Alexandersmap

    Category: Writing

    • A Wisp of a Moment, Captured

      On a recent walk I noticed the recently painted median strip dividing the road featured artwork now and then. It seems they painted the road in autumn, as the oak leaves returned to the earth to close their cycle and begin again. A few rebels, wishing for immortality perhaps, found the opportunity to capture the moment. It struck me this was what all artists do; reach out from the anonymous mass of their moment and leave something of ourselves for others to find.

      There’s something lovely in the temporary nature of this street art, akin to chalk drawings on sidewalks or sandcastles at low tide. Some art is meant to someday be a memory, recalled in quiet moments when you again walk down that street or on that particular stretch of beach. Do you remember the leaves of autumn, swirling in the wind? How quickly they fade from memory. We surf on a wisp of a moment, sometimes captured, mostly lost forever. We ought to embrace the freedom in that, elusive as it feels, for this is our fragile dance.

      “If you would create something, you must be something.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

      At times we hear the call from the naked page of a notebook, and at times from the middle of the road. Leaves locked in the amber of their moment are a whisper from seasons past to do something with this one. To feel the urgency of the season and make the most of it before the moment fades. This is the unique call of our work, leaping to our attention in the strangest of places. In each case, the question lingers in the moment: Where will you take us now?

    • The Rest of Your Life

      This is the beginning of the rest of your life
      You better start movin’ like you’re running out of time
      The realization coming over your mind
      That it should be a canter
      If you could just find the answer
      You know it could be a canter
      If you were just a wee bit less of a wanker
      More than half ae’ the time
      — Gerry Cinnamon, Cantor

      An old friend pointed me towards Gerry Cinnamon recently. Thick Scottish brogue filled with energy and clever lyrics. That friend has navigated the darkest of tragedies in his life, and I listen when he points me towards the music and writers he’s using to process his life going forward. Most of us are lucky to have easier hurdles than he’s had, but we still have hurdles. We all must find a way forward from whatever lingers.

      The first thing that old friend asked me about was how the writing was going. Not the blog writing, mind you, but that other writing. Not as well, I told him. Wrestling with fiction hadn’t felt right. Maybe non-fiction would be best. Just write and let it sort itself out. And so I am.

      What possible advice can you give a friend who has navigated grief you shudder to contemplate? Nothing unsolicited. Instead, we talked of finding beauty in a dark world, which prompted the Cheryl Strayed quote, which seemed like just enough in the moment:

      There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it,’ said my mother. ‘Put yourself in the way of beauty.
      — Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found

      Life is short. We’ve wasted enough time already, and we must be deliberate and emphatic in how we spend our days. Whatever we wrestle with, demons and darkness or a tendency to idle through our time, we must break free of our inertia and get moving. It should be a cantor. But remember to find the beautiful on the journey.

    • What to Do With Our Time

      you will never catch up.
      Walk around feeling like a leaf
      know you could tumble at any second.
      Then decide what to do with your time.
      ― Naomi Shihab Nye, The Art of Disappearing

      I’ve fallen in love with the bullet journal again. It’s not so much because of a love of organization, it’s more a need for organization that draws me deep into the pages of a blank notebook. Each X drawn through a bullet is uniquely satisfying, each habit represented as a filled in square that designates a day when I did what I told myself I was going to do fuels a desire to keep the streak alive one more day. As lines grow on paper day-after-day like a sideways bar graph, lies we tell ourselves become as apparent as the promises kept. How we reconcile each line tells us who we really are.

      If there’s one fatal flaw in the life of a busy soul, it’s following through on all that we want for ourselves. There’s only so many things we can say yes to, and endless things we must dismiss with a no. The yes’s seem so trivial stacked next to the no’s, but we forget that the collection of no’s is ours too. No’s matter a great deal in keeping us from tumbling. We aren’t leaves in the wind, to borrow Nye’s lovely analogy, we’re purposeful humans finding our way in the world.

      We must decide what we won’t be good at in this lifetime. We must see the path through the wilderness that carries us to a place where we might thrive. Breaking up is hard to do because we don’t want to let others down, but when we don’t break from things that don’t matter to us we’re letting ourselves down. Just who are we breaking up with? We must choose identity over misguided altruism. The world will ask for everything we’ve got. The best response in such moments is “Thank you, but that’s not for me”.

      Decide what to be and go be it. No isn’t fun, but it’s not ours to hold onto. The trade-off, becoming, is where the real fun is, for this is where we set our sights on big yes’s and watch them grow.

    • Selective Watering

      “Research increasingly shows that what is important doesn’t necessarily get our attention, but what gets our attention becomes important. This mirrors a concept in ancient Buddhist psychology that is often referred to as selective watering. In short, the mind contains a diverse variety of seeds: joy, integrity, anger, jealousy, greed, love, delusion, creativity, and so on. Buddhist psychology taught that we should think of ourselves as gardeners and our presence and attention as nourishment for the seeds. The seeds that we water are the seeds that grow. The seeds that grow shape the kind of person we become. In other words, the quality of our presence—its intensity and where we choose to channel it—determines the quality of our lives.” — Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness

      We know intuitively to focus on what is important in our lives, but focus can be challenging in this hyper-distracting world. The thing is, most of that hyper-distraction is self-created. We layer on all manner of apps and channels on top of the minutes that matter, and each promises something more fascinating, perhaps, than the sometimes tedious business of becoming we’re currently engaged in. We simmer in the stew of our own distractions while time relentlessly boils away.

      The concept of selective watering is a lovely way to consider what gets to grow in our lives and what we ought to let wither away. Writing this blog every day is selective watering, and so is my long-standing choice to eliminate broadcast news from my information diet. For each of us, our days begin with a series of habits selectively watered over time. We reinforce our identity as we follow through on these habits or eliminate others. Likewise, the beliefs we have about others are based as much on the way we look at the world, our biases, as they are from the acts of another. The seeds that we water are the seeds that grow.

      Knowing this, we can quickly see the breadcrumbs that brought us to this place in our lives. We are what we’ve repeatedly done, to hijack Aristotle, and so here we are; all that and a bag of chips. Assessing our current state, we may love who we’ve become or find that shell rather hollow inside. Either is an incomplete assessment, for we remain a work in progress to the end of our days. And this is our call to action! Active living is deciding what happens next. We ought to be very selective in our watering.

    • Everything Half Known

      “In the soul of man,” Herman Melville wrote, in one of his terrifying flights of prophecy in Moby-Dick, “there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.” Cast off from that protected world, he’d gone on, and “thou canst never return!” But the half known life is where so many of our possibilities lie. In the realm of worldly affairs it can be a tragedy that so many of us in our global neighborhood choose to see other places through screens, reducing fellow humans to two dimensions. On a deeper level, however, it’s everything half known, from love to faith to wonder and terror, that determines the course of our lives. Melville’s sorrow lay not just in his restless inquiries, but in his hope for answers in a world that seems always to simmer in a state of answerlessness.” — Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

      Pico Iyer pulls a reader to places they likely hadn’t considered going to in their own lives. He travels to corners of the world I’d never choose to go to myself, taunts me with eloquence I strive for in my own writing, and expands my mind with thoughts I haven’t arrived at yet in my own journey. He takes very seriously the mission of the great writer to change the reader in ways they weren’t quite ready for when they began the book. And he does so with a sprinkling of wonder in lyrical observations we’ve come to expect from him.

      The question is, what are we looking for? What are our possibilities lying in a half known life? What encompasses our soul awaiting answers? We each must reconcile these questions in our lives, wherever our journey takes us. Our lives are not about that which we are sure about, but the larger questions that surround us. The thing about finding answers is that they always lead to more questions still. Thus, our lives, lived with purpose, are a finite inquiry.

      “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms or books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

      Over time, many of us come to terms with the things we’ll never fully understand. Life isn’t about finding all the answers, merely a journey towards enough in our time. Each question and subsequent answer is another step towards becoming. Becoming what, we might ask? And that is our half known, different for each of us, yet very much the same.

    • Simply Essential

      “Never own more than you can carry in both hands at a dead run.” ― Robert Heinlein

      The quest to simplify is often a process of one step forward, two steps back. Eliminating things shouldn’t be so very complicated. Accumulating stuff shouldn’t be so very easy. It’s the eternal wrestling match of what to keep and what to get rid of. Even now I’m considering why I used “very” in the second and third sentence of this very paragraph. Simplicity seems so easy to reach for if we could get past all the complicated in our lives.

      My bride and I talk of downsizing one day. As with everything, it’s more complicated than talk. The questions of where and when and what. And with each question, the place we currently reside looks a bit better than it did before. And so spaces are cleared, things are moved out, other things are moved in. It’s a game really; a sleight of hand performed on the same plot of land with the world spinning around us. The characters come and go but the stuff remains.

      We ought to be better editors. We ought to consider what is most essential in our moment and focus entirely on that. Knowing that the game will change, and what seems most important now may seem trivial when it does, is a good way to measure the essential. When everything eventually goes away, as it inevitably will, what will we hold on to until the last? This is our simply essential. Everything else is just stuff.

    • Something Meaningful

      Every day I die again, and again I’m reborn
      Every day I have to find the courage
      To walk out into the street
      With arms out
      Got a love you can’t defeat
      Neither down nor out
      There’s nothing you have that I need
      I can breathe
      Breathe now
      — U2, Breathe

      When you settle into a conversation about the best U2 songs, well, it’s best to have a comfortable chair and a full beverage to weigh the choices against. For me, the choices alternate based on my mood at the time, but top 3 includes Breathe and The Unforgettable Fire, and we can endlessly debate the order and the third from there. One could make a case that the album that Breathe came from (No Line on the Horizon) is their best album as well, but I write this knowing it’s a sure way to rise the passions of the fanbase. I’ve been known to shift favorite album based on my mood at the moment. The blessing of U2 is having such a rich catalog that it’s even worth discussing.

      Every day we are reborn, with an opportunity to make something of our time before the lights go out once again. The analogy of a lifetime in a day is nothing new, yet the lesson escapes us now and then. We woke up yesterday, we woke up today, and we expect to wake up tomorrow too. The trick is to do something meaningful with this stack of days, and accumulate our own catalog of mastery in our lifetime.

      What’s your soundtrack for doing bigger things? Play it loud. Sing your heart out.

    • Measuring Growth

      “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” — Joan Didion

      “You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.” ― Thomas Merton

      The gift of writing is not as much about putting all that you want to say on paper or on a screen for the world to read, although that is a motivation of sorts. No, the gift is in the sorting out of what you encounter in the world and finding a way to articulate it better than we might have yesterday. One doesn’t place a Didion or Merton quote just ahead of one’s own thoughts, let alone both, without recognizing that measuring up becomes ridiculous. But this is how we grow.

      Growth is measured against whatever it is we’re reaching for. Slowly chipping away at the French language for years now, I’ve picked up enough to know I’ve made measurable progress, but not enough that I’m not lost when a rapid-fire conversation amongst native speakers surrounds me. But at least I can tell them my name and ask where the toilettes are. Progress, and a clear indicator that more immersion is in order to grow into the language I too casually aspire to master.

      The meaning in the moment is derived from accumulated experience. If our experience is limited, we might not pick up the nuance in a conversation, know the double entendre, the obscure reference or an inside joke that is derived from being out there in the world and just knowing. The trick in living is to put ourselves out there in the mix, and sort things out as best we can. Writing is active processing, documented. Hopefully edited well enough to make it interesting.

      The thing is, we learn to recognize the darkness in the world, but also the light. The tenuous line between the two is where active living takes place. We become more resilient, more informed, more street-smart as we grow, and bring that to new places where we quickly discover how we measure up. The alternative to growth is stasis and atrophy. It’s more fun to grow. Plus we finally get the jokes we missed when we were someone else.

    • The Truth of the Work

      Work is a funny thing, for it represents so much of our identity, yet, if we live well, it’s only a small part of who we are. For if this life is about the accumulation of experiences, relationships, knowledge and self-understanding, work adds to each of these things but isn’t all of any of them. We want to believe that our work has purpose, and so chafe at the jobs that seem trivial, menial, unfulfilling and generally dead ends in a climb up the career ladder. But this outlook misses so much of what makes work meaningful.

      When I look at the accumulation of contributions I’ve made in my work, it’s easy to see where I made a difference and where my contribution felt insignificant to the overall progress of the companies I worked for at the time. Ultimately, what mattered was showing up and being present for the work at hand. The value derived isn’t always up to us to determine, only that we do our part.

      “Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.” ― Thomas Merton

      We derive the most fulfillment from engagement with others, not from the accumulation of more wealth than the next corporate climber. Don’t get me wrong, financial security solves problems that linger in poverty, but at some point the pursuit of wealth and status is nothing but a distraction from the pursuit of meaning. Perhaps this is why those stories of people leaving the corporate ladder to run the country store or work in a non-profit are so fascinating. Deep down most of us just want to contribute and be a part of something bigger than ourselves.

      “Consider what a company is. A company is a culture. A group of people brought together around a common set of values and beliefs. It’s not products or services that bind a company together. It’s not size and might that make a company strong, it’s the culture—the strong sense of beliefs and values that everyone, from the CEP to the receptionist, all share.” — Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

      As Walt Whitman reminded us, the powerful play goes on, and we may contribute a verse. All the meetings and the key performance indicators lumped together are nothing but a means to an end. We’re here to contribute to something larger than ourselves in our time, and showing up for work is a demonstrated commitment to that mission. What we realize in the end is that the work we choose to do is an expression of who we want to become.

    • One’s Way

      “The important thing is never to let oneself be guided by the opinion of one’s contemporaries; to continue steadfastly on one’s way without letting oneself be either defeated by failure or diverted by applause.” — Gustav Mahler

      Gustav Mahler was an Austrian composer who’s work is familiar to us whether we know it or not. His Symphony No. 1 in D is the basic tune of “Frère Jacques”, the nursery rhyme embedded in our brains as children. He built his legacy as a conductor and composer in Vienna, a place chock full of legendary conductors and composers, and navigated his career through both anti-semitism and general criticism of his work, which pushed boundaries many weren’t ready for. So in this context, his quote becomes illuminating.

      There’s a moment after we’ve tied a shoe or set a sail just so when we look up and begin going where we determined we’d go in our minds just a beat before. It’s that moment of beginning on one’s way, wherever it may bring us, that is transformative. Everything that comes after is a matter of resolve: Do we finish what we started or to let it fall by the wayside and try something else?

      Most likely, the worst criticism we face comes from within. Self-doubt, imposter syndrome and fear of failure have destroyed more art than all the critics and book-burning zealots combined. In such moments, we must keep going, one way or another. Easier said than done, of course, but pushing through has a way of building confidence and resilience. We simply learn to ignore the voice inside.

      “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.” — Steven Pressfield

      That moment of beginning, of breaking through that Resistance, is a big step in reaching our unlived life. But every step thereafter has its own subsequent Resistance. Put one foot in front of the other, and soon you’ll be walking across the floor, as the song goes. To reach our potential we must overcome all the external and internal noise that is distracting us from that voice in our head that is telling us quietly, persistently, what we ought to do.

      Today we’re beginning something, and continuing other things. Who we once were passed away in that beat. This blog post, like the 1,663 before this one, is another step for me across that proverbial floor, with the character who wrote each long gone. What remains is the sum of each, on the way to becoming something entirely new. Who we become is in so many ways up to us, determined by the choices one makes on one’s way and our steadfast resolve to arrive at what’s next.