Alexandersmap

    Category: Stoicism

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • August Signals

      Black-eyed Susan’s once again dominate, staking a claim on more of the garden every year if you let them. I mostly let them. They remind me of conversations with a favorite gardener who’s moved on, which means they’ll forever receive favorable treatment in my garden.

      Crickets receive no such favorable treatment, but we peacefully coexist nonetheless. They play the soundtrack of August. Most of the year we hardly give crickets a thought, until they begin playing their persistent song from mid-summer to mid-autumn. Thousands of musicians announcing “We’re here, if only so very briefly.” Is there anything more stoic than a cricket?

      The gardener senses the seasons. No calendar is required. The days grow shorter even as the heat continues. For these are the dog days of August, marked by black-eyed Susan’s dancing to the persistent tune of an orchestra of crickets.

    • Write to Clarity

      “You want to become a clearer thinker, you need to spend more time alone with your own thoughts, and keep writing every day.” — @Orangebook

      How do we reach clarity? Don’t we have to wrestle with conflicting thoughts to see which emerges more persuasive than the rest? The vehicle to clarity might be walking or meditation or therapy or writing, but the wrestling within that vehicle must happen. The alternative is to reach for distraction. We all have moments with each, but which way do the scales tip?

      Maybe we never reach clarity at all, maybe we reach contentment with the great compromise of the clear and the unknown. The stoics have a saying, amor fati, which translates to love of fate. We control very little in this universe, the rest belongs to the universe to decide. Accepting what we can control is certainly a milestone moment on our journey to clarity.

      The thing is, the process of sorting out the journey is what life is. We might think more clearly, but this step in becoming brings us into a more complex head full of doubt, which, transcended, in turn leads to another. We ought to celebrate the journey to clarity, without expecting to actually arrive.

    • Meaning Abides

      “Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.” — Henry David Thoreau

      “If you want to be happy, be.” – Leo Tolstoy

      “Happiness is transient, but meaning abides.” — James Hollis

      We are all in the process of becoming whatever it is we’ll evolve into next. Blogging documents much of my own becoming, along with a few reckless photos of myself that others insist on releasing into the wild. When you document everything, the documenter captures while seemingly avoiding capture. This is a fools game, everything documented speaks, if we listen and observe closely enough. The trick is to listen closely enough to ourselves.

      The three quotes above naturally clung to each other in the course of a few weeks of reading and writing and sorting out life as it comes to you. We must consider the way in which we spend our lives, for the routines and habits offer a path to meaning and, dare we say, happiness. We are what we repeatedly do, as Aristotle reminds us (For those keeping score that’s four quotes in one relatively brief blog post—just what has gotten into this writer??).

      Perspective, of course. And an inclination to write whatever damned way suits the moment, I suppose. But don’t let me stray too far off the point here. The point is, we must spend our days chipping away at the marble to reveal the secret masterpiece hidden within each of us. Like so many of those unfinished masterpieces you see in museums, we too may run out of time. No, that’s not right—we will certainly run out of time. But we must attempt to draw as much of ourselves out of that cold marble as we possible can before we reach the end of our runway and crash into the abyss.

      We must attempt that which speaks to us. Becoming means to come to a place—what will that place be? Let it be meaningful.

    • Be Merciless With Time

      “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.” — Franz Kafka

      We are the authors of our own souls, yet most of us squander our agency and slide into compliance with expectations and deferment of dreams. What a shame. We ring in our celebration of adulthood with jobs, mortgages and parenthood. These are surely worthy pursuits (otherwise why would we do them?), but isn’t it fair to ask, what are we punting down the path in our quest to measure up?

      To be fair, we weren’t born ready to leap across the chasm. We’re never ready, really, but it didn’t feel right to risk everything, such that it was at the time, for the unknown. But every one of us is in the process of becoming whatever we’ll be next, not sitting still, and what we weren’t ready for yesterday might be just the ticket today or tomorrow. We aren’t what we were in all of our previous days, we’re the sum of it.

      So given that, shouldn’t we write a script that inspires, makes us well up a bit with emotion and make the hairs on the back of our neck stand up in nervous excitement just for the shear possibility of realizing what we’ve schemed up? I should think so. We’re all actors in our own play, why do we spend so much of it reading lines written by another?

      We mustn’t bend or dilute our future. We must be merciless — for it’s ours alone, and soon it will fall away like all of our days before. Isn’t it better to realize our greatest obsessions than to squander them in the swirl of trivial pursuits?

    • Stacking the Positives

      “We are the sum total of our experiences. Those experiences – be they positive or negative – make us the person we are, at any given point in our lives. And, like a flowing river, those same experiences, and those yet to come, continue to influence and reshape the person we are, and the person we become. None of us are the same as we were yesterday, nor will be tomorrow.“ — B.J. Neblett

      On a beautifully still morning I watched the fish in the bay react as a seal hunted for its breakfast. Perfect stillness broken by panicked splashes. The seal must eat and the fish must leap to survive. The story evolves around me, yet I have no meaningful role in it but to bear witness.

      There’s no denying the last few years brought plenty of negative experiences, and each shaped us in ways we might eagerly trade for an alternative outcome. But life isn’t gingerly holding our hand for this ride, it grudgingly allows us a seat on this train. The rest is up to us as the hits and highs come at us. What we make of our lives depends on how the sum of our experiences shapes us.

      The stakes aren’t always so dire, but in life we’re either breakfast or having breakfast. Our story will play out one way or the other, and based on how we react, in subsequent choices made in the balance of our days. We must fight for what we believe in yet accept what we can’t control.

    • Greeted With Joy

      “If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success.” — Henry David Thoreau

      I frequently tout the value of each day, going to great lengths to remind myself and anyone who’ll listen to seize it—Carpe diem!. Memento mori! It’s a system for being forever in the moment, maximizing each day as best you can as life throws its curveballs. And it immediately sorts obligations and opportunities into appropriate buckets.

      I’m not always sympathetic when others value perceived obligations over the opportunity to amplify living, but I’ve learned to accept that it isn’t my life but theirs. Still, the question remains, as we begin another day, what will we make of it? We ought to do our best to make it successful, whatever that means to you.

    • Walk the Walk

      “Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.” – Epictetus

      To make giant leaps forward in our careers, athletically, intellectually… whatever, is a worthy aspiration. But should it be a goal? Shouldn’t we focus on consistently taking action towards who we want to be, instead of focusing on the end game? If you want to be a great photographer or writer or 400 meter hurdler, then chip away at meaningful activity that moves you incrementally towards realizing that dream. Talk is BS, it’s only the walk that matters.

      Shane Parrish recently wrote about Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, who touched on this topic. Adams favors systems over goals because it reinforces success every time you do what you said you were going to do. A goal usually ends up frustrating and discouraging us while a system rewards us constantly:

      “Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.” — Scott Adams, as quoted by Shane Parrish in his blog

      I don’t agree with Adams on a lot of things, but I definitely see the truth in this statement. We can’t possibly feel successful if a goal is always out of reach, but we can feel good about our last workout or clicking publish one more day. We all should live by our personal credo. But it isn’t what we say that defines our lives, it’s what we do that exemplifies how delusional or on point that credo is. So walk the walk.

    • To Be Alive

      “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” — Marcus Aurelius

      I saw the squirrel, hanging upside down in the sun, grasping the oak bark with its cleverly-designed hind claws that hinge and hook so miraculously. He was staring intently at me, wondering what my intent was. Ready to flee, preferring to hang in the sun nibbling on whatever delights he came across. “Don’t worry about me friend,” I offered. “My intent is to celebrate the day, as you clearly are.”

      We aren’t born with the tools to hang upside down halfway up oak trees, or to soar on a whim to see the sunrise from high above the valley floor. We aren’t born able to dive deep into the sea to see how far the sunbeams penetrate the salty depths. Yet someone engineered ways for us to do each of these things, should we be so inclined. We don’t celebrate the collective contribution of humanity nearly enough, perhaps because we focus so much on our failings.

      To be alive is an immeasurable gift, extraordinary in scope yet tragically brief in duration. What exactly are we doing with each day to celebrate this gift? To flip that question upside down like that squirrel in the tree, what are we postponing in our lives that rejects the gift of this day? Isn’t that the ultimate rejection that betrays our potential? For, no matter what we might tell ourselves, we may not have another.

      Maybe this is why I love mornings so much—they offer proof that we’ve been given the opportunity to be alive for at least one more day, and with it a fresh beginning. We each have the opportunity to engineer our lives from this moment to our last. To toss our limitations aside and find a way to soar.