Alexandersmap

    Category: Travel

    • Practiced Reasoning

      “While we naturally understand that writing is a good way to share ideas with others, we under-appreciate just how much good writing helps us think about an idea ourselves. Writing is not only a means of communication, it enables us to practice reasoning.
      Writing forces you to slow down, focus, and think deeply. In a world where attention is fragmented into seconds, thinking becomes more reactive than reasoned. Only when [we] take time to play with our ideas can we hope to think about them substantially. Writing requires sticking with something a little longer and developing a deeper understanding.
      Writing is the process by which we realize we do not understand and the process by which we come to understand.”
      — Shane Parrish, Unspoken Expectations, Brain Food – No. 569 – March 24, 2024

      Until I read Shane Parrish’s latest newsletter, I still had it in my mind—even after a couple of thousand blog posts—that I was writing for others. I had it partially correct. I’ve been writing for myself, to better understand that which I encounter on this dash through the decades, and then to share that processing with you; the reader. I’ve talked of breadcrumbs and the processing of ideas before myself, so the idea isn’t exactly revolutionary, but he hammered it home well enough that I thought I’d practice a bit more reasoning writing about it here.

      The thing about documenting your own reasoning in a blog is that when you publish, you’ve let the world in on a bit of a secret. Deep down, you know more about who I am and how I process information about the world and my experience in it. Sure, I filter out enough that people aren’t guessing my passwords (those simple passwords are long gone anyway) or otherwise hacking my identity, but the bottom line remains clear: unless you’re writing a blog yourself, you know far more about how I think than I know about how you think. Advantage reader?

      Perhaps. But we aren’t adversaries in this game of life, are we? My reasoning, should you choose to follow along, is simply my half of a conversation. And as a writer we ought to view it as such. Otherwise what is it but a dull college lecture or a dad speaking to a table full of people staring at their phones? There are some blog posts that fail to resonate with the world, and it feels a lot like that latter example in such moments of posting into the vacuum of the Internet, but that is exactly the moment to remind myself that this blog post is one human’s humble attempt to reason with the universe and to see what comes from it.

      In a way, writing this blog is similar to playing chess with the computer. The computer always wins, often in frustratingly devious ways (like a cat and the mouse with me always the mouse), but each game is a lesson in strategic thinking for me, even in the loss. When the game is over, was it a waste of time or an incremental step forward towards becoming a better chess player (ie: strategic thinker)? So it is with this blog post and all those that preceded it. Each is an incremental step towards better reasoning, and better writing. And perhaps that’s enough to make me a better human too.

    • The Gift of a Lifetime

      “Just living is not enough,” said the butterfly, “one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.” ― Hans Christian Anderson

      Spring for me begins when the crocuses bloom. Well, they’ve bloomed and continue to dance in the crisp air even as the season tries to figure out who it wants to be. As usually happens in March, we had a taste of spring weather in New England before things got chilly again. This is normal, though winter was anything but normal. The climate has changed, we all feel it, and perhaps we’ll act upon it one day too late.

      I was texting with a business associate yesterday, responding to his complaints about product and service and the miserable state of affairs that is the world we live in. I politely steered him to the bright side of the road, which he found unsatisfying. There is no room for joie de vivre in his life. He’s been this way since his son passed away years ago, leaving him forever hollowed out. Who am I to tell him there’s a bright side to anything? All we can do is show that life may still be beautiful even with shadows.

      The question of a lifetime is always what to do with it. We may roam like a caribou, straying far from home through places fraught with danger. We may root ourselves firmly in place, like a mighty oak that keeps the young saplings from getting ahead of themselves in their rush to find their own light. Life is never perfect and sometimes it’s downright unfair, but we yet exist for more than to be a placeholder for carbon.

      The art of living well is to savor our experiences while we’re dancing with them. Tomorrow may bring a cold front to our doorstep, but today the sun is shining and we would be ungrateful to let it slip away uncelebrated. Each moment has it’s time, and so to do we. To elevate our experiences with our awareness is the ultimate gift we may give to ourselves. It’s the gift of a lifetime, isn’t it?

    • A Provocation to Venture

      During the pandemic I latched on to a couple of sailing vlogs that reminded me of why I wanted to be out in the world, and allowed me to be out there when we were all sheltered in place. Sailing friends pointed me towards the YouTube channels SV Delos, Sailing Uma and Ran Sailing and I was easily hooked on their visits to places I could only imagine at that time in the pandemic. Those channels led me to other travel channels, and before I knew it I was subscribing to more than I could possibly watch while still living a productive, engaged life of my own.

      When the world opened up again, travel vloggers offered an easy research opportunity: to see a place before you visit that place so you may pick the very best places to go when you get there. Want to eat the best pizza in Napoli? There are plenty of vlogs that will point you towards the highest rated, and you hungrily watch as they eat pizza and rate their favorite. From there it’s up to you to follow along or ignore their opinion altogether and go your own way.

      Visiting Seceda a couple of years ago, surely one of the most stunning places I’ve ever been in my life, we were struck by the sheer number of people clearly there to use the jagged mountains as a backdrop for Instagram photos and vlogging banter. We could shake our heads at the folly of it all, but the reason I even knew the place existed was from seeing it on a travel vlog myself. Vlogs, blogs and podcasts are the democratization of lifestyle media, and one can appreciate the form without being sucked into the vortex. There’s no doubt it can devolve into a hustle for attention in an increasingly competitive world. Why not simply experience a place instead of launching a drone or reading a script or showing a little more skin? Our lives don’t have to be coin-driven all the time.

      Watching a few of these vlogs offers some insight, but who wants to simply fund the lifestyle of someone else instead of finding a way to live a larger life ourself? Instead of vlogging my life for others to see, I write about my experiences in this blog, and happily live anonymously without the recognition a GoPro and a selfie stick offer. My choice is more insular than theirs, but that doesn’t mean I don’t post pictures from Seceda or Iceland or Muir Woods on social media and write a blog post about each of these places too. It’s a fine line between sharing our experiences and bragging about them. And of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

      Coming back to those sailing channels on YouTube, the trend now seems to be about building new boats or completely remodeling the one they have. Their channels are thus pivoting and they’re asking their subscribers to follow along. It seems that somewhere on the other side of that selfie stick are people who aren’t as satisfied with where they are, or with how much money they’re making, or maybe with the people they’re missing while they’re off making YouTube videos in faraway places. We’re all just figuring things out as we go through life. Some people just post about it more often.

      My bride watches home improvement programs and has some great ideas about how to remodel our home. I watch travel vlogs and have more reckless ideas about skipping out of town and seeing the world on a leaky boat over-provisioned with perishables and beer. Reality lies somewhere in between. We’ve made some big improvements on our home and garden as a result of her creativity and my sweat equity, and we’ve been to some places we’d never have gone to otherwise simply because we were inspired by something we saw someone else doing. When it’s all said and done, life is a short dance with our potential. The best vlogs, blogs, podcasts and sure, the best home improvement programs, explore that dance and provoke others to venture further themselves.

    • A Great Day Not to be Dead (With the Egopantis and Thee)

      I thought about my car crash and my close call
      I started getting sentimental
      I said, I love this house, I love you guys
      I even love my rusty old car outside
      And I’m so happy to be alive with you
      Let’s do all the things we always said that we would do
      ‘Cause it’s a great day
      It’s a great day
      It’s a great day
      It’s a great day
      And it’s a great day to not be dead
      — Don White, Great Day

      “The Bull Run has been a Tavern for centuries and was the first stop on the Boston-to-Albany Stagecoach route in the 1800s.” — History of the Bull Run Restaurant

      Mounted to the fireplace near the bar of The Bull Run is the head of a creature they call the egopantis. When you see it, you’ll never really forget it, mostly because your first and last reaction when seeing it is, “What the hell is that thing?” Could it be a bear or a buffalo with a distinctive facial birth defect? Or someone’s art project made eternal? The tall tales told by the establishment are enjoyable but only lead to more questions. The only certainty as we navigate fact and fiction in this complicated world is that most answers are a load of bull. So we’d clearly come to the right place.

      That we go through our lives with so few opportunities to see good friends over good food and fun live music is unfortunate. Life really should be a celebration; a forever birthday to mark the miracle of our dance through this time and place together. Life really is what we make of it. So we made our way to the quiet town of Shirley, Massachusetts for a night of live music with the beautiful comedic soul Don White. And we found some magic. Not just a strange bit of taxidermy on the wall magic, but the kind of magic that happens when you gather around a table with some of your favorite people in the world to enjoy some live music. We all remember the worst days of the pandemic when we’d wish for such moments to come back again. Here we are.

      A place as old as The Bull Run has seen a lot of characters come through its doors. A night out with Don White, the edopantis and thee was another layer on the life experience cake. We were simply the latest weary world travelers who stopped in for the night. We may not be able to get a room at the inn like we might have once upon a time, but we can surely have a memorable evening. Memories are what stay with us, after all, so let’s do all the things we always said that we would do. We are history makers one and all.

      Egopantis decked out for St. Patrick’s Day

    • For Discovery

      “We’ve been trained to believe that mediocre obedience is a genetic fact for most of the population, but it’s interesting to note that this trait doesn’t show up until after a few years of schooling.” — Seth Godin, Graceful

      “Fear of living without a map is the main reason people are so insistent that we tell them what to do.” — Seth Godin, Graceful

      A few days ago, Seth Godin offered up his e-book Graceful as a free download. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I downloaded it immediately and read it almost as quickly. It’s a short book jammed with little nuggets of gold like the quotes above. Seth’s best books and blog posts are tiny gems that punch above their weight. Something to aspire to as a writer—perhaps I’ll arrive there myself in a few thousand more blog posts.

      Many of us wing it in certain parts of our lives, but meticulously plan other parts. I write what flows through me when I sit down to write, but feed myself with a steady diet of reading material and life experience to widen the lens. The result is an often eclectic mix of topics that are most certainly not what some sign up for. But who wants to read or write about the same thing every day anyway? Art, learning and living a full life should be a meandering progression.

      There’s something overly formal about mapping out our experiences, but there’s value in the process. I have some travel coming up this spring that I’m particularly excited about. With every trip I take, I do a ton of research and planning to optimize my time in any given place. I leave some room for discovery, but in general I live my life in the fashion the lyrics of an old Seals and Croft song, “We May Never Pass This Way (Again)”. You don’t have to look up the lyrics: that’s it right there in the title. It’s the kind of ear worm song you curse for it’s persistence, but a good reminder to be fully aware in the moment.

      We don’t venture out into the world for predictable. We venture for discovery. When we leave the rigidity and structure of the classroom, we either spiral into indifference or grow into a fascination with the world and our place in it. To be lifetime students of living seems an aspiration worthy of our remaining time, don’t you think? Our growth depends on it.

    • 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.

    • The Grave of the Female Stranger

      Alexandria, Virginia is full of history, making it a wonderful place for a history buff to wander about. My early morning walk took me to the Alexandria National Cemetery and the neighboring St. Paul’s Cemetery. Honoring the Union dead was a given, but the lure of my trip was the tragic tale of a young woman visiting the region who died in 1816 shortly after her arrival. The story goes that she and her husband gathered the doctors and nurses before she passed away to have them swear never to reveal her name. They honored her wish and went to their own graves having never told her name. Her husband spent a small fortune on an elaborate tabletop gravestone and then skipped town before the bill was paid. The mystery of the Female Stranger lingers to this day. It’s said that her ghost still haunts the Gadsby’s Tavern, where she apparently died.

      Atop the gravestone is engraved the following:
      To the memory of a
      FEMALE STRANGER
      whose mortal sufferings terminated
      on the 14th day of October 1816
      Aged 23 years and 8 months
      This stone is placed here by her disconsolate
      Husband in whose arms she sighed out her
      latest breath, and who under God
      did his utmost even to soothe the cold
      dead ear of death
      How loved how valued once avails thee not
      To whom related or by whom begot
      A heap of dust alone remains of thee
      Tis all thou art and all the proud shall be
      To him gave all the Prophets witness that
      through his name whosoever believeth in
      him shall receive remission of sins
      Acts. 10th Chap. 43rd verse.

      The unique gravestone is easy to spot, and yet I always seemed to be looking in the other direction as I walked through the St. Paul’s Cemetery. The Female Stranger is not the only soul interred at the cemetery, and I spent some time reviewing the lives of her neighbors on my walk before finally circling back to give my respects to this young lady who’s spirit still haunts the region more than two centuries later. The tokens and coins left behind by other visitors indicate she is more famous in her anonymous death than she ever might have been had her name simply been revealed.

    • 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.