Alexandersmap

    Category: Philosophy

    • A Series of Somethings

      No one can change everything, but everyone can change something. If you choose to live a life with impact, it’s in your control to do so.” — Seth Godin, Powerlessness

      Godin’s post yesterday offered this nugget of wisdom as a reminder that we have agency. We may change something, should we choose to. Don’t ever tell yourself otherwise, for to do so is to rob this world of one more voice of positive change.

      What does change look like? It’s how we treat people. It’s how we treat ourself. It’s holding a standard for how we’re going to move through this world and holding the line on that with every interaction. We’ll fall short of those standards more than we care to think about, but we’ll also rise to meet them. And we’ll realize now and then that we’ve exceeded the old standard and set a new one. In this way we learn and grow and become something more than we were before.

      That person, the something more person, has momentum and influence. We float through life leaving a wake behind us—a ripple if you like. Each day we impact the life of someone. We may impact them, not directly, but by the impression we made on another, who in turn influenced that person—and so on across time. That’s the ripple of influence we may hardly be aware of in the moment. Each is a series of somethings we made out of what would otherwise be nothing. We must not simply fill the void, but fill it well.

      Writing this blog, I may reach a few people I’ll never meet in my lifetime. The intent isn’t to influence you, dear reader, but it also isn’t to shut you out of the conversation. Every day, flying by as they do, the blog is a postcard to the world. Read by some, glanced at by others, ignored by the vast majority. And that’s as it should be. This is part of my something, even if it isn’t everything.

    • Aspiring to Excellence

      “I know you won’t believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others.” — Socrates

      “As he valued excellence less and less, he began to lose his skill in assuming it.” — Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine

      For years I’ve been writing this blog, talking of that evasive personal excellence and its ancient philosophy, arete. We know that we’ll never reach it, only to get closer, until one day we release all we’ve gained to eternity. We may view this as an impossible goal and aim lower, or as a worthy height to ascend towards, offering views we’d never see if we hadn’t attempted to go even higher. Most of us tend to stick with attainable goals. And so it is that we are the lesser for having lowered our expectations of ourselves. That truth becomes apparent over time.

      Still, we may reach that time when we recognize what we’ve opted out of and choose to opt in to something more. Just as bucket lists give people who are late to the game a chance to realize some of those dreams deferred for other things, we may choose an aspirational list of personal growth that leads us closer to our potential. We may not run a PR in the marathon as we grow older, but we can fully explore our intellectual potential for as long as our mental faculty allows.

      The key is to determine a higher standard of living for which we will aspire towards, and attempt to exceed our standard from yesterday today. We may be late bloomers whatever our age, but damnit, we may bloom yet. We may aspire to arete, our evasive personal excellence, and grow to meet the potential within us. Life shouldn’t be a series of settlements of our standards for ourselves, but a steady climb to better. Shouldn’t it?

    • Do Interesting

      “Do interesting things and interesting things will happen to you.” — John Hegarty

      The more times I circle the sun, the more I feel that interesting surpasses necessary. The timeline tightens, the world changes as we work to keep pace, and the examples of days spent doing necessary at the expense of interesting accumulate. What is necessary is methodical, logical, practical. What is interesting is radical, bold and audacious. Do interesting.

      For here there is no place
      that does not see you. You must change your life.
      — Rainer Maria Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo

      We cannot compare ourselves to others. Interesting isn’t what our favorite YouTube channel is doing this week, interesting is what we do that is a departure from our norm. Interesting is taking “not yet” out of our vocabulary in favor of “why not?” It doesn’t matter what the world does today, this is our life to live in the best way we can with the tools we have at our disposal.

      What are we doing today? Make bold choices, if only for now. Tomorrow we can defer to necessary, should we feel inclined. Today is for something more. Do interesting. There’s no time to waste.

    • Where Do 2500 Blog Posts Bring Us?

      “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.” — Henry David Thoreau, The Journals of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861

      This is the 2500th blog post published. Countless others never made it this far, but surely influenced me just the same. The process of writing informs, whether the world sees what we write or not. But to publish is to be bold, today, at least for one audacious moment.

      I ask myself, sometimes, what took me so long to come to blogging? I ask myself, why I would ever write another? Each post is a minor victory in productive ritual. Each underscores a strong desire to learn and grow and become something more. A late bloomer coming to a dying art just as reading seems passé to the hip crowd. And yet, once in a while some words resonate with another.

      The thing is, I began writing thinking I might change the world, I ended up changing myself. Talk of heaven and hell is often nothing more than deferring our one and only opportunity to live and be what we will. There is no other life than this, and I’m inclined to go and do and see and be while I can. We know what’s coming for us, and ignore it at our peril.

      So where have 2500 blog posts brought us? It’s always been a call to action to go forth and see new places. And the places! Faraway and deep within, forever seeking the new and interesting. Forever changing, forever changed, with an eye on personal excellence (arete) that will be just out of reach but worth the effort. To make the most of every day we’re blessed with and write a few words about it again and again until one day it ends. One step closer to knowing with each blog published.

      Postscript: In a moment of humbling realization, 2500 blog posts brought a typo in the title, since corrected but forever locked in on social media and emailed articles. We must laugh and toast to nothing. I’m a long way from arete but trying just the same.

    • Illusions of Permanence

      Each of us has a reckoning with illusions of permanence. Things come and go from our lives with regularity. This is most obvious when we live in a place that faces a building boom. The field down the street or the woods that line the road are leveled for a development. The old farmhouse and barn are torn down and a building pops up in its place. The quiet country road is now lined with cars commuting through, and soon the road is widened and strung with traffic lights. And we mourn what was lost.

      It’s similar when a friend we’ve bonded with becomes radically different from us politically. What we believed to be forever turned out to be nothing but an illusion of permanence. The person I thought you were is not who you turned out to be, and you think the same of me. Yet, like that field and stand of trees on that quiet country road, we each have memories of what one was. We each miss the person we thought the other was.

      A plot of land might be viewed as an investment in the future of the community, but some folks feel that investment is conservation land and some think it’s a new hospital, grocery store and housing development. Both have value for a community to thrive, and both ought to be fought for. But we ought to consider carefully what will be forever lost when completing the transaction to make the change.

      Some relationships are better as transactional. We can put aside our differences and work side-by-side with a teammate or a coworker, focused on the common goal. And we can nurture a deep bond built on common beliefs and a feeling that each person in the relationship is integral to the other. Consider the circle of trust and who we might want within it, and who should remain outside. Often it comes down to who will grow with us and who will erode the essence of who we are for want of some company. We should beware the company we keep, but when the right company is found invest deeply in keeping it.

      The thing is, nothing is permanent, but some things have staying power. Everything will disappear one day, but we have agency in keeping that stand of trees or that person we care about in our lives. Or we can use that agency to drift away to do other things that feel important to us, expecting that what we remembered will still be there for us when we return. When we see the fragility of everything on our journey, we begin to prioritize the things that have staying power simply because we take the time to make them so. Ultimately, our legacy is built on what we took the time to care for beyond ourselves.

    • Beyond the Walls of Belief

      “There are two different types of people in this world. Those who want to know and those who want to believe,” — Friedrich Nietzsche

      We all believe in something, but we ought to recognize the blinders we’ve put on as we wrap our minds around it. Beliefs are made to be challenged. And so we must be open to the provocation if we wish to grow beyond who we currently are.

      We know the world is full of people who want no such thing. Belief is a corridor with high walls. Zealous believers are inclined to believe just about anything that reinforces the core beliefs they came into the conversation with. We ought to reflect in that moment on our own core beliefs as well, that we may see the walls we’ve built.

      Growth comes from knowledge, not belief. Knowledge is the goal. Knowledge of universal truth, knowledge of the self, knowledge of becoming and reaching for our potential. Personal excellence may reside just beyond our reach, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still reach.

      The thing is, we ought to recognize what our inclinations are and learn to provoke and challenge ourselves with each step. When we’ve settled on a belief we tend to stay in place with it. I may believe that all people who voted differently than I did were fools or fanatics, but believing that puts me in a box from which I’ll never climb out of until I learn to see something else about those people. I walk through my community knowing roughly half of them would judge me ill-informed with my own vote. None of us have it all figured out, and judging others is just another wall built of belief. The better question is always, where do we go from here?

      Where is the path forward when everyone is building walls with their beliefs? We must become aware of who we are and where we have holes to fill in our own incomplete masterpiece. Each step on our journey offers insight into who we might be if we would only stop believing we’ve got it all figured out.

    • What Is Mine

      “We have to make the best use of the things which are actually in our power, and use everything else according to their nature.”
      — Epictetus, Discourses

      It’s easy to get caught up in things. I wrestle with it myself at times, mostly out of a sense of fairness. We were raised to know what is right and what is wrong, and when we see things that are wrong we expect to see things made right. This is folly. The world is unfair, it always has been, and the only way to navigate this world without being forever caught in despair is to let go of that which we cannot control. That doesn’t mean to give up, and it doesn’t mean to let the worst of humanity rule the roost either. It means to focus on what we have agency over and nothing more.

      “What is mine is mine, and what is not is not.”

      Epictetus was born into slavery, studied under Musonius Rufus and became famous as a philosopher after he was emancipated. So it’s easy to see how he latched onto this idea of focusing on what is within one’s power. If you’re a slave you don’t have much agency over your own life. When you’re emancipated, you have much more, but you’ve got that experience of being enslaved as insight into how to move through life.

      And what of us? What enslaves us? We may boast of being free, but how many of us fall in line with what other’s expect of us? How many are so tethered to the screen on their phone that they won’t look up and look someone in the eye? Which offers more truth for us? All we have is this moment together. We must learn to emancipate ourselves from that which enslaves us and focus on what is essential.

      “And when I do die, how will I die? Like a man who gives up everything that belongs to someone else.” — Epictetus, Discourses

      There are experiences we want to have in this lifetime. Some will be reached, some will fall by the wayside. What we do with our brief time isn’t always up to us, but we may control what we pay attention to and how we react to each encounter. Whatever will be will be (Que Sera, Sera). The rest will pass through our grasp. The secret to a happy life is learning to let those things fall away.

    • Practicing Lagom: Moderation and Balance

      “Lagom (pronounced [ˈlɑ̂ːɡɔm], LAW-gom) is a Swedish word meaning ‘just the right amount’ or ‘not too much, not too little’.
      The word can be variously translated as ‘in moderation’, ‘in balance’, ‘perfect-simple’, ‘just enough’, ‘ideal’ and ‘suitable’ (in matter of amounts).” — via Wikipedia

      I try (sometimes successfully) to live by the maxim, “all things in moderation”. So when I came across this Swedish word, lagom, that means roughly the same thing while awaiting a large latte at a cafe last week, I had to look into it more. I’m guessing that cafe has seen its share of over-caffeinated zombies shuffling in. A little art to remind us to chill was appropriate. When the student is ready the teacher will appear.

      Life is simple when we allow it to be. We ought to practice a routine of self-regulation, which also serves as an act of self-preservation. Like anything we hoard or overindulge in, it can overwhelm us if we let it. We can’t have it all, so why try to grab it all? It will drag us down and drown us if we don’t let go of the non-essential. What is essential? It’s really not all that much when we really think about it.

      My bride spent hours on a slushy Saturday cleaning up the attic, bagging used clothing to donate, throwing away things that couldn’t be donated but were no longer of use and generally getting things sorted for the new season. It was a good way to spend a wet and raw day. We accumulate things, and if we’re not careful those things end up ruling our lives.

      In that spirit of spring cleaning, springtime is also a good time to clean up some habits we’ve accumulated along the way. Perhaps we eat more than we should, or indulge in a bit too much wine or coffee or social media outrage. Perhaps we’ve grown lazy with a habit or two we thought would make all the difference in those heady days leading up to New Years Eve. Why not use this time to clean out the old and introduce something new?

      If life seems pretty tense at the moment, it may be a sign that we need to find a way to self-regulate. Stop over-indulging in the non-essential. Spring is a great time to reset and embrace the things that make us healthier, happier and more resilient against the stressors that are out of our control. What is “just enough” for us? Consume less, carry less, and lighten the load we bear. Stay in that lane awhile and we may find we have more spring in our step.

    • Beyond This

      “What labels me, negates me.” ― Soren Kierkegaard

      There is no them
      There’s only us
      — U2, Invisible

      It felt like we were winning at one time in our collective history. But even then there were angry people. Bitterness must be fueled, and a whole industry rose up to feed outrage to those who needed a taste of it. But it’s all so addictive, isn’t it? Soon the consumers are themselves consumed. Those of us who abstained barely know them anymore.

      And there we are; us and them. It’s easy to label them, even as we’re angry at the labels they put on us. Add separation, where one isn’t looking into the eyes of the person they’re calling one of them, and we all become dehumanized. And so it is that technology, once our great hope, has become our undoing.

      Is the genie out of the bottle? It seems that way. But I’m a believer in forward progress. Sure we take two steps back now and then. God knows we’ve regressed lately. But have hope. This too shall pass. The pendulum will swing back again.

      It’s easy to label, it’s harder to seek to understand. If we are to get beyond this, we ought to get over our anger and our labels and get to know each other instead. Even writing that it sounds naive, but tell me another way forward?

      Things are darkest before the dawn. We aren’t quite as dark yet as we could be, and the trend is shockingly downward, but when enough of us say, I’m not going down there, we may level off this spiral and find a safe landing. From solid ground we may climb once again.

      There is no them, there’s only us. Put enough of us together and soon there is no more them. Or we could just go back to shouting at each other, seeing how well that’s working out. We get to choose, at least until it’s too late for choices anymore.

    • What Belongs to Us?

      “Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it.” — Rabindranath Tagore

      We know when we’re clicking on all cylinders just as we know when things aren’t going our way—by how we feel. We forget the physical sometimes when our brains try to dominate the conversation. It’s a good idea to take a deep breath now and then, if only to come back to our senses.

      There are days when I’m grateful that I write this blog, because it starts my days with thoughtfulness and random scraps of beauty collected along the journey. There are days when I consider doing something else with my time—usually when my ego gets in the way of reflection and deep thought. But writing is my way of opening up the receivers and letting in that which I wish to experience in this world. We can’t write about that which we haven’t first wrestled with. Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be a transformative force multiplier for searching and categorizing information, but wrestling with the truth within us is still the work of poets and philosophers.

      So what belongs to us? The stuff we accumulate? It will all be divided amongst our survivors one day. The things that matter most are the moments of truth and beauty we wring out of our time dancing with life. Being aware of this and going deeper still is where things get real. All the meaningless stuff swirls about us making noise for attention is just a distraction from the realization that this is it: we are here now and must do the best we can with what we have.

      So breathe deeply, feel the possibility of the moment and recognize the fragility of what we’re so often cavalier about. We’re all just borrowing moments from infinity. What belongs to us is now. What might we do with it?