Alexandersmap

    Tag: Carpe Diem

    • This Little Spark

      “You’ve got to be crazy. It’s too late to be sane. Too late. You’ve got to go full-tilt bozo. ‘Cause you’re only given a little spark of madness, and if you lose that, you’re nothing. Note, from me to you. Don’t ever lose that cause it keeps you alive” — Robin Williams, Come Inside My Mind

      What keeps us alive is more than air and water and food. What keeps us alive is adventure and mischief, discovery and creative output, deep thoughts and thrilling moments. Aliveness is captured energy in the moment before it moves on to the next vehicle. We’re all just batteries holding on to energy for some amount of time before we concede it to the next generation. We ought to use that little spark for exhilaration in our time.

      Batteries are drawn down in time, but they can also be recharged. I’m plunging into cold water again. Two days in a row, and for as many as I can string together until the water warms up enough that it’s no longer a cold water plunge. And my goodness, how I’ve missed the adrenaline high though all of this orange-tinted darkness of the world. To hell with the darkness. We must do the things that bring us energy, and hold the line for light and being.

      As Robin Williams once reminded us in a memorable character, carpe diem! Seize the day! We only have this one go at things. So go! We can all do our own version of full-tilt bozo, making memorable in this gift of a life. What’s the alternative? We’ll rest soon enough.

    • Floating Off the Edge

      “Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.” — Max Ehrmann, Desiderata

      May your hands always be busy
      May your feet always be swift
      May you have a strong foundation
      When the winds of changes shift
      May your heart always be joyful
      May your song always be sung
      May you stay forever young
      — Bob Dylan, Forever Young

      I rewatched The Last Waltz last night, secure in the knowledge that I could turn up the volume as loudly as I wanted to with my bride on the other side of the country (she may still have heard it playing). I was struck by how young each of the performers were. Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Neil Diamond, Emmylou Harris, and even Director Martin Scorsese—they all looked like kids because really, they still were. And The Band, every last one of them gone now, all were at the height of their productive youth. How quickly it all flies by… Tempus fugit.

      That film was the amber of that moment for them, and they’re locked in time. So it was fitting for Dylan to sing Forever Young, and for Scorsese to provide the amber. The Band knew what they were walking away from—the grind of the road, true, but also their youth. There’s lingering sadness at what was left on stage revealed in conversations with each member, especially Rick Danko. No, we aren’t Peter Pan, forever young and living the life of adventure, we all must grow up one day. And so it is that each of the performers have aged and faded away one-by-one. Memento mori.

      Why did I rewatch this film? Maybe it was the music, or maybe to have my own look back on a different time. An industry friend passed away this week. He was twenty years my senior and cancer took him away with a mind as sharp as someone twenty years my junior. Age is just a number—health and vitality are our true currency in life. The body or the mind will surely fail us all one day, so be bold and dance today. And while we’re at it, turn up the volume as loud as we dare. Carpe diem.

      “We’re all in the same boat ready to float off the edge of the world” — The Band, Life is a Carnival

      Maybe I write to capture my own moments in amber, or maybe I’m just leaving breadcrumbs of where I’ve been. We all have our body of work and our faded photographs (or increasingly, lower resolution JPEG’s) that whisper of who we once were in the height of our own productive youth. The trick is to keep producing, to keep dancing, and to lock some particularly shiny moments away in amber while we can, until one day this boat floats off the edge to join all the stars in infinity.

    • Moments of Clarity

      no baby, if you’re going to create
      you’re going to create whether you work
      16 hours a day in a coal mine
      or
      you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children
      while you’re on
      welfare,
      you’re going to create with a part of your mind and your
      body blown
      away,
      you’re going to create blind
      crippled
      demented,
      you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your
      back while
      the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment,
      flood and fire,

      baby, air and light and time and space
      have nothing to do with it
      and don’t create anything
      except maybe a longer life to find
      new excuses
      for.
      — Charles Bukowski, air and light and time and space

      I heard from the daughter of an industry friend. He doesn’t have long now, she told me, and is spending this time in hospice with family and friends. I reached out knowing this, and to offer a few words that I know will reach him through her. In such situations, we must say it now, or know that it will be never. These moments of clarity are profound when someone reaches the end of their life, but we must remember we’re all just a step behind them ourselves. Memento mori. So for gods sake, carpe diem already!

      We have so many excuses available to us to avoid telling someone how we feel, or to defer exercise and writing and creating beauty in a world insistent on growing darker. But it grows darker precisely because we defer the call of creating. This is our verse, after all, and it could all end today for us. What will we leave behind as our beacon of truth and courage?

      We must put all that energy used to create excuses aside and finally listen to the muse before our opportunity fades away forever. Produce something beautiful. For all the chaos and distraction, there will not be a better time than now. We’re going to create now, or know that it will be never.

    • The Total of Our Doing

      we are always asked
      to understand the other person’s
      viewpoint
      no matter how
      out-dated
      foolish or
      obnoxious.
      one is asked
      to view
      their total error
      their life-waste
      with
      kindliness,
      especially if they are
      aged.
      but age
      is the total of
      our doing.
      they have aged
      badly
      because they have
      lived
      out of focus,
      they have refused to
      see.
      not their fault?
      whose fault?
      mine?
      I am asked to hide
      my viewpoint
      from them
      or fear of their
      fear.
      age is no crime
      but the shame
      of a deliberately
      wasted
      life
      among so many
      deliberately
      wasted
      lives
      is.
      — Charles Bukowski, Be Kind

      We have all lived out of focus at times. Sometimes the good days make up for the bad. Sometimes. Like pulling an all-nighter to finish a paper we’ve procrastinated on, sometimes we pull focus out just in the nick of time to move the chains forward in our lives. But sometimes we wait a beat too long and the opportunity is lost forever. The lesson of course is to focus, but instead we blame it on fate or bad luck or the immigrants who moved in down the street who got straight to work.

      The answer has always been in focus. What kind of a life do we want to have? Why are we distracting ourselves with all of these things that pull us away from focusing on achieving that? What small, measurable step might we take right now to move us closer to the dream?

      The total of our doing keeps pace with wherever we are in this moment. How does it look so far? Stop being so outraged at the state of the world and do the things in our control. Look around and focus on the essential. To do otherwise is to waste more of this life that is already flying by so very quickly.

    • The Company We Keep

      “All we have experienced is so much gone within us, and there lies. It is the company we keep. One day, in health or sickness, it will come out and be remembered. Neither body nor soul forgets anything.” — Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry David Thoreau

      We know that we are the sum of our experiences to this moment, so why do we short our experiences garnered today? We must live as if we were dying, as that song once suggested to the hungry masses. How many listen to a call like that? Maybe tomorrow, after we finish bing watching The Office again. Haven’t we learned yet that tomorrow’s never come? Memento mori...

      These are days we’ll remember—if we make it memorable. Those of us who write in a line per day journal know the coldness of not having much to write about on any given day. On days like that, as the evening gets dark and cold, I take the pup for a walk and look for planets amongst the stars, listen for owls and coyotes in the distance, inhale the crisp air and remember that I’m alive another day. So many of our days are there simply to connect the memorable ones together. But they all count just the same.

      Reading a journal entry from Thoreau written on this date in 1837, I thought of all that was to come for him. His own thoughts were on the sum of who he was to that point. We all write our future from the perspective of our experiences and observations thus far. Expanding the palate with progressively more adventurous moments that lead us to a shift in identity. We all have the kernel of our future within us, wrapped around our past. Our past life is the company we keep, whispering to us about all that we might discover if we just step beyond the sound of our own voice.

    • Remember Your Dreams

      Take it all in
      It’s as big as it seems
      Count all your blessings
      Remember your dreams
      — Jimmy Buffett, Jimmy Dreams

      We who try to reason with an unreasonable world can get pulled into distraction before we know it. We know that distraction steals our lives away as quickly as a murderous thief. The time given to distraction will never be returned to us. Focus on the future. Remember your dreams.

      Just writing this, I thought maybe I’d link to a video of Buffett singing the song I quoted, which led me to YouTube, which promptly threw a hundred distracting options at me that could easily have taken this productive moment from me in exchange for trinkets of frivolity. It happens so quickly, so easily, that we hardly notice it anymore. And before we know it our dreams are deferred to a tomorrow that will never come.

      We must be bold to dream big, but then we must be disciplined to realize them. Be present. Be aware. Be alive and vibrantly focused on the things that matter most in this time and place. These are days we’ll remember—the madness in the world assures that, but we must make it our mission to write the script ourselves.

      To be alive and aware of what we’re doing with the time puts us ahead of the masses of minions watching curated videos all day. We may leverage that time advantage to realize a dream or two in our allotment of days. There is no other reasonable alternative but to be bold and leap into life.

    • The Right Time

      “A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting.” — Carlos Castaneda

      I spent a lifetime
      Waiting for the right time
      — Elvis Presley, Its Now or Never

      It’s been bitter cold the last few days. The kind of cold that stings bare skin. These are the days when building a roaring fire to warm ourselves was exactly what we envisioned when we were busy chopping and stacking firewood. Indeed, all that chopping and stacking led us here; so make use of that spark we jealousy hold onto and light the damned fire already!

      All that planning and goal setting to start the year is useful, but now we must get straight to the business of executing on that plan. Start the streak of productive days, or keep the streak alive if we’re fortunate to be on the right path already. The trap is to keep on planning for a bold life, instead of living it.

      There is no right time for anything, there’s only now. Do what must be done in the time we have. We all want to be the hero in our own epic journey—so what are we waiting for? It’s now or never, friend. There comes a time when chopping and stacking firewood is no longer the best use of our precious time.

    • Our Opportunity of a Lifetime

      We know what we are, but not what we may be.”
      — William Shakespeare, Hamlet

      The final day of the year offers us a clear idea of who we are, and tantalizes us with the mystery of what we may be in the next year. So here we are again, friend. What have we become? What will we become? All the weight of identity placed on a turn of the calendar. But every day offers these questions that only we may answer. To be or not to be, that is the question: every single day.

      This year coming to an end offers us the answer. We have become both in what we have consumed (food, media, books, feedback, time) and what we have produced (art, presence in the lives of others, our chosen professional work, our acceptance of or anger at our fellow humans to the sum of each in the world). We are the sum of our consumption and production to this point. We either like who we’ve become or we may reset the compass and go in a new direction entirely. That’s the beauty of a new day and the New Year: reinvention.

      It always comes back to what we say yes and no to. Today’s post completes a promise I made to myself a year ago to write every day. Regular readers know that I considered stopping to focus on other things, but pushed through the no to arrive back at yes. I’m inclined to say yes to this promise again in the next year, knowing that there will be hurdles once again. We all have those things that set our day in motion, don’t we? Writing is my motion setter.

      We may take that concept of setting things in motion to tomorrow, today. Whatever that audacious resolution may be, today offers an opportunity to set the stage. What we may be remains our unique opportunity of a lifetime. Why wait another day to get started on the path to becoming?

    • Domino Days

      “I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.” — Françoise Sagan

      At some point in our lives we must turn our best intentions into action and do the things we claim we want to do. Otherwise we are adding our voice to the choir of quiet desperation Thoreau warned us about. Playing a bigger part in the play of life naturally leads to more things to talk about, which is nice in conversation, but it also leads us to a string of ever-larger dominos disguised as days. The thrill is in seeing how big we can grow our days, simply built upon the one before.

      There’s nothing wrong with lining up a row of our days of like size, one after the other, for a time that suits us. When we raise children, every day feels like the same-sized day of changing diapers, making lunches, helping with homework, driving them to practice, teaching them how to drive and suddenly(!) moving them to college. We’re simply helping them line up their own domino days, along with our own. It turns out those days are growing in scope too, we were just to busy to realize it at the time.

      There are days when it feels like we’ll never topple those larger dominos, but each incremental day builds towards something more substantial still. Our unbroken string of days pays off with an ever-bigger life. It’s the gaps that force us to start all over again. Mind the gap, as the Brits say, and step into the next thing. Soon we’re really going somewhere.

      The blog you’re reading now (thank you) is a string of dominos disguised as daily posts taking both of us somewhere bigger than where we started. When we view our writing and our lives in this way, we begin to see that it’s all about building and sustaining momentum, thus increasing our contribution for the days beyond this one. Growth is inevitable in both our writing and our lives when we just keep pushing a little further along.

    • Adding More

      “If it doesn’t challenge you, it won’t change you.” — Fred Devito

      These are challenging times, to be sure, but there’s opportunity on the other side of those challenges. We may either face them and continue to grow or cower at the sight of them and shrink back into what might have been. We are what we put into our days, and really nothing more than that but a bit of dumb luck and random chance. Luck and chance will only take us so far—I like the odds of growing into our potential instead.

      Challenges can be thrust upon us, like losing a job or getting a diagnosis we weren’t expecting, or it can be incremental, like increasing the intensity of a workout each time we do it. Each challenge offers an opportunity for the mind and body. Is this my limit, or can I go further? We have a choice in how to react, as Viktor Frankl pointed out, to any challenge. The freedom of that choice is profoundly ours alone.

      We can choose to add more challenge to our days, with a goal of growth and change. Adding more changes us profoundly: Reading and writing more, more intense workouts, more challenging work, more focused conversations with people of consequence. The word infers increase; let that increase bring us in the direction in which we want to go.

      Remember the old expression, pay me now or pay me later? There’s a price to be paid either way, but whether good or bad those choices compound over time. There will come a time for less. Today is not that day. There’s just so much to do in a lifetime and we only have now to work with. We may choose to accept the challenges as they come at us. Let this serve as a cattle prod to complacency. Decide what to be and go be it.