Alexandersmap

    Category: Travel

    • 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.

    • Reallocated Time, With Purple Blossoms

      If time is precious, how would you react when you take a left turn instead of a right and see your estimated time of arrival immediately jump up 30 minutes? That happened when I turned onto a stretch of Route 76 near Philadelphia with heavy traffic in both directions and nowhere to turn around for miles. Under the circumstances, you could either curse at yourself for making a split-second error in judgement or turn up the music and accept the gift that the universe presented to you.

      The deeper you dive into philosophy, the more minutes you dole out in exchange for experience, the more you see how much doesn’t matter that once seemed so important. We are all marching down the same path, the same path every other human in existence has marched down. We all make a wrong turn now and then.

      The thing is, if we live to be 80 or we live to be 100, that’s between 42 and 52 million minutes. How we use those minutes is the difference between an enjoyable life and a life less enjoyable. 52 million minutes seems like a lot until you realize how many you’ve burned through already on your march down the path. Is 30 minutes out of 52 million a big deal?

      A wrong turn can be viewed as either wasted or reallocated time. The only time that’s wasted is the time we give away to distraction. Confusion may have pulled me onto the wrong road, but making it a distraction would have wasted the opportunity to turn those minutes from their expected use into something less ordinary.

      I turned up the music and enjoyed the abundant purple blossoms of the (invasive) Paulownia Trees as I crawled down the highway. It was a view I’d never have seen had I taken the “right” turn. It was the universe offering me a bouquet of flowers and some time to reset my expectations for the day. Maybe it wasn’t a wrong turn after all?

    • 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.

    • The “What’s Our Fire” Exam

      “Proper examination should ruin the life that you’re currently living. It should cause you to leave relationships. It should cause you to reestablish boundaries with family members and with colleagues. It should cause you to quit your job.” — @naval

      We march through our day-to-day life without serious thought about the big picture. What really matters to us, and are we moving towards that? Sometimes examination tells us we’re on the right track, sometimes we find more smoke than fire. But we ought to sort out what’s going on either way.

      Examination doesn’t invite trouble, it offers a lifeline. We get in the habit of saying things that won’t rock the boat. I’d suggest that the boat ought to be rocked now and then. There’s nothing wrong with a spring cleaning for the soul. Purge all those pent-up resentments and simmering anger and give them air to breath. They’ll either ignite into a bonfire or smother for lack of fuel. But we can’t just live every day ignoring the growing inferno without being burned alive from the inside-out.

      Socrates famously said that “The unexamined life is not worth living”. Are we meant to be a torch or merely kindling for someone else’s dreams? Think of the things that we accept in our life that are frivolous and inconsequential on the surface, and worse, distract us from the things that might be life-changing given the chance. The thing that makes Naval’s statement incendiary is that we may find we’ve just been kindling all along. Isn’t it fair to ask, what is our fire, anyway?

    • Wanting Wild

      “I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It’s impossible not to remember wild and want it back.” — Mary Oliver, Green, Green is My Sister’s House

      If we’re lucky, we never really grow up, we just get a bit more creative with our diversions. I used to crave responsibility, now I try to build enough flexibility in my schedule to chase waterfalls. Intense curiosity about the world around us is the key. Life is a quest, after all, adulting be damned. What are we wild things to do but seek adventure where we might find it?

      “In conclusion, it appears that nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in distant countries.” ― Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle

      Adventure is easier when you’re on the road. You see things all the time that stir your soul. It’s much harder when you’re working in an office or sheltered in place at home. If we don’t venture out into the world we’ll never find out what we’ve been missing. Charles Darwin found adventure on the other side of the world, Henry David Thoreau found it a short walk from his bed. Adventure isn’t about how far you go, it’s about getting out of your own shell. What is a shell but a prison of our own making?

      Wild is always stirring about inside of us. We must want it back in our lives enough to seek it. The world will always ask for everything we’ve got. We ought to be the wild thing that rebels against that and turns towards adventure instead.

    • To Feel, and Dream, and Go

      “Books and books and books—some five hundred volumes in all. Books of the sea and books of the land, some of them streaked with salt, collected with love and care over more than twenty-five years.
      Melville, Conrad, London, Stevenson; Gauguin and Loti and Rupert Brooke; Lubbock, Masefield, De Hartog—Slocum and Rockwell Kent; Trelawny and Cook and Bligh; Chapelle and Underhill—Nansen, Frobisher, Villiers and Scott and Louis Becke. Homer, Gerbault, and Tompkins. Hundreds more: all cast in a common mold—blessed with the genius that makes men feel, and dream, and go.
      And a special section of books that deal with the greatest frontier of all—the relationship between men: Marx and Whitman, Thoreau and Henry George, Victor Hugo, Thomas Paine and Jefferson. Lincoln and Emerson, Rousseau, Voltaire and Upton Sinclair, Shaw. Byron, Mark Twain, Roosevelt, Garrison, Jack London again and Shakespeare.”       — Sterling Hayden, Wanderer

      Well, there’s a traveler’s reading list for you. Hayden misses some he ought to have included, Beryl Markham comes to mind, but on the whole he’d built a library of transformation. And so must we. What carries your imagination to new places? What moves you?

      Hayden might have loved Mary Oliver poems. The Summer Day, in which she famously prods us to ask ourselves: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” was published just four years after Hayden passed away, so it’s not one he would have read. But they surely spoke the same language. The feelers, dreams and goers instinctively know when they encounter a kindred spirit.

      And what of us, friend? What are our libraries whispering? Our challenge is to do more than feel and dream. Our challenge is to go. Books stir the imagination and offer a map. It’s up to us to learn what our compass is telling us and chart a course. It’s up to us to weigh anchor and act on our dreams.

    • A Commitment to Transformation

      “A person susceptible to “wanderlust” is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.” ― Pico Iyer

      As I write this a cardinal is singing in the window, driving the cat a bit insane, and distracting me with questions: “What are you doing in your nest? Shouldn’t you be flying?”

      “I’m busy leaving breadcrumbs”, I silently answer the cardinal. And indeed I am. For every post is a mark for where I’ve been at any given moment. A public journal of sorts, documenting what I’m reading, where I’m visiting, who I’m learning from, what I’ve stumbled upon that made my jaw drop.

      You can’t document what you haven’t experienced. Imagination is a lovely thing, and brings so much to the world of humans (Refer to da Vinci’s Saper Vedere), but we’re also students on a quest to learn as much as we can about this life we’re doomed to leave too soon. Experiencing requires getting out in the world and finding it, not just living through someone else’s YouTube or InstaGram feed.

      Those different perspectives we encounter are building blocks that in turn carry us somewhere even richer, snowballing experiences into transformation. Who has gone anywhere in this world and returned the same person? And what is the purpose of living but growth?

      The thing about breadcrumbs is they don’t stick around forever. My trail of transformation is a click away from disappearing forever, sort of like us but with bigger data centers. That’s the way of the world, we’re all just fleeting memories in some future person’s mind. But who says we can’t fly in our time? Who says we can’t offer a small ripple felt imperceptibly on a far shore?

    • Consider Life an Adventure

      “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” ― G.K. Chesterton

      Admittedly, I’m tired writing this. Two weeks of travel and burning the candle at both ends and I’m worn out. But that’s why we dance with coffee, isn’t it? To press ahead just a bit further.

      The thing is, we’ve had a couple of years to reset. We all did the best we could under the circumstances. Getting back to whatever this normal is gives us a chance to stretch our imagination more. To find new adventures just around the corner, and to have the gumption to venture much farther. Not to fill our InstaGram feed or gain subscribers, but to shake loose of the cobwebs of the commonplace and experience the world.

      “Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.” — Henry David Thoreau

      Who ever looks back with pride on a moment when you decided to sleep in instead of dancing with adventure? We ought to consider life an adventure and do more with that notion. We ought to rise and seek more from our days, for we only have so many to work with. We’ve spent time with people on their deathbed who literally can’t go outside to see the stars, who are we to complain about stepping out into the world? Dance with the gift of freedom. Be part of something livelier.

      “Who can guess the luna’s sadness who lives so briefly? Who can guess the impatience of stone longing to be ground down, to be part again of something livelier? Who can imagine in what heaviness the rivers remember their original clarity?
      Strange questions, yet I have spent worthwhile time with them. And I suggest them to you also, that your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life be richer than it is, that you bow to the earth as you feel how it actually is, that we—so clever, and ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained— are only one design of the moving, the vivacious many.”       — Mary Oliver, The Moth, The Mountains, The Rivers

      We all have our shackles of responsibility and routine. We can bend our days to find adventure while still honoring our core responsibilities. And we should question our routines when they hold our rambunctious spirit in place. Consider, for a moment, that convenience is a shackle disguised as a mindset.