Alexandersmap

    Tag: curriculum vitae

    • 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?

    • Using Our Full Kit

      “It’s helpful to remember that when you throw away an old playbook, you still get to keep the skills you learned along the way. These hard-earned abilities transcend rules. They’re yours to keep. Imagine what can arise when you overlay an entirely new set of materials and instructions over your accumulated expertise.” — Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

      We accumulate skills and wisdom as we learn and grow, stumble and pick ourselves back up again. Step-by-step, we learn more and more about the world and how we may survive and thrive in it. This is part of our curriculum vitae—a part of our identity. We are the kind of person who can do this sort of thing. Skills learned in Microsoft Excel aren’t just transferrable from job-to-job, but those spreadsheet skills are applicable in everyday life as well. And we’re just the sort of person who can pull it off.

      Naturally, this applies to creative writing and personal finance and wiring a new light fixture as well. And physical fitness. And raising children. And speaking a language. And most important of all, following through on what we said we’d do. The person we identity as, the person people come to know us as, is an accumulation of skills and wisdom and follow-through that brought us here, now. And now that we’re here, what comes next? Luckily, we’ve got the momentum of all we bring to the table to help propel us into the future version of us we aspire to become.

      Yesterday, I broke free of 75 days of rigid diet and had some pasta, bread and wine to wash it down. I’d like to say that it was worth waiting 75 days for, but it was simply a good meal, enjoyed with family. The point of it wasn’t to celebrate eating processed carbohydrates again, or drinking alcohol for that matter, it was to mark the occasion of having completed something and resetting the mind and body for what comes next. In short, a little of that stuff, but a lot of what brought me here too. Leading up to that meal I’d already worked out twice, drank a gallon of water, read and wrote. Identity had shifted, but not been eliminated by a glass of wine and a bowl of pasta.

      One of the habits I’ve picked up along the way is tracking my sleep score and correlating it with what I consumed or expended prior to going to bed. On average, I sleep very well. But not last night. It seems that my body didn’t celebrate the return of carbs and alcohol in the same way that my mind did in the moment. More research is clearly needed, but it’s a notable development only seen through the lens of awareness developed through discipline.

      The skills learned in doing anything, including abstaining from consuming food one happens to love, are transferrable. Having laid a foundation of fitness, I may either squander that and slip back into bad habits, or use what I’ve learned to grow more fit, more productive, and more selective about what I consume in caloric and information intake. These are life skills I thought I had already, but wasn’t practicing until I jumped into the deep end with an all or nothing regimen. Lessons learned. Wisdom gained. The trick now is to not waste it by not using it going forward.

      Accumulating skills and wisdom are only valuable if we continue to use them on our path to better. We should be consistently asking ourselves, what is the next big thing for us on our climb to personal excellence? What habits need to change? What skills need to be acquired? And what can we use from all that we’ve done to bring us here to help us get there? On to the next, using our full kit of habits, skills, wisdom and street smarts. Our mindset ought to be progressive accumulation and application of all that we’ve learned, towards that place where we’d like to be. For we’ve only just begun.

    • Accumulated Value

      “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” — George Bernard Shaw

      “Those were steps for me, and I have climbed up over them: to that end I had to pass over them. Yet they thought that I wanted to retire on them.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

      There are times when doing nothing seems better than stumbling along making one mistake after another. There are times when standing still seems far more attractive than sliding sideways off the cliff. We are progressing one step at a time, even as some of those steps feel like a plateau. What are we reaching for but some better version of ourselves?

      As we grow and acquire skills and knowledge we become more useful. Our usefulness to others is a trade-off of sorts, a curriculum vitae of accumulated value used to trade our time and applied energy to the greater good, or at least a paycheck and a place in the room where it happens. But that accumulated value also applies to our usefulness to ourselves. We reach our potential through the climb.

      I spoke with an old college friend recently. Conversations with people you haven’t seen in a long time turn into a gap analysis: What have you done in the time between then and now? Relationships, children, jobs, affiliations, beliefs and habits all fill the gap, determining who we become. Some people grow apart, some grow together. Life is a game of place and time, yet we still have a say in who we might be. The thing is, a conversation like that allows us to see the gap in ourselves too. Those steps passed over summarized as growth and setbacks, lessons learned or missed, all bringing us here.

      Do we like the view? We must remember that we’re simply passing over another step. It’s helpful to ask what value we’re accumulating in this present state, and how that might ease our ascent to the next. For the journey continues this day.