Alexandersmap

    Tag: Henry David Thoreau

    • Let Us Play

      “Health lies in action, and so it graces youth. To be busy is the secret of grace, and half the secret of content. Let us ask the gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than in consuming them. In Utopia, said Thoreau, each would build his own home; and then song would come back to the heart of man, as it comes to the bird when it builds its nest. If we cannot build our homes, we can at least walk and throw and run; and we should never be so old as merely to watch games instead of playing them. Let us play is as good as Let us pray, and the results are more assured.” — Will Durant, Fallen Leaves

      Health lies in action. We know the drill: sitting is the new smoking. We must get up and move, and not just move, but delight in moving. To play is to live. Life is full enough of tedious moments, don’t you think? Our exercise ought to be fun.

      For me walking is a more fun form of exercise than just about anything save paddling or rowing. Walking in places that inspire and awe is wondrous, and ought to be a regular part of our routine, but sometimes a simple walk around the block is enough to reset the soul and stir the blood. Sometimes we focus so much on the spectacular or the glory of the summit that we forget the benefits of the activity itself. We must move, and glory in the act itself.

      This past weekend I’d contemplated a hike. Knock off a couple of summits that were particularly evasive for me on the list for one reason or another. When you hear the call of the wild you ought to listen, but sometimes that call is a siren. It was treacherously cold in the mountains, the kind of cold that will ruin a perfectly good day for the prepared, or kill the unprepared. Not exactly the play I was craving: lists be damned. So instead of a 4000 footer I opted for sea level and a January beach walk. Also bitingly cold, but distinctly more accessible. It also offered an easy opportunity to simply bail out and get back into a warm car (or bar) if needed.

      My bride and our pup are both beach bunnies at heart. Off-season walks on the beach are their kind of play, and mine too. I can spend all day at the beach so long as I’m not lying still like something that washed up. Surf speaks to me almost as much as summits do, and I view a great walk on a long beach as delightful as any walk can be.

      We chose Hampton Beach, New Hampshire for our off-season walk. We wanted to take stock of the damage from the winter storms last week, and to have a long stretch of beach sand. That biting cold ensured few people would brave the exposure of the beach, so our only company were other dog walkers and a few determined metal detector miners looking for lost riches. We each chase the American dream in our own way, and everyone needs a hobby.

      We should never be so old as merely to watch games instead of playing them. The trick is to stay in the game. To play in the sand is just as fun as playing king of the mountain. Just move, and delight in the company of others. That’s a simple recipe for a great life.

      January at Hampton Beach. Lot’s of footprints in snow, few people.
      Winter means walking in brisk solitude

    • Adding Treasure

      “Why be saddled with this thing called life expectancy? Of what relevance to an individual is such a statistic? Am I to concern myself with an allotment of days I never had and was never promised? Must I check off each day of my life as if I am subtracting from this imaginary hoard? No, on the contrary, I will add each day of my life to my treasure of days lived. And with each day, my treasure will grow, not diminish.” ― Robert Brault

      I took a walk with the pup late last night, hoping to see the Geminid meteor shower. Most magic in the sky is inevitably obscured by cloud cover, so when we’re lucky enough to have a crisp, clear sky and a meteor shower we ought to get out the witness it. It proved to be a walk filled with exclamation points punctuating the celestial dance. Like days, every walk is different. A few are special.

      We ought to seek out that specialness in every day. It’s likely hiding in plain sight. As with everything life-amplifying, a bit of awareness surely helps. Knowing the Geminids were happening got me out of a warm house on a cold evening at a time when I’m usually fast asleep. Likewise, a bit of research before traveling to a new place nets all kinds of treasures worthy of a side trip, treasures that will whisper to us in the quiet moments until we experience them, and then whisper delightfully forever after: “We really got to experience that!”

      Awareness is essential, but so is engagement; we ought to talk to the people sitting next to us, we ought to find the local scenic vistas, we ought to dance when the music kicks up a notch. and yes, we ought to miss out on a bit of comfort now and then to try bold things. The time will flow right by either way—shouldn’t we do something more with it?

      “Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.” – Henry David Thoreau

      The mindset of steadily adding memories instead of subtracting days is a wonderful way to filter exactly what we’re going to do with this day at hand. We can’t possibly stop the flow of sand through the hourglass, so maybe taking a walk on the beach and forgetting about that hourglass altogether is our best move. When we steadily accumulate magic in our moments life becomes something memorable. Go be deliberate and adventurous—for that’s where the treasure is.

    • Designing the Sweet Life (La Dolce Vita)

      “A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      In a full confession that will surprise no one in my circle of friends and family, I struggle with the act of idleness. I rarely sit still, even on vacation, choosing to explore whatever place I find myself in, and too often stack too many activities into those “idle” days. There’s no lying on the beach for hours for me. The default is activity over idleness. I marvel at the pets for their ability to simply nap away hours of a day. If I nap at all I set the alarm for 15 minutes and get right back to moving about as soon as possible. And the idea of sleeping in? There is no snooze alarm in my world.

      But that doesn’t translate to being productive all of the time. We can putter about without really getting anything done. The world is full of people quietly quitting the work they have in front of them. There are plenty of people opting out of frenetic lifestyles. There are whole cultures built around the sweetness of doing nothing (dolce far niante: I’m looking at you Italy). So how do we restless souls learn to chill out a bit and live the sweet life (la dolce vita) ourselves?

      “Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.” ― Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek

      The thing is, Thoreau and Ferriss, both known for promoting more strategic idleness in our days, have also produced some significant work that resonates beyond the moment they created it. For all their perceived idleness, there’s an underlying productivity hidden in plain sight. That’s what people miss in the idea of la dolce vita—it’s living the sweet life while still keeping the lights on with productive work. It seems we can have it all, if we create a lifestyle that is both pleasurable and productive.

      The trick is being far more strategic in our productivity, thus giving breathing room for idleness. We ought to know what we’re really setting out to do in this lifetime, and break that down into milestones. Milestones in turn are achieved through work strategically designed into our days. If that sounds like the antithesis of dolce far niante, well, I understand. But it really is the essence of living Thoreau’s “natural day”: filled with enough idle time to feel we’re not cogs in a machine while still producing something memorable.

      Productivity (and idleness) requires focus. Doing the work that matters most in the moment and then get on with living that sweet life. We’re all students of maximizing the potential of our lifetime. We ought to know what makes life sweet, and also meaningful. Designing a pace of life that balances the two is the essence of a sweet life.

      Ultimately, designing a lifestyle that maximizes our potential should be our focus. But potential for what? Wealth? Fame? Isn’t it really time spent doing the things that makes a life sweet? Time with people who matter a great deal to us. Time doing the things that make life a pleasure. Time structured in a way that it doesn’t feel like we’re biding our time but living it.

      So the question when designing a lifestyle is, “what will maximize the number of beautiful moments we may stack together in this finite lifespan?” Nothing brings focus to our days like remembering we only have so many of them. Memento mori. Stop wasting time thinking about it and go live it, today and every day we’re blessed with. The Italians are on to something, don’t you think?

    • A Dream Won’t Chase You Back

      If you got a chance, take it, take it while you got a chance
      If you got a dream, chase it, ’cause a dream won’t chase you back
      If you’re gonna love somebody
      Hold ’em as long and as strong and as close as you can
      ‘Til you can’t
      — Cody Johnson, ‘Til You Can’t

      In America, this week is always distracting. There are so many moving parts before Thanksgiving: Ingredients to purchase and prepare, people to check in with traveling from near and far, furniture to plot out in anticipation of rooms filled to capacity, cleaning (so much cleaning!), and for some of us, work to reconcile before the holiday break. This week is a hectic, wonderfully stressful mess that some of us love more than any other in a year full of blessed weeks.

      We build the life we most want, don’t we? But we can’t control everything, we must be open to the changes the universe presents to us. Who won’t be at the table this year who was there last year? Who won’t be at next year’s table? It might just be us. The underlying message is to do what must be done now. That could be rightly viewed as the overall theme of this blog for most of the last five years. Tempus fugit. Memento mori. Carpe diem.

      Most of us postpone the call or the question or simply beginning what is so much more important than what we’re doing otherwise. Most of us waste time. Henry had some advice for such moments:

      As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
      The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
      — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      We ought to feel the urgency of Thanksgiving every week. Perhaps we’d be exhausted and collapse on the couch eventually, but then again, perhaps we’d condition ourselves to living a larger life—full of love and a wee bit of conflict, anticipation and conversation, and something sweet to cap it all off with before you clean up yet again and look ahead to the next big thing. We aren’t here to kill time, we’re here to make the most of our time together before we lose our place at the table. By all means, seize it (because it won’t chase you back)!

    • Connection in Solitude

      “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can “see the folks,” and recreate, and, as he thinks, remunerate himself for his day’s solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and “the blues”; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      Another example of a Thoreau word-explosion-as-paragraph, and one I wanted to compress into a smaller bite, mind you, but didn’t have the heart to. Henry was never lonely because he surrounded himself with an ample supply of words. His work resonates because he combined so many of them into insightful and timeless nuggets that we still find nutritious today. For a guy who spent so much time alone, he still manages to connect with so many.

      The difference between solitude and loneliness is very much aligned with what we perceive ourselves to be doing with the time. Active engagement in meaningful work, expressed creativity, meditation, exercise and prayer are each forms of reaching outside of ourselves for connection to the greater energy force that hums all around us. I write this knowing the words will come, and I’m but an editor for the muse. How can you feel alone in such moments?

      Many people encountered solitude during the pandemic and were forced to reconcile what it meant for them. I found it to be a time of connection with family, who otherwise would have been off doing their own thing as I did mine. It made no difference whether I was alone in a home office or in a hotel room, for solitude is solitude anywhere—but it doesn’t have to be loneliness. Feeling alone is to look for connection with the universe and finding no answer.

      There’s no doubt that surrounding ourselves with the right people leads to a happier, more fulfilling and longer life. With any strong group dynamic we rise to meet others, even as they rise to meet us, providing a lift to the entire group. Community gives us momentum and mutual support, solitude gives us the elbow room to mine the best out of ourselves. Don’t we each need both to live a full life?

    • Another Foray With Writing

      “Mr. Alcott seems to be reading well this winter: Plato, Montaigne, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Sir Thomas Browne, etc., etc. ‘I believe I have read them all now, or nearly all,’ — those English authors. He is rallying for another foray with his pen, in his latter years, not discouraged by the past, into that crowd of unexpressed ideas of his, that undisciplined Parthian army, which, as soon as a Roman soldier would face, retreats on all hands, occasionally firing backwards; easily routed, not easily subdued, hovering on the skirts of society.” — Henry David Thoreau, Emerson – Thoreau Letters (VI-X) 1848

      Lately I seem to have drifted away from Thoreau. It’s not a deliberate act, mind you, but a full life. Like close friends, sometimes you drift apart, sometimes closer together. Everything has its time. Like those old friends, when you meet up with Henry again you pick up right where you left off.

      It seems my own creative writing is a lot like Alcott’s was in his day. I revisited some old characters yesterday, rallying for another foray with my own pen. Thoreau’s observation is keen, and as with my rowing friend who inspected my hand to see how much rowing I’d really been doing, the results show far more than a few casual statements about production ever will. We are what we repeatedly do, aren’t we?

      With that in mind, I began again. I’ve always been a streak hitter, and do my best when I have a simple goal of doing something every day without stopping. This blog is as good of an example of that as any, approaching five years of posting every day. It’s a lot like flossing before you brush your teeth—once firmly established as part of your identity you don’t easily let it go. Writing a blog is now easy for me, in a way, in that I simply do it straight away or it nags at me all day until I carve out the time to get it done. You have the right to judge the contribution each day, but not the will to get it out there in the world.

      The thing is, that clever observation Henry made to “Waldo” in that letter stings a bit when you don’t follow through. We’ve got to follow through on the things that are most important to us, or forever be judged undisciplined by that voice in the back of our head. Do the work, every day, until the work is done. The rest is just talk.

    • Break Up the Habitual

      “We need habit to get through a day, to get to work, to feed our children. But habit is dangerous too. The act of seeing can quickly become unconscious and automatic. The eyes see something—gray-brown bark, say, fissured into broad, vertical plates—and the brain spits out tree trunk and the eye moves on. But did I really take the time to see the tree? I glimpse hazel hair, high cheekbones, a field of freckles and I think Shawna. But did I take the time to see my wife?
      ... The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we’re not careful, pretty soon we’re gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.
      … I open my journal and stare out at the trunk of the umbrella pine and do my best to fight off the atrophy that comes from seeing things too frequently. I try to shape a few sentences around this tiny corner of Rome; I try to force my eye to slow down. A good journal entry—like a good song, or sketch, or photograph—ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought to be a love letter to the world.
      Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.”
      — Anthony Doerr, Four Seasons in Rome

      A long quote, but honestly I could plug the entire chapter of this delightful book in here and call it a day. This is a song I know well. We are creatures of habit, and a good habit will save us as much as a bad habit may be our ruin, but this often puts us on autopilot with our senses. There’s a fine line between being fully aware and being overwhelmed. A bit of focus on the task at hand is just as essential as being aware of everything around us. Situation awareness can quite literally save the day for us, but awareness of every situation can make us completely useless.

      Still, so many of us miss the details for the routine. How much of a drive do we ever remember? What of the miracle of commercial flight? Most people simply resign themselves to the screen in front of them for the duration, never glancing out the window at the world of wonder just outside. What of home? Do we ever immerse ourselves in something we once gazed at lovingly, like that picture we once cherished and now barely see? How many marriages end in just such a way?

      We know the Latin phrase: “tempus fugit carpe diem” (time flies so seize the day). Seizing isn’t just an action statement to go out and do bold things, though surely that’s a big part of it. It also means being fully aware of the world around us while we’re living this day. Well before the Romans began creating such memorable phrases, that old Greek sage Seneca had his own take on this, saying “As each day arises, welcome it as the very best day of all, and make it your own possession. We must seize what flees.” Indeed we must.

      Doerr seized his day moving to Rome for a year, grabbing the opportunity of a lifetime just as he and his wife were navigating the challenge of raising newborn twins. That’s quite a one-two punch to anyone’s routine. His call to leave the familiar comes from his own experience in doing just so. But even under such extreme change in his and his wife’s lifestyle, he found routine he had to break through to find full awareness. What of us?

      “Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.” – Henry David Thoreau

      At a party of the weekend I was introduced to someone as “a blogger” and was asked what I write about. I write about everything, I explained, but didn’t go much deeper out of… habit. We rise to meet our moments or we simply go through them. Writing is a form of heightened awareness of the moment. So is photography, for that matter. I tend to be the unofficial photographer at family events and during travel because I see opportunities either to capture or create the moment. In the end, moments are all we have.

      This blog is a call to arms for myself as much as it is a collection of observations and thoughts. Tempus fugit, sir, so carpe diem. Pay attention to the moment, friend, but do note the days gone by on this journey too. We waste so much of it, don’t we? We must be aware, and be productive with our days while we have them. Make each day new all over again.

    • Unhurried and Wise

      “Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      I logged on to a Software-as-a-Service account I use for work thinking I’d quickly check a box that was nagging me. Upon login I was prompted for a mandatory password change, adding another box to check instead of eliminating one. So it is that even the quickest tasks lead to more tasks, and the whirl spins our heads just when we think we have it all figured out.

      Some of us aspire to be unhurried and wise. Certainly, during the pandemic we all examined our priorities. Many pivoted to more meaning, while others leaped back into the familiar trap of distraction. I was somewhere in between, with an inclination to seek waterfalls and summits balanced by a series of compelling shows streaming on too many services to count that I simply had to catch up on so I could keep up with the conversation. I never quite met my objective on either count, but don’t feel compelled to finish any of them at the moment. Checking boxes is a game, and there are times in our life when we grow tired of games.

      When we make time for nature and poetry in our lives, we aren’t being frivolous, we’re seeking the essential. To do this properly is to eliminate distraction and focus on where we are now. Some of us become masterful in adding one more thing to the list, thinking it will be the one thing that will fulfill us or at least make the day complete. This is a form of frenzy, which is never an attractive state. Better to shorten the list than shorten our state of awareness and calm. The goal of life should never be to rush through it.

      If I aspire to anything in this stage of life, it’s to move closer to unhurried and wise. By all accounts I’ve got a long way to go in both respects, but there’s no rushing to unhurried, and there’s no shortcut to wise. It begins with shorter lists and lingering longer on the quietly beautiful magic around us. Some tasks are inevitable, but they should never be at the expense of what has a right to be in this moment.

    • Isle au Haut: A Billion Stars and Pristine Trails

      “This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      Anchored in a quiet cove, boat rolling steadily (and indicating why we were alone in this place), we stepped out into a brilliant sky to bear witness to a billion stars. The Milky Way so bright it reflected off the water. This was what we’d hoped for, yet almost missed fleeing mosquitoes earlier in the evening. We were not so alone after all.

      The thing about sailing that is so attractive is your ability to place yourself in places like this, nudged up against a corner of Acadia National Park that few ever venture to. There are no buses or fifth wheel camp trailers on Isle au Haut. Those are fine people too, just more than I seek out when getting away from it all. Here you find the quiet bliss inferred in the very concept of a nature preserve.

      Spending a bit of time on the main stretch (where the road is actually paved), we found the locals friendly and the ice cream sandwiches tasty, but I couldn’t buy a stamp for my postcard after 11 AM. Isle au Haut has what must be one of the nation’s smallest Post Offices. If you want counter service get there early. So it goes. The stamp will have to wait.

      The hiking trails are mostly well-defined here, and in some boggy corners nature’s winning the battle to reclaim them. They say build it and they will come, and surely we do, but not so many that you ever feel you can’t get some solitude. We saw precious few fellow hikers, despite the delightful trail network. This naturally continued out at the anchorage. Precious few fellow sailboats. There is plenty of elbow room on Isle au Haut. May it always be this way.

      Isle au Haut Lighthouse (1907)

    • The Greatest Ghost

      “In the end, we are haunted by the examples of the past, the denied permission to live a free journey. We are haunted by the partial examples of those in our purview, taking their pusillanimity or oppression as predictive of our own. We are haunted by the social constructs that tell us what a woman is and what she can or cannot do, and what a man is and how he will be shamed by living beyond these calculated constrictions. We are haunted by bad theology, bad psychology, and bad social models into thinking we are defined by our history, by our race, or by cultural heritage. We are haunted by the unexamined lives of our ancestors and caregivers. We are haunted by the widespread impression that history is the future. We are haunted by the limited imagination of our complexes. And even more, we are haunted by the small lives we live in the face of our immense possibilities. Haunting is individual, generic, cultural, and extremely hard to challenge because it so often seems bound by generations of practice, ancestral fears, and archaic defenses of privilege.
      The biggest haunting of all, the biggest shadow that occludes our sense of sovereignty in the outer world, is the specter of our unlived life. Something within each of us suffers, longs, despairs, persists, and even goes underground to reemerge as fantasy, as projections onto surrogate objects of desire, or as anesthetizing self-soothing. When the soul is not honored, when our possibility is denied by an outer oppressor, a social proscription, or worse, our own pusillanimity, our pathology intensifies. We are bombarded with pharmaceutical anodynes, cultural distractions, and rationalizations and evasions that facilitate these deflections from the summons to personhood. In the context of such hauntings, the greatest ghost for us is the apparition of what was possible but that we shunned. Such moments are not very pretty and may have to haunt us even more to get our actionable accountability. If we live in haunted houses, we are called to turn the lights on and clean house.”
      — James Hollis, Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey

      I suppose Hollis’ words might be broken down to this: We mustn’t live our lives encumbered by the embedded beliefs that have held us back thus far. We must break away from that prison and go live boldly. To do otherwise is to succumb to our limitations. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau put it.

      These are lessons that come to us in time. We see the ghosts for what they are and work to open our minds that they might drift away. Are we the best of what we might have been? Probably not, but we can point to the highlights proudly and remind the ghosts that we’ve lived a good life nonetheless. We each know where we might have done more. That doesn’t make what we’ve done worthless, but it ought to be a foundation more than a prison cell. Who we become next is largely based on what we do with the days left for us.

      The trick to chasing the ghosts away is boldness. Our ghosts don’t want to follow us into scary places. Just as a bully often caves in when confronted, so too do our self-limiting beliefs. We are capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for. A bit of audacity is good for the soul, and sets it free to go be. Audacity is the antithesis of pusillanimity (I don’t even like writing pusillanimity, let alone being it). Like the character George in Seinfeld, doing the opposite opens up all kinds of possibilities for us.

      We are what we repeatedly do, this we know to be true. So it’s fair to ask ourselves, what voice directs what we’re repeatedly doing? Is it a ghost or the song of freedom from who we used to be? Is it time for a new dance track? Stop shunning possibility. Dance with audacity, it may just turn the ghosts on their heads.