Alexandersmap

    Category: Stoicism

    • Buds of Fire

      And in the shadow of our human dream of falling,
      human voices are Creation’s most recent flowers,
      mere buds of fire
      nodding on their stalks.
      — Li-Young Lee, Dying Stupid

      Working through the gardening shed, I found a terra cotta pot sporting hints of old root filaments, betraying its previous occupant from last season. Each life takes their place in line, lives their season and moves on for the next to take their turn. The keen observer sees hints of past lives all around us, ghosts whispering that they once turned their gaze to the sun too. Gardeners know a thing or two about the tenuous hold we have on our time. So do writers and poets.

      May mocks the meticulous gardener. Put your best foot forward and the trees crap all over it, again and again, until you admit you aren’t in control of anything. Life offers lessons for the attentive student. Seasons come and go. So too do we. We are only here for a brief dance with our best intentions.

      Life is change—this we know. Some of those whispering ghosts are us, telling tales of past seasons gone forever, of who we used to be. Sometimes there’s just wisp of filament that betrays our past life, sometimes it’s the whole pot. Still, there’s work to be done in the now. While there’s time in this season, fill an empty pot with something new.

    • The Whisper of the Window Seat

      The more I travel, the more I believe there are two types of people in this world: those who would block out all the noise and retreat into themselves, and those who are actively engaged with everything and everyone around them. This might be best observed on a plane, where the window seat becomes a portal to the universe for those actively looking out the window, or alternatively, closed the entire flight that the traveller may forget that they’re propelling tens of thousands of feet above the earth in an aluminum tube. Take those two travelers and bring them into a room or a garden and I’d bet most would behave similarly.

      I’d like to believe that I’m actively engaged in the world, but still own noise cancelling headphones and resent the person in front of me for reclining their seat. I celebrate the input I seek from the world, yet resent encroachment from that which I don’t. Does that make me complex, or practically engaged? I’m a work in progress either way; with stoicism as a lens for which to see the world.

      Given the choice, would you choose an aisle seat over a window seat? Would you take one for the team and sit in the middle seat? These are choices that say a lot about us. The aisle offers flexibility—you can stand up any old time you want to so long as that fasten seatbelt sign isn’t illuminated. Yet you’re constantly encroached upon by (seemingly) every person bumping into you as they pass by. There’s joy but also despair in the aisle seat, presented to you in a jolt just as you doze off.

      That middle seat must be suffered. You know exactly what you’re in for, and usually, that vision is realized. There’s something very stoic about traveling in the middle seat. Amor fati—love of fate. We accept the universe as it comes to us. All we can do is cross our arms and take the air miles. If you’re lucky, the person in the window seat is a kindred spirit and has the shutter open for you to catch a partial view of what might have been.

      The more I travel, the more I want the window seat. Sure, you’ve got to manage your bladder trips wisely, but otherwise you’re in a place of least possible encroachment under the circumstances with the most opportunity for wonder just an open shutter away. We’ve all got such a short trip in the big scheme of things, why not be open to experience as much as possible? Everything but that reclining seat, anyway.

    • The Promise of Now

      “He was weary of himself, of cold ideas and brain dreams. Life a poem? Not when you went about forever poetizing about your own life instead of living it. How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty! This chasing after yourself, craftily observing your own tracks—in a circle, of course. This sham diving into the stream of life while all the time you sat angling after yourself, fishing yourself up in one curious disguise or another! If he could only be overwhelmed by something—life, love, passion—so that he could no longer shape it into poems, but had to let it shape him!” ― Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

      Often in the urgency of becoming, we forget to savor moments. It’s an odd thing to say, being an unabashed savorer of moments, to admit that I lose the feel of now sometimes in my quest for a then I may never reach. But now is ours to live, everything else is chasing promises.

      A person in my close circle heard that their cancer is terminal, which means that they’re facing their mortality more profoundly than they had every imagined before. The truth of the matter is they were dying all along—we all are—but he wasn’t focused on the expiration date. When someone hears they’re going to die they immediately wonder exactly when. This is a fair question, to be sure, but perhaps the better question, for all of us, is what will we do with the vibrant and healthy days left for us? Not the bedridden, atrophied and out of time days, but our very best days of those we have left?

      In a way, a diagnosis is a gift, forcing the person hearing it to focus on the urgency of living now. This awareness magnifies what is essential. When all the noise is finally filtered away, what calls to us?

      Go out and live, friends, for our time is so very brief. Dive deeply into the stream of life. Savor the moments and create memories that will make you smile at the sheer audacity of living in the now. Feel this moment, and the next. Be overwhelmed by life, love and passion, for these are the spices of today. Realize the promise of now while it’s here.

    • Through the Darkness and the Light

      And consider, always, every day, the determination
      of the grass to grow despite the unending obstacles.
      — Mary Oliver, Evidence

      We are change agents, creating new iterations of ourselves with every action. But so is everyone and everything else, which makes change exponential and complicated. There are some things we simply can’t control. One moment we’re celebrating what we’ve accrued and the next we’re mourning what has passed. The moments in between are often confusing and stressful. Mostly, we can only control how we react.

      “Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

      Life is change, which means accepting the two sides of that coin. Amor fati. There will be obstacles and setbacks. Life is a series of such lessons, learned and forgotten and re-learned again. The lessons are unending, meaning we must learn to endure. We must find a way, despite it all.

      “The nature of the rain is the same and yet it produces thorns in the marsh and flowers in the garden.” — Arab saying (via Anthony De Mello)

      Through everything, there is growth, but isn’t it fair to ask ourselves, what are we growing towards? What are we rooted in, to sustain us in troubled times? What are we reaching for, when times are better? These are our days, through the darkness and the light, to do with what we will.

    • Nothing More Than This

      I could feel at the time
      There was no way of knowing
      Fallen leaves in the night
      Who can say where they’re blowing?
      As free as the wind
      Hopefully learning
      Why the sea on the tide
      Has no way of turning
      More than this
      You know there’s nothing
      More than this
      Tell me one thing
      More than this
      Ooh there’s nothing
      — Roxy Music, More Than This

      Life keeps happening, one day to the next, as we so very quickly make our trip around the sun. It’s easy to wrap ourselves in this—to stress over the passing of time and people and things out of our control. Alternatively, we might simply take the days as they come to us. For things come and go as they will, and after all, there’s no stopping the tide, friends. The best we can do is anchor ourselves in something true.

      Each day offers something. We are each collectors of memories, built to savor and reflect if we give ourselves to such things. Shouldn’t we? For life is nothing more than this: the people and places that make us who we are in our time. We know deep down that it will all scatter one day, but not just yet.

    • Optimizing the Interval

      “Several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, The Wall

      “Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and women who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will last forever or else are so frightened it won’t that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.” — Henry Miller

      On the face of it, this pair of quotes might feel morbid and dark, but they’re simply pointing out the obvious. Memento mori: we all must die, so what will we do with the time left to us? We ought to make it something worthwhile. And so it is that at some point in our lives we truly recognize that someday our time will end. That moment of realization until the last moment of our lives is our interval. We owe it to our fragile selves to optimize that interval.

      Given the outcome, shouldn’t we stack as many healthy, fully vibrant and alive days into that interval as possible? Lean in to consistent exercise and good nutrition, that we might not one day surprisingly soon erode into a shell of ourselves. Read the great books now, that we might build our foundation stronger, and sit at the table of the greatest minds awaiting our arrival. Contribute something tangible in this world, not to be remembered, but to sustain the positive momentum the best of humanity offers. These are worthy goals for an interval as shockingly brief as this.

      Several hours or several years are just the same, friends, we must seize what flees.

    • Self… Less

      “A person totally wrapped up in himself makes a small package.” — Harry Emerson Fosdick

      It’s human nature to see the world through our own lens, but that doesn’t make it productive or particularly informative. So how do we reconcile this with a blog published daily? At what point does it become a vanity play? The very act of producing daily is a statement of self (Look: I’m still here!”), but it shouldn’t ever be about the self.

      When the writing becomes too self-absorbed, it become less interesting, as selfies make the worst photographs. A selfie may create an image for the photographer to remember the moment, but by nature the place the picture is being taken in is dominated by the person, screaming “Me!” for all who will listen. Writing in a self-absorbed way is simply journalling in disguise.

      The tricky thing about living in a world that celebrates the individual so much is that it promotes so much individualism. Yet we are at our very best when we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. The self often gets in the way on our path to something more. Self… less is a better mission. It focuses the mind on bigger things, inherently beyond the limitations of the individual.

      “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.” — Epictetus

      Each day offers an opportunity to reach for the mirror or the telescope. Which will help us see beyond our present position? Yet we each have our verse to contribute. This daily practice of becoming ought to be documented. Does this create a contradiction? That depends on the underlying motivation of the writer. To contribute to the conversation is an act of generosity. To dominate the conversation is something less. The mission is clear: to draw from the self to contribute to something beyond it.

    • Analog and Delightful

      Change is good, but it can also be a pain in the ass. This is exemplified by the forced version upgrades Apple puts us through before we can resume our regularly scheduled activity. Microsoft has their own version of upgrade hell, and I’ve recently undergone the process of re-learning everything I thought I knew about Microsoft Office when I was issued a new laptop PC for work. There’s something to be said for pen and paper in this constantly changing world of technology.

      If I sound like an old dog, well, forgive me. I pride myself on keeping up, I just prefer choosing the time and place for when my world is turned upside down. Tech doesn’t work that way. Critical updates and staying a step ahead of the bad guys is paramount, and [sorry, but] f**k your feelings, friend. It’s not about us with tech, it’s about the greater good versus the underlying bad. Here we are, buttercup; embrace the suck. Amor fati.

      The thing we must accept is that the people building all these tech tools love to fiddle around with this Pandora’s box. The rest of us, simply wanting efficiency in our lives, are along for the ride. Once we’re on the ride, we’re on. Buckle up and mind your hands. No loose items allowed. Carpe diem.

      I’ve been telling myself that the blog site needs an upgrade for a long time now. While acknowledging that fact, I nonetheless avoid doing anything about it because there is pain associated with that change. Ah, yes, the excuses: I’ll have to learn new things and I don’t have time to learn right now. Re-designing the blog will be disruptive and inherently full of risk. All I really care about is writing and sharing that writing every day, what’s the point of a forklift upgrade on the web site?

      Sooner or later, we have to rip off the bandaid. Technology will continue to evolve to torture us, er, to make our lives easier. We must learn to keep pace. We aren’t old dogs, friends, we’re surfers riding the bleeding edge of technology wherever it takes us. As with most tech, it will end up in the recycling center, dusty and forgotten, soon enough. Memento mori. But that’s then, this is now. Just do it. Just remember to change your password to something impossible to remember, er, hack.

      One of the small joys I have each day is taking out my bullet journal and tracking my progress on tasks, streaks and long-term goals. It’s all so very analog and delightful. I like to think of myself as technologically savvy, but I’m just fooling myself. All this technology is a means to an end, the rest is just a game played by someone else’s rules. Give me simplicity. For deep down, I just want to be analog and delightful too.

    • By the Handful

      ‘You only go around once in life, and I’m going to grab a handful of it.’ — Steve McQueen

      The world is not back to “normal” post-pandemic, for there’s an increased state of madness and fragility buzzing around us all, but it’s clear that people are living larger lives. Who’s to blame them? Shouldn’t we be grabbing our handful of bold and earnest living in the face of it all? This is our time. Carpe diem.

      Las Vegas offers hope and distraction and a chance to step out of ourselves, just a little bit, and try new things. Sometimes those things are big and bold. Sometimes it’s a $10 dollar mechanical bull ride. Watching a line of buzzed glory riders ride the mechanical bull at Gilly’s late into the evening, I was struck by the parallel to McQueen’s statement. Each character climbed aboard, tucked one hand firmly onto the grip, the other high in the air and went for their crazy ride. Each held on for their time and no more. The bull always wins in the end. Still, the riders declared that we can each make something glorious before we’re thrown.

    • The Chill Lane

      “Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes angry.” — Euripides

      Commuting was never my thing, but sometimes you’ve just gotta do what you’ve gotta do. When I was not very much younger, I used to grow angry at the neat rows of brake lights in front of me. Likewise, a red light when there was nobody else at the intersection would drive me crazy. My bride rolls her eyes when I detour a different way to avoid some particular egregious traffic lights. I still have a deeply engrained habit of active avoidance of traffic lights, and have stated I’ll move out of the town I live in the moment they install them. I may just be posturing, but still, there’s a grain of truth in every jest.

      Really, it’s a control thing. Traffic and traffic lights are mostly out of my control, which hints at the deeper truth that most of life is out of our control. So what’s the solution? Amor fati — Love of fate. Simply put, focus on the things that you can control, accept the rest, and stay in the chill lane.

      Anger is weakness, displayed. It will be our undoing if we let it be. So don’t let it be. As we learn and grow we come to see the world differently, and see the folly of the angry life. To reach our potential in this life we must remain clear on our purpose and avoid the petty distractions some bad commute or bad civil engineering might stir up. It’s all relative, of course, and none of this matters when we look at the bigger picture. Amor fati, friend.