Alexandersmap

    Category: Personal Growth

    • Illusions of the Moment

      “When you go through life with preferences but don’t let your happiness depend on any one of them, then you’re awake. You’re moving toward wakefulness. Wakefulness, happiness—call it what you wish—is the state of nondelusion, where you see things not as you are but as they are, insofar as this is possible for a human being. To drop illusions, to see things, to see reality. Every time you are unhappy, you have added something to reality. It is that addition that makes you unhappy. I repeat: You have added something … a negative reaction in you. Reality provides the stimulus, you provide the reaction. You have added something by your reaction. And if you examine what you have added, there is always an illusion there, there’s a demand, an expectation, a craving.” – Anthony De Mello, Awareness

      Monday mornings are a good time to revisit De Mello. To confront the reality of the work week ahead without dread requires a measure of acceptance of the moment you’re living in. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing do something else as soon as you possibly can. If you enjoy it, understand what it draws out of you and double down on that. Most people in the world today have the freedom to choose how they react.

      The entire quote above might immediately makes you think of Viktor Frankl’s thoughts on stimulus and response. Even in the worst of moments, we can choose how to react to stimulus in our lives. Accept the truth of the matter for what it is and see things for how they are. That might not make you happy, but it makes you fully aware. And don’t we need to be in that state to make effective, meaningful decisions in our lives?

      The question is, what exactly are you adding in the moment? What are your illusions about the way things ought to be, about how someone should speak with you, about wearing a mask or getting vaccinated or how we see a person a bit different from ourself? How do you view that job you’re going to or the title you have or the car you drive? How about how you view the person driving in front of you or the one trying to pass you? What are you adding in that moment?

      We often confront illusions in how others treat us. I had a conversation with an old friend who was poking at me about a tendency I used to have when we were younger. I smiled and let the moment slide away, knowing I’m not that person anymore. You learn to accept who you once were as you get older. But doing so in the moment is a bit trickier, isn’t it? It requires us to be constantly aware of the illusions we’re throwing up. What story am I telling myself right now? And what might happen if I simply subtracted that story?

      This idea of observing yourself in the moment between stimulus and response is a way of getting outside of your own head and seeing the choices in front of you. To shatter the illusion that you don’t have a choice in how you react. To shift to a state of non-delusion and maybe, to choose the path towards happiness. In the thirty years since I first read Man’s Search for Meaning and accelerating in the two years since I read Awareness I’ve chipped away at this within myself. I’m under no illusion that I’ve mastered it, but I work with the tools available to step outside myself towards wakefulness.

      This is a skill that is especially handy on some Monday mornings.

    • Endlessly Changing Horizons

      “The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” – Chris McCandless

      I’m a traveller at heart, a wanderer and nomad wannabe. So it’s easy to be stirred to action by McCandless’s quote above. He was the subject of Into the Wild, making him instantly more famous than those of us who chose a less aggressive path to chase new horizons. I know viscerally the call that brought him to the wilderness of Alaska even as I question his tactics for getting there. I’m far less risk-averse than many, but far more so than McCandless was.

      Friends poke and prod at the nomad in me, knowing it wants to break free and go. There’s a rawness in the desire when it gets stamped down too many times. And the pokes always seem to hit home right in that sore part. Nomads seek endlessly changing horizons to see what’s over there, and then over in that other place. Always chasing new and different. I know this chase.

      There are three fair questions to ask when you chase horizons: What do you seek? and How will you pull this off? and What are you leaving behind? Purpose, logistics and consequences. If you tackle all three and feel comfortable with the answers, then what are you waiting for? Go!

      Joy comes through seeing the change in yourself as you encounter new perspectives. Sometimes that’s in another place, and sometimes that’s in finding a new place within yourself. No, changing horizons aren’t about chasing, they’re about becoming.

      So, again, what is it you seek?

    • Choosing to Be

      “Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important, in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne

      The ground rules are simple, really. You either embrace where you are in this world or you don’t. Some folks are quite happy with where they landed in life. But if you aren’t amongst the blissful few, you can join the chorus of disenfranchised, low agency complainers whoo thrive on misery. Or maybe choose to be something else. To work on that alternate vision for your one wild and precious life.

      Be means a few things. To be is to continue. Fine. But it can also mean to act. To do. Be is a choice.

      Choosing to be engaged, to be a part of things instead of apart from things, to be alive while you’re living, these are the things that fill the world with your individualism. Your uniqueness. That vibrant otherness that is different from the rest.

      Choosing to be out there, doing things, building things, making connections. Seeing things. Learning to understand and feeling the hunger pangs that come with knowing you don’t know enough.

      If you’re reading this you woke up this morning, which straight off makes it a good start. What will we not settle for? What burns inside us, waiting for us to set free to fill the world with? What will we choose to be?

      This might all feel like fluffy prose. I get that and write it seeing the eye rolls from a few of you. But what’s the alternative to choosing to be something more? Something less? More of the same old, same old?

      Screw that. Be so much more. Go fill the world.

    • Breaking from the Routine

      “If you wanna fly you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” – Toni Morrison

      It’s simple, really. You decide what to be and go be it. But then the excuses begin. The commitments. The stuff to do. The comfortable routines that drag you back to reality (the reality you choose) and keep you right where you were yesterday and where you’ll be tomorrow.

      Habits are a path to fitness, wealth, knowledge and power. But habits are also a path to sloth, financial stress, mindless binge watching and low agency. The choice, friends, is ours.

      Do you really want to fly? Then break away from the things that hold you down (Morrison put it more succinctly). That might be stuff, mortgages, and relationships, or it might simply be habits. More likely it’s a combination of both.

      There are very legitimate reasons for not traveling right now. But no reason not to explore. To get up early and ride or walk to places nearby that you’ve never seen before. Burning calories and firing up the imagination.

      The pandemic either jolted you free of the routines that held you back or boxed you more tightly in. The fitness world exploded last year even as it imploded. You couldn’t get a bike or kayak or pair of snowshoes to save your life. But you could walk out the door and keep walking until you reached your goal. You don’t need stuff to fly. You need courage to break away.

      I picked up one of the barbell plates stacked neatly on the weight rack and walked around with it for a while. It was exactly the weight that I wanted to lose. Exactly what I was already carrying around with me with the excuses for not losing it. It was a wake-up call. A reminder of what I’ve drifted away from lately. Of what I’d drifted to.

      If you want to fly, you can’t be weighed down with shit. This applies equally well to anything that matters: reaching peak fitness, accumulating knowledge, reaching peak earning power, and efficiently exploring the world.

      I put that weight plate back on the rack and then walked around without it, looking at the accumulation of stuff in the house, thinking about the accumulation of obligations… and recognized that the routine was quietly killing me. Something had to change. Someone has to change. And I took the first small step.

    • Living in the Layers

      I have walked through many lives,
      some of them my own,
      and I am not who I was,
      though some principle of being
      abides, from which I struggle
      not to stray.

      We’re all collectors of sorts. Accumulating experience, relationships and perspective as we march through our time on this spinning blue ball in the dark vacuum of infinity. We acquire it all and, if we’re generous, bundle it up into shared wisdom before we become part of infinity ourselves. This sharing of experience differs from shared experience; that which you and I might experience together. Sharing is passing something of ourselves along to others, as I’m passing along this Stanley Kunitz poem.

      When I look behind,
      as I am compelled to look
      before I can gather strength
      to proceed on my journey,
      I see the milestones dwindling
      toward the horizon
      and the slow fires trailing
      from the abandoned camp-sites,
      over which scavenger angels
      wheel on heavy wings.
      Oh, I have made myself a tribe
      out of my true affections,
      and my tribe is scattered!

      The last few weeks are a whirlwind of my tribe coming home and leaving home. One returns, one leaves, friends stay for the weekend, other friends drift apart. We all scatter about to wherever the song in our hearts lead us. That we remain together at all is a blessing of shared moments.

      How shall the heart be reconciled
      to its feast of losses?
      In a rising wind
      the manic dust of my friends,
      those who fell along the way,
      bitterly stings my face.
      Yet I turn, I turn,
      exulting somewhat,
      with my will intact to go
      wherever I need to go,
      and every stone on the road
      precious to me.

      I try to explain how this will go to my children as they graduate and move into new phases of their lives. Most relationships are based on convenience and proximity. Teammates, classmates, coworkers, soccer parents… in each case you share something in common at the same time and place, and meaningful moments collect here. But the bond is only as strong as the links that hold it together. Most relationships eventually drift apart, though you might pick up exactly where you left off when you see each other again and piece together what you’ve each been up to in the interim. Some relationships seem to stand the test of time and trial and absence.

      In my darkest night,
      when the moon was covered
      and I roamed through wreckage,
      a nimbus-clouded voice
      directed me:
      “Live in the layers,
      not on the litter.”
      Though I lack the art
      to decipher it,
      no doubt the next chapter
      in my book of transformations
      is already written.
      I am not done with my changes.
      – Stanley Kunitz, The Layers

      Life is littered with old bonds broken by circumstance. But experience informs. We’re all changing, and our transformation continues even as the tribe changes too. Each layer of our life makes us deeper. Each chapter adds context and richness. We are the sum of our accumulated experience, relationships and perspectives to this point. All these layers add up to one hell of a stepping stone.

      Which makes you eagerly wonder… just where might this next step lead to?

    • Chasing the End

      There’s a phenomenon in reading a great, page-turner of a book where you can’t finish a page fast enough. The pace of your reading accelerates and you blow through pages quickly, and suddenly you finish the book in a daze. You look up and hours have gone by in the blink of an eye and you realize that you’ve just stepped out of the pages of a time machine.

      Life itself is full of moments like this. You can readily rattle off those highlight moments, maybe at a party or traveling or deep in conversation with someone of interest where we are completely transfixed with in that moment. Where does the time go? When we’re so deeply engaged in this moment and entranced by the possibility in the next, what happens?

      We aren’t really chasing the end of the story or the life moment, we’re dancing with it. There’s a state of euphoria in reading that great book, watching that great film or participating in that magical moment that transcends time. A life, well-lived, ought to feel very much like this.

      We’ve all experienced the opposite. The dull reads, the awkwardly boring work event, the polite small talk with someone who doesn’t share their life force with you. Those times when we sketch imaginative drawings on note pads or silently glance at our phone to be anywhere else but there.

      Look, I know every movie can’t be a blockbuster. Every scene can’t transfix you in wonder. How would you even know what bliss was if you didn’t suffer through boring now and then? But life is too short to go through the motions.

      We’re all chasing the end of our story. How do we make this time machine vibrate and buzz a little louder on the journey? Our time machines should be bursting at the seams with experiences when we reach the last stop, don’t you think? For when we finish, when we reach that last page of our brilliant life story, we ought to look up in those final seconds and say…

      Wow.

    • Decide

      “In a world where death is the hunter, my friend, there is not time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions.” – Carlos Castaneda, Journey To Ixtlan

      If you happen to glance at a calendar today you’ll note that the month is quickly disappearing into history. Soon it will join all the other months in our past, dead time to us but for the memories. So what do we make of our time? As Castaneda points out, it tends to be what we decide to make of it.

      I witnessed two remarkable people graduate yesterday, one a year after his graduation ceremony was cancelled, the other virtually because they aren’t allowing large gatherings yet. If I were to give advice, I’d suggest figuring out your it and then getting to it straight away. There’s urgency in every decision now. Moments are fleeting, and are to be embraced, but decide on a path and put everything into it. There’s vibrancy in boldly going after your grandest dreams.

      The advice isn’t just for graduates, it’s for all of us. A college graduate knows all too well the decisions that placed them in that cap and gown, and so do the rest of us. Simply decide what you want to spend the short time you have left in this world doing. What brings meaning and purpose to you? What makes you excited to begin another day? For otherwise we’re just drifting aimlessly, wasting our one chance.

      If that seems overly urgent, well, it’s meant to be. We must live with the urgency Castaneda demands from us. If you want to be or do something in this world you can’t waste this present. Decide what to be and go be it. There’s no vibrancy in indecision.

    • An Open Mind and a Closed Mouth

      “Many fail to grasp what they have seen, and cannot judge what they have learned, although they tell themselves they know.” – Heraclitus

      If I’ve learned anything in my time on this planet it’s that I don’t know much of anything about most things. But I know a lot about a few things. Very few things, really. The rest is just general knowledge mixed with opinion and occasional bluffing. But even here, I’ve learned to just say what I know and don’t know. The truth shall set you free.

      Knowing what you don’t know, you learn to recognize what other people don’t know. No matter what they say. And sometimes specifically because of what and how they say it. If we are the average of the five people we hang around with the most, do we really want to be a mix of ill-informed opinion and gossip? I should think not.

      Too many are quick to weigh in with advice and commentary on things they’re clearly not experts in. Knowing something well generally means being able to explain it in terms a child might understand. Given this, it seems that most people are bluffing. For all the information readily available in the world, most people just take something they heard at face value and parrot it back at you like it’s gospel.

      Learning begins with first seek to understand. That requires a healthy dose of humility and knowing what you don’t know. When you approach the world with an open mind and a closed mouth you can learn all kinds of things. Like what kind of person you want to become. That seems to be a good starting point.

    • The Battle of Timidity and Boldness

      “Focus your attention on the link between you and your death, without remorse or sadness or worrying. Focus your attention on the fact you don’t have time and let your acts flow accordingly. Let each of your acts be your last battle on earth. Only under those conditions will your acts have their rightful power. Otherwise they will be, for as long as you live, the acts of a timid man…. Being timid prevents us from examining and exploiting our lot as men.” – Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan

      I did the math, mentally adding 25 years to my current age and toyed with the idea of being that later age. There are no guarantees that I’ll ever reach that point in my life, of course. No guarantees for any of us marching through time on our annual trip around the sun. But I toyed with the idea of being an old man and wondered at the state of my mind and body. I wondered at the experiences I’d had in the interim, these years between now and then.

      This long sleep we have in store for ourselves is our future, whether a quarter century away or this afternoon, and we ought to live boldly instead of merely timidly existing. I won’t say I’ve mastered this, but I live a better life knowing that the whole dance could end on the next drum beat. But we can do so much more. Simply by living with urgency.

      This theme, the constant reminder of our imminent death, runs through Stoic philosophy. And it runs through this blog. I try, not always successfully, to use it as a cattle prod to my backside. A jolt of awareness that this could all end at any moment, so break free of that routine, break away from the timid existence and live a life of adventure and boldness. It’s the underlying theme of this blog, beginning on the home page with Thoreau’s call to action:

      “Rise free from care before the dawn and seek adventures.” – Henry David Thoreau

      If we accept that we must die, and as improbable as it might seem, at any moment, what might we do to live now? If this is our final act, what will it be? And, if blessed with another, what of the act to follow?

      The answer clearly must be to live the moment with urgency. Say what must be said. Do what must be done. Get out there and live boldly! Pursue the magic in the moment with vigor and a profound lust for life.

    • Each Leap

      It’s funny how things cluster together. Bursts of activity that lump together depending on the place that you’re in emotionally, physically, developmentally. Like jumping rock-to-rock to cross a stream, these places are where we land at a given moment in our lives.

      Some are easy to identify: “student” to “early career” to “committed relationship” to “parent” are all leaps we’re familiar with. But there are other, smaller leaps that come to mind. Over the last year I’ve had clusters of activity – hiking, chasing waterfalls, devouring poetry, home improvement projects, etc. that consumed me for a time and then I was on to the next thing for a while. Those waterfalls are still calling, just as mountain peaks are, it’s just not their time right now.

      Each leap lands you in another place in your life. Each leap changes you forever. I’ll never be who I was before I had children, nor will I ever be the same person as I was before I read The Summer Day or saw a snowshoe hare sprinting through the snow on the summit of Mount Moosilauke or a hundred other leaps large and small that have brought me to this particular landing spot.

      Each leap brings us further across the stream, further from who we once were while closer to what we might be. Knowing we’ve changed, and fully aware of the risks, we must choose which leap to take next. Sometimes we get wet, sometimes we reach a dead end, and sometimes we reach a landing spot we never dreamed of getting to. There are lessons in each.

      At the moment I’ve landed on a series of home improvement projects that demand the usual investment of time and money. But I’m already plotting my next leap, and have an eye on the one after that too. All while the characters in my life are making their own leaps, some drawing closer, others moving further away. And this is as it should be. The stream keeps flowing, even as we leap from stone to stone.

      Nothing ever has been or ever will be the same. You can’t just sit on a rock in the middle of the stream forever. You’ve got to leap again. So make it a good one.