Alexandersmap

    Category: reading

    • Crossing the Stream to Deeper

      “If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else….

      The way to discover a terrifying longing is to liberate yourself from the self-censoring labels you began to tell yourself over the course of your mis-education… Focus on the external objects of fascination, not on who you think you are. Find people with overlapping obsessions.

      The information universe tempts you with mildly pleasant but ultimately numbing diversions. The only way to stay fully alive is to dive down to your obsessions six fathoms deep. Down there it’s possible to make progress toward fulfilling your terrifying longing, which is the experience that produces the joy.”
      — David Brooks, “The Art of Focus”, The New York Times

      The tricky thing about discovering “primary source” material is that you’ll uncover that what you believed to be primary source references other primary sources, which infers they aren’t the primary source at all. Such is the Great Conversation, spinning through life one book, interview or article at a time. We leap from one to the other, like stones across a stream, until we reach our destination with delight (and a new stack of reading material).

      Something recently pointed me towards Cal Newport’s Deep Work, which is a how-to book on pushing the shallow work aside to get to the deep work, where we differentiate ourselves and find true meaning in our careers and lives. Newport, in turn, pointed me towards several articles and books that I hadn’t previously been aware of, and a couple that I hadn’t fully absorbed on the first go-around. I’ve pursued them all recently, all in an effort to get meaningful work done. For we all must go deeper if there’s any hope for us to contribute something meaningful. And that requires breaking the spell of distraction:

      “Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.” — Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

      Here’s the thing: In diving into all this material around deep work, I’ve questioned whether this blog is itself deep or shallow (It aims for deep, but sometimes skims a bit shallower than I’d like). But what is the purpose of the blog but to establish a daily habit of writing and finding things out—things that gradually pull me deeper? Put another way, those stones I’m hopping across in life are documented, one at a time, for anyone that wishes to follow along. But even here, we all choose our own path across that stream of life, we just happen to land on the same spot now and then.

      That terrifying longing? It’s on the other side, and the only way to reach it is to stop watching the debris float by in the stream of distraction and focus on the next landing spot, and the one after that. Our time is short, and we have so far to go. So go deeper.

    • Falling Into That Anne Rice Universe

      “We’re frightened of what makes us different.” – Anne Rice

      Anne Rice passed away on December 11th. She created Interview with the Vampire and the series of books that followed it, all of which I consumed ravenously as she awakened in me a new perspective on the world. To be swept up in a world of androgynous vampires where humans are definitely lower on the food chain, written from the perspective of a powerful woman, shook up the very different world of Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum novels I’d been hooked on at the time.

      Anne Rice turned the world upside down with her vampire series. She brought us face-to-face with what makes us different and forced us to confront it in captivating stories, and influenced a generation of writers who followed her to dive deeper in their own work. Here are five more quotes that stir and bolster and inspire:

      “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

      “To write something you have to risk making a fool of yourself.”

      “You do have a story inside you; it lies articulate and waiting to be written — behind your silence and your suffering.”

      “And books, they offer one hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.” – from Blackwood Farm

      “And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually… it doesn’t matter. Because if God does not exist, then life… every second of it… Is all we have.” – from Interview with the Vampire

    • What We Create, What We Leave Unfinished

      We create ourselves by our choices. – Søren Kierkegaard

      In my house there are a hundred half-done poems.
      Each of us leaves an unfinished life.
      – Mary Oliver, Thinking of Swirler

      It’s an oddity in my character, admittedly, that I linger with poetry and well up with emotion over words. After a particularly stunning pink swirling sky at sunrise I could think of nothing better to do with my morning coffee than pair it with Mary Oliver. Life is a series of choices, one quietly laid upon the other, carrying us to eternity. I’ll regret many, but not this one.

      What will we create in our time here? What will we leave unfinished? These are the questions of a lifetime, and the questions of each day.

      I’ve mentally cast aside this blog dozens of times, but each morning I wake up and write anyway. It isn’t the writing that challenges and mocks me, it’s measuring up to the words. Knowing what’s unfinished, knowing the choices that make up a lifetime. Waking up with a chance to measure up once again.

    • To Be Touched by Everything I’ve Found

      One obvious problem with long drives is that it eats into reading time. You can solve this with audio books, of course, but then what of podcasts? As a heavy consumer of both, what do you choose? And this is where time becomes our enemy.

      Long drives require epic podcast episodes, and there’s nothing more epic than Hardcore History with Dan Carlin. For the last year I’ve been saving long stretches of travel to complete Supernova of the East, which is like all of Carlin’s podcasts: devastating edge of your seat listening. You want a little perspective as you crawl along in traffic over the Tappan Zee Bridge? Listen to the details of the Battle of Okinawa as Carlin spins his magic.

      What do you do when you’ve finished a series like Supernova of the East and you need to step back into the better side of humanity? Music helps. Lately I’ve been mixing classic rock and what today is known as “Americana” music (personally, I just call it music). Specifically, diving into old Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young tunes and new Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit compilations. Looking for poetry set to music? You can’t go wrong with either. As a lover of words piled together just so, Isbell does to your brain cells what a complex Cabernet does to your taste buds.

      The best I can do
      Is to let myself trust that you know
      Who’ll be strong enough to carry your heart
      – Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Letting You Go

      When you get to a hotel room in some remote place and you’ve caught up on all those emails and administrative work, what next? Drink? Watch television? Or dive back into the books that have tapping you on the shoulder for attention? There’s a place for every form of entertainment, but in most of my travels the hotel television never gets turned on. But the Kindle app does.

      After some consistent prodding by a friend of mine, I’m finally finishing Sapiens by Yusef Noah Harari. I know, what took me so long? Honestly it just kept slipping down the pile as other books jumped ahead. Regrettable, but life is about tradeoffs. What we choose to dance with in our brief time makes all the difference in how we see the world. Now that I’ve almost wrapped it up, I see what all the fuss is about.

      “Even today, with all our advanced technologies, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC – wheat, rice, maize (called ‘corn’ in the US), potatoes, millet and barley. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years. If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine is that of ancient farmers.” – Yusef Noah Harari, Sapiens

      Speaking of that stack of books, I put aside a couple of other books to focus on completing Sapiens. One in particular, The Blind Watchmaker, is a heavier lift than Sapiens, but compliments it well. I’ve referenced it before in the blog, and look forward to moving it to the virtual “done” pile. Combined, these two books have shaken my perspective of the world and how we got here.

      “If you have a mental picture of X and you find it implausible that the human eye could have arisen directly from it, this simply means that you have chosen the wrong X.” – Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker

      Inevitably I need to sprinkle in page-turner fiction, poetry and sharp left turn material to shake off reality until I can catch my breath again. Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda was a definite left turn for me, an interesting read that got me thinking about mysticism and craving more time in the desert Southwest.

      “You can do better. There is one simple thing wrong with you—you think you have plenty of time.” – Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan

      The Sea in You: Twenty Poems of Requited and Unrequited Love by David Whyte is a lovely collection of poems by one of our living masters. Whyte stirs words together with the best of them and catches my imagination with his alchemy. I’ll surely spend more time with Whyte in this blog in the near future.

      “be weathered by what comes to you, like the way you
      too
      have travelled from so far away to be here, once
      reluctant
      and now as solid and as here and as willing
      to be touched as everything you have found.”
      – David Whyte, The Sea in You: Twenty Poems of Requited and Unrequited Love

      We collect bits of wisdom and memorable nuggets in our consumption. Does this make us better conversationalists or a faster draw on Jeopardy? Most likely, but there’s something more to it than that. To revisit the old cliche, we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. What we consume either amplifies our biases or challenges them. I choose to be challenged, and find myself slowly stretching and building a better mind, with greater perspective, through what I listen to, watch and read.

      In short, to be touched by everything I’ve found.

    • Chasing the End

      There’s a phenomenon in reading a great, page-turner of a book where you can’t finish a page fast enough. The pace of your reading accelerates and you blow through pages quickly, and suddenly you finish the book in a daze. You look up and hours have gone by in the blink of an eye and you realize that you’ve just stepped out of the pages of a time machine.

      Life itself is full of moments like this. You can readily rattle off those highlight moments, maybe at a party or traveling or deep in conversation with someone of interest where we are completely transfixed with in that moment. Where does the time go? When we’re so deeply engaged in this moment and entranced by the possibility in the next, what happens?

      We aren’t really chasing the end of the story or the life moment, we’re dancing with it. There’s a state of euphoria in reading that great book, watching that great film or participating in that magical moment that transcends time. A life, well-lived, ought to feel very much like this.

      We’ve all experienced the opposite. The dull reads, the awkwardly boring work event, the polite small talk with someone who doesn’t share their life force with you. Those times when we sketch imaginative drawings on note pads or silently glance at our phone to be anywhere else but there.

      Look, I know every movie can’t be a blockbuster. Every scene can’t transfix you in wonder. How would you even know what bliss was if you didn’t suffer through boring now and then? But life is too short to go through the motions.

      We’re all chasing the end of our story. How do we make this time machine vibrate and buzz a little louder on the journey? Our time machines should be bursting at the seams with experiences when we reach the last stop, don’t you think? For when we finish, when we reach that last page of our brilliant life story, we ought to look up in those final seconds and say…

      Wow.

    • The Next Thing

      Some ideas grab you and you can’t put them down until they’re finished, and then you sense them glowing in the fibers of your being like the smell of ozone after an electrical storm. Sparks of imagination fire off in your brain like lightning in a summer storm.

      Inevitably in writing I get so excited about a concept I’m contemplating that I’ll want to jump immediately to write about that one instead of the topic I’d originally pursued. This is maddeningly distracting, of course, and I force myself to stay on point with whatever I’d started down the path on in the first place. But first, to stop the nagging I get it out of my head and summarized the thoughts on paper or in a few key words in my drafts to return to again another time.

      Does a million thoughts in your head indicate an active mind or a distracted mind? I think both, if you let the thoughts pull you too far off that path. Each is Frost’s path less taken, tantalizingly close to being realized. But if you stray too far down that way you’re not going very far at all on the one you started on. So which is the right way? Both can be. Or neither.

      Books are the physical representation of this phenomenon. That book started then put aside in favor of another that strikes your fancy. Then you hit on one that stirs your soul into a frothy latte of inspiration with an extra shot of espresso emphatically pounding passionately in your heart. You eagerly chase this one to the end, throwing aside all the partially completed tomes. Before you know it you have a pile of books (or drafts) stacked up in need of reckoning with and you’re bouncing off the walls.

      Next things offer hope. Next things stir the soul. Next things excite the senses. Next things spin up anticipation. Next things are our possible future cresting in our imagination like a wave, on the verge of being fully realized in the break.

      But first, there’s this other thing. Commitments to follow through on. Things started that we honor with focused effort. For to finish what you started honors more than the work. The work we choose to finish leaves a legacy of promises kept. Promises to ourselves and others. The next thing must wait until this thing is finished. For all the paths we might roam, it’s the only way we’ll ever get where we’re going.

    • That Moment When Everything Changed

      “I wonder if I should have a change — a year in Europe this time — something new, something better, perhaps. A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think. It is no good telling yourself that one day you will wish you had never made that change; it is no good anticipating regrets. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday…

      It seems remarkable to me at least that if I had not gone to Molo, I might never have seen New York, nor learned to fly a plane, nor learned to hunt elephant, nor, in fact, done anything except wait for one year to follow another… How can the course of a life be changed by a word spoken on a dusty road?”
      – Beryl Markham, West With The Night

      In this last year of the pandemic, with borders closed and wandering spirits limited to adventures of the local kind, it’s easy to throw your hands up in frustration at the “one days” that are postponed. Of one year following another with a measure of stasis unfamiliar and a bit uncomfortable. If we’re fully engaged we learn to make do, to thrive really, in those local adventures and appreciate what we have in our own back yard.

      You want a quick adventure? Click on the link above and read Markham’s book. Put aside the disgust of elephant hunting for this one (it was a different time) and immerse yourself in the perspective of an adventurous soul and a brilliant writer. Growing up in Kenya a hundred years ago, training thoroughbreds before pivoting to flying.

      Markham’s life changed when she met a man repairing his car who flew in the first World War and would soon teach her to fly. He sparked her imagination with possibility, and the rest of her life sprouted from that spark. She quickly charms you and makes you wish you’d met her in the brief time we breathed the same air. If I’d read this book at twenty I might have dropped everything and flown straight to adventure myself.

      So why not now? As with many adventurous role models, she makes you wonder; what is our own pivot? What is your moment that changes everything? It may not be a chance encounter, it might just be a small leap into the unknown. We’ve learned a lot about the world and ourselves over the last year. If there’s one clear lesson from all of it, it’s that the world was always trying to tell us something. But we were too busy distracting ourselves to pay attention.

      “The world does not act on us as much as it reveals itself to us and we respond.” – Shane Parrish, The Great Mental Models, Volume I

      How will we respond to the last twelve months that changed everything? And what shall we make of our future? Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday. Our one day can begin today. We don’t have to rely on some chance encounter with someone who teaches us to fly. That moment that changes everything can, indeed must, be this one. Flying requires summoning the courage to start down the runway and the accumulated experience to soar.

    • Achieving Something Beyond

      “The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond them.” – Alan Watts

      Enjoying being alive is surely a worthy pursuit, but even Watts, in pointing this out, was achieving something beyond himself. For otherwise, what are we contributing beyond a few laughs over drinks? Unsaid, I believe, is contributing joyful pursuits that create those ripples that live on beyond your lifetime.

      I’ve visited the graves of many notable names in history, and generally it’s a chunk of silent stone in a lonely plot. The best graves betray the personality of the person who resides there. A clever line about how they lived, or what they believed. Or maybe it’s the stone itself that signals the character of the person. Ralph Waldo Emerson lies below a chunk of rose quartz, which stands out amongst the weathered gray stones of his family and peers on Author’s Ridge. Whether you ever knew much about Emerson, you’d surely note the personality emanating from his gravestone.

      Of course, Emerson left a big ripple well beyond a rock on a hill through his contribution to the world. Did he enjoy writing and speaking? Certainly. Emerson wasn’t running around in a panic trying to achieve something beyond himself. He just did the work. And so did Watts. And so must we.

      “Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremulous for successful labor. It is a tempest of fancies, and the only ballast I know is a respect to the present hour.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

      There’s a distinction between being alive and achieving something in your life, but they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. And usually the things that make us feel most alive offer more than just a momentary dopamine rush. They’re part of building something beyond ourselves. Family, meaningful work, friendships that transcend convenience, and community. These things aren’t achieved, they’re earned one moment at a time.

    • A Realm of Sunset and Moonlight and Silence

      “My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty; we dip our hands in this painted element; our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

      I’m returning Emerson once again, partly to counter the din of political tweets and headlines that dominated over the last week, and partly because I’d like to read or re-read all of his work in 2021. Which brings me back to his essay Nature, for (I believe) a third reading. And I couldn’t help but linger on the sentence above, which resonates in this time, and for this place I myself reside, in a house in low land, with limited outlook, on the skirt of the village. Emerson had the Concord River to paddle to truth. I have the New Hampshire woods and the wildlife it sustains to show me the way.

      Days like these, a quiet bit of immersion in the forest seems in order. We live in strange times, distracting times, and I’ve seen the impact on my writing lately. Thankfully, I know where to find the remedy: in nature, in tapping into the Great Conversation, and in solitude.

      “Accept what comes from silence.
      Make the best you can of it.
      Of the little words that come
      out of the silence, like prayers
      prayed back to the one who prays,
      make a poem that does not disturb
      the silence from which it came”
      – Wendell Berry, How To Be a Poet (to remind myself)

      A special thanks to Maria Popova and Brain Pickings for pointing out this particular poem in a recent tweet. This poem immediately served as a catalyst on two fronts: to search for more Wendell Berry and seek the silent contemplation I’ve stolen from myself absorbing the madness of the world. Silence, as they say, is golden.

      So outside of paddling off on my own or building a small cabin in the woods, how to bring together the natural world and the silence necessary for contemplation? The answer, for me, lies in early mornings. The conspirator against a quiet mind is the whirl of madness in the world and a desire to keep up and understand it. In these times, finding a way to paddle or walk away from it all, if only for a little while, seems imperative.

      If only to find your own voice again.

    • Hit the Road, Jack

      “You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?” We didn’t understand his question, and it was a damned good question. – Jack Kerouac, On the Road

      I first visited Jack Kerouac’s grave in Lowell, Massachusetts when I was 20 years old. Once I knew where it was I’d stop in now and then to visit in my younger days. Usually there would be some scattered bottles of whiskey or some other tribute piled about. I’ve seen similar tributes with Thoreau and Twain’s graves, but Kerouac’s was first. It was there that I learned the sticky bond between a great writer and his readers.

      It was always mañana. For the next week that was all I heard—mañana,a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.

      Funny thing, I was wrapped up in the history of Kerouac, but I kept putting off reading his classic On the Road for years. Maybe I didn’t want to be disappointed if I didn’t like it. Maybe I had an image of what it was but wasn’t willing to see for myself what it was all about. But it was always mañana with this book. Until a friend posted a picture of his grave on social media that triggered me and I immediately downloaded it and started reading.

      “What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want?” She didn’t know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.

      I think if I’d read On the Road at 20 I might have hopped in my Ford F-150 and crossed the country right then. Because at 20 you understand how Sal and Dean feel. The lost souls bouncing coast-to-coast searching for answers. When you live a bit you realize you’re searching in the wrong place most of the time. Most of the answers you need are right where you started. What are you aching to do? What do you want?

      “The days of wrath are yet to come. The balloon won’t sustain you much longer. And not only that, but it’s an abstract balloon. You’ll all go flying to the West Coast and come staggering back in search of your stone.”

      Wandering about in life sounds romantic, but Kerouac paints the grim reality of the quest. The abject poverty, the desperation and rootlessness. The descent into drugs and sex and casual regard for anything meaningful. The pursuit of what’s next. If Sal and Dean had iPhones they might never have left New York. They may have scrolled blankly through their Twitter feed. The search continues one generation to the next, the characters just use a different mode of transportation.

      He made one last signal. I waved back. Suddenly he bent to his life and walked quickly out of sight. I gaped into the bleakness of my own days. I had an awful long way to go too.

      It took a few decades but I finally finished On the Road. And really, I don’t have an urge to immediately drive across the country chasing dreams. Well, maybe a little bit. But mostly I understand. I see how it influenced the Baby Boomer generation when it was published in 1957. I hear it echo in Bob Dylon and Simon & Garfunkel songs (Listen to America and you’re On the Road with Jack Kerouac). I understand now how it influenced me even without reading it. What took me so long? I don’t know. But I’m happy I’ve finally crossed that bridge.