Alexandersmap

    Category: Exploration

    • The Magic Is in the Smallest Things

      Walking around in Salzburg, Austria offers a visual feast of bustling streets and five squares, the Salzach River, the Salzburg Cathedral, the cafes and biergartens, and above all, the Hohensalzburg Fortress high atop Festungsberg hill. The core hardscape is essentially the same for us as it was for Mozart 250 years ago. You can feel history with every step in this city. You can hear the whispers of all those who came before you.

      One small detail struck me more powerfully than all the ornamentation in Salzburg combined. Walking along the Getreidegasse, with all its shops and people from all over the world, I came across a doorway with four pull cables that ran up the outside wall to the four floors above, each cable run to the inside of each apartment. It was an old doorbell system from the days before electricity, still functional today. I wanted to ring the bell and ask the local resident if I could see the bell on the other side of the cable. And imagine this has likely happened many times on such a busy street with such a tantalizing pull readily at hand for those returning from biergartens late in the day.

      It’s funny the things that stick with you when you travel. I look for small details like this wherever I go, for these details are where the magic is. The smallest things speak the loudest if you’ll only slow down long enough to listen.

      Doorbell pulls from another era

    • Early Morning Walk in Castelrotto

      As an American from the northeast, I know all about traffic, but it was a surprise to encounter so much of it on the stretch from Hohenschwangau, Germany to Castelrotto, Italy. Then again, it was a beautiful Saturday morning and the world seemed to be going on holiday. Chalk it up to poor planning on my part. If there was a silver lining, the drive was stunningly beautiful and all that sitting at a standstill allowed me to look around.

      When we finally got to Castelrotto, we weren’t inclined to jump right back into the car and leave this lovely little town. A brief walk after dinner revealed the character of the place, which prompted an early morning walk before the bell tower started its daily ritual of marking time beginning at 6 AM. The magic in any place is revealed on the edges of the day, for me that time before the world wakes up is most special. And so it was that I fell in love with this little town that seemed impossible to get to the day before.

      There are three languages spoken here, and the locals seem to know a few more than that. Italian, German and Ladin are the core languages, which reveals both geography and a history of land grabbing. World War I settled the border, but the locals seem to roll with it and pivot quickly to whatever language you’re speaking. After my brief stumbling with German, that generously included English. No matter, the beauty of the place transcends my words anyway.

    • Widening Circles


      I live my life in widening circles
      that reach out across the world.
      I may not complete this last one
      but I will give myself to it.

      I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
      I’ve been circling for thousands of years
      and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
      a storm, or a great song?
      — Rainer Maria Rilke

      This act of giving ourselves to it—to experiencing life and being an active part in the dance, is what living is all about. You want meaning in your life? Give yourself to it. Don’t recede into the corner, for we aren’t meant to be wallflowers. Get out and mingle. Find those kindred spirits looking for a spark.

      Readers know I embrace solitude wholeheartedly for the conversation I might have with myself. I celebrate the offseason as much as anyone! Yet those closest to me observe that I actively engage with everyone around me. And why not? Aren’t we all fellow passengers on this cruise through the briefest of time? We ought to give ourselves to the mission and be fully alive in our moment together.

      Today is the beginning of another circle, reaching wider than the last, and carrying us to places previously unencountered. Give yourself to it! The world opens up for us through deliberate intent. Reach out and thrill in where it takes us.

    • Pack Light

      “Travel like Ghandi, with simple clothes, open eyes and an uncluttered mind.” – Rick Steves

      Packing for a trip, or for a hike, informs. It teaches us what we can do without. And it turns out we can do without a lot of things. Add a few layers, a few event-specific bits of fashion if you must, and always (always!) good shoes. Don’t forget your toothbrush. If you have to weigh your suitcase to keep it under the limit you’re doing something wrong. The goal with suitcases and backpacks is the same: maximize the empty space available to you. Simplify.

      The lesson here naturally applies to all things. We ought to live a more simple, uncluttered life. We ought to speak less and listen more. We ought to write with more brevity and fewer clever words we throw around too often (like brevity).

      We carry too much baggage with us. We use too many words. We speak too much. Simplify and open enough space to experience the world. Navigate the world as a poet might do. With lightness and an eye for detail.

    • Horizons

      An old trick, this habit of scanning the horizon in search of a challenging quadrant and wondering: Is this my destiny? A childish trick, for we know if we go far enough we’re bound to return full circle—to the point of departure.. What is it about that horizon? What lies on the other side? Not just ships and land and more of the same old ocean—but what is the magic that calls…and who am I fooling really? — Sterling Hayden, Wanderer

      We each look to the horizon, wondering at our destiny. Some look and feel it too far a journey, and maybe it is. Maybe we aren’t meant to endlessly follow the horizon. Then again, maybe we gaze out at such a distance as a way to stop us from ever going in the first place.

      “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” — Lao Tzu

      Focus too much on the horizon and you’ll surely stumble. Focus too much on the step in front of you and you’ll find yourself going in circles. The answer, of course, is to keep one eye towards the horizon with the other on this next step.

      As Hayden points out, the funny thing about chasing horizons is that you’ll eventually end up going full circle back to where you began. What he doesn’t say is that you’ll be a different person upon your return. Surely you’ll look at where you started in a whole new light.

      We chase all sorts of horizons through travel and writing and learning new things. A quest doesn’t always mean setting sail, but the analogy holds true nonetheless. For when we chase horizons we’re embarking on a journey of transformation. We all ought to chase horizons, for deep down, we know we can’t stay where we’ve been. Not when there’s so much out there for us.

    • How Much Alive

      “It matters not where or how far you travel—the farther commonly the worse—but how much alive you are.” — Henry David Thoreau

      Sitting outside, listening to birdsong in the magic hour before the world shook the cobwebs off, I watched a couple of large birds fluttering tree-to-tree. I wondered at them, thinking perhaps pileated woodpeckers who tend to behave this way, or maybe a couple of young turkeys waking up from their roost. Definitely not hawks on the hunt. Black and white with a bit of duck-like appearance to them, I quickly exhausted my list of possibilities and remained mystified. The binoculars and camera remained safely in the house where they offered the least amount of help in the moment. So I quietly thanked them for their visit and released them from my attention as they worked their way away from my own perch. I may find out yet who my visitors were, but it wasn’t our moment for a proper introduction.

      We aren’t meant to know everything, but we ought to be curious. We all seek answers in this world. We climb to high summits, fly to faraway places, seek solace in the new. Shouldn’t we celebrate the world as it comes to us? Why do we feel compelled to fly across the globe? Because we know it’s out there, and like those birds, once we’re aware of that fact we want to know a bit more about it.

      Thoreau traveled too, he just wasn’t collecting frequent flyer miles or navigating security lines. He sought faraway places relative to his time and place, traveling to Cape Cod and Maine and paddling down the Concord and then up the Merrimack Rivers. He sought what was just out of reach just as we do. Credit the pace of travel if you will, but he didn’t postpone his aliveness for when he arrived at his destination, he encountered it in each moment along the way. Shouldn’t we do the same?

    • Roots and the Road

      “Be good and you’ll be lonesome.” — Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

      I’ve had this quote in my mind for a decade or two, floating about in the back of my brain. It sneaks back to the front now and then, mostly as a taunt to be more adventurous. Some may say I don’t need a prompt like that.

      A healthy dose of mischief leads us into all sorts of adventure. A healthy sense of place leads us to a life of meaning. There’s a happy medium somewhere in between. We ought to be a bit adventurous, but ought to have something that grounds us too. How we weigh that out is different for each of us. We’re never really lonesome when we’re running towards something.

      Last weekend Twain’s words drifted back front and center as I walked through a local greenhouse. It comes down to whether to plant tomatoes. If I plant them this year it signals I’m locked in to this place for at least another season. If I forgo the tomatoes, you might say I’m free to roam.

      Life is more complicated than that. We aren’t locked into a life by the crops we plant. But it sure feels like you’re rooting yourself to that plot of land while you’re planting them. That chicken manure sure smells a lot like commitment when you’ve caught the adventure bug.

      Still, I do love a good tomato.

    • To Learn and Grow and Discover

      “There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.” ― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

      We have an opportunity to learn and grow and discover until our very last days. On the other hand, we might consign ourselves to the corner of closed up people waiting to die. What kind of life is that? Life isn’t easy, but why turn off the lights years before last call?

      Lifelong learning is well beyond our formal education. I actively rebelled against a good chunk of that formal education, by some miracle earning both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree. Admittedly, I might have gone further along the arc of human potential if I’d just followed that formal education a bit more stringently. Maybe I’d have gone to Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard. But that wasn’t meant to be my arc. Maybe it wasn’t yours either. Each of us runs the race of maximizing our personal potential at our own pace.

      Formal education teaches you rules others want you to live by. Those who master it early enough get a strong lead and a key position in the pack. What some of us realized in navigating that formal education is we didn’t really want to be part of the pack anyway. Sometimes we confuse indifference for incompetence. The first time I tacked Calculus I thought I was incompetent. It turns out I just didn’t care about it enough to try. When I did care enough the experience was wholly different.

      Lifelong learning is a personal quest for understanding, but it ought to sparkle and pop and illuminate for the thrill of it all. For it is a thrill to remove the “un” from aware or familiar. It’s a thrill to master a simple phrase in a foreign language or to try to cook something that seemed outside your skillset before. That excitement can build on itself for the rest of our lives.

      Who says we have to be bored and lonely and used up at the end of our days? We get to reinvent ourselves every day, if we don’t squander the opportunity to learn and grow and discover. There’s enchantment in that moment when we finally realize what we’d been missing all this time. Who says we can’t carry that sense of enchantment to the end of our time? Sounds like a hell of a ride.

    • Seeing the World Wherever You Are

      “The wise man knows that it is better to sit on the banks of a remote mountain stream than to be emperor of the whole world.” ― Zhuang Zhou

      We anticipate what we believe we’ll find in the world, when we get out there to meet it. There’s a level of understanding that comes with experiencing first-hand the grandeur of this planet. We humans have our quietly persistent bucket lists that range from Paris to Machu Picchu to the Grand Canyon to the Appalachian Trail. We hear that siren question us: When will we listen and finally go?

      I may sound like a one-trick pony at times, writing about such things as wanderlust and the urgency of now. But I’m just as content walking in an old forest nearby, walking across landscapes that have changed or stubbornly remained the same with the history of this continent. There is an entire world to see within throwing distance of wherever we are at this moment.

      Restlessness may be the soul telling us we haven’t arrived quite yet. Then again, it may mean that we haven’t seen what is right in front of us yet. To fully savor life we must learn to pause and see the richness of the world wherever we are. That doesn’t mean we’ve arrived where we are meant to go, but we’ll never fully immerse ourselves in this business of living if we are constantly planning our escape.

      That doesn’t mean we ought to wrap ourselves in a blanket of comfortably familiar routine. Life demands that we go out and meet it, comfort be damned. But let’s not rush past every mountain stream on our climb to the pinnacle. If hiking teaches us anything, it’s that the highlight real isn’t always the summit, but what we’ve encountered along the way.

      Life isn’t that highlight real of places we’ve been, but the person we became in each step. The world is out there, but also right here. Waiting for us to see it. Our world is this next step.

    • I Saw Tranquility

      “Deep in the forest there is something sacred that exists without a perceptible function. This is the central core, the navel of the world, and I want to return to that place.” — Hayao Miyazaki

      Last month I walked through a forest with several coworkers on a group hike. One of them commented that the naked trees were spooky and reminded him of The Blair Witch Project. I looked around and saw something completely different. And two days later I doubled down on that place and hiked alone in the dark before dawn with a failing headlamp. The things we do for love.

      So much of the world is what we perceive it to be. I may find tranquility in a stand of trees, someone else sees a buildable lot and the trees themselves as a commodity to haul off to the mill. America was built on such vision. Thankfully there are people who saw the land as something timeless and preserved it. Were we to level every forest where would we ever find ourselves?

      The trees are beginning to leaf out in the Northern Hemisphere, transforming the naked landscape. Soon the forest will hide things that are apparent in colder months. Leaves bring deep shade and mystery to the forest. Often what we see appears distinctly different from one person to another. What the forest is really showing us is not itself, but our own nature. My hiking friend that day saw horror in the naked forest. I saw tranquility.