Alexandersmap

    Category: Writing

    • Finding the Boldly Creative Work Inside of Us

      “Some arrogance is essential to the creative process. The very idea that your private thoughts or feelings are worth sharing with anyone outside your family or friends is already a kind of arrogance. Arrogance is the exit and entry point to the humiliation that art requires. Not unrelated is a dubious courage that when you find yourself out of your depth in troubled waters, you will discover how to swim. Another daft but true idea that creativity seems to depend on.” — Bono, Surrender

      “Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That’s why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there’d be no Resistance.” ― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle

      Taking a leap into anything is a bit scary and uncomfortable. Think a moment about public speaking. Did you shudder just then? Walking up to a microphone to deliver a speech can be daunting, yet some of us flip the switch and do it anyway. It’s nothing more than playing a character—a bigger version of our normal self. A bigger version that has something to share that others may find connection and meaning from. That voice inside that says you don’t deserve to play that bigger version is the real fraud, not the person you’ve become. Every step on the climb can be thought of as arrogance should we surrender to the Resistance.

      Art is very much like public speaking, in that we are putting ourselves out there for all to judge. There is a large sample size of writing now that would give the world a pretty good idea of who I really am deep down inside. Is there arrogance in thinking anyone really cares to find out? Surely there’s some truth to this, but how else do we move forward in this world were it not for the boldness to speak up and show our work?

      I’ll embrace arrogance if it means I’m bold. I’ll embrace the courageous leap into the unknown if it leads to growth and better work. I’ll risk it all for better. How about you?

      Behind those words are other words. The self-talk of someone who knows that there’s still so much work to do. The words of someone who doesn’t dare leave this world without putting my best out there, but knowing the best is yet to come. Feeling that urgency and acting on it is all that really matters. The rest is just talk.

      “Decide what to be and go be it.” — The Avett Brothers, Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise

    • Begin Every Day

      If I flinched at every grief, I would be an intelligent idiot.
      If I were not the sun, I would ebb and flow with sadness.

      If you were not my guide, I would wander lost in Sinai.
      If there were no light,
      I would keep opening and closing the door.

      If there were no rose garden,

      where would the morning breezes go?
      If love did not want music and laughter and poetry,
      what would I say?

      If you were not medicine, I would look sick and skinny.
      If there were no leafy limbs in the air,
      there would be no wet roots.

      If no gifts were given, I would grow arrogant and cruel.
      If there were no way into God,
      I would not have lain in the grave of this body so long.

      If there were no way from right to left,
      I could not be swaying with the grasses.

      If there were no grace and no kindness,
      conversation would be useless, and nothing we do would matter.

      Listen to the new stories that begin every day.
      If light were not beginning again in the east,
      I would not now wake and walk out inside this dawn.
      — Rumi, Wake and Walk Out

      Perhaps the rain has kept me from waking earlier than normal today. Perhaps the grogginess that accumulates inside over a long and productive week is best expressed with sleeping in. Or perhaps it was staying up late, not wanting the day to end, conceding it at last as the calendar turned to a new day. Perhaps… or surely it was all of those things.

      No matter if later than before, we must rise once more. There’s work to be done each morning, to set up the day for success, whatever that means to each of us. Life is about meeting our purpose and being productive with our time to fully realize our potential. Nothing matters but this dance with life.

      And what is life? It’s the stories we write in these moments of clarity and awareness, days stacked one upon the other, until we cease beginning. Is every story a page-turner? Of course not, but doesn’t it help set up the next chapter?

      Each morning I’m struck by the wonder of being, but isn’t that wonder grounded in the awareness of ending? Our story will end. That may be someday, or it may be today, but it isn’t just yet. Knowing this, don’t we owe it to ourselves to properly rise to meet this day?

      In this quest to be more productive and purposeful, sometimes we don’t see the things that sparkle in our days. Things like poetry and a walk through the garden and the tickle of the breeze. What is a breeze but the change of the air? So it is with us, feeling the tickle of change within us. We must always be aware of the sparkle, and lend it our light, that it may offer reflection.

    • Reading and Writing and All the Other Things

      “I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It’s greed, plain and simple. When my characters join the circus, I’m joining the circus. Although I’m happily married, I spent a great deal of time mentally living with incompatible husbands.” — Anne Tyler

      “I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.” — Anne Tyler

      We read fiction to escape: to be someone else in another place, if only for a little while. We write fiction to explore: to create something bolder within ourselves that we might not otherwise explore, and drop these characters into the places we might not dare to go in a normal lifetime. To take a walk on the wild side without too much damage. Each of us seeks something more in this world in some way. Fiction offers safe passage to extraordinary places.

      This blog doesn’t dabble in fiction, although this writer has. There’s a distinct separation there, between fiction and non-fiction, and between creative output and daily observation. My name isn’t even Alexander, which may lend to the confusion. Certainly it doesn’t offer optimization of the brand. But so it goes. The motive isn’t to develop a brand, but a deeper understanding of the world and my place in it.

      Sometimes we want to explore other lives, represented in fictional characters who come to life in the pages of a book. Sometimes we want to explore the meaning in our own life, and optimize our potential in this brief go-around. If I’m sure of anything in this daily ritual, it’s that I’m a better writer and a better human for having consistently done it. Writers develop characters, and we also develop our own character. Those richer and bolder lives aren’t just on paper, after all, they’re within us too.

      This business of reading and writing is a lovely part of who we are, but let’s face it: Most of our life is made up of all the other things. When done well, we develop a deeper perspective and sense of place through our active participation in words, but also through our engagement with the world. We must step outside our comfort zone in small ways that lead to bigger and bolder things. Just as a snowball grows as we nudge it along, so we grow as we accumulate skill and confidence through repetitive action. As with the snowball, at some point it grows beyond our capacity to push it, and it is then that we must seek the help of others. We must develop the awareness and courage to ask for help when we find our pushing isn’t quite enough.

      When you stop to think of it, we’re each the authors of our own lives. Those characters we develop are often us. Just as they stretch and grow, so too do we. All the other things that make up a life are derived from our imagination and the courage to step out into the unknown. It shouldn’t just be fiction.

    • On Ritual and Routine

      “Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.” — Jane Kenyon

      Last year my bride and I took a morning walk on a quiet beach in the off-season. We saw an older gentleman swimming with his dogs in the brisk Atlantic Ocean and met him as we were walking back towards our car. Well, as is usually the case, his dogs met us first, and he joined them in introductions soon after. He looked like Obi-Wan Kenobi in a thick, hooded robe. He mentioned that he took this Atlantic Ocean plunge with his dogs every day of the year, no matter the weather. The robe and the walk back home were his rewards for completing this ritual, and were thus an integral part of it. His fitness level and radiance betrayed a lifestyle worthy of consideration.

      Lately I’ve thought more of lifestyle design—of deliberately choosing how to spend my remaining time on this earth in daily ritual and routine. We might agree that we’re already living our lives based solely on the bookends of ritual and routine. The question is, are we optimizing our life or should we build better bookends? Is writing first thing in the morning the best use of this time? Or is a long walk better? Or a brisk plunge into cold water? The answer is whatever sets the table for an exceptional day—what comes first should hardly matter, just that we do the things that, stacked together, make up a productive and meaningful day, and by extension, our life.

      We tend to track things like workouts, but don’t always track other things that make up our days. Tracking habits makes sense when you’re trying to establish or reinforce them. I began flossing every day when I stared at an empty box one day, knowing I’d broken the streak. A friend quit smoking simply so he didn’t have to leave a day on his calendar without a big X through it. We forget sometimes in our realization that we can’t control everything that we can control some things. And these small things, added up over time, become big things indeed.

      The way to be a good steward of our gifts is to protect our time in ritual and routine. Kenyon outlines hers in the magical quote above. We might add a few others that punctuate our own days. The trick in building these bookends is to fill the space in between with more activity worthy of our precious time. We know that that space will be filled either way—shouldn’t we make it fulfilling?

      Plunge into things that optimize your days

    • Buds of Fire

      And in the shadow of our human dream of falling,
      human voices are Creation’s most recent flowers,
      mere buds of fire
      nodding on their stalks.
      — Li-Young Lee, Dying Stupid

      Working through the gardening shed, I found a terra cotta pot sporting hints of old root filaments, betraying its previous occupant from last season. Each life takes their place in line, lives their season and moves on for the next to take their turn. The keen observer sees hints of past lives all around us, ghosts whispering that they once turned their gaze to the sun too. Gardeners know a thing or two about the tenuous hold we have on our time. So do writers and poets.

      May mocks the meticulous gardener. Put your best foot forward and the trees crap all over it, again and again, until you admit you aren’t in control of anything. Life offers lessons for the attentive student. Seasons come and go. So too do we. We are only here for a brief dance with our best intentions.

      Life is change—this we know. Some of those whispering ghosts are us, telling tales of past seasons gone forever, of who we used to be. Sometimes there’s just wisp of filament that betrays our past life, sometimes it’s the whole pot. Still, there’s work to be done in the now. While there’s time in this season, fill an empty pot with something new.

    • What Things, Accomplished?

      “The fact of the matter is that aiming discipline at the right habit gives you license to be less disciplined in other areas. When you do the right thing, it can liberate you from having to monitor everything.” — Gary Keller, The One Thing

      Doing the right thing begins with knowing what the right thing is, of course. Keller points out that that right thing ought to be our one thing we prioritize in a day. Not the only thing we focus on, mind you, but the box we must check before we move on to other things. His recommendation is time blocking, and working on it until you’ve achieved your goal for the day.

      As a daily blogger, that one thing for me is writing before I move on to other work or family time or exercise. The question is, what are we saying no to that we might say yes to our one thing? One might say the answer is that if you’re focused on the right thing, it doesn’t matter what you say no to. Everything aligns when we focus on the right thing, which Keller said more efficiently than I just did.

      But is writing a daily blog an appropriate one thing? Shouldn’t exercise or family or work be prioritized before writing? It’s not like I’m paying the mortgage with the stream of cash coming in from blogging revenue. The thing is, blogging isn’t about generating revenue for me (you won’t find an advertisement, a Substack subscription offer, or even a basic email subscription. No, the writing is free and probably too hard to find, and is simply a process of documenting my thoughts and observations. Come along for the ride or opt out—for it’s either welcome or no hard feelings, really.

      So what comes after the right thing has been checked off becomes the next one thing. We generally know what this ought to be, the trick is to time block for this second and third right thing the way we do our one thing. Does this make us overly structured in our days? Perhaps, but that which we don’t prioritize often gets overlooked. We must schedule ourselves lest we forget ourselves.

      So maybe the question shouldn’t be, “what’s the right thing?”, but “what things, accomplished, will make this a day without regrets?” More succinctly, decide what to be and go be it. Of course, everything begins with one. But it shouldn’t end there.

    • The Clear Path

      “We are kept from our goal, not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.” — Robert Brault

      I have a work friend who works at a frenetic pace. He’s constantly charging from one thing to the next, in a hyper-reactive state trying to do more than one ought to aspire to in a day. His favorite self-depreciating joke is to turn his head sideways and yell “Squirrel!” and take a step in that direction. In a way that’s exactly what he’s doing with his time. Despite his best intentions, the chase becomes his day, the path always changing in crisis mode. His answer is to work even harder.

      The world wants us to fall in line, to play our part, to belong to something bigger than ourselves. The trouble starts when we aspire to greater things. We might decide what to be and head down the path to being it, but there are so many seemingly urgent distractions along the way. Greater things call to us, but good enough is so very much closer.

      Every day we check the boxes: writing, exercise, flossing, etc. that move us from this to that. Incremental progress isn’t a leap, but it’s progress nonetheless. We are, after all, on the path to our goal. But is it enough? Baby steps aren’t quite a stride, let alone a leap. But it helps if those baby steps go in the direction we’re aiming at. Save the squirrel chase for some other day.

      There’s something to be said for upping the ante. When we aren’t progressing forward quickly enough we may choose to take a leap: Sign up for a 5K, or a writing class in Paris, or make a bet with a friend with stakes high enough to make you uncomfortable (like donating money to a candidate you despise if you don’t hit your goal by a certain date). These stakes aren’t a clear path, but they sure help us focus on it.

      Life flies right on by, whether we chase our dreams or not. We ought to pursue the greater at the expense of the lesser. This begins with ratcheting up those incremental habits to something more like a stride, or even a leap. We’re less likely to stray down a side path when we’re charging along towards our primary goal. Raise the stakes, and the path becomes clear.

    • The Promise of Now

      “He was weary of himself, of cold ideas and brain dreams. Life a poem? Not when you went about forever poetizing about your own life instead of living it. How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty! This chasing after yourself, craftily observing your own tracks—in a circle, of course. This sham diving into the stream of life while all the time you sat angling after yourself, fishing yourself up in one curious disguise or another! If he could only be overwhelmed by something—life, love, passion—so that he could no longer shape it into poems, but had to let it shape him!” ― Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

      Often in the urgency of becoming, we forget to savor moments. It’s an odd thing to say, being an unabashed savorer of moments, to admit that I lose the feel of now sometimes in my quest for a then I may never reach. But now is ours to live, everything else is chasing promises.

      A person in my close circle heard that their cancer is terminal, which means that they’re facing their mortality more profoundly than they had every imagined before. The truth of the matter is they were dying all along—we all are—but he wasn’t focused on the expiration date. When someone hears they’re going to die they immediately wonder exactly when. This is a fair question, to be sure, but perhaps the better question, for all of us, is what will we do with the vibrant and healthy days left for us? Not the bedridden, atrophied and out of time days, but our very best days of those we have left?

      In a way, a diagnosis is a gift, forcing the person hearing it to focus on the urgency of living now. This awareness magnifies what is essential. When all the noise is finally filtered away, what calls to us?

      Go out and live, friends, for our time is so very brief. Dive deeply into the stream of life. Savor the moments and create memories that will make you smile at the sheer audacity of living in the now. Feel this moment, and the next. Be overwhelmed by life, love and passion, for these are the spices of today. Realize the promise of now while it’s here.

    • Going Further

      “All people, no matter who they are, all wish they’d appreciated life more. It’s what you do in life that’s important, not how much time you have or what you wished you’d done.” — David Bowie

      “If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.” — David Bowie

      How did you spend your time in the last 24 hours? Did you find yourself out of your depth? Someplace exciting? I hope so. My own time was spent digging a ditch for a drainage pipe, and then filling it in again. And I tried a new way to cook bone-in pork chops and corn on the cob. On the surface, none of this is particularly exciting, but it was all unique experience compared to the norm. Life is about trying new things to see what we’re capable of, after all. Sometimes those new things seem pretty mundane.

      The point is to do more things out of our comfort zone. I’ll never be a rock star, but I’ll keep trying new things in this lifetime. I can confirm that 26 meters of ditch digging teaches you a few things about yourself. There was always going to be sweat equity paid this weekend, whether a hike or a long walk on the beach. Both of those sound a lot better than digging that ditch, but I’ve done each many times in my life. The ditch informed. And now that it’s done, I will take that labor with me to the next decision I make down the road.

      Choosing adventure and experience over the routine is a path towards a larger life. But so too is choosing the small challenges that everyday living presents to us. We won’t always be up on a stage with the spotlights on us, but we can all appreciate life a bit more. Doing more is the way.

      David Bowie might have been a rock & roll star, but he was also an avid reader, who would look around at all the books in his library mournfully, knowing he couldn’t possibly read them all in his lifetime. We all feel that way about something in this brief lifetime. All we can do is live with urgency and celebrate what we manage to get to in our days.

    • Putting It All Out There

      “If today’s social media has taught us anything about ourselves as a species, it is that the human impulse to share overwhelms the human impulse for privacy.” ― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

      But all the promises we make
      From the cradle to the grave
      When all I want is you
      — U2, All I Want Is You

      They say that sharing is caring, but the twist is that the share is what we care about at all. Life is change, how we process that within ourselves is ours alone… until we share it. So much of what we think and feel becomes part of the collective with a click. What happens after the click is out of our control, but something is released from us anyway. We’ve put ourselves out there in a declaration of the moment and try to move on to the next.

      The reader is in a time machine, picking up where we left off and processing our unique stack of words into thought. Sometimes a comment coming back to me after something I’ve published throws me for a loop, and I need to re-read what I wrote to see who I was at the time. We’re each on our path to becoming, and who I’ve become after clicking publish is somewhat different than the person I was before.

      That timestamp of the moment isn’t trivial, for it’s a brief glimpse into our fragile lifetime. As the years go by, so do the moments. Is sharing a grasp for the elusive amber? We can’t be forever locked in any moment but through the media that carries on after us. Still, there’s a big difference between a journal and a blog post, isn’t there? Should there be?

      What compels us to share anything of ourselves at all? Do we need to clear space for our new identity? Are we leaving breadcrumbs for others who might be inclined to follow? Perhaps the very act of sharing of ourselves is integral to becoming whatever it is we’re moving towards. Each of us have our reasons—our why— for sharing that run beyond ourselves. This why is the puzzle in everything shared, to be discovered by others.