Alexandersmap

    Category: reading

    • Significance Transcends

      “History is, above all else, the creation and recording of that heritage; progress is its increasing abundance, preservation, transmission, and use. To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man’s follies and crimes, but also as an encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors, it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, loves, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing. The historian will not mourn because he can see no meaning in human existence except that which man puts into it; let it be our pride that we ourselves may put meaning into our lives, and sometimes a significance that transcends death. If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children. And to his final breath he will be grateful for this inexhaustible legacy, knowing that it is our nourishing mother and lasting life.” — Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

      We are the sum of all that has come before us, with a mission to process and pass along this wealth of knowledge and contribution to future generations. When we talk about the Great Conversation, we rightly wonder what our own legacy might be. We must feel the urgency to contribute. We must lean into Walt Whitman’s response to this very question: That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. Walt wasn’t just writing prose, he was struggling with the same things we struggle with, with fewer notifications and cat videos. We’re simply links in the chain, anchored to the work of those who came before us.

      Lately I’ve seen the momentum that comes from steadily pushing the flywheel for years. The writing is easier, conversations seem more productive and meaningful, and a deeper and richer connection to the world has led to growth and understanding. We simply begin to realize that we’ll never have it all figured out, we cannot live forever and so we’ll run out of time before we grasp everything we hoped we might, and with the startling realization that our significance in the universe isn’t all that big. Yet we may still transcend this lifetime anyway, simply by being actively engaged in our time.

      When we feel the connection to the countless generative souls who made us who we are, we may feel compelled to rise to the occasion of our lifetime as well. There is magic in showing up every day and doing the work. Our verse is ours alone. Just as we thrill at discovering a magical verse from a distant voice, our own verse may one day delight a future treasure hunter. Doesn’t it deserve its moment in the sun?

    • Here We Are

      “Welcome Aboard, Mr. Pilgrim,” said the loudspeaker. “Any questions?”
      Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: “Why me?”
      “That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?
      “Yes” Billy in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.
      “Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”
      — Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

      Every book is different the second or third time you read it, and when you add a few decades of life experience to the lens they tend to transform into something entirely new. More accurately, we do, even as the book remains the same. Re-reading Slaughterhouse Five as an adult makes the changes in me readily apparent. Perspective is a beautiful thing indeed.

      Lately I’ve been saying time flies more than I can ever recall saying it. This whole life is a time warp of emotion and transformation and growth and the occasional sideways slide off the cliff. We do with these things what we will, for we each handle the changes we go through in our own way.

      Not everything will make sense, all we have is control over is how we react. Life is complicated in that way. No wonder they needed to write a serenity prayer. It speaks to the common challenge we each face of dealing with our moment in the amber:

      God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

      The thing is, all these changes move us along the path. Heck, change is the path. That which does not kill us makes us stronger, makes us better equipped to handle the next thing that comes our way, and the one after that. Resilience is a superpower honed through adversity. We ought to remember that some have it much worse than us, and sure, some have it better too. But we’re all going through something.

      So here we are, in the amber of this moment, trying to figure out that evasive why. Maybe Vonnegut had it right all along and there is no why at all. Does that mean we shouldn’t look for purpose? Or simply to stop trying so damned hard and live the best life in the amber that we can muster? We know how it ends, we ought to focus on how it plays out instead.

    • Borrowed Awareness

      “One day Rumi was teaching by a fountain in a small square in Konya. Books were open on the fountain’s ledge. Shams walked quickly through the students and pushed the books into the water.
      “Who are you and what are you doing?” Rumi asked.
      “You must now live what you have been reading about.”
      Rumi turned to the books in the fountain, one of them his father’s precious spiritual diary, the Maarif.
      Shams said, “We can retrieve them. They will be as dry as they ever were.” He lifted out the Maarif to show him. Dry.
      “Leave them,” said Rumi.
      With that relinquishment of books and borrowed awareness, Rumi’s real life began, and his real poetry too.” — Coleman Barks, From the introduction of Rumi: The Big Red Book

      There’s a creeping awareness that comes over you when you read a lot of books. A realization that you’re simply borrowing knowledge but not living it. It’s the equivalent of being all talk and no action. Being well-read is only a starting point, the rest is up to us.

      Humanity is filled with people who are formally educated but not fully realized. We each have an opportunity to meet our potential, but most of us hide from it in books. Our development doesn’t stop when we finish the book—really, we’ve only just begun. The universe shows us the way and nothing more. This is where we pick up and carry ourselves forward into who we will become.

      There’s nothing wrong with reading books, but we must get out of the covers. We’re far better for having borrowed the knowledge, we just can’t stop with that, satisfied and on to the next. We must stand up on those books, and from that higher plane, reach for something that might have been out of our grasp otherwise.

    • Reading and Writing and All the Other Things

      “I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It’s greed, plain and simple. When my characters join the circus, I’m joining the circus. Although I’m happily married, I spent a great deal of time mentally living with incompatible husbands.” — Anne Tyler

      “I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.” — Anne Tyler

      We read fiction to escape: to be someone else in another place, if only for a little while. We write fiction to explore: to create something bolder within ourselves that we might not otherwise explore, and drop these characters into the places we might not dare to go in a normal lifetime. To take a walk on the wild side without too much damage. Each of us seeks something more in this world in some way. Fiction offers safe passage to extraordinary places.

      This blog doesn’t dabble in fiction, although this writer has. There’s a distinct separation there, between fiction and non-fiction, and between creative output and daily observation. My name isn’t even Alexander, which may lend to the confusion. Certainly it doesn’t offer optimization of the brand. But so it goes. The motive isn’t to develop a brand, but a deeper understanding of the world and my place in it.

      Sometimes we want to explore other lives, represented in fictional characters who come to life in the pages of a book. Sometimes we want to explore the meaning in our own life, and optimize our potential in this brief go-around. If I’m sure of anything in this daily ritual, it’s that I’m a better writer and a better human for having consistently done it. Writers develop characters, and we also develop our own character. Those richer and bolder lives aren’t just on paper, after all, they’re within us too.

      This business of reading and writing is a lovely part of who we are, but let’s face it: Most of our life is made up of all the other things. When done well, we develop a deeper perspective and sense of place through our active participation in words, but also through our engagement with the world. We must step outside our comfort zone in small ways that lead to bigger and bolder things. Just as a snowball grows as we nudge it along, so we grow as we accumulate skill and confidence through repetitive action. As with the snowball, at some point it grows beyond our capacity to push it, and it is then that we must seek the help of others. We must develop the awareness and courage to ask for help when we find our pushing isn’t quite enough.

      When you stop to think of it, we’re each the authors of our own lives. Those characters we develop are often us. Just as they stretch and grow, so too do we. All the other things that make up a life are derived from our imagination and the courage to step out into the unknown. It shouldn’t just be fiction.

    • Going Further

      “All people, no matter who they are, all wish they’d appreciated life more. It’s what you do in life that’s important, not how much time you have or what you wished you’d done.” — David Bowie

      “If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.” — David Bowie

      How did you spend your time in the last 24 hours? Did you find yourself out of your depth? Someplace exciting? I hope so. My own time was spent digging a ditch for a drainage pipe, and then filling it in again. And I tried a new way to cook bone-in pork chops and corn on the cob. On the surface, none of this is particularly exciting, but it was all unique experience compared to the norm. Life is about trying new things to see what we’re capable of, after all. Sometimes those new things seem pretty mundane.

      The point is to do more things out of our comfort zone. I’ll never be a rock star, but I’ll keep trying new things in this lifetime. I can confirm that 26 meters of ditch digging teaches you a few things about yourself. There was always going to be sweat equity paid this weekend, whether a hike or a long walk on the beach. Both of those sound a lot better than digging that ditch, but I’ve done each many times in my life. The ditch informed. And now that it’s done, I will take that labor with me to the next decision I make down the road.

      Choosing adventure and experience over the routine is a path towards a larger life. But so too is choosing the small challenges that everyday living presents to us. We won’t always be up on a stage with the spotlights on us, but we can all appreciate life a bit more. Doing more is the way.

      David Bowie might have been a rock & roll star, but he was also an avid reader, who would look around at all the books in his library mournfully, knowing he couldn’t possibly read them all in his lifetime. We all feel that way about something in this brief lifetime. All we can do is live with urgency and celebrate what we manage to get to in our days.

    • Mining for Gold

      “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need” — Cicero

      My attention comes back to the garden this time of year. It’s too soon for annuals, too early for most perennials, and my sinuses are reminding me that the cool air is filling up with pollen. We celebrate the great awakening of the garden and surrounding landscape, even with a few sniffles and sneezes to punctuate the season.

      I know a few things about awakening. I came into this world in April, so I mark the end and subsequent beginning of another trip around the sun this month. Take enough of those trips, and reinvent yourself enough times, and you begin to see patterns of behavior. Learning who we are is like reading the current in a river, finding the deepest channel and accelerating downstream towards our destiny.

      I mostly write in a home office with a solid library of books patiently awaiting discovery. There are books I’ve read many times and books I’ve told myself I’ll get to someday. For better or worse the convenience of a Kindle tends to dominate my reading selection nowadays. So why keep books at all? For the same reason I plant daffodils. Daffodils are planted once and reappear in your life regularly to punctuate the moment. Books tend to do the same. I’ve turned to my collection many times over the years since I’ve planted them on the shelf.

      What we plant in ourselves tends to grow. Will we amend our minds with rich content and labor, or simply lean into whatever other’s grow for us? Give me dirty fingernails thumbing through favorite books. We mine for gold in the garden and in the library. These are our days to dig deeply and plant that which will live beyond us.

      Daffodils

    • Words

      “Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.” — Mary Oliver, Sand Dabs, Six

      “A word is no light matter. Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is, a symbol of a creative thought.” — Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way

      Some of us admit to being word geeks. It’s not the complexity of the word, not even its origin (itself a delicious riddle), but the meaning packed into the deliberate placement of that word that draws us in. We become more deliberate readers as a result. This is where the magic in poetry, in music, and in prose resides. Surely something to aspire to in our own writing, and in our very conversations. Words matter a great deal.

      When someone says they would like to have a word with you, why does it have a negative connotation? Is it the singularity inferred in the statement? It’s not a conversation, it’s a word. What they mean, of course, is they want to tell you something while you actively listen to them. We have two ears and one mouth: we should always be actively listening more than we talk. The loudest talkers are rarely the most powerful people in the room, would you agree? We should learn to find the clues hidden in plain sight. Active listening is a superpower.

      As it is with people, so too with words. If writing has taught me anything, it’s to read more deliberately. Every word, placed just so, means something to a great author or poet. So it should mean something to us.

    • The Book Stack

      “A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

      “The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity…” — A. Edward Newton

      I wrestle with books. I love reading, and stack more books than I ought to into my life. Settling down with a great book is one of my favorite activities, so why do I pile on more than I can possibly get to? The stack of books taunt me. Even as I write this I can see them in the periphery, mocking my use of time when it doesn’t involve them.

      We live in a time where we’re blessed with abundance in everything around us, and cursed with the same scarcity of time. We must be prudent in what we add to the pile, and what we edit out. Reading is just another experience in a brief life that contributes to its richness and meaning. The rules of good nutrition apply. Beyond the required reading of a formal education, we get to choose our information diet. But we also then live with the consequences. When we use our reading time wisely we enhance living substantially.

      Imagine my delight when my Twitter feed offered up the two quotes above within a few days of one another to perfectly summarize my… situation. We live an impossibly short life for the sheer number of books available for us to read, and then pile on the distractions of life (like Twitter), and how are we ever to get to everything we want to read? The very act of writing this blog is stealing time from reading, even as writing fuels my hunger to read more. Which experience is more valuable in the moment? Isn’t life a quest to find balance between what we do and what we consume?

      And therein lies the answer; reading is just another form of collecting experiences that build a life. As with other experiences, we are what we prioritize. We can’t do everything, but we can certainly do the most important things. So it is with reading. It’s not just a stack of books and an infinite jumble of words, it’s the building blocks carrying us higher and higher towards a richer perspective and broader potential. It’s ours to realize, or to leave on the shelf.

    • Each Page

      All of Time began when you first answered
      to the names your mother and father gave you.

      Soon, those names will travel with the leaves.
      Then, you can trade places with the wind.

      Then you’ll remember your life
      as a book of candles,
      each page read by the light of its own burning.
      — Li-Young Lee, Become Becoming

      Recently, I spoke about travel with people who aren’t traveling right now for the same reasons I once didn’t travel. Different chapter of life, as the saying aptly goes. Each page offers value and helps complete the story, but we don’t always see that when the story is incomplete.

      The thing is, the story is always incomplete to the very end. We live a novel life with the last page ripped out. There’s simply no knowing how this one turns out until we get there ourselves. Each page is ours to write, mostly ours anyway, edited by the troupe that presently surrounds us. Our task is to make it a hell of a story.

      Page-turners tend to be thrilling but lack substance. Weightier tomes sometimes feel plodding and a chore to get through but leave a mark long after we’ve tucked them up on the shelf. Somewhere in between is a life’s work that is meaningfully appealing and often reflected upon.

      Ultimately there will be other chapters. Aware of this, we might choose to weave magic and depth into this one. When we arrive later in our story, the pieces may finally all come together. It’s then that we’ll remember the true meaning of each page.

    • Everything Half Known

      “In the soul of man,” Herman Melville wrote, in one of his terrifying flights of prophecy in Moby-Dick, “there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.” Cast off from that protected world, he’d gone on, and “thou canst never return!” But the half known life is where so many of our possibilities lie. In the realm of worldly affairs it can be a tragedy that so many of us in our global neighborhood choose to see other places through screens, reducing fellow humans to two dimensions. On a deeper level, however, it’s everything half known, from love to faith to wonder and terror, that determines the course of our lives. Melville’s sorrow lay not just in his restless inquiries, but in his hope for answers in a world that seems always to simmer in a state of answerlessness.” — Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

      Pico Iyer pulls a reader to places they likely hadn’t considered going to in their own lives. He travels to corners of the world I’d never choose to go to myself, taunts me with eloquence I strive for in my own writing, and expands my mind with thoughts I haven’t arrived at yet in my own journey. He takes very seriously the mission of the great writer to change the reader in ways they weren’t quite ready for when they began the book. And he does so with a sprinkling of wonder in lyrical observations we’ve come to expect from him.

      The question is, what are we looking for? What are our possibilities lying in a half known life? What encompasses our soul awaiting answers? We each must reconcile these questions in our lives, wherever our journey takes us. Our lives are not about that which we are sure about, but the larger questions that surround us. The thing about finding answers is that they always lead to more questions still. Thus, our lives, lived with purpose, are a finite inquiry.

      “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms or books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

      Over time, many of us come to terms with the things we’ll never fully understand. Life isn’t about finding all the answers, merely a journey towards enough in our time. Each question and subsequent answer is another step towards becoming. Becoming what, we might ask? And that is our half known, different for each of us, yet very much the same.