Alexandersmap

    Tag: Arete

    • The Steady Ascent

      “The main reason to produce something every day is that you must throw away a lot of good work to reach the good stuff. To let it all go easily, you need to be convinced that there is ‘more where that came from’. You get that in steady production.”
      — Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living

      Amusement parks may have Lightning Pass lanes, and tourist attractions may have a “Skip the Line” scheme (there’s always a line, it’s just a little shorter), but the work that we produce in a lifetime has no such option. Getting to the good stuff isn’t accomplished without putting in the time.

      Sure, I hear the call of Artificial Intelligence (AI) filling the gap between apprenticeship and mastery. Maybe research and first drafts don’t have to be so tedious. But there are lessons in the grind, and the willing student reaches wisdom not found in AI efficiency.

      The Mona Lisa wasn’t painted in a couple of days. Leonardo da Vinci carried that portrait with him for the rest of his life, adding touches, refining the work, ignoring it and coming back to it. It was never really completed before he passed, it simply reached its final state of being. That state happens to be masterful; A pet project that became the most famous painting in the world.

      Writing every day is sometimes a grind, but it teaches and informs the writer. We may publish regularly or be forever polishing our master work. Unlike our friend da Vinci, we ought to ship our work regularly, that we may move on to something else. The good stuff is earned daily. The great stuff is just over the next rise, awaiting our ascent. If we keep climbing.

    • Collecting Evidence

      “I don’t know what that means. To truly live.’
      Kongo paused again, his eyes wandering to the walls of the cave, to the blackness at the far end.
      ‘To find work that you love, and work harder than other men. To learn the languages of the earth, and love the sounds of the words and the things they describe. To love food and music and drink. Fully love them. To love weather, and storms, and the smell of rain. To love heat. To love cold. To love sleep and dreams. To love the newness of each day.”
      ― Pete Hamill, Forever

      If you’ve never read Forever by Pete Hamill, consider it worthy of your time. I wander back to it now and then, when I think of Cormac and Thunder leaping towards their destiny in the New World. I have no business re-reading it now, with so many books awaiting my attention, and yet it found me again anyway.

      How do we live? The proof will unfold daily, in our choices. It’s in who we reach out to and how we react to our awareness of the world’s general indifference to us. We are here to master the self, not the universe. Personal excellence, that old friend Arete, will always be just over that next rise in the hill. Never fully realized. And yet we may live and grow and become something more profound than who we’ve started our day with.

      Indeed, this day is entirely new. And ours to perhaps fully embrace or maybe waste in our usual offhand way. “The proof will be in your living”, Kongo later says in that enchanting chapter of that magical novel that I keep returning to now and again. And indeed, life unfolds thusly. What will we look back on one day, thinking of today’s climb? May the newness of this day provoke us to collect evidence of a worthy ascent.

    • Call It Inspiration

      “The composer does not sit around and wait for an inspiration to walk up and introduce itself…Making music is actually little else than a matter of invention aided and abetted by emotion. In composing we combine what we know of music with what we feel.” — George Gershwin

      I once wrestled with time. Once I called it time management, and then productivity, and maybe a few other names along the way. The way itself is time, and within it, we produce something or we do not. It was never really time at all, it was how we use our lives. And how we use our lives is who we are, and who we will become, and how we will be remembered one day.

      That’s a lot of wrestling.

      Perhaps that effort is better applied towards discovery. I write every day to discover what will stroll into the room next. We go back and forth a bit, I takes notes as quickly as I can, and the muse exits once again. Who saw that coming? And thanks for the, uh, time.

      Yesterday I finished a delightful book I’d never have read but for the fact that I said yes to it at the exclusion of a lot of great options I said no to. And then I immediately started reading another. The more books we read, the less we’re staring at a screen. That seems like a great trade-off to me. What does that have to do with productivity? Everything. And nothing at all.

      All that we do in our lives is derived from the experiences we make for ourselves. Writing, reading, travel, work, coexisting with these characters in our lives… it all accumulates into something larger than where we began this journey. And growth is where it’s at, friend. We are alive, and life is forever growing into something more than we started as. Just keep heading towards the light, wherever it takes us. Call it inspiration if it helps.

    • Our One Passenger

      “To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” — Henri Bergson

      We are not who we once were. We come to know this, and either work to reject the premise or accept that change for all it represents. The former is rather sad in the end (when the truth catches up to us), the latter may be sad initially, until we move on to the next. Replaying our greatest hits (and misses) simply chains us to a standard that no longer exists. And none of us want to be the person making a fool of themselves (even if we’re pretty good at it).

      The trick is to be young at heart and vibrant to the end, but also wise beyond our years. How do we balance this? I believe it’s by being active: To be fit and moving kicks that old body we’ll grow into down the curb for as long as possible. To forever be a student of life keeps the mind engaged and growing. The dream is a body, mind and soul that is sharp and in peak form for whatever age we find ourselves at. When we are at our best we open up the best possibilities available to us here and now. Surely that is something to aspire to.

      How does this look in practice? Instead of dwelling on what once was or what will never be, look at the progress made. Growth is easy to see when we are aware of the distance we’ve come. It’s an ever-expanding catalog of books read and re-read, experiences savored or sometimes simply survived. It’s the expanding menu of foods, languages, hobbies and pursuits accumulated over a lifetime.

      I may not be a golfer, but I’ve played enough golf to delight in a great shot and laugh at myself for a horrible shank. I may never master French or German, but I’ve gone down the path of learning each language. I may never eat fermented shark fin again in my lifetime, but I’ve lived to tell the tale. Those hikes gone terribly wrong? Survived those too, and laugh as I cringe thinking about some of them. It’s all accumulated into who I’ve become, even as it isn’t who I am.

      It’s all our endless creation—until the end. We may be as creative as we wish to be in the pursuit. Not to dwell on the highlights and low points, but to build a better vessel. It’s all ours and nobody else’s. We are one of a kind, forever reinvented for the delight of our one passenger. Knowing how far we’ve come, we may have our courage bolstered for the journey ahead.

    • A Higher Standard

      “The people they want to ingratiate themselves with, and the results, and the things they do in the process. How quickly it will all be erased by time. How much has been erased already.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

      It’s easy to get caught up in the madness in the world. The evil-doers and the zealots and the profiteers. What are they but a constant flow of distraction and detraction drowning us in nonsense? We must build a resilient mind that shrugs off the insults and affronts. We are here for greater things than a circus clown show.

      Knowing this, what are we waiting for? Why succumb to such distraction when time is growing short? A higher standard awaits us still.

    • Release It

      “Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.” — William James

      We marvel at those who are exceptional in their pursuits. Those who reach the pinnacle of achievement are rare and fascinating to behold. We can rattle off their names, envision them rising to meet their greatest moments, and wonder at how much more we humans can achieve. That many of them are flawed in other aspects of their lives offers some reassurance that nobody is perfect. We all have crosses to bear, after all, but just look at how they soar when they leave it behind.

      Naturally, this gets us thinking about what we’re doing with our own unlimited potential. Mostly we try to get through the day, hoping the commute home isn’t too bad. To reach for personal excellence (arete) seems just out of reach. But that’s where arete is meant to be.

      We aren’t meant to ever reach perfection, we are here to climb as close to it as we may, given the limitations of a lifetime. That doesn’t make the ascent less worthy—it makes our daily excuses all the more tragic.

      Please release me, let me go
      For I don’t love you anymore
      To waste our lives would be a sin
      Release me and let me love again
      — Engelbert Humperdinck, Release Me

      (Isn’t it crazy what resides within us, yearning to be released? Some things must be released as quickly as possible. Sorry, Engelbert.)

      So what are we to do? Do what the legends of our time do: put aside our burden of excuses and focus the available time and energy that release frees up towards that which makes us shine in a world that would otherwise be darker without our excellence. Whatever that is. It’s struggling to emerge from the weight of our excuses. Release it already.

    • Gathering Towards

      “Your soul is the priestess of memory, selecting, sifting, and ultimately gathering your vanishing days toward presence.”
      — John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

      If all that we’ve experienced has brought us to here and now, and we are the sum of each of these days, it follows that whatever days we have left ahead of us are destined to be gathered as well. So why not raise the bar with heightened experience, greater expectations of ourselves, and a healthier approach to living? Awareness is seeing all that is, but also all that could be.

      Thinking in possibilities is optimistic. It’s the dreamer within, imagining best possible outcomes. We all need to follow a dream, but we also need to root ourselves in reality. The better approach may be to also think in probabilities. Probabilities are calculated. They’re pragmatic. They’re based on facts. Now I know facts are funny things nowadays, but it turns out they still work in the real world of moving ourselves from here to there.

      To design a life, we ought to begin with the end in mind. Not the very end, but the desired outcome of this particular phase of our lives. We may think of our lives as a series of projects that we bring to conclusion. These projects define us and build our CV (Curriculum Vitae), qualifying us for even more ambitious projects. A career, a soul, our physical fitness, education and relationships with others and ourselves are built from all that we gather in each phase of our life. Drift too much in any one area and we see that area suffer.

      This is where awareness comes in handy. We learn to see the gaps forming in our lives, and to formulate plans to fill them. If one plan doesn’t work, try another, and another still. What is the probable outcome of establishing a better fitness and nutrition routine today and every day? What is the probable outcome of reading at least ten pages of a great book every day? What is the probable outcome of putting the damned phone down and being fully present with that person we’re talking to?

      We are each either climbing towards personal excellence (arete) or sliding away from it. Yes, we are the sum of our days, but that one step forward or those two steps back don’t define us, it’s simply where we are starting from as we begin our next day’s climb. Every act gathers us towards some outcome. What shall it be?

    • It’s Our Time Now

      “The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?” — Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

      The end of the Winter Olympics brought with it the usual mixed feelings. On the one hand, there’s a glow from witnessing the pursuit of excellence that inspires and stimulates one’s own pursuit of arete. When we see elite athletes performing at a high level, it’s natural to ask what in the world we’re doing with our own precious life.

      The answer, friend, is the best that we can given the circumstances. We are on our own path of discovery. We are on our own climb to better. We may celebrate the excellence of others, but don’t dare to compare, for we know that comparison is the death of joy.

      The end of the Olympics also releases us from watching them, that we may go forth and do our own thing once again. We are in the business of optimization of the self, first and foremost, because that’s who we’ve got to spend the rest of this lifetime with. So take stock of what’s working and keep moving in that direction, but surely, also make note of what’s not working and begin to reinvent, remove and restore accordingly. For it’s our time now.

    • Bringing Ourselves to Life

      It’s hard not to notice the connection between habits and momentum. Do something once and nothing much happens. Do something every day and it gradually manifests into identity. We simply become what we do over and over.

      Every time I think I’m going to shelve this daily blog to focus on something else, I think about the streak that I would break. Sure, missing one day of thousands isn’t the end of the world (and let’s face it, it will happen one day), but it’s the end of a streak. And with it some incremental bit of identity would go with it. So it is with the things we do. They become us, and we become them.

      This year is almost two months old, and already there are trends. Forget about politics or the weather, I’m referring to the things that we can control. How many books will we read this year? How much money will we make, or invest? Where is our momentum carrying our fitness and health? Are we seeing intellectual growth or decline though the actions we take today and each day? Habits are the compound interest of identity.

      I write this knowing there’s work to be done on my own habits, even as I celebrate the fruits of some habits that manifest themselves in what appears to be good fortune. Sometimes we are lucky, no doubt, but mostly we move in the direction determined by our daily actions. So do something positive today, and then repeat it tomorrow. And then try to keep the streak alive.

      Simple, right? Life has a way of blowing up our greatest plans. But we can’t worry about all that life will bring to us, all we can do is act today to bring ourselves to life. Momentum will never develop without a start. We’re all writing our story, one day to the next. Take interest in what compounds, for it becomes our story in the end.

    • To Be, Well

      “Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do.
      Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you.
      Sanity means tying it to your own actions.”
      —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

      With respect to the folks who are spun up about the latest offensive thing happening in the world, the thing that matters most to our well-being is what we can control ourselves. And what we can control is our actions. So it follows that we must be bold in facing the day!

      Our choices may not seem like the thing that moves the world, but our choices move our world. We have the agency to choose how we react, and we have the agency to act. Reaction and action are change agents. We change and grow based on how well we leverage these agents in our lives.

      Our well-being is largely a lagging indicator of the choices we’ve made to this point. Make better choices and life improves. Make no decisions and we may expect that things will remain as they always have been, but this is folly. Everything changes and we must be decisive in steering our lives where we want it to go. Ignore the call to action and opportunity slips away. Fortune, after all, favors the bold.

      Our climb to personal excellence is full of choices. Each day we may choose to worry about what others think or feel about us. Every day we may think of nothing but ourselves, and one day wonder where everybody went. Or we can look around, see the changes that need to happen to build a life of excellence. We may choose each day to do what must be done to be, well. In the end, isn’t that the only logical choice?