Alexandersmap

    Category: Relationships

    • Our Present Sphere

      “All around us lies what we neither understand nor use. Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us confine ourselves to that till the lesson be learned; let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural. I never see any of these things but I long to get away and lie under a green tree and let the wind blow on me. There is marvel and charm enough in that for me.” — Margaret Fuller

      Today we bury a part of the family, completing his journey back to the earth. Back to the eternal. Our time together was relatively short, as lifetimes go, but memorable. We all live on in memories, they say. My experience with such things makes me believe it to be so.

      Memories are borne out of moments. Moments in turn from living with full awareness of our present sphere. Will we ever master the moment? Probably not, but as a sommelier trains their taste buds to discern the nuances of a wine, we might train our minds for nuance too. And in doing so, savor life more each day.

      The thing we generally say when someone passes is, “rest in peace”. But their passing is a message to us too: Memento mori — remember, we all must die. So pay your respects, hug one another and go out and live while there’s still time.

    • A Simple Salut Will Do

      Some words, like salut and aloha, mean both hello and goodbye. It reminds me of the nonsensical lyrics of the Beatles song, catchy tune that it is, but which blathers on endlessly about goodbyes and hellos. A simple word that means both is rather handy, don’t you think?

      My daughter flew home from across the country, making for a lovely hello, and will join me today in saying goodbye to friends and fellow bloggers Fayaway as they set sail for warmer waters. Goodbyes are rarely as fun as hellos. Isn’t it better all around to say; “until we meet again” Then again, a simple salut would do in all such circumstances.

      Hellos and goodbyes are simply placeholders that bookend moments together. We dance on the floor of life for this moment and go our separate ways for awhile. Perhaps we’ll see you out here on the dance floor again sometime. It’s lovely to believe it so, isn’t it? Life is what we make of it, and relationships are very much in line with that. There are people who have lived on the same street with me whom I haven’t seen for more than ten years. And there are people I’d fly across the globe to visit for a couple of days.

      Seeing Fayaway in faraway places seems likely and offers poetic possibilities. Yes, I like the elegance of the french “Salut” in such moments. And today I think it might do.

    • Living Life Between Two Melvill(e)s

      “As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

      “Ye cannot live for yourselves; a thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men, and along those fibres, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and return to you as effects.” — Henry Melvill, from “Partaking in Other Men’s Sins”

      (As an aside: Henry lived between 1798–1871, Herman between 1819 – 1891, meaning they were tenants on the planets at the same time for 52 years. I doubt they ever met, but they’re forever linked by the latter quote, often associated with Herman Melville because of the similarities in their names and because people simply grab quotes online and use them without doing basic research beforehand.)

      We each live our lives somewhere between responsibility and adventure, don’t we? It’s like our moralist angel is named Henry, while our adventurous devil is named Herman. But life isn’t lived at the extremes? Most of us find ourselves somewhere in between. Our souls want to dance with a calling all its own, and we ought to find the tune that suits us best.

      Yet a thousand fibres connect us. Think about the hundreds of thousands of souls called to war just this year in Ukraine and Russia, simply because of the decision of one man. I imagine most of them would say their best life would be living the normal life they had before the world turned upside down. We choose to be who we are within the social and political fabric we exist in, and ought to celebrate the relative freedom to choose.

      You might think of Henry as a wet blanket, tossing out themes of cause and effect with such authority, but the reason it resonates is because the truth is woven into his sermon. But so too are the words of Herman. We all hear the tormented call to the coasts of our imagination, those places we’d be but for this other thing we must do first. For some it’s a tropical beach, for some it’s filled with icebergs and polar bears, but it calls just the same. Barbarous is in the eye of the beholder.

      Most of us don’t have to live a life mutually exclusive of adventure or responsible productivity. We get to decide what to be and do our best to be it. We’ll each hear calls from the other side, beckoning us to be more adventurous or more responsible. That’s the sound of freedom of choice in a world that doesn’t always offer it in equal shares. We’re privileged to have such options in our brief dance with life. Ultimately, we choose what we lean into to find our balance, and what we let drift away. We ought to be at peace with that.

    • A Lifetime of Closing Doors

      Death twitches my ear.
      “Live’” He says, “I am coming.“
      — Virgil

      The twitch is there, reminding me to make the most of each day. You may have noticed a lean towards Stoicism early on in this blog. Stoicism celebrates every moment of life, because we remind ourselves that infinity is calling. So decide what to be and go be it. To be or not to be, that is the question that Hamlet forever ponders. And so must we.

      My favorite barista retired. I walked in to chat, er, to get a coffee made just so, and she hasn’t been there. Then again, I haven’t been there, traveling and such, but back again and eager for the banter of familiarity. After a couple of tries, I asked a new barista where Sue was, only to find out she’d simply…. retired. Moved on to try new things with her brief dance with light. And I was momentarily floored by the abruptness of it all. It’s not life and death, not yet for either party, but it was one more door closing in a lifetime of closing doors.

      I have a cat that meows incessantly if there’s a door closed that she wants to be on the other side of. Pick her up, give her a treat, try to ignore her at your peril: nothing resolves the meowing but an open door. We all have this curiosity, perhaps expressed less annoyingly (perhaps), to know what’s on the other side of the door. We aren’t in a rush to find out, but we’ll find out one day. And knowing that, we must accept that the door is closed for a reason. It’s not our time to dance with infinity, it’s our time to dance with light. So dance, friend.

    • What Energy Remains?

      “Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.” — Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero

      I read this on the two year anniversary of the passing of my favorite Navy pilot. That this particular quote should pop up on September 12th is easily explainable, of course, being the birthday of the author Ondaatje. Yet it was this particular quote, dropped into my circle of awareness at precisely the moment when I needed to read it, that reverberated for me. And I wondered, what border am I crossing this week?

      We ought to rise up to meet our moment. We ought to raise our voice and lend our hand, for these are the things that demonstrate that we care just enough about something other than ourselves. The question is in the meeting—just what might we offer to another in our brief time with them? The answer to that question lies inside, but generally it ought to be all that we can give.

      Every interaction is an opportunity to lift. We create ripples of positive or negative energy simply by the friction generated in our words and actions. We dance with each, making our mark on the moment, and move on. But have we met a higher standard or did we let the opportunity slip away? What energy remains?

      Our hidden presence lingers even after we move on. You may think back on the energy rippling from the soul of another you interacted with this morning or a decade ago. What is it, exactly, that reverberates from that moment that stays with you even now? How do we process that and return it to the world?

      When I think back on each interaction with my favorite Navy pilot, the ripples tell me to seek more: More joie de vivre, more humor, more effort to measure up in the moment, and more focus on each personal engagement with another as I continue my march through time. These are his ripples passing through me to the world. His energy, continuing to reverberate, even as I remember what was lost.

    • Weaving a More Effective Life

      “Habit is a rope. We weave a thread every day, and eventually we can’t break it.” — Thomas Mann

      “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristotle

      This business of repeatedly doing is leading somewhere, with our destination highly dependent on what we repeatedly do. Such is the way. Mann’s observation rings true as well, for habits become nearly impossible to break once established. Each small choice is another thread—another resounding, audacious statement about who we want to be.

      Our natural inclination is to be a part of something. To build an identity around community or family. This can reinforce positive behavior, or amplify the worst in us. The choice isn’t always ours to decide which pond to swim in, but we may choose whether to keep treading above the surface or drift down into the muck on the bottom.

      When our identity is wrapped up in a community that is slowly drifting away, as people get older or recede from view towards other communities, we also choose how to react to that. People come and go. Our health and work and feelings about the world we live in change moment-to-moment. To be highly effective in life we ought to weave a thread of consistent activity that remains independent of the whims of fate. When the world unravels around us, and eventually it will feel that way for all of us, just how resilient are we?

      “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”— Viktor Frankl

      Life is constantly testing our mettle. We control so very little in the big scheme of things. Frankl’s famous observation reminds us that we do get to choose how we react. We have a say in what we might become in our brief dance with the universe in all its harsh indifference. We still might decide what to be and go be it.

    • Torn Between Two Places

      God it’s so painful when something that’s so close
      Is still so far out of reach
      — Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, American Girl

      September conjures up images of red and gold leaves in crisp air. I thought of their possibility while sneaking another swim in water that believes it’s still summer. But what we linger on isn’t always where we are, is it? I reminded myself to savor the water while I was still in it.

      We’re often torn between where we are and where we want to be. Between things we’re comfortable doing and things we’d like to try. It’s a fiendish place; nurtured dissatisfaction with one, with a lingering frustration that the other is just out of reach. We reason with the mind to accept one place, while the other place sings its siren song. No matter, were we to reverse our position, we’d likely yearn for the place we just came from. Such is human nature.

      The space between seems to be the real issue. We can’t have it all, but we dwell on images of places we’d love to be, or parts of our lives we’d love to return to, or maybe run away from. Surely, it’s there in that between where the devil resides. It’s our no man’s land where dreams go to die if we dare wander into it. And don’t we all stumble into discontent at times in our lives?

      All season I’ve been dealing with a garden neglected at the start of the growing season while I bounced around in Europe in June. It never really established itself, then came the drought, and here we are at the end of the season with a sad little garden that’s a shadow of its former self. The garden and I gave it a go, despite it all, and now it will go dormant for the winter before we try again next year. But I wonder, will I be inclined to try again, or leave it for the beauty of another place once again?

      Such are the considerations of an itinerate wanderer with a strong sense of place. Making a go of it here, while thinking about there. With American Girl playing in my head as a soundtrack of this life between two places.

    • Days to Come

      “Days to come stand in front of us
      like a row of lighted candles—
      golden, warm, and vivid candles.
      Days gone by fall behind us,
      a gloomy line of snuffed-out candles;
      the nearest are smoking still,
      cold, melted, and bent.”
      — C. P. Cavafy

      When you think about it, our days gone by are a stack of previous lives, somewhat resembling us today. Yet we must seek the vivid and alive, embrace our days to come, especially this one, at the expense of what we once were. For there’s no growth in dwelling on the past—we must stand ourselves on top of who we once were, we aren’t built to linger there.

      What’s done is done, what lies ahead is all that matters now. Past accomplishments and failures, all the good and bad, are like books we once read that form us in sometimes notable, and often insignificant ways. There’s no telling in the moment you pick it up for the first time what it will mean to you until you give it your attention in the moment. Such are our days—notable and insignificant, but all adding up to this.

      Days to come offer hope for a better future. It’s our time together, formed today, and nurtured in however many more we might have. Like the past, we’ll face new highs and lows, savor wins and absorb losses. Each are inevitable. All we can do is give each our singular attention and an honest attempt to make the most of the line, however long it might be.

    • Solitude as a Path Forward

      “Society is the cave. The way out is solitude.” — Simone Weil

      We know, deep down, that our way is found in the quiet moments. It’s so easy to be caught up in the expectations and scandals of society, so easy to trap ourselves in the words so tightly shaped around the stories of our lives, that we might never really fly. Yet we must fly, whatever our flight path may be, if we are to get out of that cave. How many countless souls never fly?

      We grow up hearing we might be odd if we aren’t part of the group. As adults we hear that we’re either in the collective party of the righteous or there’s something suspicious and odd about us. To be a part of the tribe we must participate in the rituals of the tribe. And so we all fall in line, find our career path, work to strengthen our relationships, build our bridges, marry up and in, and then have kids and place them carefully into the right environments to maximize their own potential in society.

      There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a part of things. We learn and grow in society. We play our part and find meaning through our connection with others. We meet people who help transform us from what we were to what we might become. We rightfully celebrate our place in society and the people who are woven into the fabric of our lives.

      One might point to the social structure as the clearest way to find our place in this world. We get in the mix, bounce ideas off each other, collaborate, feed off the energy in the room, get a leg up with the help of others, and so on. And indeed, so it is that we thrive in a world built on maximizing the contribution of the individual for the benefit of our collective future together.

      But if there’s a shared secret we all know, it is the critical nature of solitude in finding our own path forward. It’s the voice inside your head saying, “And what of me?” We can’t really make out what that voice is saying until we step away from the din. What we find, if we are so audacious as to listen, is that that voice has a lot to say.

      Is it narcissistic to ask such questions? Parts of society would shout down such selfish ideas. The very idea of contemplation and individuality are reckless and dangerous in many corners of this world. But is it selfish to seek solitude, or selfless to find places to reflect? We don’t run away from society, we stride boldly towards ourselves. The boldest ideas are conceived in solitude.

    • Reaching Enough

      About suffering they were never wrong,
      The old Masters: how well they understood
      Its human position: how it takes place
      While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
      How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
      For the miraculous birth, there always must be
      Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
      On a pond at the edge of the wood:
      They never forgot
      That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
      Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
      Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
      Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
      In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
      Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
      Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
      But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
      As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
      Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
      Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
      Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
      — W. H. Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts

      The big things happen around us, things that are planet-changing, culture-changing, life-changing, yet most people go about their business in the most human of ways—intently focused on themselves. Walk into any scene playing out around us and chances are the actors are engaged in the mundane while largely ignoring the monumental. Wars, political scandals, climate change, images from deep space…. all are monumental but don’t quite make the cut when compared to that itchy nose or debate over what’s for dinner or who is taking the recycling out.

      It’s this we must understand in our attempts to influence and cajole the apathetic. It’s not about us, it always must be about them. To inspire, stir or instigate the story necessarily must reach into the souls of each member of the audience. Storytelling, selling, pandering for votes—each is a form of engaging the audience and making them feel the story is all about them. For even if it feels like it’s about something much larger, it never really is. It’s always been, and forever will be, how might I stir something in you?

      And even then, someone else will be walking past oblivious to the two of us. No matter, for we can’t reach everyone. We just have to reach enough.