Alexandersmap

    Category: Productivity

    • Give It Wings

      “Days are expensive. When you spend a day you have one less day to spend. So make sure you spend each one wisely.” — Jim Rohn

      “Let others lead small lives, but not you. Let others argue over small things, but not you. Let others cry over small hurts, but not you. Let others leave their future in someone else’s hands, but not you.” — Jim Rohn

      When we think of life as brief, we realize the expense of each day. How we use them in turn matters more. In fact, we come to realize that everything matters. Each day, each decision, stacked together makes up our life, however big or small it may be. Over time we might see that we have agency over our days, and in that realization everything changes.

      That word, agency, is usually greeted with a blank stare. Most people don’t think in terms of agency, of believing to the core that we have a say in how we react to our environment and the actors working for and against us. Thankfully, in the modern world slavery largely doesn’t exist as a legal construct. Yet how many settle for subservient lives?

      “A slave is he who cannot speak his thought.” — Euripides

      We each grow into our potential. We each decide what to be and, within reason, have the opportunity to go be it. Living a larger life doesn’t come simply from the decision, for we must build habits and systems that carry us across the gap between desire and achievement, but it begins there. We plant our seed and nurture it until it is fully realized, selectively watering that which will become our future identity.

      We each develop a working philosophy for our lives, shaped over time. If we’re lucky it’s derived from a place of high agency and boldness. We know, deep down, what we wish to become. Each day offers an opportunity to bridge the gap: To rise up to meet our potential, uniquely ours, represented in the hopes and dreams we shelter from the harshness of the world. Like any fragile dream, we must set it free to fly or flounder on its own. The way to realize a fuller life is simply to give it wings.

    • No Other Way

      when it is truly time,
      and if you have been chosen,
      it will do it by
      itself and it will keep on doing it
      until you die or it dies in you.

      there is no other way.

      and there never was.
      — Charles Bukowski, so you want to be a writer?

      Keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. The writing continues for another day. Who it finds is anyone’s guess. But like a spouse bored of life with you it must find a way out. Nothing boring, nothing pretentious, nothing that doesn’t scream to leave you and meet the world.

      A high bar to clear. We’ve all slogged through countless boring books, tedious slogs through the waist-deep piles of words that mean nothing but a thesaurus referred to. And, if we’re honest, we’ve written our share of boring too. All to tempt the muse. All to find the magic and make ourselves a part of it. Join the Great Conversation once and for all, and maybe, if we might be so bold, find a place at the table one day.

      But not today. Not just yet. Today we work through the process. Truly, there’s no other way.

    • Create It

      “By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.” — Franz Kafka

      We’re each authors of our story, written daily. It’s easy to forget that sometimes. The novel we’re writing is realized in our daily action, page-by-page. We either arrive at the finished product or we flounder in the minutia of distraction. Nobody said life was fair, friend, only relentlessly present. And we all know the present is our gift.

      “Man plans, God laughs.” – Yiddish adage

      We may not arrive at what we set out to create, but we’ll be further along than had we never begun. Is that enough? I went to Iceland for the Aurora Borealis, and found relentless cloud cover mocking me each night. But I found glaciers and ancient volcanoes expressed as waterfalls and basalt columns instead. Am I the lesser for having gone? The lesson is to leap anyway.

      Kafka isn’t stating that just because we desire something deeply enough that we create it, only that we can’t possibly create it unless we desire it to exist first. Fate and grit play their part in the end. All we can do is do the work.

    • Be Whole

      To be great, be whole;
      Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.
      Be whole in everything. Put all you are
      Into the smallest thing you do.
      So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor
      Because it blooms up above.
      — Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa

      An early morning. Out the door long before the dawn brought me deep into the heart of New York City commuter traffic. I still tell myself that this is the price of greatness, something I’ve told my children more than they want to hear, something I don’t always want to hear myself. Yet it still applies, and should for a lifetime. For don’t we owe it to ourselves to put all we are into everything we do?

      The price of greatness is consistently showing up and doing the things we know deep down that we must do. We might never reach greatness even paying the price, but we’ll surely get closer than we might otherwise. Mostly, we honor a commitment to ourselves to at least reach for it. Without this honor, we aren’t quite whole are we? We’re incomplete because we left something of ourselves out of our work. We owe ourselves something more. To be whole.

    • Simply Do

      “I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.” — Naomi Shihab Nye (with a nod to @MayaCPopa for showing the way)

      Fame is overrated, contribution is where it’s at. We are utilitarian at the root of it, here to be productive in our time, whatever our calling, lighting the way until we pass the torch.

      We tend to lean into complicated. This is a distraction from the beautiful truth, a collective turn away from the briefness of being, a wish before the song fades and we blow out the candles. It’s contribution that lives beyond wishes.

      Poetry stares the truth in the eye, wanting nothing more than to face it. I wished somedays I was a better poet, a better writer. I’d forgotten what I could do. Now I simply do.

    • A Wisp of a Moment, Captured

      On a recent walk I noticed the recently painted median strip dividing the road featured artwork now and then. It seems they painted the road in autumn, as the oak leaves returned to the earth to close their cycle and begin again. A few rebels, wishing for immortality perhaps, found the opportunity to capture the moment. It struck me this was what all artists do; reach out from the anonymous mass of their moment and leave something of ourselves for others to find.

      There’s something lovely in the temporary nature of this street art, akin to chalk drawings on sidewalks or sandcastles at low tide. Some art is meant to someday be a memory, recalled in quiet moments when you again walk down that street or on that particular stretch of beach. Do you remember the leaves of autumn, swirling in the wind? How quickly they fade from memory. We surf on a wisp of a moment, sometimes captured, mostly lost forever. We ought to embrace the freedom in that, elusive as it feels, for this is our fragile dance.

      “If you would create something, you must be something.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

      At times we hear the call from the naked page of a notebook, and at times from the middle of the road. Leaves locked in the amber of their moment are a whisper from seasons past to do something with this one. To feel the urgency of the season and make the most of it before the moment fades. This is the unique call of our work, leaping to our attention in the strangest of places. In each case, the question lingers in the moment: Where will you take us now?

    • The Rest of Your Life

      This is the beginning of the rest of your life
      You better start movin’ like you’re running out of time
      The realization coming over your mind
      That it should be a canter
      If you could just find the answer
      You know it could be a canter
      If you were just a wee bit less of a wanker
      More than half ae’ the time
      — Gerry Cinnamon, Cantor

      An old friend pointed me towards Gerry Cinnamon recently. Thick Scottish brogue filled with energy and clever lyrics. That friend has navigated the darkest of tragedies in his life, and I listen when he points me towards the music and writers he’s using to process his life going forward. Most of us are lucky to have easier hurdles than he’s had, but we still have hurdles. We all must find a way forward from whatever lingers.

      The first thing that old friend asked me about was how the writing was going. Not the blog writing, mind you, but that other writing. Not as well, I told him. Wrestling with fiction hadn’t felt right. Maybe non-fiction would be best. Just write and let it sort itself out. And so I am.

      What possible advice can you give a friend who has navigated grief you shudder to contemplate? Nothing unsolicited. Instead, we talked of finding beauty in a dark world, which prompted the Cheryl Strayed quote, which seemed like just enough in the moment:

      There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it,’ said my mother. ‘Put yourself in the way of beauty.
      — Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found

      Life is short. We’ve wasted enough time already, and we must be deliberate and emphatic in how we spend our days. Whatever we wrestle with, demons and darkness or a tendency to idle through our time, we must break free of our inertia and get moving. It should be a cantor. But remember to find the beautiful on the journey.

    • Deliberate Reflection

      “Productive activity has nothing to do with being swept away by the inertia of busyness. It is not about quantity, either. Rather, it is a deliberate choice of where and how to direct one’s attention.” — Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness

      We seek solitude, when possible, in the quiet places. Places of stoic beauty with elbow room necessary to reflect. Places of quiet walks and the indifference of cold. For me these places are off-season beaches and lonely trails that lead me deep into the woods, or most days simply the magic hour before the rest of the world awakens.

      Some believe solitude is the very opposite of a productive place, thinking collaborative effort and the energy of the pack fuels production. But we humans aren’t cogs in a factory, at least we aren’t meant to be. We can be so much more than that if we choose to find it within ourselves. There is no reflection in a turbulent sea.

      Sometimes, even in quiet places, perhaps especially so, we come across characters who are starved for attention. They’ll steal sand from our hourglass if we let them, and take us away from ourselves. These sand gobblers disguise themselves brilliantly in the faces we trust the most. There’s nothing wrong with sharing our sand with others, but we must guard against the gluttonous lest they take it all.

      We must be deliberate in where we use our time, and mindful of just who is the director of our attention. The world will always ask for everything. What we give to it is up to us. We earn our director position in every moment. Deliberate reflection is not an act of selfishness, it’s preservation of the self.

    • What to Do With Our Time

      you will never catch up.
      Walk around feeling like a leaf
      know you could tumble at any second.
      Then decide what to do with your time.
      ― Naomi Shihab Nye, The Art of Disappearing

      I’ve fallen in love with the bullet journal again. It’s not so much because of a love of organization, it’s more a need for organization that draws me deep into the pages of a blank notebook. Each X drawn through a bullet is uniquely satisfying, each habit represented as a filled in square that designates a day when I did what I told myself I was going to do fuels a desire to keep the streak alive one more day. As lines grow on paper day-after-day like a sideways bar graph, lies we tell ourselves become as apparent as the promises kept. How we reconcile each line tells us who we really are.

      If there’s one fatal flaw in the life of a busy soul, it’s following through on all that we want for ourselves. There’s only so many things we can say yes to, and endless things we must dismiss with a no. The yes’s seem so trivial stacked next to the no’s, but we forget that the collection of no’s is ours too. No’s matter a great deal in keeping us from tumbling. We aren’t leaves in the wind, to borrow Nye’s lovely analogy, we’re purposeful humans finding our way in the world.

      We must decide what we won’t be good at in this lifetime. We must see the path through the wilderness that carries us to a place where we might thrive. Breaking up is hard to do because we don’t want to let others down, but when we don’t break from things that don’t matter to us we’re letting ourselves down. Just who are we breaking up with? We must choose identity over misguided altruism. The world will ask for everything we’ve got. The best response in such moments is “Thank you, but that’s not for me”.

      Decide what to be and go be it. No isn’t fun, but it’s not ours to hold onto. The trade-off, becoming, is where the real fun is, for this is where we set our sights on big yes’s and watch them grow.

    • Something Meaningful

      Every day I die again, and again I’m reborn
      Every day I have to find the courage
      To walk out into the street
      With arms out
      Got a love you can’t defeat
      Neither down nor out
      There’s nothing you have that I need
      I can breathe
      Breathe now
      — U2, Breathe

      When you settle into a conversation about the best U2 songs, well, it’s best to have a comfortable chair and a full beverage to weigh the choices against. For me, the choices alternate based on my mood at the time, but top 3 includes Breathe and The Unforgettable Fire, and we can endlessly debate the order and the third from there. One could make a case that the album that Breathe came from (No Line on the Horizon) is their best album as well, but I write this knowing it’s a sure way to rise the passions of the fanbase. I’ve been known to shift favorite album based on my mood at the moment. The blessing of U2 is having such a rich catalog that it’s even worth discussing.

      Every day we are reborn, with an opportunity to make something of our time before the lights go out once again. The analogy of a lifetime in a day is nothing new, yet the lesson escapes us now and then. We woke up yesterday, we woke up today, and we expect to wake up tomorrow too. The trick is to do something meaningful with this stack of days, and accumulate our own catalog of mastery in our lifetime.

      What’s your soundtrack for doing bigger things? Play it loud. Sing your heart out.