Alexandersmap

    Tag: David Hackett Fischer

    • The Cold Water Initiation

      “Though it be the hottest day in July on land, and the voyage is to last but four hours, take your thickest clothes with you, for you are about to float over melted icebergs.” – Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod

      The stretch of water between Cape Sable Island in Nova Scotia and Cape Cod in Massachusetts is known as the Gulf of Maine. A lot of history has floated between these two points, from Native Americans and later the Basque fishing and whaling these rich and vibrant waters to explorers like Giovanni da Verrazzano and Samuel de Champlain mapping the coast and looking for places for settlements. The Gulf of Maine remains the one constant that each would recognize, though they might wonder where all the fish went until they glance back at the developed shoreline.

      In 1604 Champlain ventured south from Port Royal to explore the coast of Maine. It was on this trip that he discovered Acadia, and further south, the “baye longue” between two capes and a long stretch of sand beaches on the present coast of New Hampshire.” (David Hackett Fischer, Champlain’s Dream. It’s on these beaches that generations of New Englanders and vacationing Canadians have discovered the truth in Thoreau’s words: this water is as cold as melted icebergs!

      Cold water gets in your blood, and you don’t celebrate it so much as accept it for what it is: a shocking reminder of how insignificant we really are. The Atlantic Ocean is divided into the Northern Atlantic and the Southern Atlantic, but really, there are divisions within divisions. A swim in Miami is not the same as a swim in Virginia, and a swim in the Hamptons on Long Island is definitely not the same as a swim at Hampton Beach in New Hampshire.

      You aren’t really a New Englander until you’ve taken the plunge into the Gulf of Maine on a hot day. It’s an initiation of sorts into the extremes. There isn’t a person who swam in early July at Hampton Beach who couldn’t relate to the bobbing passengers at the end of Titanic. The cold water hardens you, tests your mettle, and reminds you of your mortality. And that’s why I’ve grown to love a bracingly cold swim now and then. That stinging skin is a shocking reminder that you’re still very much alive… if a bit numb.

    • Striving for Prévoyance

      “C’est une prévoyance très nécessaire de sentir qu’on ne peut tout prévoir.”
      (“It is a very necessary forethought to feel that you cannot foresee everything.”)
      – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

      Prévoyance. The word tantalizes me, capturing my imagination, tauntingly just out of reach. It’s a French word, essentially translating basically to “foreseeability”. Prévoyance is powerful when applied to the markets, or business, social trends or simply whether to bring an umbrella with you on your walk. It also helps greatly when managing our own lives. I heard a richer and more profound definition from David Hackett Fischer when describing this trait in Samuel Champlain. He defined prévoyance as “the power of a prepared mind to act upon chance events in a world of deep uncertainty.” My French hasn’t reached that level of nuance just yet (and never will without immersion), so I’m grateful when people point out the magic sprinkled in such words.

      The problem with learning is in learning what you don’t know, or levels that you haven’t yet reached in life. But within that inherent underlying frustration lies growth and progression towards a higher self. And that’s where I find myself: decades into life and scrambling over jumbled bits of acquired knowledge in a climb to wisdom and higher truth. The promised land that I’ll never quite reach, but a step closer than I was yesterday or the day before. Sisyphus has nothing on me.

      “It was better to be in the right place than to be smart and work hard. It was best to be cunning and focus on results rather than inputs. Acting on a few key insights produced the goods. Being intelligent and hard working did not.” – Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle

      In this life I find myself climbing a succession of mountains, looking around with a sigh, and descending back down to climb yet another (refer to yesterday’s post). Perhaps with a bit more prévoyance I might have climbed fewer mountains, and chosen the right one much earlier in life. But such is life: we don’t know what we don’t know until we gain experience or acquire and leverage knowledge from others who have had the experience.

      “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

      That distinction between greatness and meanness lies in which mountains we climb, and how soon we turn back down the path to ascend a different mountain than the one we’re climbing. And that leads back to foreseeability, to prévoyance, and acting upon chance events in a world of deep uncertainty. And so I stuff the brain with as many bits of knowledge from as many perspectives as I can consume, for knowledge, well-used, is the key to prévoyance. This blog, in many ways, is the public-facing library of that accumulated knowledge (such that it is), and the breadcrumbs on the path of where I’ve been recently. And in the 370,000 thousand published words, perhaps it telegraphs where I’m going too.