Alexandersmap

    Category: Personal Growth

    • The Upward Spiral

      “One of the major problems that arises when people work to become more effective in life is that they don’t think broadly enough. They lose the sense of proportion, the balance, the natural ecology necessary to effective living.” — Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (all subsequent quotes are also Covey’s)

      I’m not a marathon runner, but I’ve walked the length of a marathon for a fundraiser, and in walking you experience the same feeling around the 20 mile mark that a runner feels. You’ve hit a wall, you’re mentally and physically done, and you just want the whole thing to end already. This feeling of hitting a wall is similar to the feeling I get when my life is out of balance. Not enough vacation time, not enough exercise, not enough applied efforts towards a work goal… unbalanced.

      When that happens, you feel like you enter a downward spiral. You lose your rhythm and things that came easily seem more difficult. You succumb to distractions like social media or binge-watching shows. You take shortcuts: one indicator for me that I’m out of sorts is when I start using K-cups instead of making coffee with the AeroPress. It may seem trivial, but the extra minute or two to make a better cup of coffee all seems too much in the moment.

      It’s right about then that I begin to take corrective action. Vacation time, of course, helps a lot. Weekends of meaningful, deep restoration instead of tasks and catch-up work. Hiking and other exercise. Deep, distraction-free reading. Meditation, prayer… whatever draws you outside of yourself and into a more balanced place. When you’re in a downward spiral the first thing to do is arrest — a rest — your descent. Give yourself a break already!

      “Renewal is the principle — and the process — that empowers us to move on an upward spiral of growth and change, of continuous improvement. To make meaningful and consistent progress along that spiral, we need to consider one other aspect of renewal as it applies to the unique human endowment that directs this upward movement — our conscience…. Conscience is the endowment that senses our congruence or disparity with correct principles and lifts us toward them.”

      Reversing that downward spiral, that just survive to fight another day feeling, changes your mindset. Re-energized and restored, you might be so bold as to think about climbing again. To put yourself on an upward spiral towards a higher place in your life. To prioritize the things that bring you positive energy and push aside the bad habits accumulated on your downward spiral and refocus on the essential few things that matter most for you. Things that bring you energy and vitality. In short, remap your life and put yourself back on course.

      “The law of the harvest governs; we will always reap what we sow — no more, no less. The law of justice is immutable, and the closer we align ourselves with correct principles, the better our judgement will be about how the world operates and the more accurate our paradigms — our maps of the territory — will be.”

      “Moving along the upward spiral requires us to learn, commit, and do on increasingly higher planes. We deceive ourselves if we think any one of these is sufficient. To keep progressing, we must learn, commit, and do—learn, commit, and do—and learn, commit, and do again.”

      To reach a higher plane demands a lifetime of consistent learning, commitment and action. But when the saw is dull you won’t make progress. That old expression, “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”? There’s truth in that. Take a rest, evaluate your course and correct as necessary. And only then can you get back on that upward spiral.

    • Making it Interesting

      “If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” – Ray Bradbury

      I’ve read this Bradbury quote before, and it made me smile but didn’t resonate at the time. Now it reads differently. Now I’m deep in it and looking at the wrestling match with the Creative Muse with both dread and delight. Now I’m scheming where I might insert travel and more writing into my days. Now I look at dusty books that have long occupied space on my shelves mocking me for not getting to them, and knowing they hold secrets I’ll never know until I earn them.

      I happen to be slogging through a couple of books that bore me to tears, but now and then drop a wisdom nugget into my shaking hands. Why read two dull books at once? When I grow frustrated with one I turn back to the other, then back again, until some moment when I finish both. My reward will be reading some page-turner fiction that I may finish on one cross-country flight.

      The mission is to make your own writing interesting. To not create one of those dull slogs you get through before you reward yourself with the page-turner. If you live with the naive (even reckless) goal of earning a place at the table with the great writers you must do (and publish!) the work, but you must also create something compelling.

      And that’s the wrestling match, isn’t it? Anyone can throw up a bunch of words, the trick is to make them swing together to the music in your soul. While there’s time.

    • The Changes You Take Yourself Through

      Everybody needs a change
      A chance to check out the new
      But you’re the only one to see
      The changes you take yourself through
      – Stevie Wonder, Don’t You Worry About A Thing

      In New England, October is the time of tangible, visible change. The world transforms around you in such strikingly obvious ways that even the most inward-facing among us look up and see it. The days get shorter and darker, the air crisp and demanding of attention, and of course the leaves paint the landscape in an explosion of color. No wonder this is the time of year most people who live here point to as their favorite.

      It seems a good time to celebrate change. The incremental changes we see around us are also happening within us. We grow incrementally better or worse, depending on our focus and applied effort. And because we’re humans you might make tangible progress in one area while you slide a bit sideways in another. Such is life.

      When you write and publish every single day you force yourself to become a keen observer. And you become more efficient in putting thought to paper (or onto the screen and whatever database in the Cloud they take up residence in). Sometimes you’re the only one to see the changes you take yourself through, and sometimes a percentage of the world takes notice. The only part that’s important is that you take yourself through it to see where you go next.

      Change. We get so caught up in getting there that we forget to celebrate here. Dance in the moment that you recognize that life is this short wonderful eruption of thought and emotion and transformation. Maybe turn the volume up a bit more today. For there’s urgency in the air. Celebrate where you are. You’ve come so far already.

    • To Squander the Day

      We are reconciled, I think,
      to too much.
      Better to be a bird, like this one-
      An ornament of the eternal.
      As he came down once, to the nest of the grass,
      “Squander the day, but save the soul,”
      I heard him say.
      – Mary Oliver, The Lark

      We become especially adept at committing ourselves to activities with the least return on our time invested. What is an unproductive meeting but an agreement between two parties to squander time? As if we had the time to spend.

      This challenge by Mary Oliver, declaring that we reconcile to too much in our days, pokes deeply at that inner doubt we might have about how we’re spending our time. That (now) she’s challenging us from the grave amplifies the message. Jealously guard your time for that which is most important. Squander the day, if you must, but save your soul!

      We take stock of our calendars and see a growing trend back to the office, back to travel and meetings and getting things done. Some excites us, and some is a reconciliation to the mission at hand. This is the life of a professional, we do what we must to get where we want to be in our careers.

      But what if we saved our soul instead?

    • Beauty as a Gateway

      “I will not of a certainty believe that there is nothing in the sunset, where our forefathers imagined the dead following their shepherd the sun, or nothing but some vague presence as little moving as nothing. If beauty is not a gateway out of the net we were taken in at our birth, it will not long be beauty, and we will find it better to sit at home by the fire and fatten a lazy body or to run hither and thither in some foolish sport than to look at the finest show that light and shadow ever made among green leaves.” – W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

      We, born as we are with a shelf life, chase the divine. In big ways and small, putting yourself in the way of beauty is a gateway to the divine within our mortal existence. It’s why we stumble through muddy paths to find hidden waterfalls, wake in the deepest part of the night to make our way to sunrise vistas, and brave the sounds of the forest to dwarf our egos amongst the giants. In nature we encounter the divine, and in doing so coruscate an otherwise dim life with grace and wonder.

      Admittedly, some of us are schemers, carving out time in our lives for glimpses of the otherworldly. On a recent flight north I glimpsed a spectacular sunset above the clouds and cursed myself for not getting a window seat on the western side of the plane for that particular trip. We must be deliberate even with the mundane if we are to enter the gateway to the divine. That particular world of magic and light was meant for others to witness.

      It’s no surprise that Yeats was a fellow seeker. You can’t be a poet without first being a collector of moments of dazzling infinity. If there’s an afterlife, the westernmost reaches must get crowded with poets and philosophers lined up to see the green flash of another epic sunset. And if there isn’t an afterlife, shouldn’t we catch as many while we’re here as our time allows? Who’s to know until we get to whatever come next? But why risk missing out on the divine in our daily lives? Seek it now.

      It’s all around us, waiting for you to notice.

    • The Dew of the Morn

      Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill
      For there the mystical brotherhood
      Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
      And river and stream work out their will;

      And God stands winding His lonely horn,
      And time and the world are ever in flight;
      And love is less kind than the gray twilight
      And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.
      – W.B. Yeats, Into The Twilight

      When you read Yeats you feel the old Druid blood stir within. We know this world, where the sun and moon whisper, and the wood and river and stream work their will upon us. We’re never quite right when we’re too far away.

      We all run calculations in our heads, figuring out our time and where we want to place ourselves next. We run the numbers, and they tell us to get back to what’s important as quickly as possible. The world piles atop you, scorning your hopes and dreams, reminding you of responsibilities and your time earned. Save such folly for another day, the voices say.

      The blood of the ancients beats in our hearts, you and me, and it has a different rhythm than this world at large. It grows restless and impatient with our stories of later and soon enough. What is hope but a deferred dream?

      Time and the world are ever in flight. There’s no catching either, is there? Our hope is in the dawn, when we walk out into the freshness of a new day and seek what’s been calling us all along. But the dew of the morn is drying with the rising sun, and soon our footprints will fade. Seize the moment.

    • Make it Now

      How have I not made a note of every word
      You ever said
      And time, is not on our side
      But I’ll pretend that it’s alright
      – Mumford & Sons, Beloved

      Each conversation, each moment of insight and full awareness of another’s presence is a gift twice given; now and in our memories. Life is a series of such exchanges, one after another from our earliest recollection to our last fading moment before we leave this world in the hands of those who carry on without us. The people who make us feel most alive are those who embrace this exchange, leaving us more energized than we were in the moment before.

      Our time together is brief and fleeting, and each moment matters. When we finally see this, we squeeze as much meaningful engagement as we can from our relationships. For some, it’s too late in the game. So why not begin immediately, with the urgency that life demands?

      We tell each other to stop to smell the roses, but what of lingering in conversation a moment longer? What of hugs that take the breath away and smiles that spark the light in another’s eyes? What of quick notes and calls out of the blue? Time is not on our side, friend. If not now, when?

      Make it now.

    • You Only Need to Know

      “Great minds have purpose, others have wishes. Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortunes; but great minds rise above them.” – Washington Irving

      Washington Irving was right on the mark with this observation. Imagine if he’d lived to see people staring at their phones all day? There are so many distractions today, and never enough rising above them. So it seems anyway.

      But there are plenty of people living with purpose. People who are driven to succeed in the path they’ve chosen for themselves. The trick is to find that purpose and focus on it like your very life depended on it. For in so many ways, it does.

      You know it’s up to you, anything you can do
      And if you find a new way
      Well, you can do it today
      Well, you can make it all true
      And you can make it undo
      You see, ah-ah-ah, it’s easy, ah-ah-ah
      You only need to know
      – Cat Stevens, If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out

      You only need to know what you want to do, your purpose, and then, well, you can do it today. At least begin to do it today. And isn’t that the tricky part? To stop telling yourself stories about what you are and go write a new story. Rise above the wishes and distractions and misfortunes that life stirs in our little pot and see just how far you can take this purpose of yours.

      Injecting clever quotes and catchy tunes into your day is one thing, but finding purpose and following it are another. The point here is that there’s so much noise in our lives that we never really listen to hear what our calling is. If you aren’t listening, you aren’t focused. And you miss the purpose as life noisily passes you by.

      Listen. Focus. Find a new way (yes, you can do it today).

    • Nature’s Pilot

      “THE DEVIL. What is the use of knowing?
      DON JUAN. Why, to be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of the least resistance. Does a ship sail to its destination no better than a log drifts nowhither? The philosopher is Nature’s pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.”
      – George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

      On the long road to knowing, admittedly some of us are late bloomers. But the path is long, even as life is frustratingly short. We humans, pre-built with an expiration date, aren’t designed to ever know it all. But in learning we might find the right path instead of wasting this precious time wandering about in trial and error.

      What is philosophy but refined knowledge about how to best live? It is knowledge acquired and contemplated on, which offers channel markers as we navigate uncertain waters in our time. This is what we draw on from humanity’s philosophers, and increasingly from ourselves as we grow.

      Growth is a choice. And choosing this line of greatest advantage offers the opportunity to steer instead of drift. In Shaw’s work, Hell is populated with the posers and drifters. To transcend this fate, we must strive for improvement:

      “I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it. That is the law of my life. That is the working within me of Life’s incessant aspiration to higher organization, wider, deeper, intenser self-consciousness, and clearer self-understanding. It was the supremacy of this purpose that reduced love for me to the mere pleasure of a moment, art for me to the mere schooling of my faculties, religion for me to a mere excuse for laziness, since it had set up a God who looked at the world and saw that it was good, against the instinct in me that looked through my eyes at the world and saw that it could be improved.”

      The truth about philosophy is that it isn’t a thought experiment, it demands active participation. To go through the motions in life is the greatest of sins, for it’s a betrayal of the self. We owe it to eternity to use our time as best we can. Our moment to steer is now.

    • Taking Our Measure

      “The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor: he took my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.”

      “When you go to heaven, Ann, you will be frightfully conscious of your wings for the first year or so. When you meet your relatives there, and they persist in treating you as if you were still a mortal, you will not be able to bear them. You will try to get into a circle which has never known you except as an angel.” – Jack Tanner in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman

      These two quotes from Shaw’s fascinating play Man and Superman resonate with anyone who has tried to shed the preconceptions that those who knew us “then” have about what we’re capable of “now”. We all grow, yet there’s a lag time for those who might measure our fit based on the person we used to be. This is one reason people job hop or move far from home. If you leave your old identity behind, you free yourself to be whatever you want to be in the place where you land.

      Of course, one person we never leave behind is ourselves. If we aren’t aligned with a belief in our future potential we’ll never reach it. What is left of us then but incremental improvement? That’s not a leap forward at all, but a slow shuffle across our brief time.

      When we grow we no longer fit into that old character we used to be. We must adjust our own expectations of what is possible, take a deep breath and leap towards our greater potential. And if necessary find a circle that believes in our present potential instead of clinging to our limited past.