Alexandersmap

    Category: Personal Growth

    • Naturally Next

      “Remember that there is only one important time and that is now. The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion. The most important person is always the person you are with, who is right before you, for who knows if you will have dealings with any other person in the future? The most important pursuit is making the person standing at your side happy, for that alone is the pursuit of life.” ― Leo Tolstoy, The Emperor’s Three Questions

      What next? I’ve heard the question over and over again since summer ended. Is it because I’m asking it myself? Or because we reach the same point in life where such questions become increasingly important? I think if I ask one more question in this paragraph I’ll lose a few subscribers in rapid succession. What’s next is blessedly the next paragraph.

      We navigate our place in the world, run into obstacles we learn to get around or stall behind indefinitely. Habits are obstacles, and so is a closed mind. Sometimes we get so focused on the obstacle in front of us we don’t step back to see the many ways around it. When writing stops flowing I simply walk away for a few minutes, make a coffee or throw the frisbee to the pup and the obstacle drifts away.

      I think Tolstoy had it mostly right with his focus on the present moment, and the most important person being the one we’re engaged with right now. But is our most important pursuit making that person happy? I think this itself becomes an obstacle, for happiness is a fickle thing, and serving the whims of another’s state is slavery.

      We’ve all got to find our own path to whatever is next for us. Helping others to see is a fine thing indeed, but they must learn to reconcile their obstacles in their own life. Maybe that obstacle is us. To give space and time for others to find their own way may be the most generous gift we can give them.

      What’s next? The sky filled with migratory birds noisily chatting about the commute. Maple leaves turning yellow and orange and red as the sun gradually reminds them that their time is almost over. Montauk Daisies budding so very long after the rest of the garden fades. Cherry tomatoes bursting in the autumn sun because we cannot possible keep up with the harvest. Next is always right in front of us, showing us the way around whatever we imagined was impossible to get beyond. Dare I say we must pay attention to now? Or is that one question too many?

      Then how about this? Answers come from doing. Stop worrying about the obstacle and simply do what calls for attention today. Like writer’s block, simply doing something pulls us inevitably to possibility. Look around, it’s all around us—everywhere except that place we were stuck in. We may simply do what is naturally next, and see where it takes us.

    • Brahma Muhurta

      “Brahmamuhurta (Sanskrit: ब्रह्ममुहूर्त, lit. ’time of Brahma’) is a 48-minute period (muhurta) that begins one hour and 36 minutes before sunrise, and ends 48 minutes before sunrise. It is traditionally the penultimate phase or muhurta of the night, and is considered an auspicious time for all practices of yoga and most appropriate for meditation, worship or any other religious practice. Spiritual activities performed early in the morning are said to have a greater effect than in any other part of the day.”
      — James G. Lochtefeld, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism

      I don’t practice Hinduism, but based on the definition above it’s apparent that I’m an active seeker of truth and meaning during Brahma Muhurta. We each tend to fall into a rhythm of life that works for us, and my auspicious time for writing and the deep contemplation that sometimes accompanies it is this period of time before the dawn. That it is precisely 48 minutes (muhurta) is interesting. My writing usually lasts much longer, and often in a state of flow, not contemplative. Does that mean I’m not properly harnessing the optimal time for a deeper dive into the soul? Should I save my writing for after Brahma Muhurta? Perhaps, but it seems to work for me.

      Creativity isn’t so rigid a process as to be wrapped into a 48 minute window of time. Nor is spirituality for that matter, whatever spirituality means to you or me. The point is to consistently put ourselves in a state of openness and to see where it brings us. If that’s prayer or meditation or madly scribbling on a pad of paper, we are using the time of Brahma actively engaged. What washes over us in that muhurta is for us to come to know.

      Here’s the thing, I think it all comes back to what Cheryl Strayed’s mother told her about putting ourselves in the way of beauty. When we show up consistently open to hear what the universe or God or the muse or that nugget between our ears has to say, eventually something is going to whisper back at us, if only to get us off their back. We don’t get a sunrise or sunset, a brilliant idea or spiritual enlightenment if we don’t place ourselves in a position to receive these blessings of the moment. Since we’re up before the dawn anyway, we ought to be open to receive whatever comes next. And to then do something with it before it drifts away like the stars fading with the morning light.

    • Of Blossoms and Stars

      Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
      Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
      — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

      Here’s to the stargazers among us. We tend to walk with tilted heads, with eyes towards the infinite. Time is marked by the celestial dance. We are but brief witnesses—spectators watching the play unfold and yet knowing we are a part of it just the same. The masses are busily scurrying about, thinking the universe wraps around them. Look up on a crisp September night to find the truth of the matter. We are nothing but fireflies to the universe. And yet we burn brightly for our brief moment.

      The garden is fading rapidly, but some of its stars rise just in time to save the season. Sedum autumn joy blushes for all the attention it receives from the bees. Chrysanthemums, top-heavy with blooms, positively glow even as their neighbors bow with fatigue. The Montauk daisies (Nipponanthemum nipponicum) are just now budding, promising their own show in days to come. These are days we’ll remember, the garden reminds us, in the long nights of winter coming soon enough.

      Isn’t it strange how we feel most alive as the days grow shorter? Is it heightened attention or a building sense of urgency to squeeze more awareness into this brief fling with the sun? I think it’s appreciation for the beautiful dance and gratefulness for being a dancer ourself. To mourn the season coming to a close is to miss the sparkling rise of the next. We must be active gardeners in this life, no matter the season at hand. Look around, for magic is all around us.

    • See What Unfolds

      The Barred Owls have returned. There is a mating pair that moves through the trees, hooting it up to check in on each other while they each hunted in different places in the woods surrounding us. I’m told that Barred Owls hunt independent of each other, eat what they eat and catch up again later. “So how was work today?” “Fine, had hoped for a baby bunny but only caught a field mouse.” Romantic stuff.

      Also developing in the neighborhood, a large beaver has moved in to the stream, wading about just after dusk above the bridge. It’s been a few years since I’d seen a beaver in the stream, and I’m wondering if the drought had dried up its previous nest. Beaver will move on when their food source is used up, not unlike the owls. We’ve all got to eat. While the owls are big talkers, the beaver works in silence most of the time.

      We’re seeing yet another bumper crop of acorns this year, which explains the abundance of animals that feed on them moving back into the neighborhood (along with the animals that feed on the feeding animals). It’s been a hot dry summer after a wet spring. I wonder what that means for the fall foliage this autumn, but I don’t wonder enough to look it up. We all have the world at our fingertips, don’t we? We ought to let a few things simply unfold before us just to keep the magic in our lives.

      I’m finally reading a paperback version of Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen, based entirely on the recommendation of Rainer Maria Rilke, mind you. I’m at a point in my life when I look around and find most talking heads haven’t got much to add to the conversation, so I dig deeper. Don’t just stop with the work of an author or poet or artist—seek out the works that influenced them. What challenges and transforms us, collectively?

      Today’s world is unfolding exactly as I anticipated when the elections went the way they went a year ago. We are where we are because people believe what they want to believe, and feel emboldened to behave the way they behave because others do it so it must be okay. We too may choose how to react in such times. How do we want to navigate this world that we live in?

      My advice, since you’ve read this far, is to seek out the timeless over the trend whenever possible. Things will come and go in a lifetime. We mustn’t forget that the lifetime in question is ours. We must do the best we can with what unfolds before us. There is more to this world than the madness swirling noisily on the platforms of choice. Go deeper and see what unfolds.

    • Our Box of Stories

      I spent a few minutes scanning the Substack of a clever hipster with far more subscribers than I have on that platform and really all of my platforms combined. She stated that blogging is long dead, and Substack was getting there itself. And I smiled to myself, knowing just how uncool I’ve become for still calling it a blog. Why not simply call it writing? Or a daily newsletter? Or the complicated ramblings of a self-absorbed passenger on this ship of fools we call now? It’s all just the great conversation, in whatever way we dare to put it out there. The rest is positioning ourselves as close to relevance as we can get, if we choose to. Some of us forgo influence for deeper, calmer waters. It all matters, and none of it matters, all at once. We do the best we can where we are, with what we have.

      Our box of stories is that which surrounds us, holding us in place so we don’t stray too far into reckless places. My story is telling me to be responsible today and go to work after writing this [whatever we want to call it] and doing a few chores around the homestead so it’s still in one piece when I eventually return. There’s more to the story than that, but why bog down your story by going long with mine? Let’s keep it real, and really concise.

      The thing is, we know we ought to re-write our stories now and then, just to change the box we find ourselves trapped in. We’re all running out of time to experience all that lies outside our box. That’s the underlying story, no matter how we write it. We don’t have to ruin all our stories, but we ought to stretch the box beyond the limits those stories have given us. Today is as good a day to try something new as any. What are we currently writing? Make it fresh and a little bolder than the box can contain.

    • That Fierce Embrace

      It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
      or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel
      abandoned.
      If you know despair or can see it in others.
      I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world
      with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back
      with firm eyes saying this is where I stand. I want to know
      if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living
      falling toward the centre of your longing. I want to know
      if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequences of love
      and the bitter
      unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have been told, in that fierce embrace, even
      the gods speak of God.

      — David Whyte, Self Portrait

      To be ourself in a world that expects acceptance, or at the very least acquiescence, is audacious. Mothers, wanting the very best for their babies, might call it reckless. Best to fall in line, get a proper degree, leading to a proper job, offering a proper life. ‘Tis proper, we’re trained to believe, to focus on the score. Grades and status and titles and the right zip code.

      The score is memento mori. The score is tempus fugit. If we are to melt into that fierce heat of living, we must go against the grain more often than our tribe may be comfortable with. They only want the best for us. We know this, and we must learn to be bold anyway. A lifetime is far too short for all that we want for ourselves, let alone all that our tribe expects of us.

      The real question, the one we’ve avoided all along in this tribal dance, is why won’t we simply embrace it?

    • Release the Dancers

      “He was weary of himself, of cold thoughts and intellectual dreams. Life a poem! Not when you perpetually went around inventing your life instead of living it. How meaningless it was, empty, empty, empty. This hunting for yourself, slyly observing your own tracks—in a circle, of course; this pretending to throw yourself into the stream of life and then at the same time sitting and angling for yourself and fishing yourself up in some peculiar disguise! If only it would seize him: life, love, passion—so that he wouldn’t be able to invent it, but so that it would invent him.”
      — Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

      There’s a fine line between imagination and invention. We dream big dreams, or perhaps simply a wee wish or two, and they each dance about happily in our imagination until we do the work to realize them or eventually get sick of being teased by the dancers and find something else with which to fancy for awhile. Life isn’t meant to be a dream, it’s meant to be a gradual realization of our potential. It’s a matter of turning imagination into reality through deliberate and purposeful work. That line is crossed through action.

      “Decide what to be and go be it.”… —The Avett Brothers lyric that lives rent free in my head.

      Incremental experience—the experience that Jacobsen’s character Niels is pining for—in turn forever reinvents us. The person we’ve become is far more capable of doing this next thing than the person we were then. We imagine possibilities we couldn’t imagine from our previous vantage point, and we move along a timeline of steady progression.

      It’s natural to chafe at the limitations of our current level of experience. This discomfort is a catalyst for change—if we allow it to be anyway. Unless we’re forever paralyzed by inaction and low agency. We must develop our voice over time and learn to use it to realize possibility:

      Alas for those that never sing,
      But die with all their music in them!
      — Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Voiceless

      We are forever inventing ourselves or settling into the stasis of an under-developed character. We must raise our voice and sing! This life is flying along with or without our active participation. By all means, step away from the mirage of dreams and do something with this day. Release the dancers!

    • Marking the Path of Being

      “All the bright precious things fade so fast, and they don’t come back.” — from F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

      I love a rainy day with nothing much to do. I find there haven’t been all that many of either rainy days or days without much to do this summer, so savoring the sensation feels right. Let tomorrow bring the crush; today is for too precious to concede to busy.

      The tricky thing about being busy is that we lose the capacity to savor when we’re trying desperately not to drown. There’s no floating with stillness when the waves are choppy and filled with sharks and other drowning people. An angry sea is no place to be. We must seek stillness in our lives if we are to find awareness and peace.

      When we get busy things tend to slip away with time. We focus on the important and urgent instead of the essential few. If it’s important we ought to focus on it, right? I mean, it’s important. And if it’s urgent we don’t have time to debate, we just do. This mindset makes us feel productive, but it forever kicks the essential down the curb.

      “How many pages will be left empty because your process was dampened by doubt and deliberation?” — Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

      We must develop and nurture our non-negotiables in life. Mine include time to exercise, read, sleep, and yes: to write. If I get enough of these four, then even the stormiest day feels manageable. Writing every day coaxes the busy mind into awareness. To dabble in the essential for an hour, or a few hours, before the angry sea attempts to wash over us is a gift we give to ourselves. What do we make of this accumulation of blog posts and pages written? Will it take us anywhere in the end? It’s taken us this far already, friend.

      A lifetime is an empty and hollow thing indeed if we don’t fill each day with something more than we began it with. What is accumulated is a growing awareness and the willingness to experience and do the things that may come to us if we would only be open to them. These words are simply marking the path of being. How many pages may we fill in a lifetime of deliberate being? There is a hint of an answer revealed here and now.

    • Our Beautiful Choice

      “A person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.” — Carl Rogers, On Becoming A Person

      I walk by a single tree that is clearly more distressed than it’s neighboring trees. The foliage has already begun to change to gold and faint orange. The drought most likely, I think to myself on one pass beside the tree. There are many loops past this tree, and thus many chances to observe things like the rate of change in the foliage relative to the trees around it. Each pass marks the incremental change in both the tree and me. I may have a little more agency, but every reunion with the tree reminds me that I’m really just moving in circles most of the time. We are kindred spirits, alive in the same moment, transformed by environment and place.

      “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for its not the same river and he’s not the same man.” ” — Heraclitus

      All these changes have brought us here. Collectively. I’ve turned away from the news of the world—politics and sports and celebrity gossip mean nothing to me now. To focus on what is within my control and nothing more is liberating in and of itself. We are explorers, charting a path through an upside down world. When we find the ground beneath us isn’t solid, as on a beach with the surf constantly pulling the sand from beneath our feet, we too must adapt and adjust our stance. And eventually find our way to solid ground once again.

      Life is change. And it’s never been nor ever will be fair. Environment and place are largely out of our control, but how we move through this world is our beautiful choice to make. We may get caught up in the swirl and concede the sinking or choose a path to something more tangible from which to base our growth upon. Decide what to be and go be it. Our potentialities are always ahead of us, awaiting our move in that direction.

    • Drive

      So if I decide to waiver my
      Chance to be one of the hive
      Will I choose water over wine
      And hold my own and drive?
      Oh
      It’s driven me before
      And it seems to be the way, that everyone else gets around
      But lately I’m
      Beginning to find that when I drive myself, my light is found
      Whatever tomorrow brings I’ll be there
      With open arms and open eyes, yeah
      Whatever tomorrow brings I’ll be there
      I’ll be there
      — Incubus, Drive

      When we finally step away from the endless loop of habit, when we break free of that relentless and pervasive collective belief about who we are and what we ought to be doing with our lives, we may be surprised at the character who emerges. There’s much more to us than the stories we’ve told ourselves. Identity is honed one choice at a time.

      Since completing a summer of transformative action, I gave myself a break. Easing off the twice a day workouts, having some carbs with that protein (or skipping the protein for carbs), and perhaps the most transformative thing of all, indulging in a few drinks to mark the occasion(s). A few days of that will inform pretty quickly. We can easily slide back into who we once were, or we can decide that there’s no going back and reset our days accordingly. It’s like moving back home after college—we’re different people than we were before, and those old rules don’t apply quite the same way.

      Choosing water over wine more often than the other way around profoundly impacts wellness. This is not much of a secret, but it isn’t something we like to think about when we’re deep in the cycle of having a glass of wine with dinner, and another to cap off the evening. I’ve found that my sleep score is greatly improved when I don’t drink. Deep, restorative rest is more important than ever for me. Is our sleep pattern the foundation of wellness? Ask someone who doesn’t sleep well. How’s your sleep? What ought to change to improve it?

      My answer to making significant changes in my life is to choose big goals but the smallest possible increments with which to move the chains. I have a big round number birthday coming up in the spring, and there are a few things I’d like to be when I get there. Healthy and fit, for starters. But also more informed than I am now by continuing on a path of learning that is accretive. And of course, this writing path has a natural milestone that must be crossed eventually.

      Each of us has a vision of who we’d like to be at some point in our lives. We forget that time is flying along (tempus fugit) and we’re quickly running out of runway to take off. Applying a bit of lift each day is the only way to ever get off the ground. Sure, light is where we find it—gratitude and awareness of who we are today is as essential to our wellness as sleep, diet or exercise, but rising to an ever-higher level of illumination optimizes who we will be when we get there. Growth is by its very nature expansive, even as it remains deeply rooted in identity.

      Whatever tomorrow brings, surely we hope to be there. Just who do we want to be when we arrive? There’s no time to waste now, friend. Drive.