Alexandersmap

    Category: Exploration

    • Filling in Holes

      “The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait until that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.” ― Henry David Thoreau

      They say a tired dog doesn’t dig, but I have a dog that never tires. This mild, wet winter has given her ample opportunity to perfect her digging technique. And so the next few days I’ll be spreading enough stone to pay for a trip to Paris. Mulching the beds with stone is meant to act as a natural deterrent for a wonderful (really) dog who wants to dig holes everywhere. It’s a way of telling her, “not here”. With time and some training, eventually she’ll grow out of these teenage years.

      We know when something has shifted within ourselves and it’s time for change. Do we leap at that moment, or live a life of quiet desperation? Thoreau famously suggested most of us do the latter. It’s famous because it resonated with the masses, who fail to act on the wisdom in the observation. We must have the agency to go. To do that we must have the courage to let go of the things that hold us in place.

      Easier said than done. That puppy who has brought so much joy into our lives is also an anchor to a lifestyle. Having the agency to go on a trip is one thing, but the more we layer into our lives the harder it is to simply walk away. Great lifestyle design means layering in the things we want most in our lives and eliminating the things that aren’t as important. The dog stays, and so the trip to Paris may be pushed out yet another year. We can’t have it all, but we can have the things we focus on the most.

      Don’t get me wrong—there will be plenty of travel to come this year, and with it arrangements for dog sitting and lawn mowing and all the things that come with balancing priorities. There’s a price tag for all of this, in time and money and the discipline to see it through. The payoff is a life far richer than it might have been otherwise. Filling in holes was the entire reason we got the dog in the first place.

    • Becoming That Which One Essentially Is

      “Nobody can enjoy the experience he desires until he is ready for it. People seldom mean what they say. Anyone who says he is burning to do something other than he is doing or to be somewhere else than he is is lying to himself. To desire is not merely to wish. To desire is to become that which one essentially is.” — Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi

      I was talking to my bride about an upcoming trip friends are taking to a place I’ve wanted to go. We’re going to a few remarkable places ourselves this year and we can’t do everything, right?Sure: we can’t do everything… I can’t argue that I often say I want to go to many places, but there are precious few that haunt me in my dreams.

      To desire to see the world is common, but precious few actually seek out all of the places they want to go to. Those trips of a lifetime are called that because most people only take them once. It’s up to us to determine if that’s enough. My own time bucket for such travel is shockingly short, and so I feel I must go when the siren calls. We all know what those sirens were up to, don’t we? Calling us to the rocks. The only safe way out was to keep going.

      The person we are now is the person we’re ready to be. Who we aspire to be means nothing more than the direction in which it sends us. We are here because we were once called here, and we willingly made the journey. Sometimes we arrive at a place we love, sometimes we find that it’s not what we wanted at all. Who we become next is up to us—but we must keep moving.

      As James Clear said (and I’ve quoted countless times now): “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.” Knowing this, we simply begin moving deliberately in the direction we wish to go in. Our habits are the incremental steps towards becoming. It begins with desire and is realized through consistent action. Simple, yet so hard to grasp sometimes. Routine hides in plain sight, after all.

      The thing is, we seek so much more than to visit various places. It’s not the visit, it’s the transformation of the visitor. We are completing a puzzle who’s picture is our future self. But in this puzzle, we get to choose some of the pieces. And just when we look at ourselves in the mirror, the puzzle pieces get scrambled all over again. We can’t spend our lives wishing for tomorrow, but we can choose some of the pieces now that will make up who we’ll be then.

    • People, Pets and Places

      “Don’t be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.” — Bertolt Brecht

      “It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” — Marcus Aurelius

      Recently, a colleague from overseas asked for some advice on where to go and what to do for a weekend in Boston. Answering this question is both easy and challenging. Oftentimes we are so caught up in the familiar routine that we forget to explore the things that make a place special. Go to the museums, take a walk through the Public Garden or the Esplanade, and definitely try the oysters, I told her, but it reminded me that I ought to take my own advice and step off the usual loop more often myself.

      If we crave anything in our average days, it’s more boldness. But to be bold in the face of an abundance of adequate choices a good life throws our way seems ungrateful—when life is good, why be so audacious as to turn it upside down? Does taco Tuesday really ever get old? Only when we question it. At that moment, we realize there can be more to a random weekday than the same thing we had last Tuesday.

      One might think taking the dog for a walk is mundane. I beg to differ! Every walk with a dog is a perspective changing event. Lately we’ve been walking the dog in a new place every weekend. Different beaches, woodland walks, rail trails. Every place is different for the dog, and different for us when viewed through the eyes and nose of an eager pup. In every walk we experience something new ourselves, and expand our lives in the process. It’s why we opted to adopt a rescue dog in the first place, because life is larger when we wrap more people, pets and places around ourselves.

      When viewed through the lens of a brief life, our choices in the everyday feel more essential. We can’t celebrate wine o’clock all day without flushing our vitality down the drain, but we can surely seek out the exclamation point in an otherwise mundane moment. Try a different walk or visit that museum we recommend to others but never seem to get to ourselves. Maybe even skip the tacos for once and try a donburi bowl. Sure, it’s not as alliterative, but it offers a whole new taste for Tuesday. The whole world awaits the adventurous spirits who venture out into it. So be bold in those choices today.

    • Why This?

      “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. ― Marcel Proust

      Yesterday I wrote of writing every day no matter what. The streak is very much alive and will be until the day it isn’t. The underlying question is why? Why do this at all? No fame or fortune or other such ego stroke. A blogger can’t even state they’re a novelist. Plenty of helpful people in my life would like me to lump a bunch of these blog posts into a series of books. Honestly, once they’ve been released into the world the words aren’t ours anymore. Perhaps that’s why they come so freely? No paywall or subscription necessary. This is just me in the moment, telling friends what I’ve stumbled upon on my journey.

      Writing is discovery. It’s finding something new within ourselves each day and bringing it to the surface. It’s surprising ourselves and others that we’re still at this thing. It’s the occasional comment from someone you hadn’t realized was paying attention at all. Writing is processing the complexities of the world and our place in it and putting a stake in the ground for who we are at this moment in time. I write these words without truly knowing where they’re coming from. We surf in this way with the Muse, along for the ride pretending we have some measure of control.

      Writing leads to an increased power of observation. It leads to new books and podcasts and small corners of the past that most people drive by on their way to someplace else. If awareness is the key to being present, then self-awareness is knowing when to shut the hell up and understand what is happening in the moment. When we write we’ve channeled that awareness into words. Here’s another time stamp of that dance.

    • Processing Time

      “Wash the dishes relaxingly, as though each bowl is an object of contemplation. Consider each bowl as sacred. Follow your breath to prevent your mind from straying. Do not try to hurry to get the job over with. Consider washing the dishes the most important thing in life. Washing the dishes is meditation. If you cannot wash the dishes in mindfulness, neither can you meditate while sitting in silence.” — Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation

      The writing of the blog post started late this morning, with fresh snow to clear from the driveway a priority, and a relatively subdued morning to follow. The words will come, as they always do, and they’re often better for having changed up the routine. I know I was the better for having done a small bit of exercise in the cold air with a pink and orange kaleidoscope of dancing clouds greeting me through the bare trees.

      The driveway and I have an understanding. If the snow is heavy and wet and more than two inches, I use the snowblower. If light and fluffy and less than four inches, I alway shovel. All other conditions fall somewhere in between, but I default to the shovel when it’s a reasonable ask of myself. I do this because so little in our lives is analog or manual anymore. We’ve got engines and batteries and computers for everything nowadays. These things do the work for us, but rob us of time to process anything in our minds. How many drive to the gym to walk on a treadmill, watching the screen in front of them take them to another place? How does that stir the imagination? I have a friend who walks through the woods to work every day and consider him the luckiest commuter I know.

      We must design a lifestyle that allows us to contemplate things, and to dream and discover things about the world and ourselves. There must be time in our daily lives for us to reflect on the world and our place in it, or we will remain nothing but distracted souls like all the rest. That’s not us, friend. Carve out and protect that processing time. As a bonus, we’ll be greeted with a job well done and a wee bit more clarity.

    • Maps

      “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” — Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity

      “A map is the greatest of all epic poems. Its lines and colors show the realization of great dreams.” – Gilbert Grosvenor

      I was having a conversation with a friend the other day. I’d asked him when was the last time someone had pulled up asking for directions? It just doesn’t happen now—there’s a phone app for that. That same app takes us to parties and work appointments and the Grand Canyon. Maps are relegated to the wall or the imagination. GPS rules the road now.

      Grosvenor, the founder of National Geographic, had it right when he compared a map to poetry. It stirs the imagination similarly. When you look at a great map of a place, how can you not be stirred to explore that place? Maps whisper to me like Sean O’Connell beckoned to Walter Mitty: Go!

      The name of this blog is Alexander’s map for a reason, it’s based on William Alexander’s pamphlet Encouragement to Colonies and my own wanderings around the northeast corner of North America. I saw a replica of the map Alexander commissioned in a conference room in Newfoundland and it sparked my imagination, which is exactly why he had it commissioned in the first place. I just came into the picture a bit later than he’d planned. That one map completely changed the person who viewed it that day.

      If maps are no longer needed for everyday use, they still have a place in our lives. Maps give us the big picture, while a GPS just tells you where to go. We must always reference the big picture when determining where we want to go in our lives, while remembering always that the map is not the territory. The world is more complicated than that.

      What sparks our imagination? Where do we want to go in our lives, and what tools are we using to get there? The answers to these questions are more important than we might believe.

    • On Discovery

      “Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.” ― Henry Miller

      The fun of travel is to go to unfamiliar places and discover a world wholly different from our own. A place where we may find the similarities or delight in the rituals and traditions that make a place unique. The sin of travel is to go and not meet the place halfway. How many people go to a place and never attempt the local language? How many stick to food they know and never indulge in the local cuisine? Discovery is getting outside of ourselves and meeting the world on its terms, and finding out something new, not just about that place, but about ourselves.

      The thing is, most of us recognize this about travel, but what of art? When we dive into the unknown in our creative work, are we going deeper with it or retreating back to familiar themes? I’ve heard the feedback: this blog dances on the same ground more often than not, and I’m straying further beyond the themes of memento mori, carpe diem, tempus fugit and amor fati to see what I may find within. Now familiarity with these themes are so central to a well-lived, productive life that they inevitably find themselves in the mix again and again, but who wants to be a one-trick pony?

      The routine changes slightly, adapted to circumstance and commitments, but the daily reckoning continues. Open up a blank page and see what comes out to greet the world. We must be creative and chase our impulses, or we cannot truly live the life we were meant to live. The question to ask ourselves is, are we settling for the familiar and comfortable so much that we aren’t challenging our perspective?

      How will today be different than yesterday? Go do the unusual: live and tell about it. There is so much untapped within. We ought to shake that tree and see what falls out.

    • Some Impulse Rose

      Wanly upon the panes
      The rain slides as have slid since morn my colourless thoughts; and
      yet
      Here, while Day’s presence wanes,
      And over him the sepulchre-lid is slowly lowered and set,
      He wakens my regret.
      Regret—though nothing dear
      That I wot of, was toward in the wide world at his prime,
      Or bloomed elsewhere than here,
      To die with his decease, and leave a memory sweet, sublime,
      Or mark him out in Time . . .
      —Yet, maybe, in some soul,
      In some spot undiscerned on sea or land, some impulse rose,
      Or some intent upstole
      Of that enkindling ardency from whose maturer glows
      The world’s amendment flows;
      But which, benumbed at birth
      By momentary chance or wile, has missed its hope to be
      Embodied on the earth;
      And undervoicings of this loss to man’s futurity
      May wake regret in me.
      — Thomas Hardy, A Commonplace Day

      Some of us are naturally adventurous of spirit, impulsive and keen to dive into bold things. We live our lives in a state of active temperance that we may be useful to others. Now and then the impulsive spirit bursts out of us, like a sudden flame in a fire we thought was dying out. Anyone who knows this writer has seen a burst of boldness now and then. Sometimes expressed as a leap into cold water or a crazy dance at a party, or simply a bit of mischievousness in the midst of an otherwise dignified conversation.

      In the last week, I’ve squashed plans schemed in audacious moments. Plans to hike in temperatures well below zero, fly to another country for the weekend, and quit my job and buy a boat. None of these impulsive moments rose to spark a fire, but they burn inside nonetheless. Will they become regrets for having not done them, or relief for having come to my senses? Only time will tell. In general, we are slaves to reason more than impulse.

      The counterpoint to reason is impulsiveness. It’s straying from the expectations the world places on people like us and boldly stepping outside the norm. What is more prudent than doing what people expect of us? What is perceived as more irrational than turning those expectations upside down?

      The most common way to temper impulsiveness is to defer those adventures to another time. To bow to practicality and prudence and shelve that crazy idea for another day. Those days never come, we know, but they make us feel better in the moment. Until one day we’re watching the rain bounce against the window pane realizing that those days are behind us. Enter regret.

      The battle within us rages on. To stay the course and be the steady and reliable anchor or to weigh anchor and see where the current takes us? There are hazards in each extreme: a boat forever anchored eventually rots away and sinks, while a rudderless boat eventually is dashed on the rocks. Somewhere in the middle is a life of adventure anchored in calculated risk. Be bold, but not reckless. Just don’t wait for regret.

    • The Quest for Better

      “Let me start with issuing you a challenge: Be better than you are. Set a goal that seems unattainable, and when you reach that goal, set another one even higher.” — Herb Brooks

      Wishes are nice. When my daughter asks me what my wish is on any given occasion for such things, my answer is always “world peace” because it’s as good a wish as any, and better than most. The short answer is, I don’t wish for things, I plan (too often over-plan) and I take steps towards them. Planning and deliberate action are better than wishes.

      Resolutions are nice. I don’t make them, because I would always break them. Instead I see the person I want to be, identify what that person would be doing every day to reach further than that point and I start adding those routines to my own calendar. As a streak hitter, I know streaks are made to be broken eventually. I try to string together as many days as possible on any desired trait and track it in a journal. Writing has surpassed five years every day and counting. Some other habits aren’t holding up as well. Each informs and I restart every day with the best intentions fueled by a desire for better than I currently am. How about you? What gets you beyond the resolution rut?

      Experiences are the currency now. Doing things I wouldn’t have done a few years ago. Even thinking to do things is a step beyond the more insular world I once inhabited. Each stage of life brings with it a new set of priorities. Prepare better meals. Speak a second or third language better than yesterday. Experience something entirely new each week. Pretty soon that calendar is full of interesting leaps forward. Pretty soon we’ve become that person we thought unattainable. And the quest for better begins anew.

    • Pick Your Moment

      “Pick your moment and the sea will do what it can for you, however small the boat and however unpracticed the helm. The wind was steady on the beam, and as it says in the old Gaelic song, it felt as if Freyja ‘would cut a thin oat straw with the excellence of her going.’

      This moment of ecstatic ease is the significant historical fact. Anywhere that can be reached on a calm day will be reached. What matters is the invitation, not the threat, and if there is an opening, people will take it…

      The peopling of the Shiants is only one fragment of an endless chain. That is why this crossing of a potentially alarming sea, at a moment which is picked because the weather is kind and the spring is coming, because the tide is running with you and the sun is out, when you can see where you are going and you have everything you need, is one of the deepest of all historical experiences. Don’t imagine the past as a place full of catastrophe and horror. This is its colour: a chance fairly taken, a sense of happiness in the light of spring. The Minch is laced with the wakes of ancestors and this wonderful, easy-limbed stirring of Freyja on the long Atlantic swell is a stirring of the past. I smile in the boat now and open my face to the warmth of the sun and the shining of the sky.” — Adam Nicolson, Sea Room

      “While you see a chance, take it.” — Steve Winwood

      When shall we leap? When is that moment when we look around and say, “It’s now or never” and go beyond our norm? We each have these moments in our lives when we see the gap and decide it’s not all that far of a leap after all. Perhaps we’ve closed it with growth. Perhaps we’ve built a strong enough foundation that it’s not so much a leap as it is a natural next step. Perhaps. But there’s still that gap… until finally we close it. Or perhaps we reach our limit, never to be closed. What will it be?

      The breathtaking beauty of Nicolson’s prose was masterfully set up in story-after-story of tragedy at sea. Of “the Stream of the Blue Men” that is the unpredictable and unforgiving Minch sinking boats and taking the lives of leapers for centuries before. We know of places like this—places that will take the lives of the unprepared and unlucky alike. Mountains and oceans, whole continents full of wild things. Flight and now space. Frontiers are meant to be conquered, as they say. The gap between who we are and what we’ll become are meant to be closed. What matters is the invitation, not the threat. This is the way we progress. Just pick your moment.

      But don’t wait forever. The gap is our game, but the clock is our nemesis. We aren’t getting any younger, friend. Tempus fugit: carpe diem. We ought to leap when the leaping looks good.