Alexandersmap

    Tag: Henry David Thoreau

    • Walking to Interesting

      If you watch a commercial on television, or a reporter out on a city street, or even the cast intro on Saturday Night Live in February 2021, everyone is wearing masks. A year ago you’d have wondered at it, even as the pandemic rapidly descended on the world. Today it’s commonplace, and I’m more often surprised at the outliers walking into a store without one. I stood in a line for snowblower parts and a mechanic walked briskly through the store unmasked. In a crowded grocery store I saw an elderly woman(!) without a mask on. In both cases I had the same reaction I might have had two years ago to someone wearing a mask. Isn’t it funny how the world has changed our perceptions in such a brief turn of the calendar?

      I chafe at restrictions, favoring wandering, crossing borders, friendly conversations with strangers and simply getting out there. But we all sense a light at the end of the tunnel, and we’ll reach a tipping point with vaccinations as we did with mask wearing. With more and more people I know joining the ranks of the vaccinated, a sense of optimism grows. Travel will soon be a reality again, even if a bit different from the travel of a few years ago. There’s plenty of travel available today, without worrying about the complexity of borders, just outside.

      “My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walking

      Many times during the past year I’ve thought of Thoreau walking the landscape I know today. There’s plenty that’s changed since his time, but there’s also plenty that remains just as it was then. Much of it remains undisturbed, as if in a time warp, awaiting a visitor. I doubt he ever got up to the corner of New Hampshire where I walk, but I’ve walked in his woods near Walden and note the similarities.

      “Walk until your day becomes interesting — even if this means wandering out of town and strolling the countryside. Eventually you’ll see a scene or meet a person that makes your walk worthwhile.” – Rolf Potts, Vagabonding

      With a hint of the coming snow in the air, I took my snowshoes out to find new prospects. I quickly moved off the packed trail into virgin snow, crunching along on the snowdrifts through woods and fields. Cold hands soon warmed as I worked up a good pace past old stone walls and silent trees. Snowshoeing offers a slow burn, steady state workout similar to cross-country skiing. There’s a small thrill in hovering over the frozen land while blazing a new trail on snowshoes, and I felt a bit like I was flying as I crunched along.

      Reconnecting with the blazed trail at a frozen stream crossing, I noted the collection of prints of those who had come before me. Snowshoes and fat tire mountain bikes, micro spikes and dog prints spiraling in circles from the trail in patterns of joyful exuberance and the freedom of the winter woods. It occurred to me that my own tracks were more similar to the dog prints than those of the trail walkers. Wandering spirits are rarely contains for very long on defined paths.

      A simple walk in the woods, off trail, can change a person. In winter what was familiar ground becomes a voyage of discovery. Perception is how we frame the world around us, and I find it best to turn my perceptions upside down now and then. Every walk suggests something profoundly new, and winter transforms both the landscape and the visitor alike. Pausing a moment, I listened to the sound of silence. My snowshoes and I had walked our way to interesting, embracing the cold indifference of the woods to pandemics and masks and turns of the calendar.

      Walking along on familiar trails transformed into strange country, I stopped worrying about the neglected collection of stamps in my passport. Feeling a million miles from anywhere I’d every been before, I came across a border marker deep in the woods indicating I’d crossed over from the town forest of my neighboring town into the undeveloped forest of my own town. I smiled and noted that not all borders are closed. And the unfamiliar isn’t very far at all from home.

      Into the snowy woods
      Snow blanket on an old stone fence

    • Bold

      “So long as I am hanging on
      I want to be young and noble.
      I want to be bold.” – Mary Oliver, Desire

      There’s that word again. Bold. I chase it down, let it challenge me. Take a deep breath and get after it yet again. To rise free from care before the dawn and seek adventures, as Thoreau put it so well.

      Latin words for bold translate to audax, confidens, fortis, and they all fit. To be a bit audacious, confident and fortified are generally celebrated in this harsh world. We all aspire to a bit of boldness in our actions, don’t we?

      It’s the last day of the year that most everyone would love to see go away. And yet great things happened despite it all. I started to take stock of the exceptions to the general malaise that was this year and generally the ones I had any control over started with a bit of boldness. Deciding what to be and then going out and being it. I save the selfies for others. Ego is my enemy. Instead of celebrating those mountains climbed and the waterfalls sought out I’m quietly putting them in my memory bank with a smile. That’s what archives and search are for.

      What have we done with our time this year? What will we do today? Next year is upon us, what shall we make of it? Begin in earnest, today.

      I have places to be and I’m excited about the future. That begins with celebrating the last day of the year and finding the next micro adventure to fill the days with wonder until the world opens up again someday. It begins with a measure of boldness.

    • 11 of My Favorite Books Read in 2020

      Looking back on this maddening year, I found I read a lot of poetry that inspired and a lot of page-turner novels that distracted. It would be easy to make half this list collections of Mary Oliver poems, but I subtracted poetry from the list altogether to focus on the craft of the written novel or book. Still, I like to bend the rules, so in making my list of top ten favorite books for the year, I chose eleven. This was a nod to Charlie Mackesy, who spun a bit of magic in a year where it was essential. Illustrating the timeless nature of books (or perhaps how far behind I am in catching up), only four of the eleven were released in 2020. These eleven books are listed in no particular order, largely because there’s a bit of wonder in each of them. Each informed and delighted me.

      Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor
      “The more oxygen life can consume, the more electron excitability it gains, the more animated it becomes. When living matter is bristling and able to absorb and transfer electrons in a controlled way, it remains healthy. When cells lose the ability to offload and absorb electrons, they begin to break down.”

      I find myself thinking often about breathing after reading this book. Waking up with a dry mouth reminds me I need to be better at nasal breathing, when hiking I try to control my breath and focus on how I’m taking in oxygen, and when I chew almonds I crunch with satisfaction, knowing it helps release stem cells and increase bone density. This book is highly informative and strongly recommended for anyone, well, breathing.

      The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More With Less by Richard Koch
      “Equality ends in dominance: that is one of the messages of chaos theory. The 80/20 Principle’s message is different yet complementary. It tells us that, at any one point, a majority of any phenomenon will be explained or caused by a minority of the actors participating in the phenomenon. Eighty percent of the results come from 20 percent of the causes. A few things are important; most are not.”

      This was the most highlighted book of the bunch. Honestly, there were chapters I skimmed over because they didn’t sing a tune I wanted to hear, but the theories here are sound. I wish I’d read this book at the beginning of my career, but it’s not too late to implement the core principles in many aspects of my life.

      The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson
      Hitler wanted still more force applied against Britain. America seemed increasingly likely to enter the war but would do so only, he reasoned, if Britain continued to exist. On March 5 he issued another directive, No. 24, this signed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW), aimed mainly at how Germany and Japan might coordinate strategy under the Tripartite Pact, which both had signed with Italy the preceding fall. The goal, the directive said, “must be to induce Japan to take action in the Far East as soon as possible. This will tie down strong English forces and will divert the main effort of the United States of America to the Pacific.” Beyond this Germany had no particular interest in the Far East. “The common aim of strategy,” the directive stated, “must be represented as the swift conquest of England in order to keep America out of the war.”

      We all grew up sort of knowing about The Blitz. This book neatly sums up just how tenuous the situation was. I fancy myself well-informed about World War II, but I learned far more from the The Splendid and the Vile than I expected to. For all our complaints about the pandemic, most of us have no idea what real sacrifice is. Larson brings us closer to understanding with this book.

      The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
      “What do you want to be when you grow up?” asked the mole.
      “Kind,” said the boy.

      A beautiful, simple book. I picked this up for my daughter as a gift and read it quickly before wrapping it up. If 2020 kicked you in the ass, read this. Then read it again. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is art, meditation and a warm hug disguised as a book.

      Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved The Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by David Sobel
      The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time. This difference makes finding latitude child’s play, and turns the determination of longitude, especially at sea, into an adult dilemma—one that stumped the wisest minds of the world for the better part of human history.

      I’ve danced around this book for years, never getting around to reading it. And then I went to Greenwich and saw the chronometers ticking away in their plexiglass cases and resolved to get right to it when I returned home. This is a story of perseverance solving what was believed to be the impossible. A delightful book.

      Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick
      No longer mindful of the debt they owed the Pokanokets, without whom their parents would never have endured their first year in America, some of the Pilgrims’ children were less willing to treat Native leaders with the tolerance and respect their parents had once afforded Massasoit.

      Living in New England, you can’t really get away from the story of the Pilgrims. But the part we seem to forget with the Pilgrims is how much they relied on luck and the strategic kindness of Massasoit to survive at all. It seems I’m a descendent of a Pilgrim (or two), so I’m told, and that lineage makes me all the more indebted to the Pokanokets who assured that those first few years here weren’t the last for the passengers on the Mayflower. As the quote above suggests, that indebtedness seemed to skip the next generation, paving the way for the tragedy of King Phillip’s War.

      Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee
      “That four-to-one ratio in writing time—first draft versus the other drafts combined—has for me been consistent in projects of any length, even if the first draft takes only a few days or weeks. There are psychological differences from phase to phase, and the first is the phase of the pit and the pendulum. After that, it seems as if a different person is taking over. Dread largely disappears. Problems become less threatening, more interesting. Experience is more helpful, as if an amateur is being replaced by a professional. Days go by quickly and not a few could be called pleasant, I’ll admit.“

      Reading McPhee, like reading Hemingway, it’s easy to get just a bit intimidated. The beauty of this book is that he pulls back the curtains to show you the way. Great research, editors and fact checkers smooth out the rough edges and polish the story, but the work you put into it makes the finished product shine.

      Cape Cod by Henry David Thoreau
      “The ocean there is commonly but a tantalizing prospect in hot weather, for with all that water before you, there is, as we were afterward told, no bathing on the Atlantic side, on account of the undertow and the rumor of sharks. At the lighthouse both in Eastham and Truro, the only houses quite on the shore, they declared, the next year, that they would not bathe there “for any sum,” for they sometimes saw the sharks tossed up and quiver for a moment on the sand. Others laughed at these stories, but perhaps they could afford to because they never bathed anywhere. One old wrecker told us that he killed a regular man-eating shark fourteen feet long, and hauled him out with his oxen, where we had bathed; and another, that his father caught a smaller one of the same kind that was stranded there, by standing him up on his snout so that the waves could not take him. They will tell you tough stories of sharks all over the Cape, which I do not presume to doubt utterly,—how they will sometimes upset a boat, or tear it in pieces, to get at the man in it. I can easily believe in the undertow, but I have no doubt that one shark in a dozen years is enough to keep up the reputation of a beach a hundred miles long.“

      This book, like Philbrick’s Mayflower, informs the native New Englander about the places that once were the places that now are. I have a stack of quotes from this book that I’m saving for other blog posts, but the one above reminds us that the question of sharks has been around a lot longer than we might believe. Like Thoreau I’m much more concerned about undertow when swimming in the surf, but hey, you never know…

      Siddhartha: A Novel by Hermann Hesse
      “Were not all sufferings then time, and were not all self-torments and personal fears time? Weren’t all the difficult and hostile things in the world gone and overcome as soon as one had overcome time, and as soon as time could be thrust out of the mind?“

      I’ve heard enough people recommend this book that eventually I had to read it, and I finished it in 2020. Amazingly, it feels like I read this a decade ago, for all that’s happened this year. Like The Alchemist, it’s a story that teaches you a bit about yourself as you wade through it.

      Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All The Facts by Annie Duke
      What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of “I’m not sure.”

      How do you make decisions? How can you make better, more informed decisions when you don’t have all the facts? And what is a game of strategy versus a game of chance? This book uncovers some of these answers. As with anything, there’s book smart and there’s street smart, and reading about it and understanding it in real life are different things. Duke sprinkles in some street smarts hard won on the poker tables.

      Sailing True North: Ten Admirals and the Voyage of Character by James G. Stavridis
      “The contemporary malaise is the unwillingness to take chances. Everyone is playing it safe. We’ve lost our guts. It’s much more fun to stick your neck out and take chances. The whole attitude is to protect yourself against everything, don’t take chances. But we’ve built this country on taking chances” (Quoting Rear Admiral Grace Hopper)

      A quick, enjoyable read that offers lessons learned from some of the great “Admirals” in history. This is examination of character in ten short biographies, but also an unflinching look at racism and sexism in the Navy and how that battle continues to be fought to this day. And there’s no mistaking the Admiral’s feelings about character in certain political leaders we currently suffer through. A timely message for all of us.

    • 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.

    • Islands of Time, Cornerstones of Castles

      “Behind the issue of how we allocate time lurks the even more fundamental issue of what we want to get out of our lives.” – Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle

      In reading Koch’s book it struck me how profoundly influential he was in Tim Ferriss’ The Four Hour Work Week. Not a shock, really, since Ferriss often refers to Koch’s book as one of his cornerstones. I suppose I’d always thought of his use of the Pareto Principle as the essential takeaway, but didn’t realize the extent to which Koch urges lifestyle design himself in his book.

      The 80/20 Principle offers the usual business cases for who you spend your time with and what you spend your time on in business, but I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting the deeper dive into the self that he thrusts upon you. I’ll tap into this book in future posts, but wanted to explore Koch’s top ten highest-value uses of time. Here they are:

      The Top 10 highest-value uses of time:
      1. Things that advance your overall purpose in life
      2. Things you have always wanted to do
      3. Things already in the 20/80 relationship of time to results
      4. Innovative ways of doing things that promise to slash the time required and/or multiply the quality of results
      5. Things other people tell you can’t be done
      6. Things other people have done successfully in a different arena
      7. Things that use your own creativity
      8. Things that you can get other people to do for you with relatively little effort on your part
      9. Anything with high-quality collaborators who have already transcended the 80/20 rule of time, who use time eccentrically and effectively
      10. Things for which it is now or never
      – Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle

      The list is fascinating on a lot of levels as a look at what a “highly successful person” prioritizes. I’ve put that in quotations because not everyone has the same belief about what success is, but you can’t take away that he’s accomplished quite a bit using his belief system. We all have this lurking issue of time, for we aren’t immortal, are we? So what would you prioritize?

      Well, Koch suggests making four lists to identify your own 20 percent that you should prioritize. He segments them as “islands”, or small segments of time, under which you list the things you’ve done that have contributed disproportionately towards each. The segments are: Happiness Islands, Unhappiness Islands, Achievement Islands and Achievement Desert Islands (periods of greatest sterility or lowest productivity). Your task is straightforward: Identify each, and then act accordingly in how you prioritize your time.

      Ah, yes… Making lists is one thing. Acting accordingly is quite another. And this is where most people fall off. And this is what Thoreau meant in one of his most famous quotes:

      “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      Thoreau would have seen common ground in Koch’s list, and he himself pointed the way in Walden:

      “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      Ferriss also mentioned Walden as a cornerstone book, and it is for me as well. But cornerstones only mean something if you build your castle on top of them. Otherwise they’re just a few rocks oddly places that someone else might trip over if they were distracted with their own life. Koch’s four islands are a great guide for prioritization and action.

    • Awaiting Discovery

      “It is remarkable that men do not sail the sea with more expectation. Nothing remarkable was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood. The heroes and discoverers have found true more than was previously believed, only when they were expecting and dreaming of something more than their contemporaries dreamed of, or even themselves discovered, that is, when they were in a frame of mind fitted to behold the truth. Referred to the world’s standard, they are always insane.” – Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod

      This is a year of the commonplace and unromantic if you let it be.  Lockdowns and border closings and mandatory quarantines tend to temper the passions of the high agency traveler.  But then again, if you keep your expectations and dreams focused on regional adventuring until things open up again you might just find the world under your nose.

      Yesterday I watched a bobcat, set against the snow, on the hunt.  It was slinking along the edge of the forest where the fence announces wilderness begins.  I expect it was attracted to the bird feeder activity, for there were squirrels and juicy birds for the taking for the ambitious hunter.  Unlike my snowshoe hare encounter I wasn’t prepared for a picture, and I settled for locking her image in my brain.

      Leaving Cape Cod the other day I stopped to fill up the tank and, glancing up, noticed 9-10 osprey hovering in the wind, all clustered together.  I’ve never seen so many osprey flying together, and there they were right above me gliding gracefully about.  By the time I finished fueling the car the osprey had drifted away to awe others elsewhere, but damn if they didn’t capture my imagination first.

      For all his fame as a transcendentalist and beholder of truths, Thoreau didn’t travel very much in his lifetime.  He spent most of his lifetime in Concord, Massachusetts, with notable trips to Cape Cod, up the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to the White Mountains, to the Maine woods, and one solitary trip across an international border when he visited Quebec.  And yet he saw more than most people who travel far beyond the northeast corner of North America.

      There’s light at the end of the pandemic, though we remain in a dark and treacherous tunnel.  This isn’t the time to cross borders, but the world outside our Twitter feed remains vibrant and alive, awaiting discovery.  The bobcat,  osprey and Thoreau have each inspired me to shake off the creeping prosaic mood that shorter, darker days cloak you in and dive back into adventuring.

      Et toi?  Are you ready to re-join the hunt?  Nothing remarkable was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood.

    • The Grinch Seeks the Seashore

      “The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world.” – Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod

      I’m a bit of a contrarian in this family. While others are planning to transform the house into a Christmas wonderland, I’m thinking about cold and isolated beaches. Don’t get me wrong, I like warm beaches too, but they’re in short supply this time of year in New England. And when they’re warm they definitely aren’t isolated.

      I saw some of the extended commercial they call the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade on NBC yesterday while prepping for Thanksgiving dinner. The best way to watch the parade is standing on a street corner in New York. But maybe not in a pandemic. The second best way to watch it is on mute so you don’t have to hear all the breathless commercials for each sponsor as some designated singer lip syncs their cover of a holiday song that will be featured on some rom com special on… NBC. But really, I love the holidays.

      Christmas decorations are lovely, the problem is me. I don’t turn on a dime like that. I don’t rush out to grab whatever is on sale, I don’t flip a switch to start Christmas the moment the Thanksgiving dishes are cleaned, and I don’t have all my gifts purchased yet either. I like to ease into the holidays one at a time, thank you.

      So while the holidays are ramping up in this New Hampshire household, I’m thinking about staring at the ocean. Perhaps too many SV Delos videos? Too much time away from the sea? Really, it could be any number of things, but mostly I think I’m not ready for the crush of Christmas. And yet here we are anyway.

      I’ve plotted an escape. A quick weekend on Cape Cod next weekend to stare at Buzzards Bay, feel the brisk wind on my face, and mentally shift gears from Autumn to winter. Cape Cod in early December is wondrously quiet, which is just what the Grinch needs before he switches to Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.

      But that’s next weekend. Today the Grinch strings Christmas lights on dormant trees. After all, it isn’t all about you. Right? Happy Holidays.

    • Making Decisions

      “If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.” – Michel de Montaigne

      “If you’re not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, say “no”.
      When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” — then say “no.”
      – Derek Sivers

      When you’re presented with a choice, there are a few paths in front of you. You could go with the flow and see where it leads you. You could just say no to everything and stay the course on whatever you’re currently doing. Or you could explore the path, decide if it’s a hell yeah! or a maybe yeah and jump in… or jump away.

      I found myself a while back with an attractive offer to go play in another sandbox for what was on paper a big chunk of money more. I contemplated it, talked to a few people to bounce the idea off of them, and thought about it some more. Tempting. Distracting. But admittedly less than Wow! for me. I’m at a point in my life where time expended on the unknown for incrementally more profit better mean a Wow! or it’s necessarily a No!

      “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      And so it was that at 4 AM I woke up for a bathroom break and lay there with the Sivers phrase above spinning through my head, reminding me that this thing you’re contemplating? It’s not a Hell yeah! for you. It’s an opportunistic money grab. And what of the time expended in its pursuit? For life is very short, as living keeps reminding me. So it’s a “no”. Which led me to wondering, then what is my Hell yeah! anyway? And it was right in front of me all along. And then I knew where to double down.

    • The Cumulative Force

      “Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it.”
      – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

      Re-reading Self-Reliance is always a pep talk with the Master. Sometimes I wonder at (and have written before about) the conversations Emerson and Thoreau must have had taking a walk about Concord, Massachusetts back in the day. Emerson, a dozen years older than Thoreau, might have offered more insight early on, but Thoreau measured up over time, diving deep into Transcendentalism and immersion in Nature (with a capital N). Thoreau was undoubtedly influenced by Emerson, and Emerson by Thoreau, yet each brought their own gift to the world.

      I’ve wondered at the writing lately. The content is a collection of many topics jumbled together, and much of that is by design. The scattered thoughts of one person marching through time. I’ve debated a shift to a once a week newsletter, which inherently would be more refined, more substantial and less clutter in the inbox of those who follow. But changing to a weekly post would change my habit loop in ways I wish to avoid. No, I subscribe to the Seth Godin school of daily blogging.

      So what then? Narrowing the focus to specific topics? Specializing for the pursuit of 1000 true fans? Instead of the trivial many blog posts, focus on the vital few, as Joseph M. Juran would say? If I were to monetize this site, I’d surely do that. But the goal of Alexandersmap is to seek adventure, to understand the place I find myself in (both physically and mentally) and write about it. And so it will continue as it always has been. The rest of the writing necessarily will evolve into a more focused pursuit of those vital few. But there’s something to be said for habit loops and cadence and Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours theory. Just write, often, on a diversity of topics, and the process will necessarily change you and improve the writing.

      And so here we are, one day at a time, building the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation, and seeing where it takes me. Is it a talent to write every day? Or accumulated skill? It would be brash to declare the former, and modest the latter. There’s a mix in there somewhere, but I do believe in sweat equity and making the most of the time we’re given. I’m a writer as long as I’m writing. There are plenty in this world doing the same. Whether the writing is that which I can do best? That will have to sort itself out. But I’m better for cultivating it.

    • Drink Up Before the Dregs

      “Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time.” – Seneca

      “What is the state of things, then? It is this: I do not regard a man as poor, if the little which remains is enough for him. I advise you, however, to keep what is really yours; and you cannot begin too early. For, as our ancestors believed, it is too late to spare when you reach the dregs of the cask. Of that which remains at the bottom, the amount is slight, and the quality is vile.”
      – Seneca, Letters From a Stoic

      We had our first frost of Autumn overnight. The fog rising from the ponds this morning betrays warmer days conceding to cooler nights. In New Hampshire the leaves will soon turn progressively to bright yellow, red and orange before turning brown and returning to the earth to fuel the next generation. Such is the cycle of life.

      Early mornings trigger my adventurous spirit. I have the most energy and a willingness to dare greatly. By 9:30 – 10 PM I’m generally running on fumes and ready to call it a night. While I’m not old just yet, I suppose I’m the opposite of youth in this respect. Certainly the opposite of the rest of my household. And if a day is a lifetime, I reach the dregs sooner than most. But I started so much earlier in the day savoring that first sip (metaphorically, of course). I honor the Thoreau quote on the home page whenever possible, seeking adventures, but mostly I rise early.

      Seneca’s Letters From a Stoic is a call to action written almost 2000 years ago and still ignored by the vast majority of people in their lifetimes ever since. Nothing is ours but time! Keep what is really yours, for you cannot begin too early. Savor this very moment, such that it is, and make of it what you can. That is the eternal challenge for each of us. To spend wisely this moment. And each day offers reminders to get to it already.