Alexandersmap

    Category: Stoicism

    • See the Changes

      She has seen me changing
      It ain’t easy rearranging
      And it gets harder as you get older
      Farther away as you get closer
      — Crosby, Stills & Nash, See the Changes

      I have a place along the shore that I’ve visited countless times. The hardscape hardly appears different from visit-to-visit, it’s the bay and the sky, the trees and the characters who surround this spot that change. I’m just another changing character in the history of this shoreline, witness to the changes around and in me. Here today, gone tomorrow. What are we to do, knowing this, but linger in the now?

      Like the bay, I return to the CSN song often. It remains the same, it’s the listener who changes. It will last longer than me, like so much in this world, and that’s as it should be. We are players in the game, writing our verse before we hand off to the next. We should celebrate this, not for the small hold we have on living now, but for our awareness. For we know the score, don’t we? It ain’t easy rearranging, but the truth shall set us free.

      Buzzards Bay

    • The Futility in Fragility, and Doing It Anyway

      If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one
      Drying in the colour of the evening sun
      Tomorrow’s rain will wash the stains away
      But something in our minds will always stay
      — Sting, Fragile

      Pushing snow off a driveway in an active snowstorm is an act in futility, displayed for all to see in the snowflakes quickly filling the void, relentlessly stalking you and the shovel down the pavement. Best to wait until it ends, clear it all at once with a snowblower, or a plow, or perhaps not at all if the forecast offers hope of melting days to come. But that’s not me. I clear the way, accept the temporary nature of my labor, and retreat inside to let the falling snow erase my work. Until I do it all again. Such is the way with fragile things. We’re all temporary, despite our efforts, but we may leave a mark nonetheless.

      Perhaps nobody knows fragility and futility like a snow shoveler. Perhaps. Tell that to the soldier. Tell that to the climate activist. Tell that to the writer. Everything is futile, at least until we prove it otherwise. Everything is fragile. Tell me otherwise.

      But there’s meaning in the work. And so we do it anyway. Again and again.

    • Here’s Your Miracle

      “No matter how long your journey appears to be, there is never more than this: one step, one breath, one moment – Now.” — Eckhart Tolle

      For all the times I’ve reminded myself that there’s only today (memento mori, so carpe diem), I often get swept up in distractions and comparison. Living is a daily wrestling match with what we know to be true and what we wish it to be. So I’m continuously reminding myself that we ought to celebrate the moment more for what it is: a miracle of presence amongst the living. This is it, friend. Do something with it. And strangely, out of nowhere, the sound of Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald filled my head with harmony:

      For once in your life, here’s your miracle
      Stand up and fight
      Make no mistake where you are
      (This is it)
      You’re goin’ no further
      (This is it)
      Until it’s over and done
      — Kenny Loggins & Michael McDonald, This Is It

      I had to face facts. After returning from the epic of Iceland, it was hard to celebrate the miraculous in the routine I’d returned to. And when we can’t possibly celebrate, we ought to at least savor the miracle of being. So for the last two nights I walked out to watch Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites parade past in a long line. There’s something inspiring about a satellite streaking through the sky, and that feeling is amplified into something altogether surreal when you see dozens of them following one another in a long line at exactly the moment that they’re supposed to.

      So in a way, that parade of satellites playing to the soundtrack of a cheesy 70’s song were just the ticket to shake me free from the post-vacation funk that a return to routine subjected me to. It was a good reminder that there’s nothing routine about living. The funk is derived from not being present with being here, now. Step outside of yourself and look up. We must make the most of the miracle while it’s here. And tell me, what’s more miraculous than pulling Elon Musk, Eckhart Tolle, Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald together into one post about Stoic philosophy?

    • On Valentine’s Day, Accept Þetta Reddast

      In Iceland there’s a saying that speaks of resilience and hopefulness. In only a few days there I heard it several times, evidence of the shared belief of her people, . Þetta Reddast means it (Þetta) will all work out (Reddast). In case you’re wondering, as I did, Þetta Reddast is pronounced “thet tah red ahst“. As with countless visitors before me I fell in love with Iceland almost immediately. And I also learned that she won’t always love you back but not to worry because it all works out in the end. Þetta Reddast, friend.

      On Valentine’s Day, we celebrate the love we have for that special someone. But love is a fickle and evasive thing indeed. Live a few years and you’ll experience the good, bad and ugly of love. Some of us are lucky and find a lifetime partner. Some of us never find love at all. Most are somewhere in the middle sorting it out one day at a time. As with Iceland, it all works out in the end, mostly. Enjoy the chocolate either way.

      I say love will come to you
      Hoping just because I spoke the words that they’re true
      As if I offered up a crystal ball to look through
      Where there’s now one there will be two
      — The Indigo Girls, Love Will Come to You

      The thing about finding true love is you can’t expect it, but you have to have faith that love will sort itself out for you eventually. It’s never perfect, for none of us are perfect, and to expect it to be so is a fools game. It’s simply two people finding each other at the right time and place in their lives, when the single track trail becomes wide enough for two to walk the path together. But trails narrow and widen as we keep hiking, don’t they? Þetta Reddast. Remember it will all work out in time.

      My bride and I went to Iceland looking for adventure and a glimpse of the Northern Lights. We found adventure, but we danced with Iceland’s notorious weather and wind each night instead of the Aurora Borealis. Looking at the Aurora app, we could see epic reds, oranges and greens dancing just out of reach. We learned quickly to accept the truth in Þetta Reddast. It just wasn’t our time to be on the dance floor with Norðurljós. Perhaps, as with love, our paths will cross some other time. I’m hoping just because I spoke the words that they’re true.

    • The Practice of Living More

      I’ve become known in some circles as an avid traveler, but don’t think of myself that way. That’s comparison at work, both theirs and mine, fogging the lens of perspective. Wiping it clear, it’s more that I’m an aspiring traveler immersed in a busy life. That’s not quite the same thing, but better for me at this point in my life. Travel is a choice, and so is building a strong sense of place and contribution. We can have a healthy measure of each applying a little balance and flexibility, but we can’t have it all. What will we choose, knowing this?

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

      Aristotle may have also observed that mediocrity is also built on repeatedly doing. We each get our stack of days to work with. Some choices are taken from us, some choices are hidden from us, but most of us in the modern western world have the agency to do with the bulk of our time what we would. Habitualizing excellence seems a prudent use of that time.

      The trick in living a life closer to excellence is in the repeatedly doing part. Arete, or excellence in life, is something to aspire to through our daily action. We pay penance to the gods we serve through our habits and applied effort. Put another way, through our practice:

      “When an activity becomes a practice, it shifts from something that you are doing at a point in time to an ongoing process of becoming.” — Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness

      The practice of daily living is ongoing, but with an expiration date we either reconcile ourselves with or distract ourselves from. Stoicism is holding on to that realization that this all ends one day and making the most of the time. How we live matters a great deal when we feel the urgency of an expiration date. Continuous improvement and living with intent are a prudent use of that urgency. The practice of living more means working to realize the things we aspire to, while savoring the life we’ve already built for ourselves.

    • Kindred Contributors of Light

      Kindred comes from a combination of kin and the Old English word ræden (“condition”), which itself comes from the verb rædan, meaning “to advise.” — Merriam-Webster Dictionary

      Talking to a friend about poetry, I mentioned a poem by Li-Young Lee, and paused our phone conversation while she read it, waiting for the payoff when one reacts to great poetry. We do this now and then; find some magic in the world and bring it to light for others to see. We each find our fellow torchbearers by the light they bring to the world. We learn, don’t we, that our light alone is not enough in the darkness? But just as the stars bring light and meaning to the infinite void of the universe, kindred spirits bring hope to us back on earth.

      Another poem, discovered in the infinite darkness of social media, drew me to Lee, and I in turn put his work out there that others may see:

      So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I
      make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
      we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
      measuring by eye as it falls into allignment
      between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky,
      she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.

      One day we’ll lie down and not get up.
      One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

      Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize
      what we love, and what it takes
      to tend what isn’t for our having.
      So often, fear has led me
      to abandon what I know I must relinquish
      in time. But for the moment,
      I’ll listen to her dream,
      and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
      more and more detail into the light
      of a joint and fragile keeping.
      — Li-Young Lee, To Hold

      We are co-conspirators, you and I, each kindred contributors of light to the universe. We wrestle with the why, make the most of the how, and reconcile our when. It’s a fragile grip we have on our moment, but our hold feels more secure when the load is shared. Eventually we all must release our hold, but think of the light we might pass along before our torch burns out.

      But let’s not talk about fare-thee-wells now
      The night is a starry dome
      — Joni Mitchell, Carey

      Thanks Joni. Yes of course, there’s more: Hope. Meaning. Dreams realized. To be a contributor of light in the face of infinite darkness is to illuminate possibility. To live a full and wonderful life requires the friction of active engagement with all that this world offers us. We must wrestle with thoughts and ideas and opinion and find a greater truth than the myths we were taught to calm us in our moments of doubt. Friction creates a spark that, nurtured, brings light. Here we may warm ourselves in the glow of our potential, realized in this, our moment of fragile keeping.

    • Here it Comes

      Another year already? With so much left undone?! So many good and bad days, rolled into twelve months. It’s been a great year. It’s been a horrible year. And now it’s over. And so it all begins again tomorrow.

      If we’ve learned anything from our stack of years, it’s that time flies, and 2023 will go just as quickly as 2022 did, and 2021 before that. We ought to feel that urgency and apply it to our days. I hope we do.

      Ready or not, here it comes. Beginning with today and tomorrow and each precious nugget of living. May we use it wisely.

      Happy New Year!

    • Tossing Aside the Blindfold

      “In the eighteenth century, when educated European tourists visited the Alps, they deliberately blindfolded their eyes to shield themselves from the evidence of the earth’s horrid irregularity. It is hard to say if this was not merely affectation, for today, newborn infants, who have not yet been taught our ideas of beauty, repeatedly show in tests that they prefer complex to simple designs. At any rate, after the Romantic Revolution, and after Darwin, I might add, our conscious notions of beauty changed. Were the earth as smooth as a ball bearing, it might be beautiful seen from another planet, as the rings of Saturn are. But here we live and move; we wander up and down the banks of the creek, we ride a railway through the Alps, and the landscape shifts and changes. Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture, and lapse into a dreamless sleep. Because we are living people, and because we are on the receiving end of beauty, another element necessarily enters the question. The texture of space is a condition of time. Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurtling shuttle. Did those eighteenth-century people think they were immortal? Or were their carriages stalled to rigidity, so that they knew they would never move again, and, panicked, they reached for their blindfolds?” — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

      I think the point of Dillard’s quote, and the reason I chose it, was to highlight the imperfect nature of our time here, and the extraordinary capacity to receive and embrace beauty despite, or perhaps because of our awareness of the duration of the ride. We are active receivers of the ugly truth and the beautiful realization that life is a brief dance with wonder. Our version of modern blindfolds is of course a mobile phone with its infinite distractions flashing pretty images in our face. Do we truly see the rugged imperfections surrounding us when we’re a click away from something with ten million views just waiting for ours?

      A man died of exposure on a trail I’m very familiar with over the Christmas weekend. The details haven’t fully been released but it appears he was unprepared for the elements, trusted his phone to guide him and light his way when it got dark, and perished when he lost the trail and his battery faded away with his life force. Friends or relatives on the other side of the planet alerted emergency personnel, who found him too late to save him. That mobile phone might connect us to the world, but it isn’t active connection to other people, just the illusion of it. Life is a fragile dance with beauty, and (it seems) his ended when he got too comfortable with that illusion in a cold and unforgiving place.

      The thing is, that trail is one of the most beautiful and popular trails in the White Mountains. It’s easy to understand why he chose it. The tragic irony is that he received the beauty he sought in his climb, but his blindfold killed him in the end. It’s unfair to judge the hiker who perished, for at least he was out there trying to make the most of his moment (if tragically unprepared).

      There’s a lesson for every hiker in his story. But isn’t there another lesson hidden in plain sight? For shouldn’t we wonder, how many others are slowly wasting their lives staring into their own blindfolds? We must be actively engaged in our lives to see the imperfect beauty surrounding us.

    • Listen Carefully, Spend Wisely

      Colm Doherty: I just have this tremendous sense of time slipping away from me, Pádraic. And I think I need to spend the time I have left thinking and composing. Just trying not to listen to any more of the dull things that you have to say for yourself.
      Pádraic Súlleabhain: Are you dying?
      Colm Doherty: No, I’m not dying.
      Pádraic Súlleabhain: But then you’ve loads of time.
      Colm Doherty: For chatting?
      Pádraic Súlleabhain: Aye.
      Colm Doherty: For aimless chatting?
      Pádraic Súlleabhain: Not for aimless chatting. For good, normal chatting.
      Colm Doherty: So, we’ll keep aimlessly chatting, and me life’ll keep dwindling. And in twelve years, I’ll die with nothing to show for it, bar the chats I’ve had with a limited man, is that it?
      — Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin

      There’s a darkness in this film that is borne of desperation. The characters react to the bleak reality of their lives in different ways. Colm and Pádraic’s sister, Siobhan Súilleabháin, desperately seek something beyond their relentlessly trivial existence. Pádraic sees nothing at all wrong with living out his days one exactly the same as the one before. And this raises the central question of the film, one we all faced at the height of the pandemic: what are we actually doing with our time? Is this all there is for us, or might we create something meaningful that lives beyond us before we pass? These are questions many of us wrestle with, while others contentedly choose more of the same. We each reconcile our brief dance with the world in our own way.

      These questions are timeless, even if we aren’t. Indeed, this temporary shelf life drives us to find answers. Our old friend Thoreau famously observed in the beginning pages of Walden that “the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation”. We bear the weight of these questions still, amplified by that realization that time is slipping away. Memento mori, friends. Carpe diem.

      The thing is, we shouldn’t despair at the thought. There ought to be freedom in that realization. We have an opportunity to amplify our living, and make it resonate in our time. We have the opportunity to create something that lives beyond ourselves, something that ripples. Alternatively, we might simply live. Neither choice is wrong, unless we’re quietly telling ourselves it is. The answer for each of us is to listen carefully, and spend wisely.

    • A Combination of States

      “Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” — Anaïs Nin (with a nod to Marginarian)

      I might have said something about this process of becoming in this blog a few times, not having read the Nin quote before but somewhere along the way influenced by the thought. We all have similar ideas because the human condition is similar for most of us, generation-to-generation, even as we gradually, possibly, improve our lot. History rhymes, as they say.

      Maybe we’re in a state of bliss, or a state of dread, or a state of exhaustion. We might feel all these in one afternoon. Changes of state are a lifetime migration filled with big and small changes, like ripples dancing on larger ocean swells. We feel the cold splash of reality even as we’re lifted to another height, and drop down the other side. We can try to bob along in one place for awhile, thinking we can control change by treading water, but life drifts on without us if we don’t remain an active participant. Life is movement. Movement is change.

      The trick is accepting state change. Moving through it as it presents itself to us, influencing what we can and leaving the rest to fate. Amor fati. Love of fate. Where we are is where we are. Where we’ll be next is only partially our choice. Love it? Celebrate the moment. Hate it? This too shall pass.

      The distraction industry thrives because people want to remain in a state of bliss, or anger, or apathy. Distraction isn’t active participation in your own life, it’s chasing our tail around in circles thinking it’s progress. By contrast, becoming is an active word, full of hope and frustration, bliss and setbacks. That’s life in a nutshell. One crazy combination of states, experienced one after the other, to the end. We ought to view that with the adventurous spirit of an explorer, don’t you think?