Alexandersmap

    Category: Writing

    • Keep It Simple

      “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” —Jack Kerouac

      Simple seems so complicated some days. Mondays often openly mock the very idea of simplicity. Want to do big things in this lifetime? Meet your wrestling partner, complexity. Complexity usually doesn’t play by the rules.

      Of course, Kerouac danced with eloquent simplicity in his writing through applied effort. For him to point out he too was a work in progress is a generous gift to those of us fighting the same battle. If there’s a takeaway, it’s to do the work anyway. It won’t write itself, no matter how complicated our lives are. Simple isn’t easy, it’s only meant to appear that way.

      My own rulebook states I click publish every day. I always aim for morning, but that’s negotiable, while publishing daily is very much nonnegotiable for as long as life and luck allow. We all have our lines in the sand and our own idea of what simple means. Writing every day, each day becomes an incremental step towards our own version of simple.

    • More of This

      As I publish this, it’s the 18th of March, or the 77th day of the year. Lucky sevens, if you will, falling just after St. Patrick’s Day. The luck of the Irish following us? Let’s hope for that, but get back to living with purpose just the same. For we make our own luck, don’t we?

      We can usually predict the future by looking at what we consistently do. With that in mind, I’ll likely be writing every day, barely keeping the Duolingo streak alive and will have read my share of books (though never quite enough). It’s easy to see those filling in from now until the end, whatever that looks like. But what of the gaps? The inconsistencies also predict who we become, don’t they?

      It’s clear I need to get a dog soon if I want to maintain a walking streak, as walking the neighborhood at night without a dog just makes me feel like the weird neighbor. I probably don’t need to enhance that reputation. Alternatively, I could move to a place where walking is just the most obvious thing to do with your time. Kudos to friend and fellow blogger Joe, who managed to find a job and home in close enough proximity to each other that he can walk or snowshoe between the two. Joe doesn’t seem to complain about finding time to walk, he just walks. He proves every day that we can create the situation that works best for us when we focus on it.

      Life can surely be unpredictable, but we can safely predict that our life will mostly be more of this if we keep doing the same thing every day. The question to ask is, is more of this okay, or is it carrying us to a place we’d rather not go? Almost a quarter of the way into the year, we can see the trend we’re setting for ourselves, can’t we?

      “You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”
      ― James Clear, Atomic Habits

      When the year is over, it would be great to have written all I’d like to write, to have read all that I’ve got on my reading list, and to finally hold my own in a rapid-fire conversation in French. But it would also be great to be in better shape than I began the year, to have positioned myself for a successful year in my career, and to spend meaningful time with exceptional people. These are things we can look back on the blank spaces with regret, or we can celebrate as small wins strung together just so. More of this can be a positive statement, if we create the right situation for ourselves.

      So what’s the trajectory? Is more of this a good thing or bad? With this answered, we’ll know what to do next.

    • Where Is This Going?

      “A path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you . . . Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself alone, one question . . . Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t it is of no use.” ― Carlos Castaneda

      It’s fair to ask ourselves, “where is this going?” now and then. We already know, deep down, where things are going. The question merely raises to the surface things we bury in busy.

      If we only seek answers about the path we’re on, are we giving the path itself time to reveal itself to us? Yesterday, we considered the fact that the road doesn’t move, we do. Thus, the path is merely a path. We’re the ones who change. When we ask, “where is this going?” we’re really asking, “where am I going with this?”

      When Castaneda asks, “Does this path have a heart?”, he’s really asking, “Do I have the heart for this path?” The question is the same for all of us, whether we’re building a career, stacking words together just so in a blog or novel, hiking a seemingly infinite list of trails or sailing around the world. When we put everything of ourselves onto the path, we figure out just where we’re going. And whether it’s right for us.

    • These Roads

      These roads don’t move;
      You’re the one that moves.
      — Jay Farrar and Benjamin Gibbard, These Roads Don’t Move

      Jay Farrar framed this song around the words of Jack Kerouac back in 2009. I’d first heard it while driving around the northeast, trying to make things work in a job I’d eventually leave. The song has been a favorite ever since. Jobs come and go, songs and memories stick with us for a lifetime.

      Back when this song was released, I often thought I ought to write more, but never got around to it. Mostly I felt I didn’t have enough to say. I wonder what that me would have come up with? I can guess, being me at the time, but not really the me of now. Somewhere there are old journals full of quotes and restless thoughts of a younger man, then, as now, trying to figure things out. What was missing was the act of publishing. But the universe wasn’t exactly feeling the void. Only me.

      Writing is simply a routine developed over time. So it is with collecting experience. We move through the world bearing witness to all that we stumble upon, while doing our best to rise to meet the moment. Each road brought us here. But we’re the ones that moved.

    • Finding the Way

      Nobody ever says of a painter that he has lost his way. It is said of writers. But when one is talking about a painter one says, “He is finding his way.” — Mary Oliver, Sand Dabs, Six

      The curse of restlessness, as described yesterday, is a burning desire to pile on more and more to the to-do list. How much can we fit in? More, more, more! The worker bee in me seeks to do more. The philosopher in me wishes to still the madness and listen to the universe. The writer in me finds his way tactfully between the two, looking for just the right way to sum up the day.

      And so it is that the words come. Today, before the wave crashes, I delight in the colors in the clouds as I listen to the growing roar. And click publish before I’m swept away.

    • When I Reach It

      “I want to risk hitting my head on the ceiling of my talent. I want to really test it out and say, ‘Okay, you’re not that good. You just reached the level here.’ I don’t ever want to fail, but I want to risk failure every time out of the gate.” — Quentin Tarantino

      As we climb towards our potential, it often feels as if we’re meeting our limitations head-on. The choice in these moments is to either fight through them or retreat towards something less than our best. We’ve all done both, remembering moments of truth where we rose to meet it and moments when we feel we fell short. Each offers a lesson, don’t you think?

      The past being the past, the only thing we can do with it is to learn how to meet the next moment. Will we lean into it or stumble backwards? Developing a bias towards action only occurs through action. Sometimes that action is a baby step, sometimes it’s a leap. The trick is to seek consistent improvement and find our limits.

      I’m no Tarantino, but I’ve seen progress in my own life through confronting my limitations and pushing on anyway. Perhaps someday I’ll reach excellence and mastery, but more likely than not I’ll just be better than I was yesterday. And maybe that will be enough for that day. I’ll let you know when I reach it.

    • The Book Stack

      “A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

      “The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity…” — A. Edward Newton

      I wrestle with books. I love reading, and stack more books than I ought to into my life. Settling down with a great book is one of my favorite activities, so why do I pile on more than I can possibly get to? The stack of books taunt me. Even as I write this I can see them in the periphery, mocking my use of time when it doesn’t involve them.

      We live in a time where we’re blessed with abundance in everything around us, and cursed with the same scarcity of time. We must be prudent in what we add to the pile, and what we edit out. Reading is just another experience in a brief life that contributes to its richness and meaning. The rules of good nutrition apply. Beyond the required reading of a formal education, we get to choose our information diet. But we also then live with the consequences. When we use our reading time wisely we enhance living substantially.

      Imagine my delight when my Twitter feed offered up the two quotes above within a few days of one another to perfectly summarize my… situation. We live an impossibly short life for the sheer number of books available for us to read, and then pile on the distractions of life (like Twitter), and how are we ever to get to everything we want to read? The very act of writing this blog is stealing time from reading, even as writing fuels my hunger to read more. Which experience is more valuable in the moment? Isn’t life a quest to find balance between what we do and what we consume?

      And therein lies the answer; reading is just another form of collecting experiences that build a life. As with other experiences, we are what we prioritize. We can’t do everything, but we can certainly do the most important things. So it is with reading. It’s not just a stack of books and an infinite jumble of words, it’s the building blocks carrying us higher and higher towards a richer perspective and broader potential. It’s ours to realize, or to leave on the shelf.

    • Stories in Time

      Now through the white orchard my little dog
      romps, breaking the new snow
      with wild feet.
      Running here running there, excited,
      hardly able to, stop, he leaps, he spins
      until the white snow is written upon
      in large, exuberant letters,
      a long sentence, expressing
      the pleasures of the body in this world.
      Oh, I could not have said it better
      myself.
      — Mary Oliver, The Storm

      A rafter of wild turkey hens took up residence in the woods prior to the last snowfall. Likely anticipating the snow better than this human could, they opted for the scattered certainty of fallen birdseed from the feeders over the starkness of scratching out a next meal from the deep blanket of fresh snow. Who can blame them? Without a dog for longer than I care to think about, a turkey might find the backyard a relative paradise. This turkey nurtured the land to be just so, for children who have long since migrated. The tracks across the snow break up the blanket as children and Bodhi once did, and I quietly celebrate the contribution to my own tracks.

      Perhaps it’s time to welcome another dog to write its own story in time. Life goes one. We bring to it what we choose.

    • Offering Value

      “You don’t get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to the hour.” — Jim Rohn

      Until we feel and believe the urgency of time, we can’t possibly know the tragedy of wasting it. So it follows that if we trade our time for a paycheck or a pursuit, we ought to be applying the urgency of the hour to the task. Herein lies value. We don’t settle for things we value in ourselves, we rise to meet it. That rise requires grit and growth, persistent effort and the humility to learn and adapt over time.

      Maximizing our potential isn’t a trivial pursuit, it’s a calling. When we think of our best work, of productivity and effectiveness and execution, we ought to think of it in an aspirational sense. The never-ending pursuit of mastery. It’s never been about status or titles (those are things our parents want of us), it’s about making the most of the opportunity in whatever calls to us to meet it. It’s about bringing value to our calling. Those who do it best transcend space and time, but we may all contribute a verse.

      So what is our value? It’s a riddle we spend our lifetime answering. Uniquely ours, yet hard to define. Carried, yet willingly given to others. In fact, the more we share of ourselves, the more we are valued. Offering value is knowing the urgency of time and contributing it anyway, to the best of our ability, to meet the moment.

    • The Futility in Fragility, and Doing It Anyway

      If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one
      Drying in the colour of the evening sun
      Tomorrow’s rain will wash the stains away
      But something in our minds will always stay
      — Sting, Fragile

      Pushing snow off a driveway in an active snowstorm is an act in futility, displayed for all to see in the snowflakes quickly filling the void, relentlessly stalking you and the shovel down the pavement. Best to wait until it ends, clear it all at once with a snowblower, or a plow, or perhaps not at all if the forecast offers hope of melting days to come. But that’s not me. I clear the way, accept the temporary nature of my labor, and retreat inside to let the falling snow erase my work. Until I do it all again. Such is the way with fragile things. We’re all temporary, despite our efforts, but we may leave a mark nonetheless.

      Perhaps nobody knows fragility and futility like a snow shoveler. Perhaps. Tell that to the soldier. Tell that to the climate activist. Tell that to the writer. Everything is futile, at least until we prove it otherwise. Everything is fragile. Tell me otherwise.

      But there’s meaning in the work. And so we do it anyway. Again and again.