Alexandersmap

    Tag: Memento Mori

    • Acutely Aware

      “Remember, remember,
      this is now,
      and now,
      and now.
      Live it, feel it, cling to it.
      I want to become
      acutely aware
      of all I’ve taken
      for granted.”
      ― Sylvia Plath

      The urgency of now is amplified by the awareness of time going by. We ought to do the things we believe we ought to do now, while time is ripe and dreams are unfaded by the rapid flow of the days to follow. Tempus fugit, friend: Time flies.

      Plath died young, taking her own life after putting her children to bed. Knowing that, read the poem again and feel how it changes. There is more desperation, more immediacy to the words when life hangs in the balance. A few more minutes, a few more years—it’s all the same. Memento mori.

      Now that we’ve got that out of the way, we ought to go out and live with this bonus time we’ve been given. Seneca reminded us to seize what flees. Carpe diem. Why would we dare to waste our time so carelessly? Accept the fragility of the moment and do something with it.

      A cold water plunge shocks the body into immediacy (I wonder sometimes why nobody follows me in). The body is jolted into sudden awareness of the moment. There is no distraction in cold water, it’s sink or swim. So what will do for your soul? But enough of intellectual discourse; what will jolt us into awareness that this is it? That there is only now? Live it, feel it, cling to it.

    • We Are Stirred

      I don’t want to be demure or respectable.
      I was that way for years.
      That way, you forget too many important things.
      How the little stones, even if you can’t hear them,
      are singing.
      How the river can’t wait to get to the ocean and
      the sky, it’s been there before.
      What traveling is that!
      It is a joy to imagine such distances.
      — Mary Oliver, I Don’t Want to be Demure or Respectable

      When this blogger is finally done (perhaps when he begins to refer regularly to himself in the third person), it may be when the collection of Mary Oliver poems have all been quoted. It could just as easily have been Henry David Thoreau or Marcus Aurelius. Truly, I don’t mean to keep returning to each of them here, but then I re-read a poem like this one, in just the kind of mood I find myself in now, and well, here we are.

      We know when we’re ready for the next. To imagine such distances. Oh, the audacity to try to reach them! We all get tired of being demure and respectable. Don’t we? No, maybe not all of us. But some of us. The kindred fire is easy to feel when encountered. We are fellow schemers, some of us. We dream our dreams and chase some of them. We aren’t satiated by travel or poetry or encounters in the wild—we are stirred. Forever wanting just a bit more than this, please and thank you.

      To be demure is to concede that now is not entirely for us. Now is a time to be present and honorable and a sacrificer of time and energy and that special fire within that longs for oxygen and fuel. To do the right thing is honorable. Honor has its price, but truly, it also offers its beautiful dividend that cannot be ignored. A sense of place and connection keeps us alive and thriving too—just look at those Blue Zone folks for affirmation.

      As a friend recently phrased it, we have competing opportunities in our lives. The only wrong answer is to be a slave to someone else’s dream that robs us of our vitality. In time, we learn what is an empty pursuit and what feeds the flame. Having felt the heat within, how will we now feed it, so it doesn’t peter out like the vitality in so many others who have come before? It’s a joy to imagine such distances we may travel as we grow into our possibilities. Go! Do something with it while there is time.

    • A Brief, Salty Moment

      I love a great beach as much as anyone, but given the choice, give me a rocky ledge with an steady ocean roll crashing into it. The bigger the swell, the higher the foamy spray, the happier I am to be there to witness it. This eternal battle between land and sea will go on as long as there’s an ocean. We only get to witness if for our finite moment—roughly equivalent to the time as that foamy spray leaping into the air for a brief, salty moment before returning to the sea. What is a few seconds or a hundred years to infinity? All the same. It is us that feels the thrill of the brief flight.

      Knowing the score as we do, we might choose to be a little saltier today. There is nothing but now. Make a big splash.

    • Busy Got Me

      When I am among the trees,
      especially the willows and the honey locust,
      equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
      they give off such hints of gladness,
      I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
      I am so distant from the hope of myself,
      in which I have goodness, and discernment,
      and never hurry through the world
      but walk slowly, and bow often.
      Around me the trees stir in their leaves
      and call out, “Stay awhile.”
      The light flows from their branches.
      And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
      “and you too have come
      into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
      with light, and to shine.
      — Mary Oliver, When I Am Among the Trees

      Suddenly the leaves have returned to the earth. Tropical rain and gusty wind have done the job, and wet clumps of oak leaves blanket everything like a first snow. I shuffle through the fallen leaves knowing that I didn’t walk in the woods nearly enough this season. Busy got me once again.

      I too am so distant from the hope of myself when I get busy. Too busy for peak fitness or deep work or even to mop the kitchen floor. Too busy to reach out to someone who may need to talk—or maybe it was me that needed to talk. Those moments fall away like autumn leaves in a storm.

      Busy is a choice we make to subtract meaning from our lives for the belief that there is growth in hustle. There’s nothing wrong with filling our days with productive and meaningful work. Just don’t believe that busy is the same thing.

      The answer is to go easier along this path. To back away from the transactional life and choose a new direction while there’s still time. Like tea leaves, those wet leaves blanketing the ground have something to tell us. If not now, when? Don’t let busy rob you of all that is dear. All that is light. All that would fill our days if not for busy.

    • Old Riddles and New Creeds

      After one moment when I bowed my head
      And the whole world turned over and came upright,
      And I came out where the old road shone white.
      I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
      Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
      Being not unlovable but strange and light;
      Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
      But softly, as men smile about the dead

      The sages have a hundred maps to give
      That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
      They rattle reason out through many a sieve
      That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
      And all these things are less than dust to me
      Because my name is Lazarus and I live.
      — G.K. Chesterton, The Convert

      Chesterton famously converted to Christianity when he was 48. The fame came with his zealous endorsement of the Catholic faith in his writing. The poem above is one example of that, indicating his joy at being born again. He passed away at 62, which seems really young now, but a full life in 1934 when his whole world turned over and came upright.

      Now I’m not especially religious, but I fancy myself a spiritual being on a quest for experience, knowledge and enlightenment. This blog is a ship’s log of sorts, showing where my journey has taken me thus far. I’d like to think I’ve come a long way. I’d like to think there are many pages left to write. ’tis not for us to know such things, only to do what we can with today’s entry.

      I’ve come to value the sands of time more than gold, and the wisdom of voices who have crossed the threshold. The young seek shortcuts to influence and wealth, the old seek solace in a life of connection and comfort. I’m somewhere in between, learning what I will, sharing what I feel s’éclairer. This is our age of discovery, friend, for we are here, now and alive. Picking up what we can in our time even as it falls away.

    • Fear (The Little Death)

      “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” — Frank Herbert, Dune

      Fear seems to be popping up a lot in my world lately. Not because I’m afraid so much as the idea of it comes up all the time. We know that once we notice something we see it everywhere. Well, fear was noticed, and here we are.

      What are we afraid of anyway? Death? Memento mori. Whether we’re afraid or not, we will all die anyway. Failure? Life is one failure after another. But it’s also one success after another. Need an example? We all woke up today. Call it a win.

      The thing is, most fear that holds us back from doing something is a dream dying on the vine. String enough dead dreams together and we’ve wasted our lives. Ignore enough fears and maybe we reach summits we’d hardly dare to dream of they seemed so audacious.

      We’re wounded by fear
      Injured in doubt
      I can lose myself
      You I can’t live without
      — U2, Red Hill Mining Town

      What is so important to us that we feel the fear and do it anyway? What is worthy of our courage now? What are we waiting for? We know deep down that tomorrow is too late. Socrates told us that we must seize what flees. Tempus fugit: Time flies. And the opportunities of a lifetime fly with it.

    • Always Mine Time

      “When I paint a picture, the time it takes will always be mine, or I get something out of it; time doesn’t end because it has passed. I feel sick when I think about the days that are passing—interminably. And I don’t have anything, or I can’t get at it. It’s torture; I can get so furious that I have to pace the floor and sing something idiotic so that I won’t start crying with rage, and then I almost go crazy when I stop again and realize that meanwhile time has been passing, and is passing while I’m thinking, and keeps on passing and passing. There is nothing so wretched as being an artist.” — Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

      When we stumble across that which captures our move through time, traps it in amber as Vonnegut put it, we realize the infinite—that which is timeless. Timelessness is itself an illusion, as is time, we simply capture our passage through it with something that will outlast us.

      Do you doubt this? Look at an old photograph from a moment in the past and feel what stirs within. Read an old letter, when people still wrote those, and see what is captured in amber. I write this blog post, as with all the rest of them, knowing that once I hit publish it becomes always mine time—this moment of thought and emotion and intellectual momentum (or perhaps inertia) are now captured. I move on to the next thing in my day, and the next; passing and passing. What of the rest is captured? Precious little, but these words remain.

      What artist hasn’t felt swept up in the moment of creation? What artist hasn’t felt the emptiness of uncreative moments? We must be productive in our time, or watch it drift away like so many empty days. The only answer to the coldness of time is to do work that matters, and to strive towards mastery in it. Personal excellence (arete) may be forever out of reach, but to reach for it is to make something more out of… time.

    • Of Blossoms and Stars

      Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
      Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
      — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

      Here’s to the stargazers among us. We tend to walk with tilted heads, with eyes towards the infinite. Time is marked by the celestial dance. We are but brief witnesses—spectators watching the play unfold and yet knowing we are a part of it just the same. The masses are busily scurrying about, thinking the universe wraps around them. Look up on a crisp September night to find the truth of the matter. We are nothing but fireflies to the universe. And yet we burn brightly for our brief moment.

      The garden is fading rapidly, but some of its stars rise just in time to save the season. Sedum autumn joy blushes for all the attention it receives from the bees. Chrysanthemums, top-heavy with blooms, positively glow even as their neighbors bow with fatigue. The Montauk daisies (Nipponanthemum nipponicum) are just now budding, promising their own show in days to come. These are days we’ll remember, the garden reminds us, in the long nights of winter coming soon enough.

      Isn’t it strange how we feel most alive as the days grow shorter? Is it heightened attention or a building sense of urgency to squeeze more awareness into this brief fling with the sun? I think it’s appreciation for the beautiful dance and gratefulness for being a dancer ourself. To mourn the season coming to a close is to miss the sparkling rise of the next. We must be active gardeners in this life, no matter the season at hand. Look around, for magic is all around us.

    • That Fierce Embrace

      It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
      or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel
      abandoned.
      If you know despair or can see it in others.
      I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world
      with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back
      with firm eyes saying this is where I stand. I want to know
      if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living
      falling toward the centre of your longing. I want to know
      if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequences of love
      and the bitter
      unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have been told, in that fierce embrace, even
      the gods speak of God.

      — David Whyte, Self Portrait

      To be ourself in a world that expects acceptance, or at the very least acquiescence, is audacious. Mothers, wanting the very best for their babies, might call it reckless. Best to fall in line, get a proper degree, leading to a proper job, offering a proper life. ‘Tis proper, we’re trained to believe, to focus on the score. Grades and status and titles and the right zip code.

      The score is memento mori. The score is tempus fugit. If we are to melt into that fierce heat of living, we must go against the grain more often than our tribe may be comfortable with. They only want the best for us. We know this, and we must learn to be bold anyway. A lifetime is far too short for all that we want for ourselves, let alone all that our tribe expects of us.

      The real question, the one we’ve avoided all along in this tribal dance, is why won’t we simply embrace it?

    • A Sense of Progress

      “One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress.” — Daniel Kahneman

      “My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there” — Charles Kettering

      This writer’s near-constant focus on improvement is simply a reminder to keep going towards the things that we can control. Sure; momento mori, but before that, we ought to have something to look forward to. A sense of progress is essential to our well-being. We’re all heading towards something, and we’d like to think it’s something better than everything that surrounds us now. Better health. Better relationships with others. Better options for how we spend a random Friday night. Focusing on one thing we may improve upon leads us to better in that thing. Expand that improvement to a few things, and maybe we can feel some positive momentum developing.

      The world may feel like a hot mess right now, and really, there are compelling reasons to feel that way. We cannot control most of what is happening, but we should raise our voice when we can influence the trajectory. How we treat others, and how we treat ourselves, matters more than we realize in any given moment. Ripples project from the center, but they also interact with other ripples. So we must always strive for that evasive personal excellence (arete), knowing that it’s not something that stays bottled up in our core, but is something that projects outward towards others, raising the standard for each of us.

      The thing is, we tend to become what we focus on. When we focus on the steady decline of society, we become fearful and mistrustful, which perpetuates, well, the decline of society. When we focus on developing new skills and our overall fitness, we realize incremental improvements that lead us to a higher level of performance. This in turn may transform our belief in the state of things from pessimistic to optimistic. Applying that positive force on building bridges and lighting beacons of hope may just transform others along the way.

      One twist in our belief for the future may just spritz a little joy into an otherwise methodically-dismal life designed by the doom cycle trolls. Indeed, we’re collectively heading towards the very thing we focus on the most. We ought to set the compass accordingly. Make some progress today—towards something better. It makes a world of difference.