Alexandersmap

    Tag: Arete

    • A Win For the Day

      “The vast possibilities of our great future will become realities only if we make ourselves responsible for that future.” — Gifford Pinchot

      I was pondering a different quote than the one above, one by John Wooden, who said, “Make each day your masterpiece.” I think we’d all love to make a masterpiece, but find most days the end product is somewhere closer to good enough. Maybe that’s why there are so few masters in any field. That singularity of purpose is exceedingly rare.

      I believe Wooden meant to raise our personal standard. When we hold ourselves to a standard of excellence, we may not exceed that standard, but we may get far closer to it than we otherwise would have. String enough of those days together and we’re really on to something.

      The thing is, we know most of that talk is great for a motivational poster on the break room wall, but it doesn’t mean a thing unless we internalize it and make it our own. We either raise our standard or we opt for something less for ourselves. Whether that’s comfort or laziness or distraction, something pulls us down from reaching excellence most days. But maybe today we can see some incremental improvement and call that a win for the day.

      When I write about arete, or personal excellence, it’s not some fluffy self-motivational expression, it’s a reminder to try a little harder today. As adults, we must be responsible for our own development and do a little better at the things we do today, and then stretch even further tomorrow. And see where it takes us. It can’t help but be somewhere better than the place we started.

    • The Precious Hour

      “To fill the hour—that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

      To win the hour is to advance. To waste it is the proverbial two steps back. We grow forward or we recede backwards into a lesser version of ourselves. Stack enough wins together and we have the makings of a great day—and a great life.

      As time goes, nothing is worth more to me than the first hour of the day. If I don’t use it properly, the rest of the morning feels rushed or incomplete. What is proper? Using the mind before the day steals my attention. Writing and reading something worthy of the precious hour.

      My bride is still asleep when that first precious hour ends. Her productive time is later, when my energy begins to wain. And she’s still going strong well after I’m ready to call it a night. We all have our time when we feel most effective. We all know our limitations, even if we won’t always admit them to ourselves.

      We’ve heard it many times: we each have the same 24 hours to work with. Making good life choices for each may create an amazing day. Making really bad choices can certainly ruin it. We are the sum of our decisions and the discipline we bring to each hour. It will all fly past us if we aren’t more deliberate with how we use the time. Tempus fugit. Carpe diem.

      For me the 13th hour is when I begin to stumble into the questionable. I may eat nutritious food, exercise, do focused and meaningful work and be a good companion to my fellow travelers on this ship of fools we call the present. But then I get mentally lazy, snack on junk food, maybe wash it down with a drink, scroll social media and allow that to stir feelings of anger or envy. All of it wastes that hour, and may leave a lasting impression on the other 23.

      The trick is not just to make the most of our best hour, but to raise the standard for our worst. One good hour won’t make or break a lifetime, but it can certainly put us on the right path. There are 8,760 hours in a year (leaving those leap years aside). That’s way too many to focus on, but we don’t get to skip ahead anyway. It’s fair to ask more of ourselves in each hour to come if we wish to reach a higher level of personal excellence than we reached previously. Raising our average begins with expecting more of ourselves in our best and worst hours. And of course, that begins with this one. Make it precious.

    • Godlike

      “The struggle of life is one of our greatest blessings. It makes us patient, sensitive, and Godlike. It teaches us that although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”
      ― Helen Keller

      We are not the sum of the best of our days any more than we are the sum of the worst of them. We are shaped by all that we encounter, and we are either frail or toughen in the face of it all. Choose a path to greater resilience, challenging as it may be.

      The thing we forget sometimes on our best days is that we’ll struggle through really bad days too. To press on, learning and growing and finding a way to become that something or someone we set out to be is a hero’s journey. Hero’s naturally run into a few obstacles along the way. It’s not meant to be a casual stroll through the garden.

      To be Godlike is audacious, but also aspirational. It’s a decision to reach closer to personal excellence, our old friend Arete, despite our human shortcomings. We will never get all the way there, and yet we may get closer. So toughen up buttercup—we have places to go and things to do.

    • Always Mine Time

      “When I paint a picture, the time it takes will always be mine, or I get something out of it; time doesn’t end because it has passed. I feel sick when I think about the days that are passing—interminably. And I don’t have anything, or I can’t get at it. It’s torture; I can get so furious that I have to pace the floor and sing something idiotic so that I won’t start crying with rage, and then I almost go crazy when I stop again and realize that meanwhile time has been passing, and is passing while I’m thinking, and keeps on passing and passing. There is nothing so wretched as being an artist.” — Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

      When we stumble across that which captures our move through time, traps it in amber as Vonnegut put it, we realize the infinite—that which is timeless. Timelessness is itself an illusion, as is time, we simply capture our passage through it with something that will outlast us.

      Do you doubt this? Look at an old photograph from a moment in the past and feel what stirs within. Read an old letter, when people still wrote those, and see what is captured in amber. I write this blog post, as with all the rest of them, knowing that once I hit publish it becomes always mine time—this moment of thought and emotion and intellectual momentum (or perhaps inertia) are now captured. I move on to the next thing in my day, and the next; passing and passing. What of the rest is captured? Precious little, but these words remain.

      What artist hasn’t felt swept up in the moment of creation? What artist hasn’t felt the emptiness of uncreative moments? We must be productive in our time, or watch it drift away like so many empty days. The only answer to the coldness of time is to do work that matters, and to strive towards mastery in it. Personal excellence (arete) may be forever out of reach, but to reach for it is to make something more out of… time.

    • Applied Exuberance

      “He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.” — William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

      “Exuberance is Beauty.” — William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

      I write for creative expression (no shocker there), and also for the realization of a desire to write. To honor Mr. Harding’s proclamation in front of the entire class that I would be a writer one day while reacting to a bit of prose about balloons I’d handed in for an assignment in class. I don’t remember the names of most of my teachers in my K-12 education, but I will always remember Mr. Harding. Years have flown by since that slightly embarrassing, highly thrilling moment. I believe Mr. Harding would be pleased with my development as a human, but he’d likely wonder when I was going to finish the hero’s journey he set me out on that day long ago.

      Journeys happen at their own pace. I’m a late bloomer and an early riser. That means I always feel two steps behind and eager to get a good start to the day to try to catch up to where I perceive the rest of the world already is. Looking around, I know this is largely an illusion, but it’s a useful story to tell myself anyway. I’m farther along in my development than I otherwise would be. Still, there’s so much more to do.

      There’s a trendy movement on social media called “5 to 9 before 9 to 5“ that must be popular for me to have heard about it at all (so intently do I follow trends on social media). It’s simply a clever phrase for what many of us have been doing for years: lean into meaningful productivity early in the day, before the world wakes up and drags us into its agenda. Create, exercise, read, meditate, pray… whatever wins the early hours helps us win the day. The early bird gets the worm. Nothing new here, just great marketing of a great concept I happen to subscribe to. Tempus fugit. Carpe diem.

      The thing is, our days get away from us pretty quickly. The modern world wants us outraged, medicated, subscribed to multiple streaming services and dutifully paying our taxes. We must wrestle back our time if we wish to accomplish anything we truly desire. If we dare to strive for personal excellence (Arete), we must act, and carve out time for ourselves to do it. Exuberance, like excellence, isn’t reached by going through the motions. So we must apply ourselves to the task. Hurry now: for our time is flying by.

    • Walls Be Damned

      “Art may only exist, and the artist may only evolve, by completing the work.” — Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

      I was reading some poetry, thinking that maybe I’d include it in today’s blog, and each poem spoke to me reluctantly—’tis not our day to be turned about in your precious blog. I know a cold shoulder when I encounter one. We must never force the issue, for we’d all know the truth of the matter soon enough. Some days we must simply work our way through our walls without the dance of poetry and song to light our way.

      Ideas come easy. It’s the work to realize them that is difficult. Writing every day is a form of paying penance to the muse, but also a ritual of doing what I said I was going to do, if only for this hour or two before the day washes over me. Excellence is a habit—right Aristotle? Well, this work in progress aspires towards excellence, as we all should in our pursuits, even knowing we will fall short. Ah yes: short, but ever closer. That’s the thing, friend.

      Having completed a blog, having clicked publish, the muse feels satiated and the pressure is off until tomorrow morning, when it will press upon me yet again. But there are other stories to tell, deferred indefinitely. Will those stories pass with me one day, or will I finally bring them to light? That’s the curse of the creative mind, knowing there’s more to tell, but for more time. The only answer is to just do the work—walls be damned. For our time together is only so long, and there’s so very much to bring to light.

    • A Sense of Progress

      “One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress.” — Daniel Kahneman

      “My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there” — Charles Kettering

      This writer’s near-constant focus on improvement is simply a reminder to keep going towards the things that we can control. Sure; momento mori, but before that, we ought to have something to look forward to. A sense of progress is essential to our well-being. We’re all heading towards something, and we’d like to think it’s something better than everything that surrounds us now. Better health. Better relationships with others. Better options for how we spend a random Friday night. Focusing on one thing we may improve upon leads us to better in that thing. Expand that improvement to a few things, and maybe we can feel some positive momentum developing.

      The world may feel like a hot mess right now, and really, there are compelling reasons to feel that way. We cannot control most of what is happening, but we should raise our voice when we can influence the trajectory. How we treat others, and how we treat ourselves, matters more than we realize in any given moment. Ripples project from the center, but they also interact with other ripples. So we must always strive for that evasive personal excellence (arete), knowing that it’s not something that stays bottled up in our core, but is something that projects outward towards others, raising the standard for each of us.

      The thing is, we tend to become what we focus on. When we focus on the steady decline of society, we become fearful and mistrustful, which perpetuates, well, the decline of society. When we focus on developing new skills and our overall fitness, we realize incremental improvements that lead us to a higher level of performance. This in turn may transform our belief in the state of things from pessimistic to optimistic. Applying that positive force on building bridges and lighting beacons of hope may just transform others along the way.

      One twist in our belief for the future may just spritz a little joy into an otherwise methodically-dismal life designed by the doom cycle trolls. Indeed, we’re collectively heading towards the very thing we focus on the most. We ought to set the compass accordingly. Make some progress today—towards something better. It makes a world of difference.

    • True Before You

      I want to unfold.
      Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent;
      for there I would be dishonest, untrue.
      I want my conscience to be
      true before you;
      want to describe myself like a picture I observed
      for a long time, one close up,
      like a new word I learned and embraced,
      like the everday jug,
      like my mother’s face,
      like a ship that carried me along
      through the deadliest storm.
      — Rainer Maria Rilke, I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone

      One need not be religious to reach for the divine. We may aspire for a level of consciousness and growth that prods us along on our journey through life, reaching ever-higher towards something more than this. Arete, or personal excellence, is a human aspiration for the divine, for which we know we’ll fall short. But reaching for it is the thing.

      We have this one shot at things. We’re told that if we do it right once is enough. It’s the doing it right part that’s the trick. What’s right for you may not be right for me. Life is a deadly storm with no survivors. To know this and still set the sails for a journey of a lifetime is audacious and liberating. Decide what to be and go be it.

      Truth is discovered through awareness and a ritual of keeping the blinders off. It’s cleaning the hazy film off the mirror and having a closer look. Truth is something that unfolds before us. We write it down, think it through, move towards something more visceral. Repeat. That’s where this writer has lingered lately (as if you had to be told). With every blank screen, with every word pondered and debated (Is this too much truth?) Just where are we taking this? How close to the truth do we dare to go anyway?

      If that sounds too serious and self-absorbed, well, believe me, I think so too. Blogging is simply the laying of breadcrumbs along this path of discovery. We’re on our way to find out. Have a laugh at the imperfections even as we strive for some measure of improvement. We’re all doing the best we can given the spoiler of how it all ends. That, friends, is the truth.

    • That Ain’t Us

      Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
      There’s still time to change the road you’re on
      — Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven

      We forget sometimes that change is dynamic. We make choices, live with the consequences and if we are lucky, get to react to the changes they bring to pivot when appropriate. Or simply double down on the road we’re on now.

      Decide what to be and go be it. If we don’t like being that character, change into someone entirely new. We get to re-write the script again and again in a lifetime, unless we really screw up. Choices, like changes, are incremental. We rarely reach a path of no return. We simply find that returning to who we once were isn’t all that appealing anymore.

      Having reached a place I recently aspired to be at, I have decisions to make once again: Go by the same path I’m currently on or try something new. New is often our best bet. We may take the best of what’s working and build a new path with that skillset and curated stack of good habits. This is how we all learn and grow and evolve towards our potential, by forging a new path with the best we’ve picked up along the way. And those things that don’t fit this new version of us can stay on the path behind us, because that ain’t us anymore.

    • Do Hard Things

      “All great and precious things are lonely.” — John Steinbeck

      Do hard things. This must be our mindset if we are to move forward on our journey to personal excellence (Arete). Opting for easy is a path to average. We’ve all been on that path enough already and know where it leads. It may be comfortable for a long time, but it doesn’t satiate a restless soul. We must learn and grow and become what we decided to be in the time we have while managing the circumstances we’re allotted. There is always a reason not to be bold.

      What is great and precious? We know it when we imagine it for ourselves. Finishing a marathon or writing a novel may be great and precious, but each comes with a heavy price in time and effort (writing anything using an AI hack is not great nor precious, it’s inherently average). We must learn to do the work, and learn to be lonely in the work. It’s the price of greatness that must be paid out every day.

      This summer I’ve had many excuses to just stay the course on my previous fitness lifestyle. Walk a bit, row occasionally, ease off of the carbohydrates and drink in moderation. Those lifestyle choices brought me to where I was back in June when I pivoted into a mental toughness program to blow up the old routine and begin anew. Today is the last day of that program, but not really. Once we strengthen our resolve to do hard things, we begin to look for more hard things to do beyond where we’ve arrived.

      What is lonely about pursing personal excellence? It’s the jabs from friends and family when we say no to what we once said yes to. It’s setting off on a workout or stepping away to write or read or otherwise do the work that must be done instead of having a beer and talking about the state of the world. Early on, when our new habits are young and fragile, it takes an “F you” attitude to overcome the doubts and casual pressure to just make an exception this one time. Mental toughness is developed in the trenches of mind games within our trusted and well-meaning circle of influence.

      The thing is, 75 hard was never a fitness program, even as it leads to greater physical fitness. It’s about eliminating the excuse cycle from our mindset and developing a bias towards action in all audacious and meaningful things. 75 days later, I’m neither great nor precious, but I’m closer to arete than I was before I started. Lifestyle choices don’t really end, they simply evolve in time. We begin to ask ourselves, if we can finish this, just what can we do next? Decide what to be next and go be it.