned whether this blog is itself deep or shallow (It aims for deep, but sometimes skims a bit shallower than I’d like). But what is the purpose of the blog but to establish a daily habit of writing and finding things out—things that gradually pull me deeper? Put another way, those stones I’m hopping across in life are documented, one at a time, for anyone that wishes to follow along. But even here, we all choose our own path across that stream of life, we just happen to land on the same spot now and then.

      That terrifying longing? It’s on the other side, and the only way to reach it is to stop watching the debris float by in the stream of distraction and focus on the next landing spot, and the one after that. Our time is short, and we have so far to go. So go deeper.

    • Stop… Look Around

      “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.” – Ferris Bueller

      We charge through life honoring commitments and chasing dreams. Yet nothing is more urgent than the need to pause now and then to look around at what the world presents to you. The generations whose collective imaginations were captured by Ferris Bueller living in the moment often forget to do the same now and then, if only for a moment.

      Yesterday I managed to shoehorn in a visit to a waterfall between business travel and six meetings and conference calls. What makes the day worth living is subjective, but few argue that a little balance in our mad dash through our careers is essential to our well-being. So stop now and then to see what you’ve been missing. The work will still be there when you turn back to it. But you might look at it differently.

    • Reaching Your Creative State

      “Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the work; acquire that state of soul unburdened by desire and self-will which is the state of grace of the intellectual worker. Without that you will do nothing, at least nothing worth while.”
      – A.G. Sertillanges, O.P. The Intellectual Life

      Every day is a reinvention, a chance to be reborn into whatever you wish to become in this life. For me, this becoming is the whole point of living. But it begs the question—becoming what? Not an easy question, one most people immerse themselves in distraction to avoid answering (present company accepted). Blogging is a public sorting of this becoming bit. The messier work happens behind the scenes.

      When you have a general idea where your compass is pointing, you must put yourself in a state where you might execute on that vision for yourself. And this is where it gets tricky. All those skills you’ve learned to distract yourself from figuring out what you want to be when you grow up work equally well at keeping you from getting things done.

      “Creative people organize their lives according to repetitive, disciplined routines. They think like artists but work like accountants.” – David Brooks, “The Good Order” The New York Times

      And there lies the secret sauce to doing anything worthwhile: Repetitive, disciplined routines applied daily from now until… ad infinitum. Sertillanges calls this productive place your state of soul. A place where we can actualize the spirit of our deepest work and bring it to the world. What a gift. When you’re in this state, why would you ever want it to end?

      The trick to reaching this state of soul is hidden in plain sight: Establish routines and have the discipline to stick with them. Repeat. None of this is revelatory, what’s required is consistency of effort. So get to it. The world awaits your best work.

    • Night Dies For Day

      Day’s sweetest moments are at dawn;
      Refreshed by his long sleep, the Light
      Kisses the languid lips of Night,
      Ere she can rise and hasten on.
      All glowing from his dreamless rest
      He holds her closely to his breast,
      Warm lip to lip and limb to limb,
      Until she dies for love of him.
      – Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Dawn

      Sleeping in is relative to when you normally wake up. For me, 7 AM qualifies. I long ago stopped setting alarm clocks (except for those first flights of the day moments you can’t miss), mostly because I long ago stopped trying to burn the candle at both ends. When you go to bed at a decent hour, you wake up for the magic hours.

      This idea of sleeping in is seductive, but I know when I do it I’ll feel like I’ve missed out on something special—that lingering bliss of the world waking up around you, while you take stock of all that you’ve done with the day already. Call it satisfaction, maybe, or perhaps merely the confidence that comes with being ahead of the game.

      Then again, maybe you can call it overconfidence. Are we ever really ahead of the game? No, we do what we can to stay in the game in the best position possible. I used to wake up and check work email first thing in the morning, to be perceived as hustling because I was answering an email before 6 AM. That’s a game I don’t play now, a fool’s game of posturing and positioning. When you wake up to the world you see that we have no time for games, only living. Remember night gets her revenge on day all too soon.

      There was a time when I wouldn’t linger with a poem like Dawn. Feeling it frivolous and romantic, almost soft porn in its wordplay. Have I become frivolous and romantic? It’s not like I’m watching Hallmark movies here, just lingering in early light. The dawn brightens, and the world becomes more clear. Or maybe I just stopped looking inward enough to notice.

      All glowing from dreamless rest

    • Eudaimonia: The Act of Living Well

      There’s an ancient Greek word, frequently associated with Aristotle, called eudaimonia. Aristotle meant it as living virtuously. It’s best translated in modern English not as “happiness”, but as “flourishing” or “living well”. Let’s face it, chasing happiness is a fools game (for happiness is an evasive and subjective pursuit, and without purpose, empty), but pursuing eudaimonia—living well—is a lifestyle choice. And it begins with knowing what living well means to you.

      The spirit of eudaimonia, going back to Aristotle, is to make the most of yourself in your short time here. That making the most of yourself business is what you and I have been chasing for a long time, isn’t it? To live virtuously, to flourish in the art of living, to learn and grow and travel and build something better of yourself. To be fit and vibrant and sharp as a tack. To be articulate and passionate and the eager student in this master class of living.

      We are all in the pursuit of eudaimonia, we just don’t use that particular word to describe our objective. Maybe we should. There’s another Greek word, Arete, meaning excellence, that comes to mind. If Arete is the ultimate goal, eudaimonia is the path to get us closer to it. We may never reach the former, but we can certainly flourish and live well and strive to maximize our potential. And isn’t that the point of living in the first place?

    • Right Where You Are

      The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun
      rose from the sea,
      and there was one of it and one of me.
      – Elizabeth Bishop, Crusoe in England

      An old work acquaintance moved to the city, and walks to an embarrassment of great restaurants just down the street. I asked her about the noise and such things, being a country mouse like me. But all she talked of was the thrill of being in the heart of it. She was right where she wanted to be. And isn’t that a thrill?

      I walked the short beach twice yesterday, to see what I was missing working with my back turned to it. I feel gratitude for the beach, but mostly for the bay that opens up the sky and the universe beyond. You don’t get quite so spun up about projects when you look at salt water. And I wondered again why I don’t live in such a place as this. Do you get tired of the infinite? I should think not. But our time with the infinite will come soon enough. Now we wrestle with deadlines and commitments and trivial pursuits.

      It’s different for each of us, this right where you ought to be feeling. The question might not be where you are at all, but what you’re doing that ought to be confronted. If you feel you’re right where you want to be in your work, in your life, then the world you walk out to meet will feel right no matter where you are. And when it’s not, well, even the divine feels a bit off.

      We are where we are, there’s no getting around that. We only have this one go around before the universe moves on to those who come after us. It’s not the place so much as how you fill it that matters. Otherwise it’s just a void, isn’t it?

    • Promises to Keep, Promises Kept

      “Whose woods these are I think I know.
      His house is in the village though;
      He will not see me stopping here
      To watch his woods fill up with snow.

      My little horse must think it queer
      To stop without a farmhouse near
      Between the woods and frozen lake
      The darkest evening of the year.

      He gives his harness bells a shake
      To ask if there is some mistake.
      The only other sound’s the sweep
      Of easy wind and downy flake.

      The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
      But I have promises to keep,
      And miles to go before I sleep,
      And miles to go before I sleep.”
      — Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

      You can’t really live in New Hampshire without hearing the echo of Robert Frost in every stand of trees or old stone fence. I could drive to his old farm in fifteen minutes give or take, should I be inclined to. Some days I’m inclined to. But like so many things, not nearly enough.

      I woke up in the middle of the night with this poem running through my head. It’s been awhile since it’s lingered there, or if it had it didn’t bother to wake me from my slumber. Maybe it’s the cold days and the pleasant thought of woods silently filling with snow that seized my attention. But no, I should think it was the many promises to keep that are waking me in the middle of the night.

      That’s it: promises to keep. Big projects due this week that occupy my mind, and things left undone in my life that nag at me, so much more than the things done in my life that I don’t give myself enough credit for. It’s funny how the promises to keep are so much louder in our heads than the promises kept. We are our own worst critics, aren’t we? But after running through the promises I broke to myself that kept me awake I began listing the ones I kept, and eventually drifted back to sleep.

      To borrow from another Frost poem written in nearby woods, that made all the difference.