Alexandersmap

    Category: Personal Growth

    • Scattered Thoughts

      Today I’ve driven all over the state of Connecticut, and I’ll be honest, I look at the woods and see the ghosts of the Pequot who conceded this land to English settlers.  I also think of Benedict Arnold, a native son of Connecticut, betraying his own neighbors in battle after he defected.  These woods could talk, if given the chance.  Instead I rely on the whispers of those who came before, and it’s really hard to hear them over the hum of highway traffic and bulldozers clearing more land for commercial development.  There’s a lot I love about Connecticut, but the ever-expanding development isn’t one of those things.  Knowing the history of a place makes you angry when you see that place abused, and too much development feels abusive to me.  Does that make me a preservationist?  Probably.  Venus and the moon are dancing this evening, and the wind is howling in Connecticut, as if voicing it’s displeasure at being left out of the tango in the sky.  I stared at the two for a few minutes and left them to finish their dance as I checked into my hotel for the night.  It’s not lost on me that I complain about development while staying in hotels and driving on highways and visiting customers in office buildings. I don’t have a problem with development when it’s done well, it just seems to be mostly down and dirty profit-maximization development in most cases, and where’s the magic in that?  I love the quiet corners of Connecticut, and wish that there were more of them preserved for the future.

      “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” – Anais Nin

      The beauty of writing every day is in the magic you relive in the moments you’ve lived, and in pulling magic out of the air that you weren’t even aware of until you start typing.  I’m not sure why I waited so long to begin writing, but I know I can’t go back to not doing it.  Writing is transformative for the writer, as reading is for the reader.  I’m currently being transformed by reading Josh Waitzkin, Leo Tolstoy, Ryan Holiday, Jack Gilbert, Mary Oliver and Nathaniel Philbrick.  I’m in a routine where I’ll read a few pages of Waitzin, Tolstoy and Holiday in succession and a poem or two from Gilbert and Oliver early in the morning.  I read Philbrick in the evening in a traditional book because I appreciate the tactile experience of reading a book more in the evenings and don’t want to start my day wearing reading glasses, thank you.

      All this highway driving around Connecticut reminded me of an unpleasant moment five years ago as I was driving up I-95 through Connecticut.  A man had committed suicide by jumping in front of an 18-wheeler that had no chance of swerving out of his way.  I was close enough to the situation that they hadn’t covered up the body yet, and I still see the face of the man staring blankly in my direction as his broken body lay unnaturally twisted like a bag of laundry broke on the pavement.  I’ve never been to war, but I imagine my experience with this man shortly after his demise was close to what a soldier might experience.  One moment you’re talking to a person, the next they’re a corpse.  We’re all just bags of flesh and blood and bones.  What makes us alive is our spirit and an energy force of electrical and intangible energy.  That man on the highway chose to give back his energy to the universe, and his body became nothing more than broken matter on the pavement.  Aren’t we so much more than that?

      That intangible energy carries on long after we’re gone through the people we’ve touched in our lives, but what of future generations who never knew us?  Well, I never met Mark Twain or Henry David Thoreau or Mary Oliver, but I feel their intangible energy in the words that they write.  I never met Katherine Hepburn but I feel her energy when I drive through Old Saybrook, Connecticut.  And I never met Coleman Hawkins but I’m stopped in my tracks whenever I hear him preach through his saxophone playing Mood Indigo.  We’re more than a bag of bones and blood.  Our humanity comes from that intangible energy.  When we interact with others face-to-face or through their words on the page it creates sparks, changing us.  Don’t we owe it to the world to pay this energy forward?  To weave our own version of magic?

      So that’s the mission, isn’t it?  Make it your life goal to take that intangible energy, that life force, and transcend the flesh and blood we live in.  Offering more to the world requires learning more, seeking to understand more, observing more, and becoming more.  And in return we reverberate beyond the now.  That seems a better path to me.  Focus on the contribution, and don’t worry about stupid things like WordPress changing you to Block Editor all the time.  There’s so much more to do with the time you have.  Get to it already.

       

    • Basketball and Icarus

      “Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew…
      I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.”
      – Jack Gilbert, Failing and Flying

      Last night I watched the last regular season basketball game of my son’s career. With four teams bunched up in the standings with the same conference record at the start of the game, there was a lot to play for, the winner of this game would move on to the playoffs, the loser would go home.  A similar reality was playing out in gyms in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Maine.  This was the end of some players’ triumph.

      As a parent you think maybe your kid will make the travel basketball team.  If they have some skills you think they may make their High School team, and play AAU ball on a team with good coaching.  And in the back of your mind you calculate the odds of your kid playing in college.  For the record, the odds of a High School basketball player playing in an NCAA college basketball program – that’s Division I, II and III, is 3.4%.  So for the thousands of kids playing basketball and rising through the ranks, only a very small percentage actually play in college.  Crazy small odds when you think of it.

      For my son, basketball was an obvious choice.  He’s always been a head taller than everyone else, he’s always been athletic and he’s very “coachable”.  He’s never been the leading scorer on any team after Middle School, but has always been a leader on the court and a strong defensive presence.  I’m slightly biased, but the team seems better when he’s on the court most of the time.  He had one hurdle that limited him; he had a tendency to pass up shots and open lanes and pass the ball instead.  In a game that’s played more and more at the perimeter, centers are less prioritized than they once were on the offensive end.  But put him on the defensive end and watch him shine.  He’s in the top five in blocks in the conference playing a third of the minutes of the others on the list.

      He grew up playing ball in the Merrimack Valley in Massachusetts.  The Merrimack Valley is a mix of tough city kids and suburban kids.  When you play in the Merrimack Valley you quickly grow a thick skin or you fade away.  I’ve watched a lot of wild college games with hostile home crowds, but I’d put an Andover-Central Catholic or Lawrence-Lowell game up against most college games for level of intensity and the passion of the crowd.  Basketball players are either baked or burned in this environment, and college coaches know it.  Recruiters started talking to my son and many other players during fall league games at “The Barn” in North Andover during fall ball games, and would pop up at games throughout the rest of the season.  College recruiting is a game in itself, and you feel both honored and at times bewildered by the experience.  Where’s the best fit?  Will he actually play there or are they stacking players?

      The best advice we ever heard was to choose the college first and the program second.  If your child doesn’t love the school, they won’t want to stay there.  If they don’t love the program they can still stay at the school and get a degree.  When you get a school they love with a program they like, playing with teammates they love, that’s the best scenario. And that’s where we found ourselves over the last four years.  It carried our son through major injuries and a change in playing philosophy in the program that emphasized shooters on the perimeter over big guys in the paint.  He loved his school, loved his teammates, and respected the program and stuck with it.  No regrets.  His last two points on his home court were an emphatic put-back dunk, his first dunk after two years of building his ankle strength back up.  His last dunk was on this basket two years earlier when a player came down on him as he grabbed a defensive rebound. He wouldn’t play again for a long time, and wouldn’t dunk again until this, his last home game. It came with exactly one minute left on the clock, and it was the perfect cap on those last two years of struggle.  It’s a grainy screen shot from the game video, but I love it because it shows him in flight, near the end of his own journey in this game.

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      For any basketball player to be playing college basketball at any level is a triumph.  A very small number will move on to the NBA or to coaching, but this is the end for almost every one of them.  It’s the culmination of years of playing and learning, injuries and setbacks, making teams and not making other teams, growing as people and learning important life skills like time management and mutual respect and unselfishness and risk-taking.  As with every game, it gets harder as you grow with it, but you do grow with it.  And as a parent I’ve grown with it too.

      And so we found ourselves in a gym in Maine on Senior night for the team we were playing against.  They were ahead of us in the standings walking in, but both teams knew that the winner wrote their ticket in, the loser had to hope others lost for them to move forward.  As it happened those other teams won their games while our teams played each other, setting up the win or go home scenario.  Parents watched scores on their phones, knowing more than the players did.  But the players knew the stakes.  I found myself drawn to a guard from the other team as the clock ticked down and our team holding a tenuous lead in the game.  Tears were in his eyes, and he’d pull his jersey up to wipe them away.  His coach, seeing his emotion, shouted at him to be ready for the ball should he get one more shot to win it.  That chance disappeared as time ran out on the game and the regular season.  One team moving on to the playoffs, one team at the end of their triumph. But surely a triumph for all of them, being here, playing this game at this level.

    • Listening Differently

      “When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, “What is the sound of the waterfall?” “Silence,” he finally told me. The stillness I did not notice until the sound of water falling made apparent the silence I had been hearing long before.” – Jack Gilbert, Happening Apart From What’s Happening Around It

      When my children were younger and my career path meant something different, I didn’t listen as well. I was focused on other things, or perhaps distracted, or just trying to make sense of it all. I’m not sure an extra decade or two makes much of a difference in listening, but reading a poem early in the morning seems to help. The nest is empty now, but the walls still echo, and the kids are out there in the world. You know they’re out there; you can hear them in the silence. When you see them again the essence is the same, but they’ve changed and so have you. And that’s as it should be.

      When Bodhi was still with us back in those days of chaos, I’d get him stirred up by looking out the window and asking loudly “Who’s that?!” He’d pop up and run from window to window to see what he was missing, and not seeing it scratch at the door to be let out. He’d burst outside, bark his presence, realize he wasn’t missing out on anything after all and go pee on the lawn and go lie down. There are days when my writing feels like the Bodhi ritual. The thoughts have always been there, looking to break free and see the light of the world. Writing every day forces me, reluctantly at times, to let them see the light. And in the writing other thoughts grow, like a seedling breaking the ground and reaching ever upward. We all have so much to say, don’t we?

      Outside I hear my friend the Carolina Wrenn singing her now familiar song. Other birds are singing as well, and the feeder is busy with chatter and flurry. The sun has broken over the horizon and announces that it’s best to move on. The roar of things to do today grows louder in my head. I know this sound too, and push forward before the spell is broken once again. Too late; the roar of the waterfall has broken the silence.

    • Giving Yourself Away

      “We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the manner in which we and the world meet each new day. Harm and boon in the meetings…” – Jack Gilbert, Harm And Boon In The Meetings

      I’ve had a book of poetry by Jack Gilbert for a couple of years now, but never really felt the pull of the pages to immerse myself in it until now. He’s grieving in this poem, which is more apparent as it progresses beyond my quote, but I’m drawn to the analogy of wood reaching out to the flame. All relationships are this dance between giving yourself away and in consuming the other half of the relationship as they give themselves away. It’s this concept of what you and your partner bring to the relationship today, tomorrow and the next day. Some days you give well more than your 50%, sometimes you give a lot less, but the sum of the two gets you closer to 100%. Balance. Yin and Yang. Order and Chaos in a perfect unity.

      The damage happens when one partner is always being consumed while the other burns. We’ve all been on both sides of that, whether in a friendship, a job or a marriage. Those relationships either end when one half burns out of the other jumps to another fuel source. I’m no relationship coach, but I’m approaching 25 years of marriage of playing both the fire and the wood. That gives me some level of experience in the subject, if never truly expertise. There seems to be plenty of fuel left to keep our fire burning for whatever time we’re given, and it comes back to the lyrics of the song that started it all for us, pointing to this concept of the dance between fire and the wood:

      “Now everyone dreams of a love lasting and true
      But you and I know what this world can do
      So let’s make our steps clear that the other may see
      And I’ll wait for you
      If I should fall behind
      Wait for me”
      – Bruce Springsteen, If I Should Fall Behind

      Maybe this should have been a Valentine’s Day post, but the reality is that the real work of relationships starts after the honeymoon, after the flowers and chocolates of Valentine’s Day, after the fire’s been burning for awhile. That’s when you know if you’re relationship is more than just tinder. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy. I keep coming back to this line, and recognizing myself and a lifetime of relationships in the words. We all offer ourselves to the world, and sometimes we’re burned badly. A fire does similar damage to a forest, but the forest often comes back stronger. A relationship is resilient when both sides recognize themselves in the fire and the wood – consumption and fuel – and each strives for balance in what they bring to it.

    • Between the Memorable

      “Our lives happen between the memorable.” – Jack Gilbert, Highlights And Interstices

      I don’t recall ever using the word interstices in a sentence before referencing Gilbert’s poem here, but it marries well with the quote I pulled from the poem. Interstices is the intervening space between things. So for every highlight in a life; graduation, marriage, birth of a child, bucket list trip, there’s the million seemingly mundane things that happen in between. The drive to and back from the game, not the game itself. The five minutes you’re sitting on rolled out paper in the doctor’s office, versus the time that you’re engaged with the doctor as you’re trying to diagnose why things aren’t quite right. Interstices is the break in the trees that lets that flicker of light shine in your face. It’s the stuff of life, yet the stuff in between the highlights.

      I’m sitting in a restaurant parking lot waiting for a breakfast appointment to show up. The calendar shows the appointment, and sometimes I’ll block off the drive time to ensure I give myself the time. But this waiting time is blank on my calendar. And yet it’s not blank space in my life. We’re reminded of the tenuous hold we have in life when that doctor informs you or someone in your family that not quite right is something worse. For all our talk of living in the moment, sometimes we forget about life between the memorable. Celebrate the highlights, but remember that the interstices are part of the sum and should be savored too.

    • The Game

      I play this game of productivity each morning that I’m home, taking habits I’ve looped together and creating progress metrics within them. First I set the kettle filled with cold water, then drink a pint of water while reading. I try to get at least five pages of meaningful reading done before the kettle whistles. Sometimes it’s only three pages, depending on the conspiracy between the depth of reading and the volume of water being heated. But the goal remains five pages, conspiracies be damned. I could max out the font on my Kindle app to even the playing field, but really, who am I cheating but myself?

      Once my coffee is made, I write. My goal is to write 150 words before the coffee cools enough to sip, and then finish this morning’s post before I finish the cup. Sometimes the game is easy, sometimes I fail miserably, but I’m always more productive than I otherwise might have been. Such is the nature of habit loops, pulling us moment by moment in the direction we’ve set for ourselves.

      What’s missing in this morning routine is movement. And I’m well aware of the omission. Burpees created shoulder problems, rowing for me is best done in the afternoon, and long walks aren’t possible in the frenzy of a workday morning. But not all habits need to be lumped into the same loop, and I’ve shifted movement to the late afternoon or early evening, when I need it most. It’s become a defined break between work and personal time. Often I’ll add a game or two of chess here, and read a few more pages. If I haven’t done it already, I’ll also chip away at Duolingo tackling French. This used to be a morning activity but I’d get too restless after reading and writing to lump a session with French in, so I’ve taken to doing it in the evenings, instead of watching television. I’ll combine some reading here after Duolingo. Sometimes television wins the hour but I’ve kept the Duolingo streak alive all year.

      And that brings me to the last game of the day; reading before sleep takes over. Unlike the morning reading session I’m usually tapped out by late evening. Reading in bed instead of checking Twitter or the news is a way to end on a positive note, but I know I’m good for maybe five pages at most before I’m tapped out. The game is to try, and usually I get two or three pages in before I nod off. Game over, but another day ahead of where I was yesterday. That’s a win, isn’t it?

    • Progress Whispers

      Momentum is a funny thing. It doesn’t come from one big day of contribution, but from small, daily effort over time. Like many people I use the Jim Collins analogy from Good to Great of pushing the flywheel when I reference momentum. Here’s his own summary of the flywheel effect:

      “There is no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment. Rather, the process resembles relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond.” – Jim Collins, The Flywheel Effect

      We’re all pushing at some flywheel, aren’t we? In our careers, our fitness, our relationships with our spouse and families, and really, in all of our pursuits. Put in your 10,000 hours one small act at a time and over time you reach a level of mastery, as Malcolm Gladwell has spotlighted.

      I came across this quote from Jon Acuff that got me thinking back on the flywheel effect. I’d read his book Finish last year, but I wasn’t in a place where it resonated with me. But I uploaded it again to see what I’d highlighted, and this stood out for me:

      “Progress, on the other hand, is quiet. It whispers. Perfectionism screams failure and hides progress.” – Jon Acuff, Finish

      Perfectionism screams… and blocks. Don’t write the first draft because it sucks. But everyone’s first draft sucks. Every NBA player missed countless shots in the driveway before they nailed them in the NBA Finals. Forget perfectionism, look for progress instead. Progress whispers. Did I take a step towards my goal? Yes, great! No? Don’t miss tomorrow. But keep chipping away at it. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

      I’ve written every day for well past a year, and I’m slowly seeing progress. Better writing, easier flow, expanding palette for new ideas, and an ever-increasing portfolio of completed posts. The writing has bled over into the career, pushing me to be more consistent there, and into other areas I’ve written about before. Progress whispers, but when you look back on it you find you’ve got a lot of momentum going on that flywheel. So by all means, don’t stop pushing now.

    • The Sorting of Stuff

      “Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

      We’re all built on the stuff of those who came before us. We inherit the good and the bad stuff, and become who we are based on how we sort it out. Some sort it out quickly, some never quite get there. We’re all a work in progress.

      Whenever I feel a little tapped out on the writing, I fill the bucket back up by reading more, or getting outside. It’s no secret, really, every creative person says this. They say it because it’s true. I don’t believe in writers block, I believe in closed-mindedness, distraction, laziness and apathy. Those are the Four Horsemen I struggle with, and the best way to shake free of their grip is to move the body and move the mind. I have curiosity, patience, persistence, and empathy in my favor, if I just feed them.

      Reading and then quoting Emerson sparks the imagination, which in turn primes the writing pump. The writing in turn is a sorter of stuff, stuff like the quotations that I picked up from my ancestors, stuff like an antagonist when I was 13 who had some twisted quotations in his own life manifested in targeting fellow students, stuff like the picked up pieces from reading and encounters with people over decade after decade on this planet.

      There are other stuff sorters. I’ve sorted a whole lot of stuff walking. Steps stacked on top of each other sort stuff as well as anything I know of. Maybe you meditate, or go to therapy, or talk to a close friend about your own darkest stuff, and that’s good. Everyone should sort their stuff in their own way. Mine is walking and writing. That’s my quotation from my ancestors I suppose, all gift wrapped in a baby blanket. God knows it could’ve been a lot worse.

      Here’s the scary part: I’m passing my own quotations on to the next generation, mixing sorted and unsorted stuff alike into my marriage, parenthood, and the relationships I have with friends and coworkers and siblings and random strangers and blog readers. I feel compelled to sort as best I can in the time I have. We’re all wading through the muck in our own way. Sort it out or get stuck in it. Pass on the best quotations and try to leave the worst behind.

      The world is full of loud people sorting their stuff out in public. The people who have sorted things out a bit better in their lives tend to avoid that kind of look at me spotlight. Which makes the world seem quite mad if you look around at all the screamers, zealots and provokers prodding for your attention. I’m inclined to tune out the noise, seek out the well-sorted souls and build my house of quotations from better material. A foundation built in muck will only sink. Climb to the higher, more solid ground, look around at the better view, and set your foundation there. If nothing else it makes for more stable ground for those who follow you to build on.

    • Living the Second Life

      “We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.” – Confucius

      This might be the most Stoic quote ever attributed to Confucius. Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius or Seneca danced around this same concept: Life is short, we only have today, do something with this gift. Words, really, until you truly realize it… and live accordingly.

      I’m well into my “second life”, but for me that hasn’t meant dropping everything and sailing around the world. I have friends doing that and believe me, there are days when I’d like to. But I’m deep into the life I’ve built and living means something different to me at the moment. Last night I watched another close basketball game as my son’s team pulled out an important win. He’s down to his last four regular season games in his college career and it’s not lost on him that one way or another there just aren’t many more opportunities to play left for him. And he’s rising to the occasion, playing meaningful minutes, playing big and being a leader on the court. It meant another late night of driving for me, but I wouldn’t want to have been anywhere else in the world.

    • Meeting Luck

      Last night I won $225 in a Super Bowl office pool I didn’t participate in, from an office I don’t work in, and had little knowledge of before I was told I’d won. My wife picked a random square at her job, wrote my name on it and the score aligned with that random number. That’s random luck for you.

      Saturday I watched my son’s basketball team pull out a win as they broke the press in the final minutes and hit clutch free throws as time ran out for their opponent. The game could have gone either way, but key individual matchups and years of practicing how to break the press (get to the ball!) and shooting free throws made all the difference when the game mattered most. That’s making your own luck for you.

      It’s now Monday morning, the sky is slowly brightening, and I‘m well into the day already. I have a morning routine that, like practicing free throws, becomes muscle memory. If luck is random, it’s also fickle. I’ve never won millions of dollars in the lottery, but I know good luck when I see it. Like breaking the press, you’ve got to get up and meet it.