Alexandersmap

    Category: Writing

    • Forever and Always Now

      Reflecting on the moment

      You said time makes the wheels spin
      And the years roll out and thе doubt rolls in
      In the truck stops, in the parking lots
      And the chеap motels
      When will we become ourselves?
      — Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Hashtag

      The other day I was talking with a coworker at a hotel bar in Washington, DC. He’s a few years closer to retirement than I am, doesn’t travel all that much anymore in his current role and isn’t the picture of health (probably related to too much time in hotel bars). He mentioned that he’d never visited the Lincoln or Washington Memorials before, let alone the war memorials on the National Mall. He wasn’t sure if he would have the time on this particular trip either. I looked at him, said “why are we sitting here now?!” and summoned an Uber. For the next couple of hours we visited memorials to those who exemplified greatness in the United States. I took a few pictures of and with him and shared them with him afterwards. Memories must be built, not stumbled upon.

      I’ve reached a point in my life where, when I compare the former me to the current version, I usually forgive that former guy for not being better at the art of living than he was. We must figure things out along the way, or be lucky enough to have a guide to show us the ropes. We become ourselves through deliberate acts more than stumbling along through life. When we do stumble, we figure out a way to get back on track again. Being human is full of opportunities to learn and grow.

      The thing is, we must keep challenging ourselves to step out of the box we’ve grown into. It may be bigger than the one we were in before, but it’s still a damned box. The answer to “when will we become ourselves?” must forever and always be, now.

    • Sinking In

      “The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things. Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.” ― Franz Kafka

      “The meaning of life is that it stops. Only the moment counts. It determines life.” — Franz Kafka

      The truth is, I’m way overbooked this weekend. Life stacks up its moments some days, and leave you wanting for more others. Ours is not to reason why, as Tennyson put it, ours is just to do or die (three quotes dropped and I’ve barely started writing—imagine where this post is going). The point is, we ought not question the crazy moments any more than the quiet moments, but savor them all just the same.

      I celebrate and savor and seek to capture the things I’d forget one day, that I might remember. I’m not gifted with a photographic memory, but I’m blessed with an inclination to document the moment with a picture or a note in the journal that will jog it all back one day. I think the truly blessed are those who recognize the fragility of it all and wrap themselves in the blanket of now. I’m not declaring I have it all figured out, merely that I’m aware of the time passing by. Here and now are all that matters. We ought to let that sink in before it all flies away.

      We are all collecting experiences, big and small, and building a lifetime of memories to store them. Knowing we’re the sum of our parts, I mourn the things I’ll say no to in my days just as much as I relish the things that are heck yeahs. We must never defer what we may do now, unless we’re embracing something else just as profoundly interesting for us. And that’s the underlying truth in this jumble of words and thoughts coming to a blessed conclusion: we must relentlessly sink deep into that which interests us most profoundly. And not someday, but now.

    • Learning to Fly

      “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
      — Kurt Vonnegut

      A soul in tension that’s learning to fly
      Condition grounded but determined to try
      Can’t keep my eyes from the circling skies
      Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
      — Pink Floyd, Learning to Fly

      Any self-respecting rock n’ roll fan knows that there are a few songs with the title Learning to Fly, and I love them all. We can argue about which gets your heart rate racing more, or any such thing like that, but for my money Pink Floyd’s song is the best of the bunch lyrically. Foo Fighters fans and Tom Petty aficionados might quibble, and the shear number of covers of Petty’s song indicate popular opinion on the matter, but there: I’ve said it. And yes, I digress.

      To master anything in this life we must at some point leap into the unknown and find out how we fare. Mostly we fall on our face in those early days. We either quit and play another game or we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and get to it again. Even writing that I felt the overpowering cliche of familiar metaphor wash over me (sorry). But if the metaphor fits, use it.

      The whole point of this game is discovery. Try everything, learn which things work well for us and lean into them with gusto. With enough leaps we become adept at adaptation. Sure, some people have more talent than us, but persistence matters too. Skills may be learned. The rest is just breaking through the mind games of categorization and imposter syndrome. The fact is, some people will always put us in a certain bucket (people like that don’t do things like this), but mostly we do it to ourselves first. Just go do it and be ready for the stumble (see metaphor above).

      I write this knowing that there’s some new cliff I’ll need to jump off sooner or later, that I may learn to fly yet again. Life is a succession of such cliffs, and we may grow a pair or live with being ground-based creatures. We all feel like earth-bound misfits in the beginning of anything new. There’s only one way to soar though, and so we must toe up to the edge and lean into the next. It’s the only way we’ll ever fly.

    • The Present Hour

      “I follow you whoever you are from the present hour.” — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

      As small as we are in the vastness of the universe, we each nonetheless leave our mark on history. Every interaction stays with us, every poem read, every sideways glance, every hint of fragrance in the air are a sum of our whole. We may make a big splash or a minor ripple, but we all have our verse to contribute. The magic in writing is carrying that verse across time.

      We are a collection of hours arranged as a lifetime. We whittle them away as if they were unlimited. We learn as we grow older that each had value, but some shine brighter than others. Applying this realization to the next becomes ever more essential. Whoever we are in this moment, whatever we make of it in the now, will indeed follow us for the rest of our days. Our ripple, through those we encounter, is carried further still. What will we lay upon the shoulders of those who will carry us with them from this moment on?

      Autumn is in the air. Harvest time is well underway already. The seasons signal that time is flying along, with us in tow, ready or not. What will we remember of this time in our lives? What will people we encounter remember of us? May we smile recalling the gift we gave in this present hour.

    • Slaying Dragons and Devils

      “My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.” — Carl Jung, The Red Book

      It’s amazing what a few days off will do for the body and soul. Removing oneself from the daily grind mitigates the possibility that we might be ground to dust. The old Cherokee expression about the wolf you feed comes to mind. We either succumb to the darkness within or climb to the light.

      I know deep down that I write to feed the soul and slay the dragons. The daily blog is merely evidence that the journey continues for at least another day. I might have climbed mountain summits or run after a 5K t-shirt collection instead, but no, it’s the writing that got a hold of me. That doesn’t make me a one trick pony, just curiously focused on publishing a few paragraphs each day.

      There’s nothing wrong with trying a diverse range of pursuits to see where they may take us. There’s nothing wrong with work for that matter. The soul knows when we’re on the right path and when we’ve gone astray. But we must ask ourselves regularly, what occupies us? If it’s not nourishing us, we must change our diet. Sip enough poison and you begin to love the taste, and worse, begin to serve it to others.

      The thing is, the pursuit we choose is merely our way of reaching closer towards our own truth. And the truth is, we’re all running against both the clock and our worst inclinations. We must ignore the roar of the dragon and listen for the whisper of the soul, increasing its volume through regular practice until our purpose is loud and clear.

    • Echoes

      “What we do now echoes in eternity.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

      I worry less about productivity than I might project in this blog. Each day I do what I can, provoke something meaningful out of myself and celebrate having carried the torch one more time. The chaos of the world was not mine, my contribution was steadiness and reason. If I’m blessed with another day, I’ll try tomorrow to do it better.

      We must remember that we have a chance to do something meaningful with our time. Our actions influence others, rippling across our connections to people we’ll never meet. This blog post may get a few likes, be viewed a few dozen times and fade into bits and bytes in some data center somewhere on the Internet until the power finally goes out some day in eternity. We may accept the frailty of our voice for what it is and still be inclined to add our verse.

      The doing is the thing. We must do what we can with today before it’s gone forever, like all the rest. For this is our time, friends. If not now, when? The thing about an echo is that it must begin somewhere before it can reverberate through space and time.

    • Trying to Be Good

      “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
      ― Ira Glass

      Over the weekend I replaced a door that had been bothering me for some time. As with everything, it began with a small project (add a deadbolt!) that became a big project when I made a mistake that couldn’t be fixed (measure twice, drill once). No instructions or template and an educated guess proven terminally (for the old door) incorrect. That accelerated the need for a new door, which led to a few more mistakes along the way that needed to be fixed before the door was finally, blessedly, installed. A one hour project became a six hour project. That’s what happens when skills don’t meet the standard we set for ourselves.

      It takes time to close the gap between where our standards are set and the quality of the work we produce at present. I know intuitively that I’m a better writer than I was five years ago, and remain hopeful that the writer I might be in five more years is even better. The daily blog is penance paid to the craft. Without daily effort, our skills atrophy.

      The thing is, there’s nothing wrong with having a high standard. We must aspire to greatness in our lives, that we may grow. The trick is to stay patient with ourselves during the process of becoming. Mistakes are inevitable and often expensive, for there’s an opportunity cost in everything we do. We must remind ourselves that the price paid today is an investment in our future self and simply work through it.

    • The Gods Wait

      your life is your life
      don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
      be on the watch.
      there are ways out.
      there is a light somewhere.
      it may not be much light but
      it beats the darkness.
      be on the watch.
      the gods will offer you chances.
      know them.
      take them.
      you can’t beat death but
      you can beat death in life, sometimes.
      and the more often you learn to do it,
      the more light there will be.
      your life is your life.
      know it while you have it.
      you are marvelous
      the gods wait to delight
      in you.
      — Charles Bukowski, The Laughing Heart

      I revisited some old characters this week. Some were people I hadn’t seen in some time, met with lunch in between us and life’s hurdles to compare. Some were characters invented in my head and tapped into flesh on the keyboard. Like the people I had lunch with, I haven’t visited with them in some time and there’s a chance I might not see them again anytime soon. We live the life we invest ourselves into. The gods wait to delight in you.

      I’ve become my father in some ways. I don’t check in with the kids as much, but I’m there for them when they wish to reconnect. I recognize the folly in this through the distance between my father and me before he finally slipped into dementia. Where is the light in our lives but in our children and the person we share our days with? I stay connected in small ways, to let them know I’m thinking of them. My bride has entire text conversations with them that I only hear about as an executive summary. We spend 90% of our time with our children before they leave the house. We must hold on to that remaining 10% for dear life.

      We dance with light in our days or we are wrestled into darkness. We must choose light, and be a source of it for the people in our lives who need it the most. Connection is so hard to maintain when we all have so much to do in our brief time, but it’s the essence of a joyful and meaningful life. When these days are well behind us and all we have are fragile memories of our time together, will we smile at the recollection of the light between us or see the gap? The gods will offer us chances.

    • Let it Mingle

      “You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.” — Mary Oliver, Staying Alive

      I woke up to find it another Monday. I’m ambivalent about the day of the week most times, but this Monday feels tinged with changes in the air that only Tuesday may tell. Every day is an opportunity to dance with boldness and truth. Especially this one.

      Leave it to a poet to point the way. Saying more with less (as they do). Grasping the timeless in the fragile present (as they must). Having the generosity to share with others (as we so desperately need them to do). To live as a poet is to move through the world like a sophist and reveal the naked truth hidden in plain site. We might all be poets, but for the languid inefficiency with words and an inclination to look the other way.

      To truly live in this world is to frolic through the days, not in a nihilistic way, but in a knowing the truth and choosing to dance anyway kind of way. We only have this one. What kind of spell might we stir up in the hours before us? To live with purpose and urgency and generosity and yes, a bit of whimsy, is the magic potion of the poet. We must not defer to others in our march through time, simply bring our best to each moment and let it mingle.

    • Combinations

      “I’m not the best writer, but it is a strength. I might be a 90th percentile writer.
      And I’m not the best marketer, but it is a strength. Again, maybe 90th percentile? I’m better than most, but if you pass 100 people on the street it won’t be hard to find some people better than me.
      What I have gradually learned is that it is not your strengths, but your combination of strengths that sets you apart. It is the fact that writing and marketing are mutually reinforcing—and that I enjoy both—that leads to great results.
      How can you combine your strength? That’s something I would encourage everyone to think about. You will find talented people in every area of life. It’s the combinations that are rare.”
      — James Clear, 3-2-1 Newsletter, 4 July 2024

      We thrive when our unique set of developed skills and natural talents come together at the right place and time for us to leverage them fully. And the rest of the time we’re simply figuring things out. We know when our timing is right, because it all seems to fall into place for us as if by magic. Everything else in our life is incremental growth or gradual decline. It’s up to us to choose daily routines that move us in the right direction even when the timing isn’t right for our unique combinations to thrive in a maddening world.

      I remind my daughter (and myself) to write every day because muscle memory matters. Writing every day helps us find combinations of ideas and words that we otherwise might not have found. We never know when the timing is going to be just right for our combinations, only that we must be ready to seize the moment when it arrives. When you’re young if feels like you can push off the writing for tomorrow when the muse isn’t whispering in your ear today, but it doesn’t work like that. The cruelest twist in our creative life is that it’s got a timer. We must therefore use the time we have as best we can.

      “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” — Chinese Proverb

      Most of us will go through our lives doing work that is good enough to get by but never really takes off. Perhaps the answer isn’t in the work but that we’ve put the puzzle together incorrectly. Most jigsaw puzzles have pieces that seem to fit in one place but on further review aren’t where they’re supposed to be. Once we finally see that and move those pieces to where they belong we may finally solve the puzzle. And so it is with our own combinations of skills and talents. We know when they’re not being used in the right place. Still, we must use them until we find the right combination.

      The way to unlock the puzzle is to take stock of our strengths and begin to try new combinations, that we may find the ones that work. To be forever locked up in our untapped potential is no way to go through life. Like that jigsaw puzzle, stubbornly holding on to things that clearly aren’t working will leave us with an unfinished project or worse, an unfulfilled life.

      The thing to remember about puzzles is that they’re meant to be solved. Unlike jigsaw puzzles, we humans are forever making new pieces of our identity that may be just the right combination we were looking for. So it is that we must continue to develop new experiences and skills that may be applied to our life’s work. There’s a time and place for everything. Just keep working on those combinations.