Alexandersmap

    Category: Travel

    • Smaller Bites

      George Bailey : [George hears a train whistle] There she blows. You know what the three most exciting sounds in the world are?
      Uncle Billy : Uh huh. Breakfast is served; lunch is served; dinner…
      George Bailey : No no no no. Anchor chains, plane motors and train whistles.
      – Scene from It’s a Wonderful Life

      I’m eager to get back out in the world again. That’s no secret to readers of this blog. And really, I could go at any time now. But this is a time of graduations and funerals postponed while the pandemic was raging. Of catching up with people you haven’t seen face-to-face for a long time. And celebrating the freedom that comes with being fully vaccinated even as we remember what we lost along the way.

      “Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.” – Og Mandino

      I’m not the sort to walk away from people. I see a lot of myself in George Bailey. I don’t subscribe to the concept of “ghosting” someone. I check in on the neighbors, friends and relatives and generally hold things together, remaining available for those who want or need to reach out. And this works out to be a richer life for having done so. The trade-off in time to explore the unknown remains in my mind even as I embrace the moments with connections.

      Connections… You’ve gotten better at them over the years, but that cold stoic exterior is tough to penetrate. You learn to drop it and get busy living as life progresses. As you recognize that moments are fleeting and people come and go from your circle.

      We’ve only just begun to know each other, really, when they announce that it’s last call. Do you want that last conversation you might ever have with a person to be a checkbox of bland “how’s it going?” questions or a deeper dive into the soul of the person you’re engaged with? There are two ways to ask that question: the surface level way and the grab you by the hands, look squarely in your eyes and mean it way.

      This world wants to divide us. It wants to cancel people, categorize people, shun those with differing opinions. We all tell ourselves stories, and we all wonder what the hell that other person is thinking when they expose their beliefs. Who’s right?

      Who cares? We aren’t going to get anywhere in this world if we don’t start living empathically and seeking to understand the underlying story that frames someone’s worldview. For the world to progress, we must learn to see past the party affiliations, nationality, skin color, orientation and generational biases and learn to connect human-to-human. For we might never have this opportunity to engage with each other again.

      Worldview… How do you gain a bigger worldview if you don’t get out and see the world? Well, maybe by taking smaller bites. Human-to-human interaction instead of continent-to-continent leaping. At least for now. He said. Convincingly. And wrote a poem to boil all these words down into 23. For George. But also for me:

      So, my friend
      I know I keep asking,
      “when are we going?”

      but, you know
      what I really meant was,
      “how’s it going?”

    • Breaking from the Routine

      “If you wanna fly you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” – Toni Morrison

      It’s simple, really. You decide what to be and go be it. But then the excuses begin. The commitments. The stuff to do. The comfortable routines that drag you back to reality (the reality you choose) and keep you right where you were yesterday and where you’ll be tomorrow.

      Habits are a path to fitness, wealth, knowledge and power. But habits are also a path to sloth, financial stress, mindless binge watching and low agency. The choice, friends, is ours.

      Do you really want to fly? Then break away from the things that hold you down (Morrison put it more succinctly). That might be stuff, mortgages, and relationships, or it might simply be habits. More likely it’s a combination of both.

      There are very legitimate reasons for not traveling right now. But no reason not to explore. To get up early and ride or walk to places nearby that you’ve never seen before. Burning calories and firing up the imagination.

      The pandemic either jolted you free of the routines that held you back or boxed you more tightly in. The fitness world exploded last year even as it imploded. You couldn’t get a bike or kayak or pair of snowshoes to save your life. But you could walk out the door and keep walking until you reached your goal. You don’t need stuff to fly. You need courage to break away.

      I picked up one of the barbell plates stacked neatly on the weight rack and walked around with it for a while. It was exactly the weight that I wanted to lose. Exactly what I was already carrying around with me with the excuses for not losing it. It was a wake-up call. A reminder of what I’ve drifted away from lately. Of what I’d drifted to.

      If you want to fly, you can’t be weighed down with shit. This applies equally well to anything that matters: reaching peak fitness, accumulating knowledge, reaching peak earning power, and efficiently exploring the world.

      I put that weight plate back on the rack and then walked around without it, looking at the accumulation of stuff in the house, thinking about the accumulation of obligations… and recognized that the routine was quietly killing me. Something had to change. Someone has to change. And I took the first small step.

    • Living in the Layers

      I have walked through many lives,
      some of them my own,
      and I am not who I was,
      though some principle of being
      abides, from which I struggle
      not to stray.

      We’re all collectors of sorts. Accumulating experience, relationships and perspective as we march through our time on this spinning blue ball in the dark vacuum of infinity. We acquire it all and, if we’re generous, bundle it up into shared wisdom before we become part of infinity ourselves. This sharing of experience differs from shared experience; that which you and I might experience together. Sharing is passing something of ourselves along to others, as I’m passing along this Stanley Kunitz poem.

      When I look behind,
      as I am compelled to look
      before I can gather strength
      to proceed on my journey,
      I see the milestones dwindling
      toward the horizon
      and the slow fires trailing
      from the abandoned camp-sites,
      over which scavenger angels
      wheel on heavy wings.
      Oh, I have made myself a tribe
      out of my true affections,
      and my tribe is scattered!

      The last few weeks are a whirlwind of my tribe coming home and leaving home. One returns, one leaves, friends stay for the weekend, other friends drift apart. We all scatter about to wherever the song in our hearts lead us. That we remain together at all is a blessing of shared moments.

      How shall the heart be reconciled
      to its feast of losses?
      In a rising wind
      the manic dust of my friends,
      those who fell along the way,
      bitterly stings my face.
      Yet I turn, I turn,
      exulting somewhat,
      with my will intact to go
      wherever I need to go,
      and every stone on the road
      precious to me.

      I try to explain how this will go to my children as they graduate and move into new phases of their lives. Most relationships are based on convenience and proximity. Teammates, classmates, coworkers, soccer parents… in each case you share something in common at the same time and place, and meaningful moments collect here. But the bond is only as strong as the links that hold it together. Most relationships eventually drift apart, though you might pick up exactly where you left off when you see each other again and piece together what you’ve each been up to in the interim. Some relationships seem to stand the test of time and trial and absence.

      In my darkest night,
      when the moon was covered
      and I roamed through wreckage,
      a nimbus-clouded voice
      directed me:
      “Live in the layers,
      not on the litter.”
      Though I lack the art
      to decipher it,
      no doubt the next chapter
      in my book of transformations
      is already written.
      I am not done with my changes.
      – Stanley Kunitz, The Layers

      Life is littered with old bonds broken by circumstance. But experience informs. We’re all changing, and our transformation continues even as the tribe changes too. Each layer of our life makes us deeper. Each chapter adds context and richness. We are the sum of our accumulated experience, relationships and perspectives to this point. All these layers add up to one hell of a stepping stone.

      Which makes you eagerly wonder… just where might this next step lead to?

    • Chasing the End

      There’s a phenomenon in reading a great, page-turner of a book where you can’t finish a page fast enough. The pace of your reading accelerates and you blow through pages quickly, and suddenly you finish the book in a daze. You look up and hours have gone by in the blink of an eye and you realize that you’ve just stepped out of the pages of a time machine.

      Life itself is full of moments like this. You can readily rattle off those highlight moments, maybe at a party or traveling or deep in conversation with someone of interest where we are completely transfixed with in that moment. Where does the time go? When we’re so deeply engaged in this moment and entranced by the possibility in the next, what happens?

      We aren’t really chasing the end of the story or the life moment, we’re dancing with it. There’s a state of euphoria in reading that great book, watching that great film or participating in that magical moment that transcends time. A life, well-lived, ought to feel very much like this.

      We’ve all experienced the opposite. The dull reads, the awkwardly boring work event, the polite small talk with someone who doesn’t share their life force with you. Those times when we sketch imaginative drawings on note pads or silently glance at our phone to be anywhere else but there.

      Look, I know every movie can’t be a blockbuster. Every scene can’t transfix you in wonder. How would you even know what bliss was if you didn’t suffer through boring now and then? But life is too short to go through the motions.

      We’re all chasing the end of our story. How do we make this time machine vibrate and buzz a little louder on the journey? Our time machines should be bursting at the seams with experiences when we reach the last stop, don’t you think? For when we finish, when we reach that last page of our brilliant life story, we ought to look up in those final seconds and say…

      Wow.

    • Adding Extra to Ordinary

      “A master is in control. A master has a system. A master turns the ordinary into the sacred.”
      – Ryan Holiday

      “The primary math of the real world is one and one equals two. The layman (as, often, do I) swings that every day. He goes to the job, does his work, pays his bills and comes home. One plus one equals two. It keeps the world spinning. But artists, musicians, con men, poets, mystics and such are paid to turn that math on its head, to rub two sticks together and bring forth fire. Everybody performs this alchemy somewhere in their life, but it’s hard to hold on to and easy to forget. People don’t come to rock shows to learn something. They come to be reminded of something they already know and feel deep down in their gut. That when the world is at its best, when we are at our best, when life feels fullest, one and one equals three. It’s the essential equation of love, art, rock ’n’ roll and rock ’n’ roll bands. It’s the reason the universe will never be fully comprehensible, love will continue to be ecstatic, confounding, and true rock ’n’ roll will never die.” – Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

      I’m beginning to understand the art of weaving magic. I am by no means a master, but each turn in the blog, each tangle with words in other work I’m developing, leads me closer to the sacred. The blog is my apprenticeship, never fully realized because I ship the work daily whether the magic is sprinkled on yet or not. This is a turn of the ordinary, and a march towards something more.

      Routines infer ordinary. We have our habits and generally stick with them, and we feel out of sorts when the routine is broken by happenstance or travel. But routines are where you find the magic, hidden deeply in layers of repetition and persistence. You don’t pull magic out of your ass, you work for it.

      You know it when you see it. Moments crackle with excitement. And one plus one does, for a brief moment, equal three. The greatest artists and performers regularly dance with the extraordinary. But hidden from that brilliant moment of now are the buried hours of falling flat, picking yourself up and trying something else then. You don’t add extra to ordinary without sacrifice.

      I’m well aware of where I am with my own work, and I also know where I’m going. Towards the sacred. Towards three. Towards the incomprehensible and magic and the extraordinary. I hope someday to share that with you.

    • A Moment of Wonder

      Yesterday morning I chanced upon an Oriole in the garden. He looked at me and I at him and we both had our moment of interspecies connection before he decided to fly off to join his mate (who was no doubt pissed at him for his boldness). The bright orange and dark black are still locked in my mind a day later.

      That night in the very same spot I stood while the fireflies made their debut in the yard. More likely, it was the first performance I could attend. They lit up the darkness at the edge of the woods, just as the brilliant moon was rising through the trees. I expect fireflies know more about illumination than I do, but I was beaming just the same at their shared performance. That big, bold moon and the small, sparkling fireflies dancing quietly in the dark to an audience of one.

      What do we make of the moon this week? Called the Super Flower Blood Moon because it’s a combination of the May full moon and a timely lunar eclipse. This kind of thing stirs the collective imagination of the press, the talking heads who eagerly point out the big event. As a sky geek I’m aware of it, and appreciate the need of a news celebrity to talk about something besides a mass shooting or some other tragedy happening somewhere, right now, that may impact me next. Those masters of string pulling and I can agree that this moon is something special, and special things should be seen.

      But just because something should be seen doesn’t mean that it can be. As is usually the case when there’s something of note happening in the sky, it was overcast in my part of New Hampshire in the early morning hours. The lunar eclipse, like so much in this universe, wasn’t meant to be shared with me today.

      But the universe giveth even as it taketh away. Yesterday it offered those encounters with a bold Oriole and dancing fireflies, and each changed me in our moment together. I should think a moment of wonder is all we can really ask for from the universe. Just remember to say thank you.

    • Decide

      “In a world where death is the hunter, my friend, there is not time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions.” – Carlos Castaneda, Journey To Ixtlan

      If you happen to glance at a calendar today you’ll note that the month is quickly disappearing into history. Soon it will join all the other months in our past, dead time to us but for the memories. So what do we make of our time? As Castaneda points out, it tends to be what we decide to make of it.

      I witnessed two remarkable people graduate yesterday, one a year after his graduation ceremony was cancelled, the other virtually because they aren’t allowing large gatherings yet. If I were to give advice, I’d suggest figuring out your it and then getting to it straight away. There’s urgency in every decision now. Moments are fleeting, and are to be embraced, but decide on a path and put everything into it. There’s vibrancy in boldly going after your grandest dreams.

      The advice isn’t just for graduates, it’s for all of us. A college graduate knows all too well the decisions that placed them in that cap and gown, and so do the rest of us. Simply decide what you want to spend the short time you have left in this world doing. What brings meaning and purpose to you? What makes you excited to begin another day? For otherwise we’re just drifting aimlessly, wasting our one chance.

      If that seems overly urgent, well, it’s meant to be. We must live with the urgency Castaneda demands from us. If you want to be or do something in this world you can’t waste this present. Decide what to be and go be it. There’s no vibrancy in indecision.

    • The Sleeping Compass

      You go through life thinking you’ve got things pretty well figured out (while knowing deep down that nobody does), and suddenly you trip over something you never thought of before. That’s the beauty of travel and expanded reading – you discover things that challenge the way you think. When you consume the same information every day that shell you crawl into gets pretty thick. ’tis better to get out and swim in new currents to see where it takes you.

      Many people know of Feng Shui and Vastu Shastra and this business of designing your dwelling to optimize living. Honestly, this isn’t an area where I’ve applied significant mental capacity. But lately I’ve read a bit more about Vastu Shastra and the direction you sleep in. Generally I spend about as much time figuring out which direction to sleep in as it takes to see where the headboard is. Perhaps I should have thought about it a little more.

      There are sleep compass headings developed over billions of lifetimes. The ideal sleep position for restful, restorative sleep is south. Those seeking knowledge should point east. If you’re seeking success, point west. And north? That seems to be reserved for the walking dead. Like sticking your head in a freezer.

      It seems I’ve been sleeping with my head pointing towards the west for the last 22 years. This is much better than my previous home, where I slept with my head pointing north. I’m sure glad we got out of there! Would my life have turned out differently had I simply stuck the headboard on the south-facing wall? Has facing west made that much of a difference in my success? What might have been?

      The thing is, I’m not sure I’m going to start moving the furniture around in the bedroom, or bringing a compass with me when I start staying in hotels again, but I see the merit of knowing where you are and how you’re positioned. I do believe the next overnight hiking trip might involve a quick consultation with the compass before setting up the tent and sleeping pad. After a long day of hiking a restful, restorative sleep would be most welcome.

      Living a fully optimized life begins with evaluating the best practices of our billions of fellow humans and seeing what works for you. That last bit, seeing what works for you, requires an open mind and the willingness to try something new. Maybe pointing your sleepy head to the south is worth a try.

    • The Navigator’s Station

      “The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.” – Edward Gibbon

      Some days everything clicks, and some days it pours stress over you like an ice bucket challenge run amuck. In general we try to steer our lives in the right direction, even when we drift off course now and then. The trick is to know where you want to be go and how to change course to get there. That often starts with sitting in your navigation station and sorting through where you are, where you’re going and what needs to happen to bring you there.

      The writing desk is my navigation station. I normally write at the same time every day, and I’m out of sorts if I don’t do it at that time. The last two days I’ve been out of sorts, writing late in the afternoon instead of with my first mug of coffee for the day. And that makes me feel largely off course for the entire day. This is the combined power of routine and the state change achieved through the flow of writing.

      Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to be challenging that routine trying new habits out for size. I’m also beginning to get out of the house and feeling out the new normal of work away from a computer screen. These forces are already disrupting my state, and I can feel the need to spend a bit more time at the old navigation station to fully absorb the changes.

      Changes are inevitable in life. Really, life is change. Life isn’t all about blind luck and chance encounters, there’s a healthy dose of magic when it’s done well. And that requires execution at a high level and embracing the role of navigator instead of merely being a passenger along for the ride.

      Where do you go from here? Have a seat and sort it out. Invest time where it will help the most – at the navigator’s station.

    • The Ones That Got Away

      Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
      Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
      transparent scarlet paper,
      sizzle like moth wings,
      marry the air.

      We’re into the long days now in New England. Days of early light and lingering twilight well into the evening. I wake to the sound of fishermen racing to seize their moment, wondering at the urgency of a favorite fishing spot when the entire bay is full of fish. They fish with purpose. Purpose brings intensity and competition. I know these things, even if I don’t share their commitment to fishing before the sun rises. I use that time for other things.

      So much of any year is flammable,
      lists of vegetables, partial poems.
      Orange swirling flame of days,
      so little is a stone.

      I don’t understand the lure of fishing but I understand the pull of the open water. I know the call of the early morning air. I imagine the Striper are running just below the surface as I watch the water. The lilacs are out and so they must be too. Lilacs come and go so quickly, don’t they? So, it seems, do the Striper.

      Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
      an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
      I begin again with the smallest numbers.

      Every year we go through this, these fishermen and women out on the water and me watching from shore. The boats change and so do the characters in them, but still the fish run with the tides. This year feels more optimistic than last year. We’ve all come through something together, even if we aren’t quite there yet. But the Striper don’t care a lick what we’ve been through.

      Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
      only the things I didn’t do
      crackle after the blazing dies.
      -Naomi Shihab Nye, Burning the Old Year

      So many of these moments disappear like sparks into the night sky. We burn through days like firewood, and make the most of so few of them. So much of our time burns away, and we’re left holding on to scraps of memorable. While contemplating the ones that got away.