Alexandersmap

    Category: Writing

    • If We Are to Live Ourselves: Thoughts on Didion

      “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
      ― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

      I feel the truth in Didion’s observation, seeping into to me like caffeine hitting the bloodstream. For who doesn’t look back on who they used be and shake their head? That’s no longer us, and in many ways, we might wish it never was. But that person helped carry us here.

      Joan Didion passed away yesterday. There are people far more familiar with her work—far more qualified—to write her obituary than me (See Parul Sehgal’s Joan Didion Chronicled American Disorder With Her Own Unmistakable Style”). If you want to glimpse the soul of a writer of consequence, read the words that they themselves offer to the world in their most personal moments. The words that bring you into their world in common bond. Such as this quote Sehgal highlighted:

      “I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package,” she once wrote. “I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

      Can’t you see it? Didion placing her hands on your shoulders, looking you square in the eye and imploring you to listen. Get to it straightaway! Live a bit more recklessly. Sing and dance and live outside your comfort zone. Take more chances. Decide who to be, and go be it.

      Didion knew urgency and pain. She lost both her husband and adult daughter within a couple of devastating years of each other. She herself suffered from Parkinson’s Disease in her final years. She might have lived a glamorous life bouncing between Malibu and Manhattan early on, but she suffered losses that would floor any of us. And she shared her journey out of the abyss with her readers:

      “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. — from The Year of Magical Thinking

      Ultimately we either shatter into pieces and fade away ourselves or climb back out to make something of our remaining time on this earth. Didion was a fighter. And her words that remain even as she passes betray her spirit and prompt those who remain to carry on the work:

      “Do not whine… Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.” — from Blue Nights

    • What Living Ben Franklin’s Five Hour Rule Really Tells You

      Google “Ben Franklin’s five hour rule” and you’ll receive page after page of business magazine articles gushing about how you too can transform your career and life using old Ben’s technique. They spin it to current times saying Bill Gates and Elon Musk follow this rule too! Just click and read on… and you get pretty much the same paragraph from every one of them:

      “The five-hour rule is a process first implemented by Benjamin Franklin for constant and deliberate learning. It involves spending one hour a day or five hours a week learning, reflecting and experimenting.”

      I could link to one of those articles, but which one? They all use the same two vanilla sentences. No deep dive into actual Ben Franklin quotes. I’m at a point in my life where this just doesn’t hold up for me anymore. Life is deeper than a Twitter-sized rule for living.

      You know who’s not breathlessly scanning those business articles for that one key rule used by Ben Franklin? Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Because they’ve long since passed that level of reading and shallow thinking in their own lives through consistent, dedicated learning, applied personal growth habits and occasionally taking audacious risks measured against that acquired knowledge.

      And that last bit is the key. Knowing when to take the leap into the unknown isn’t just instinct, it’s detecting patterns and opportunity gleaned from multiple sources of informed learning. Put down the mobile phone and pick up a book, find a quiet corner of your hectic life, and read. Learn something new that brings you to something else new. And as you acquire that wisdom do something with it. Gates and Musk, like Franklin before them, are just people like you and me who take things to a level the rest of us aren’t prepared or willing to go to… but could.

      For the last several years I’ve read every day, sought meaningful encounters wherever I am, stretched my reading to sometimes uncomfortable places, learned a bit of another language every day and firmly established the habit of writing about it right here in this blog. I’m living that Franklin rule without calling it that. I’ve learned that life is more complicated than two sentence rules for living. But the occasional spark of applied audacity has its place too.

    • Crossing the Stream to Deeper

      “If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else….

      The way to discover a terrifying longing is to liberate yourself from the self-censoring labels you began to tell yourself over the course of your mis-education… Focus on the external objects of fascination, not on who you think you are. Find people with overlapping obsessions.

      The information universe tempts you with mildly pleasant but ultimately numbing diversions. The only way to stay fully alive is to dive down to your obsessions six fathoms deep. Down there it’s possible to make progress toward fulfilling your terrifying longing, which is the experience that produces the joy.”
      — David Brooks, “The Art of Focus”, The New York Times

      The tricky thing about discovering “primary source” material is that you’ll uncover that what you believed to be primary source references other primary sources, which infers they aren’t the primary source at all. Such is the Great Conversation, spinning through life one book, interview or article at a time. We leap from one to the other, like stones across a stream, until we reach our destination with delight (and a new stack of reading material).

      Something recently pointed me towards Cal Newport’s Deep Work, which is a how-to book on pushing the shallow work aside to get to the deep work, where we differentiate ourselves and find true meaning in our careers and lives. Newport, in turn, pointed me towards several articles and books that I hadn’t previously been aware of, and a couple that I hadn’t fully absorbed on the first go-around. I’ve pursued them all recently, all in an effort to get meaningful work done. For we all must go deeper if there’s any hope for us to contribute something meaningful. And that requires breaking the spell of distraction:

      “Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.” — Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

      Here’s the thing: In diving into all this material around deep work, I’ve questioned whether this blog is itself deep or shallow (It aims for deep, but sometimes skims a bit shallower than I’d like). But what is the purpose of the blog but to establish a daily habit of writing and finding things out—things that gradually pull me deeper? Put another way, those stones I’m hopping across in life are documented, one at a time, for anyone that wishes to follow along. But even here, we all choose our own path across that stream of life, we just happen to land on the same spot now and then.

      That terrifying longing? It’s on the other side, and the only way to reach it is to stop watching the debris float by in the stream of distraction and focus on the next landing spot, and the one after that. Our time is short, and we have so far to go. So go deeper.

    • Falling Into That Anne Rice Universe

      “We’re frightened of what makes us different.” – Anne Rice

      Anne Rice passed away on December 11th. She created Interview with the Vampire and the series of books that followed it, all of which I consumed ravenously as she awakened in me a new perspective on the world. To be swept up in a world of androgynous vampires where humans are definitely lower on the food chain, written from the perspective of a powerful woman, shook up the very different world of Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum novels I’d been hooked on at the time.

      Anne Rice turned the world upside down with her vampire series. She brought us face-to-face with what makes us different and forced us to confront it in captivating stories, and influenced a generation of writers who followed her to dive deeper in their own work. Here are five more quotes that stir and bolster and inspire:

      “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

      “To write something you have to risk making a fool of yourself.”

      “You do have a story inside you; it lies articulate and waiting to be written — behind your silence and your suffering.”

      “And books, they offer one hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.” – from Blackwood Farm

      “And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually… it doesn’t matter. Because if God does not exist, then life… every second of it… Is all we have.” – from Interview with the Vampire

    • Memorable Moments

      Mingling at a gathering of the vaccinated recently, I got into a conversation with a person of a certain age similar to mine about the art of living. It began with the talk of regional travel and places we’d each been in the northeast—a topic I can get behind—and eventually moved on to what you do when you’re in those random places. And I brought up the one line a day journal and my habit of searching for waterfalls and other such beautiful or historically relevant places nearby. The land whispers, if we only learn to listen. Life is richer when you become a good listener.

      This act of writing one line per day has served me well, and I can stray towards evangelism on the topic when I’m not careful. Not everyone wants to be reminded to find something memorable in their daily lives. In those moments you can either revert back to being a good listener with a few neutral life questions and wait for the coffee to be served or find something interesting to mine from that conversation. Every soul has a story to tell should you listen for it.

      Life is more interesting when you’re a collector of memorable moments. Finding something unique in every waking day is one way to saunter through life with the blinders off. What shall that one line be? Four meetings and chicken for dinner? Or changing into your boots and walking down a snowy gorge to find falling water using minutes brazenly stolen from the ordinary?

      Everyone has their own idea of what makes a moment memorable. It’s our responsibility to ourselves to make something of our time. Why waste it doing the same thing we did yesterday? Make it stand out from the rest in some meaningful way. Small talk at a cocktail party offers its own opportunity to expand beyond the ordinary, if done well.

      It’s entirely possible that I bored my audience to tears at that party. Then again, they might have been inspired to begin their own daily habit of writing down one memorable moment that very day… beginning with an entry about the odd character who inspired a small change before disappearing into the line for coffee, never to be seen again.

    • Reaching Your Creative State

      “Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the work; acquire that state of soul unburdened by desire and self-will which is the state of grace of the intellectual worker. Without that you will do nothing, at least nothing worth while.”
      – A.G. Sertillanges, O.P. The Intellectual Life

      Every day is a reinvention, a chance to be reborn into whatever you wish to become in this life. For me, this becoming is the whole point of living. But it begs the question—becoming what? Not an easy question, one most people immerse themselves in distraction to avoid answering (present company accepted). Blogging is a public sorting of this becoming bit. The messier work happens behind the scenes.

      When you have a general idea where your compass is pointing, you must put yourself in a state where you might execute on that vision for yourself. And this is where it gets tricky. All those skills you’ve learned to distract yourself from figuring out what you want to be when you grow up work equally well at keeping you from getting things done.

      “Creative people organize their lives according to repetitive, disciplined routines. They think like artists but work like accountants.” – David Brooks, “The Good Order” The New York Times

      And there lies the secret sauce to doing anything worthwhile: Repetitive, disciplined routines applied daily from now until… ad infinitum. Sertillanges calls this productive place your state of soul. A place where we can actualize the spirit of our deepest work and bring it to the world. What a gift. When you’re in this state, why would you ever want it to end?

      The trick to reaching this state of soul is hidden in plain sight: Establish routines and have the discipline to stick with them. Repeat. None of this is revelatory, what’s required is consistency of effort. So get to it. The world awaits your best work.

    • What Shapes Us

      All that passes descends,
      and ascends again unseen
      into the light: the river
      coming down from sky
      to hills, from hills to sea,
      and carving as it moves,
      to rise invisible,
      gathered to light, to return
      again. “The river’s injury
      is its shape.” I’ve learned no more.
      We are what we are given
      and what is taken away;
      blessed be the name
      of the giver and taker.
      For everything that comes
      is a gift, the meaning always
      carried out of sight
      to renew our whereabouts,
      always a starting place.
      And every gift is perfect
      in its beginning, for it
      is “from above, and cometh down
      from the Father of lights.”
      Gravity is grace.
      – Wendell Berry, The Gift of Gravity

      Splitting firewood over the weekend, I swung the axe down upon a log with a previous split running partially down the oak fibers. The axe shattered the log into three pieces, one of which flew directly into my shin just below my right knee. Ouch! Of course it was the right leg–its never the left leg that gets injured. The list of “gifts” is long: Broken leg (car), sprained ankle (basalt), bruised heel (beach), torn calf (crosswalk) and a previous shin injury (steel pole on a wet deck) that looked like a second knee all assaulted the right leg. The left? Blissfully spared such assaults. By comparison this latest incident was just a small bruise and another story to tell.

      We all work to make sense of the gifts we’re given, welcome or not, they shape us. We’re molded by the world, branded by others, given a big break now and again, twisted by fate, fallen in love and gutted by loss. Our shape is our injury, accumulated over a lifetime.

      It’s not just injuries that shape us, but travel and poetry and great books and a song at just the right moment, by quiet persistence and chance encounters and dumb luck. In quiet moments I linger on conversations I had years ago with people I haven’t spoken with since. The way I see the world, phrases that I use to this day, all came as a gift from a place long ago, silt and debris carried in the current of my life and washing over others before continuing onward to eternity. We carry more than we ever realize, and reveal it to the world one small splash at a time.

      A blog is accretive. We observe the world and the gifts we receive–like a snippet from a long Wendell Berry poem–turn them in our minds and release them to wash over others. Some make an impact, most flow unobserved to eternity. Such is the way.

    • Creating Something, Daily

      “All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.” – John Ruskin

      The great thing about writing every morning is that feeling of creating something out of nothing. Reinforcing long term habits you once told yourself you ought to have with a little discipline. Discovering new things and figuring out a bit of yourself one post at a time. Blogging is similar to painting every day and sticking the finished work in the barn. Every now and then someone actually sees what you produced, but mostly you do it for yourself.

      When you think about it, could it be any other way? We are all in the business of creating our better selves. Bloggers just document it for the world to see.

      There are other “ought to” habits I should get better at. I ought to optimize the site to make it easier for people to follow. I ought to be more active in following and liking the work of the wonderful people who follow me. I ought to stick with popular topics that get a lot of attention, things like fitness and travel. But it’s more likely that I’ll continue to write about whatever strikes my fancy, which lends itself to finding more interesting things in this world through travel and reading and putting myself out there a bit more than I might have otherwise.

      Writing became my most consistent habit over the last four years. That pleases me, but no more than the artist who places those paintings in the barn. You might look back on them now and then, but you move on to making new babies. The act of creating every day, and seeing where you might bring yourself next, is why we write. Maybe one day you’ll take all that art out of the barn and do something with it, but the analogy stops there. In blogging you’ve already let it fly.

    • Promises to Keep, Promises Kept

      “Whose woods these are I think I know.
      His house is in the village though;
      He will not see me stopping here
      To watch his woods fill up with snow.

      My little horse must think it queer
      To stop without a farmhouse near
      Between the woods and frozen lake
      The darkest evening of the year.

      He gives his harness bells a shake
      To ask if there is some mistake.
      The only other sound’s the sweep
      Of easy wind and downy flake.

      The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
      But I have promises to keep,
      And miles to go before I sleep,
      And miles to go before I sleep.”
      — Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

      You can’t really live in New Hampshire without hearing the echo of Robert Frost in every stand of trees or old stone fence. I could drive to his old farm in fifteen minutes give or take, should I be inclined to. Some days I’m inclined to. But like so many things, not nearly enough.

      I woke up in the middle of the night with this poem running through my head. It’s been awhile since it’s lingered there, or if it had it didn’t bother to wake me from my slumber. Maybe it’s the cold days and the pleasant thought of woods silently filling with snow that seized my attention. But no, I should think it was the many promises to keep that are waking me in the middle of the night.

      That’s it: promises to keep. Big projects due this week that occupy my mind, and things left undone in my life that nag at me, so much more than the things done in my life that I don’t give myself enough credit for. It’s funny how the promises to keep are so much louder in our heads than the promises kept. We are our own worst critics, aren’t we? But after running through the promises I broke to myself that kept me awake I began listing the ones I kept, and eventually drifted back to sleep.

      To borrow from another Frost poem written in nearby woods, that made all the difference.

    • Thoughts on Get Back

      You and I have memories
      Longer than the road that stretches out ahead
      – John Lennon/Paul McCartney, Two of Us

      Watching close to eight hours of the creative process as The Beatles hash through two album’s worth of material in the Disney+ series Get Back was fascinating and informative. Fascinating as a lifetime Beatles fan watching these four guys work through songs you know by heart from the first basic notes to the arrival at magical songs that became so essential to your own life’s soundtrack. Let It Be and Abbey Road songs developed before your eyes and ears. Informative as you see four guys on the edge of breaking up, still pushing through with the work.

      They knew who they were. The Beatles were the biggest band in the world, the biggest band that ever was, and they recognized that what they released mattered a great deal. That must in turn be both an enormous burden and a cattle prod to get to it already. But then you had this other dynamic at work, with each of them building their own lives, four egos growing increasingly independent of each other. Paul deeply involved and at his peak creatively, pushing for more contribution from the rest of the Beatles. John nonchalant and locked in on the ever-present Yoko. George rising to a higher level and chafing at John and especially Paul’s perceived dismissiveness. Ringo showing up early, ready to go, watching things falling apart and trying to be the glue that kept it together just long enough.

      And then they started playing music preparing for their live rooftop concert. Originally it was going to be an indoor affair, maybe even some exotic location, but they wouldn’t have anything to do with that. They were tired and weren’t going to leave the country for a show, nor were they going to do the same old thing they’d done before. There was a captured moment when they told Paul about the rooftop idea and his eyes lit up, “That’s it!” all over his face.

      Growing up with The Beatles larger than life, you tend to stick each of these four young men into a bucket, representing something in your mind. But each turned out to be much more than you thought they were. Get Back reminds you of this. They were just four guys with a special chemistry that became a force of nature. And you see that as they jam together, mastering the new songs and plucking old ones out to play. Playing music together is when they rose to be The Beatles again. And the room filled with joy.

      They had memories that were longer than the road that stretched out ahead. Together for over 14 years at that point, they were about to break up and go their separate ways, still competing and trying to one-up each other for years to come. But John would be dead in just less than 12 years. This was their famous final scene as a band, something the viewer knows all along. We find ourselves wishing they’d snap out of it and focus on the work a bit more. Squeeze just a little more brilliance out of their time together. But in the end celebrating what they did give us.

      And maybe turning a bit of the spotlight back on yourself, recognizing that you could be producing more too. For if there’s a lesson in Get Back, it’s that even the most brilliant magic starts off as an awkward tune in your head. Put yourself into the work and see what grows from it.