“Divide the fire and you will sooner put it out.” — Publilius Syrus
We become what we focus on. For everything else? We never fully realize the potential of what might have been.
What is the fire? Where is our passion? If we know why do we divide it so? We split our focus into micro-bursts, smothering the creative fire within us. To give life to dreams requires fuel and room to breath.
Better to stoke the fire than to watch it die out.
It gives such a lovely glow.
“No one cares about your potential if you never deliver.” — @orangebook
There are many moments when we don’t feel like doing whatever it is we must do. The last two days were filled with a few examples for me. Ultimately we’ve got to follow through on our obligations if we’re ever going to achieve anything meaningful.
What does that have to do with a hazy sunrise picture over Buzzards Bay? Well, the haze was coming from two directions: The show in the sky and the feeling in my head. Some combination of pollen or common cold had grabbed ahold of me (the virus that shall not be named was negative) and was working hard to persuade me to just stay in bed. I’d have to be handcuffed to the bed to not make it to a sunrise, and so, haze be damned, I made my way down to the water’s edge.
Returning from the celebration of another day to tackle some writing, I came across the timely Orange Book tweet above, which reminded me once again that most of life is simply showing up. We all make our streaks and try to be present for everything meaningful in our lives. Some days we feel great, some days we feel a bit hazy, but every day we ought to make the gift count.
Every little bit of writing counts, I should think. This post, dropped much later in the day than the norm, ought to count just as much as the one dropped before the sunrise. Yet it feels different. Writing is as much about ritual as it is about content. We seek the truth in our words either way, but it feels more world-weary towards the end of the day. I think most optimists are morning people. The realists and pessimists tend to sleep in, as if not wanting to face the day.
We write to share. It doesn’t matter if it’s perfect, it never will be. All that matters is publishing and living to fight another day. It doesn’t matter that we’re nodding off from too much food and drink and work for one day. All that matters is clicking publish and feeling like we didn’t let ourselves down today. We don’t half-ass the work, but we do the best we can given the circumstances.
Today’s circumstances call for a quick post and an optimistic nod to the future. I’ll soon tackle more chronicles of figuring things out and stumbling upon beauty. For now, I’ll simply celebrate shipping against all odds.
How do you earn your first cup of coffee in the morning? Or do you set the table for your day with that first cuppa, creating a debt that must be paid back with sweat equity? I’ve always used the latter process with coffee, but lately I’ve been thinking that maybe it ought to be the former.
Maybe that’s the trick, simply get a good workout in right off the bat, no wasting time. Get right to the tough stuff. Get all Jocco Willink about it and take a picture of my watch and sweaty workout gear. Not today, mind you, but someday when I don’t need this first cup quite so much as I do now.
Habits are funny things. We begin our day with ritual, we end our day with ritual, and in between is a chaotic mix of reaction and routine. Where do you stick your workout? How about your writing? And what of that immersive reading? Just what makes a day successful for you anyway?
All these questions come to mind with that first cup of coffee. By the second cup the day is underway, the writing is at least partially complete. The first boxes are checked on that to-do list. But there’s still that nagging question lingering in the back of your mind… have I paid back that debt to my coffee yet?
“Again, we are daily forced to choose between depression and anxiety. Depression results from the wounding of the individuation imperative; anxiety results from moving forward into the unknown. That path of anxiety is necessary because therein lies the hope of the person to more nearly become an individual. My analyst once said to me, “You must make your fears your agenda.” When we do take on that agenda, for all the anxiety engendered, we feel better because we know we are living in ‘bonne foi’ [good faith] with ourselves. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the perception that some things are more important to us than what we fear.” ― James Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places
James Hollis challenges the stories we tell ourselves to stay on course. We tell ourselves to stick with the plan, to not deviate into dalliances of adventure and irresponsibility, to do what must be done… but is that living in good faith—bonne foi—with our hopes and dreams? What matters most to us anyway?
The thing is, we each have the promises we make to ourselves about what we’ll do when we get past whatever responsibility has a hold of us at the present moment. Pretty stories about career path and mortgages and obligations. Les mensonges que nous nous disons de continuer.
We do a disservice to ourselves by limiting ourselves to what feels comfortable. We know we ought to do more and yet hold ourselves back for reasons that feel just real enough in the moment to justify the safe route. We slowly extinguish our life force for the mundane and routine. What a depressing agenda that is.
Alternatively, we might choose to feed the spark:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Go to the Limits of Your Longing
There’s no time to waste, we must be the arsonist with the deadwood in our soul. We must feel the fear of the unknown and do it anyway. We must embrace the imperative to reach our potential while there’s still time. Some things are more important than what we fear.
“Books and books and books—some five hundred volumes in all. Books of the sea and books of the land, some of them streaked with salt, collected with love and care over more than twenty-five years.
Melville, Conrad, London, Stevenson; Gauguin and Loti and Rupert Brooke; Lubbock, Masefield, De Hartog—Slocum and Rockwell Kent; Trelawny and Cook and Bligh; Chapelle and Underhill—Nansen, Frobisher, Villiers and Scott and Louis Becke. Homer, Gerbault, and Tompkins. Hundreds more: all cast in a common mold—blessed with the genius that makes men feel, and dream, and go.
And a special section of books that deal with the greatest frontier of all—the relationship between men: Marx and Whitman, Thoreau and Henry George, Victor Hugo, Thomas Paine and Jefferson. Lincoln and Emerson, Rousseau, Voltaire and Upton Sinclair, Shaw. Byron, Mark Twain, Roosevelt, Garrison, Jack London again and Shakespeare.” — Sterling Hayden, Wanderer
Well, there’s a traveler’s reading list for you. Hayden misses some he ought to have included, Beryl Markham comes to mind, but on the whole he’d built a library of transformation. And so must we. What carries your imagination to new places? What moves you?
Hayden might have loved Mary Oliver poems. The Summer Day, in which she famously prods us to ask ourselves: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” was published just four years after Hayden passed away, so it’s not one he would have read. But they surely spoke the same language. The feelers, dreams and goers instinctively know when they encounter a kindred spirit.
And what of us, friend? What are our libraries whispering? Our challenge is to do more than feel and dream. Our challenge is to go. Books stir the imagination and offer a map. It’s up to us to learn what our compass is telling us and chart a course. It’s up to us to weigh anchor and act on our dreams.
“A person susceptible to “wanderlust” is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.” ― Pico Iyer
As I write this a cardinal is singing in the window, driving the cat a bit insane, and distracting me with questions: “What are you doing in your nest? Shouldn’t you be flying?”
“I’m busy leaving breadcrumbs”, I silently answer the cardinal. And indeed I am. For every post is a mark for where I’ve been at any given moment. A public journal of sorts, documenting what I’m reading, where I’m visiting, who I’m learning from, what I’ve stumbled upon that made my jaw drop.
You can’t document what you haven’t experienced. Imagination is a lovely thing, and brings so much to the world of humans (Refer to da Vinci’s Saper Vedere), but we’re also students on a quest to learn as much as we can about this life we’re doomed to leave too soon. Experiencing requires getting out in the world and finding it, not just living through someone else’s YouTube or InstaGram feed.
Those different perspectives we encounter are building blocks that in turn carry us somewhere even richer, snowballing experiences into transformation. Who has gone anywhere in this world and returned the same person? And what is the purpose of living but growth?
The thing about breadcrumbs is they don’t stick around forever. My trail of transformation is a click away from disappearing forever, sort of like us but with bigger data centers. That’s the way of the world, we’re all just fleeting memories in some future person’s mind. But who says we can’t fly in our time? Who says we can’t offer a small ripple felt imperceptibly on a far shore?
As the days grow longer in the Northern Hemisphere we detect the changes around us. The changes were happening anyway, but it seems to accelerate. Just this morning I watched the sun rise through a window where I haven’t seen the sun rise since last autumn. A mix of travel and weather conditions made it a complete surprise when it happened.
And what of the changes we take ourselves through? We exercise, eat the right food, read and write every day and nothing seems to come of it. And one day we catch ourselves in surprise at who we’ve become without realizing it. Hey, that’s me! The light dawns on Marblehead, as they say in Boston when you’re the last to know. We know we’re changing, but don’t often see it in ourselves.
Until we do.
Why don’t we have more incremental awareness? Why don’t we see the smallest of changes in ourselves as we’re making them? Are we lacking self-awareness or are we just not giving ourselves the credit we deserve for doing the work? It’s as if we’re trained not to notice that we got up and worked out for three days in a row, we have to wait until we have washboard abs to be allowed to celebrate.
The only way to be incrementally aware is to track ourselves. To write it down. To draw a big X through another day on the calendar (especially when you didn’t really feel like doing X that day). It’s not about the washboard abs or the number on the scale or the published novel, it’s about the process — saying we’re going to do something and following through on it. And then doing it all again tomorrow. Incremental action isn’t suddenly seeing the sunrise after your first day, it adds up over time and reveals itself slowly.
When it will suddenly dawn on you.
At what point on the line of consistent routine does a habit accelerate from a regular part of your life to a major part of your identity? Put another way, if we are what we repeatedly do, at what moment does what we do become us? It may be that moment when you can’t imagine doing anything else but this habit now and forever. But I think it’s a notch beyond that: when others see you as that character you’ve developed into and that habit is reinforced and self-perpetuates.
Consider a friend who has only been consistently hiking for maybe ten years. Her identity developed around hiking and she’s gained hundreds of followers on her InstaGram account because people associate an activity they want to do more of with her. Or consider my bride, who has run consistently since she was a teenager. Half the town knows her as that lady that’s always out running. Heck, I sometimes think of her as that lady too. Consistent routine develops identity. Identity becomes the essence of who we are.
But both of these women began with a first awkward step out into the unknown. Both learned what worked for them and what definitely was not going to work. The essence of who we are is derived from what is essential for us. The rest is marketing. You either inform the world of who you’ve become or wait for them to see it for themselves.
Like a river carving its deepest channel on its truest route, what we say yes and no to as we favor our chosen path becomes the deepest part of our channel. In a river oxbows gather silt and are eventually cut off altogether in favor of the channel. Likewise, some things that were so very much a part of our identity peter out and die from lack of attention. I once fancied myself a sailor, yet I don’t currently have a boat. A friend also fancied himself a sailor and purposefully accelerated and reinforced that identity by trading up to bigger and bigger boats and forgoing career advancement for a log book full of hopes and dreams realized. Who’s the sailor?
I’m about to click publish on this blog, as I’ve done every day for a few years running now. Does that make me a writer? The answer is what you want it to be. Decide what to be and go be it. And then inform the world (and yourself) with your consistency.
