Alexandersmap

    Category: reading

    • Realizing Growth

      “You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.” — Alan Watts

      “The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.”— Mortimer Adler

      I finished a second book this year, a good pace if you look at how early in the year we are, but these were stubborn books that didn’t want to finish with me in the prior year. Everything has it’s time, and certainly this rings true with books. Looking at my highlights and notes from each, I’ve made a couple of incremental steps forward this year. Let’s call that a win in a year that has otherwise started out in concerning ways.

      We know that we’re all (sometimes reluctantly) connected, but we must remain focused on our own development over the trends of humanity, and then use our growth as a catalyst for change. Knowledge isn’t something to hoard like a greedy billionaire’s money, it’s something we share with others as we navigate the world together. This blog is written to share what I pick up along the way, but so is a conversation with a random stranger sharing the same space in a café. We never really know how far our ripple will carry, only that this is our time to turn our accumulated experience and learning into a bigger splash.

      The aim isn’t to be an influencer, but to be influenced by the experiences and knowledge we gather along the way. Shouldn’t we all calculate our lives, not by time alive on this planet, but by our accumulation of experience in our living years? As a tree with it’s rings marking seasons, some years are growth years and some are survival years, but there’s a ring either way.

      It’s no coincidence that ripples from a stone dropped in a still pond resemble the rings of a tree (we might take this analogy all the way out to the universe itself—naturally we aren’t the center of it, no matter what our mother’s told us, but surely our energy and matter are an integral part of it). At the core of each of us is identity, focused either on growth or survival (holding on to what we have already). What will this year be for us? We must act on our intentions if we wish to realize growth.

    • Using Words Well

      “A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

      I’ve had a song stuck in my head for a week that is so profoundly beautiful it changed my perspective on how I want to spend my days. We’ve all had those experiences with art that change us in unforeseen ways. When we encounter prose, poetry or lyrics that awe us with truth, we are inadvertently rising to meet a higher plane of understanding about ourselves and our place in this brief shining moment. We know that the game has changed, and must rise to meet a new personal standard by mining deeper with our own work.

      So many writers tell us that to write better we must read better, and really this goes for all art. But to write better we must also learn to live better, be more present and aware, and through heightened awareness, move closer to personal excellence (arete). Some characters and places are formative, and lead us to places unanticipated before we ascend to that vista. We experience the thrill in discovery in the immediate, and the assurance of familiarity in time. And then it all repeats again with the next encounter.

      The goal is to keep building on the gains made previously. To find new paths worth exploring, to learn something new today, to use that as a stepping stone for something more tomorrow. Writing has brought me farther faster than I would have gone otherwise, but more, it brings creativity to my days that may be applied to other aspects of my life. This creates a snowball effect as each act builds upon the other, as each day builds upon the previous, to create an exponentially greater soul than the one who started this journey.

    • More and Less

      “By doing less, you might accomplish more.” — Simon Sinek

      Not that long ago, I decided I hadn’t read enough books this year. It wasn’t a matter of not reading, it’s just that the books I was reading were pretty weighty affairs that took a lot to get through. Serious books, if you will. I still have some of those serious books awaiting my attention, but I’ve mixed in some more fiction recently to make reading more enjoyable again. Reading isn’t a chore, after all, it’s a privilege available to all of us who follow the light.

      We measure our lives through the lens of more and less. I’ve been reading plenty, but not plenty of books. A shift to more pleasurable reading is meant to kindle the fire, if one needs intention at all, but it’s also more fun than slogging through more academic reads. We only have so many hours in the day for someone’s thesis. We must enjoy the pages as we must enjoy our days.

      We can’t expect more than the 24 hours in the day, but we can use those 24 hours better with less: Less distraction, less overindulgence in habits that slow our body and mind, less of the habits we’ve carved out time for that aren’t offering the return on investment we once thought they would. Our reward is more: more productive creativity in our chosen path, more engagement with people who matter most, more energy to tackle the bold pursuits we aspire to add to our days.

      We’re running out of days in the year. It’s a wonder how time flies so quickly. Tempus fugit. We don’t know how many more days we’ll have, just that it’s less than what we had yesterday. Given that, we ought to take seriously these questions of more and less, and work to optimize our time, well, more.

    • A World Full of Curiosities

      “Blessed are the curious for they shall have adventures.” – Lovelle Drachman

      I’m at the tail end of a good book, the kind you can’t put down for the progress you might make reading just one more page. The kind you mourn the finish of as much as you celebrate it. The feeling that passes over me when I finish a great book is similar to how I feel the night before a long vacation comes to an end. You’ve loved the time spent on something worthwhile and expansive, but feel a bit melancholy that it’s over too soon. I suppose life gives us that lesson over and over again.

      Awaiting the finish is a stack of books all vying for my attention. Shall it be more fiction, or back to history, philosophy or science? It’s like going to the buffet line with a tiny plate—there’s only so much time and so much to read. And competing with reading are the holidays, a few movies and series I’ve meant to get to, and the ever-present call of the wild beckoning me to do something altogether bolder with my time.

      Being curious, and not judgmental is more than just a clever way to chat up a darts opponent (Ted Lasso), it’s a way to navigate life in a more enthralling way. Who doesn’t want to be enthralled by life? We ought to put the boring chapters aside more often in favor of the page-turners. Our time goes by either way, shouldn’t it be delightful?

      That brings us to this particular chapter of our lives, which may be fraught with as much boredom or enthrallment as we can handle as any of our previous chapters. Life is what we make of it, as we so often hear. We know that this world is full of curiosities that are simply awaiting our engagement with them. Who are we to ignore all of that by plodding along with blinders on?

    • Different Things

      “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” — Attributed to Albert Einstein (but probably someone else lost to history)

      Habits have gotten us this far. Writing every day, for me best exemplified by this humble little blog, has expanded my experiences in the world as I sought out interesting things to write about. Reading every day pays dividends in creative thinking, a more expansive vocabulary and generally helps on trivia nights. These are habits that have brought me here, for all that here represents, and I’m grateful for having done them.

      And yet, some habits hold us back. I developed a routine during the pandemic of sitting at the home office desk and largely working from my desk. I bought a cool and comfortable chair. I bought a sit/stand desk that the cool chair neatly rolls under. I’ve gotten very comfortable in this space. Too comfortable. That routine no longer works in a world that wants engagement, and I force myself out into the world more often.

      If we want different outcomes, we’ve got to do different things. And so we must find new positive habits, systems and routines to replace the old ones. To try to stay the same represents stasis and our eventual decline. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep reading and writing and working out, but it does mean we ought to question why we do things a certain way and look for ways to improve.

      I made a decision this week to stop doing Duolingo, the language learning app that has been a part of my routine for 5-6 years now. It’s become an obligation to keep a streak of days going, but I’m not serious enough about it to actually reach proficiency in the languages I’m trying to learn while using it. Plus they keep ruining the experience by making it more of a game to lure more young users in. More power to them, but it doesn’t resonate with me anymore. And so it joins other apps that seemed productive once and now ring hollow. Au revoir Duo.

      The thing is, that’s not the only part of my daily routine that I’m questioning. I’m ready to turn it all upside down and try a new routine on for size. I almost shut down the blog a while back, but recognize the value in writing every day and changed my expectations about it instead. The first thing one ought to do with any habit is ask why we do it in the first place? What’s our why? Where is it bringing us? If we don’t like the answer, change the habit.

      Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
      Tell me, what is it you plan to do
      with your one wild and precious life?
      — Mary Oliver, The Summer Day

      Thanks for the reminder, Mary. Yes, we’re all going to be lost to history one day, too soon: Memento mori. When are we going to stop diddling around with a routine that wastes our precious life and get on the path to meet our potential? Personal excellence (arete) is evasive, but it’s mostly a lifestyle choice. We can choose to keep getting better at the things that matter the most on our trajectory or we can get distracted by silly things. The choice has always been ours to make.

    • The Shape of Stories

      “You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” ― Annie Proulx

      Finding stories is relatively easy when we’re paying attention to the world around us. I could write a week’s worth of blog posts based on my experiences of just the last 24 hours. That’s a 7:1 ratio for those keeping score, which infers that an active and engaged mind has infinite possibilities to create something. That doesn’t make the story interesting or easy to read, for there’s work to do beyond the first telling of a story, but it’s a great starting point.

      Here’s a story: I confronted two small disasters in my world since the last blog post dropped yesterday morning. In both cases life lessons were learned and we lived to see another sunrise. Shall I end the story there or flesh it out with more detail? A story must have structure and purpose and most of all enough interesting detail to pull a reader in. Having failed thus far at the basics, allow me to continue…

      We have one of those double ovens, top and bottom, that allow us to bake something in each independent of the other. For several years now this has worked out quite well for us. Yesterday, Thanksgiving, I turned on the oven and tucked the turkey in to roast. I inadvertently heated up the wrong oven, and our turkey sat for almost three hours in a room temperature oven before I discovered the mistake. Timing is everything with Thanksgiving and this had the makings of a disaster. After a few moments of despair, we did the only thing one can do in such moments and creatively solved the problem. Our oven has a convection bake function that greatly speeds up the cooking process. We’d never used it on something as big as a turkey but it saved the day yesterday. Crisis averted.

      Now I could have fleshed out that story with some juicy bits of dialogue between my bride and me, with her saving the day with the convection suggestion, but that’s the stuff of second or third drafts. In a proper telling of the story I would be the one stumbling, and my bride would be the hero that saved the day (she’s been saving my days for years). In my first draft, we just covered the basics and moved on to other things. In this case, there’s that second small disaster I teased earlier. Shall we continue?

      This morning I walked down the stairs in the dark, feeling my way along as I always do with a hand on the railing and years of muscle memory carrying me along. As I reached the bottom, my hand felt the dogs face greet me in the dark. “That’s not like her,” I thought to myself as I whispered a quiet good morning. I reached the kitchen, flipped the light switch and discovered something out of a murder scene. Spatters of intestinal distress all over the kitchen, literally everywhere a dog could, uh, go. “Oh no,” I muttered to myself as a reconciled myself to this new reality. But then I thought to myself, “Well, I was going to mop the floor this morning anyway.” and moved on to the next. The only thing to do in such moments is to tell the pup everything would be okay, bring her outside, grab the paper towels and begin cleanup in aisle 12.

      Again, first draft, could be fleshed out and made to sparkle with spine-tingling detail. Perhaps remove the intestinal distress part and make it a truly grisly encounter and we have the makings of a real page-turner. Stories are what we shape them into. The underlying message in both is that there’s always a solution to a problem, beginning with the decision to persevere. And from there the hero’s journey may ensue.

      So was this a memorable blog post? It can always be better but we must ship our work every day. And yet good is the enemy of great. What’s a writer to do but their best in the time they have? Only you the reader can decide whether this post was worthy of your precious time. Still, it was a memorable day since last we met. One can only hope to do their disasters justice in the storytelling.

    • Far More Than Nothing

      You get up every day, you are entitled to nothing.
      Nobody owes you nothing.
      You can have talent, but if you don’t have discipline, you don’t execute or focus, what do you get? Nothing.
      If you’re complacent and not paying attention to detail, what do you get? Nothing.
      So nothing is acceptable except your best.
      Everything is determined by you trying to be your best so you can build on positive performance.
      That is the only thing, and there should be nothing else.
      We can’t accept nothing but our best.
      — Nick Saban, The Importance of Nothing

      We must ship the work in its time, as Seth Godin reminds us, even when it doesn’t feel like the best we could offer the universe when it ships. Nothing matters more than putting out the best we’ve got at the moment. We learn and refine and grow from that release of our work to the universe, and must then leverage that to do it all over again, but better.

      Our best changes all the time as we change. My best rowing time for 2000 meters was in my early 20’s, and I know I’ll never see sub-6 minutes again in my lifetime. But I can get more fit than I am now, and beat the times I’ve posted earlier this year. Improvement is relative to where and who we are now. Better is always on the table for something.

      I’m a better writer than I was ten years ago, simply because I do it every day and I’ve developed the muscle memory to convey what I’m thinking into words on a screen. More than that, I’ve read a few hundred books in that time span, lived through a pandemic and my children growing up and people I care about passing away and a whole host of other experiences that have tangibly changed who I was then to who I am now. Simply put, our best is way better at some things now than ever before. There is always a season for some highly developed skillset or knowledge that we may bring to the world now.

      Without shipping our work we have nothing. Doing our best at the things we feel are most essential for us is the clear path to personal excellence (arete). Perhaps a poetic speech by an old football coach will be just the thing to shake those ideas loose, that we may do our best in our one and only today. Perhaps arete will be evasive today, but we may get that much closer to it than ever before. Maybe our best will be enough for today, or maybe not. But the attempt to reach it is far more than nothing.

    • Quiet Places

      We could all use a bit more quiet right about now. Whichever side of the cultural or political divide we fall on, it’s been a noisy, relentless year. If everything has its season, now seems a good time for some restorative quiet. Reaching quiet places is a journey with many possible routes. Which we take is less essential than the act of taking it.

      We don’t need money to find quiet, just a bit more social engineering and applied creativity. Removal from the noise is the obvious way—simply turn off the relentless media and walk away. A walk in the woods would be lovely, though orange is a must here in New Hampshire during hunting season. So maybe a walk on the beach would serve better for the next few weeks. However we find nature, it offers a whispered message that eternity doesn’t care a lick about our problems. Should we?

      I find the tactile more valuable than the electronic when seeking silence. Picking up a pen and scratching on a pad of paper can draw the noise right out of us and carry us to more enlightened places. Menial tasks like washing dishes or sweeping the floor may feel like chores when we begin, but carry us to quiet places as we work our way through the task.

      Ironically, sometimes the opposite of silence is just the answer. Lately I’ve returned to some music from my childhood that I’d pushed aside when a younger version of me thought it wasn’t cool enough. It’s probably still not cool enough, but neither am I, so who cares? I know all the words and that can be enough at this stage. Sometimes it’s not physical quiet at all, but internal quiet. Music drowns out the other noise around us and reminds us that some noise is joyful. That negative noise just gives up and floats away for a while.

      We aren’t monks or hermits, most of us anyway, and sequestering ourselves in quiet solitude isn’t a forever act, but a cyclical act of renewal. Just as the trees have shed their leaves and gone dormant, we need to give our minds the time to go dormant too. The noise level will inevitably rise again, but quiet has its place. Perhaps more than ever.

    • Chopping the Frozen Sea

      “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” ― Franz Kafka

      I’ve been investing in a lifetime of learning that began in earnest right about when I started writing this blog. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t learning before that, but it was learning filled with distraction and ulterior motivation: simply put, I was too busy raising children and building a career to dive deeply into the things I wanted to learn about, and so I deferred much of it until the kids were off to college and the career was somewhat established. This second stage of life is ideal for reinventing ourselves, and so the quest commenced.

      A string of habits occurred all at once. I finally started writing every day instead of telling myself to do it one day. Similar habits began around learning a second language, finding something uniquely interesting about whatever place I happened to be in when traveling and of course reading in earnest. The reading in particular has evolved from heavy fiction with a layering of history to heavier works of philosophy, history, science, etc. We become what we consume, after all. And driving it all is an underlying feeling of having fallen behind that has me striving to accelerate my pursuit of learning to catch up. This hasn’t abated over time.

      That driver shouldn’t be underestimated. To seek knowledge is to acknowledge an emptiness within us that we must fill. Each layer of learning is growth that brings us to a more complete version of our potential, yet also offers a vantage point from which to see all that we’ve missed on our singular pursuit, and so another quest begins, and so on. As the frozen sea is released, we find we may inch closer to a desired place, but the chopping never ends until we do.

      This all comes back to that version of excellence reserved only for the gods—Arete. I’ve known the word since I was an underclassman in college, but that didn’t inspire me to reach for it at the time. I simply wasn’t intellectually or emotionally developed enough to pursue excellence at a level beyond being a big fish in the small pond I swam in then. That pond flowed into a stream that became a river that brought me to the vast ocean, where I looked around and realized I’d better get to work growing.

      The thing is, I don’t aspire to be the biggest fish in the ocean anymore, I simply want to grow closer to my potential. Shouldn’t we all aspire to arete, even knowing we’ll never quite reach it? We must keep chopping away at the things that have locked us in place for far too long. What we learn is that the frozen sea isn’t something external, it’s within us, holding back the universe. Like Michelangelo chipping away at the marble to reveal the sculpture hidden within, we too must chip away to find what was hidden within all along.

    • From Within

      “I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.” ― Eudora Welty, On Writing

      As the air grows crisp and ever colder, the garden recedes back more each day towards dormancy. Why is it now that writers begin to stir and strive towards a higher aspiration? I think it comes from a place of stillness, when we finally slow down enough to feel the restlessness within. Maybe there’s a carry-over from the reading habit and a desire to dance with words at certain times of the year. Mostly I think it comes from a feeling of immediacy. It’s now or never, friend. The things we most want to see written won’t just write themselves.

      The pup has other ideas for me. I have the beginnings of carpal tunnel syndrome in my wrist from all the frisbee throws. She’s a lot like the universe in this way: always expecting one’s complete attention for as long as she wants it and not a second more. If we are to accomplish anything in this lifetime, at some point we must learn to break away and listen to that voice within that similarly insists on our attention.

      The thing is, we run out of excuses not to be daring. We must create the work we want to see in the world. Those aren’t my words, they’re the words of every writer who had the audacity to think they had something to say in their time and got to work. Enough of reasoning already! Be bold and begin, but finish it this time.