Alexandersmap

    Tag: Memento Mori

    • Extending the Joyride

      “Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.” — Giacomo Leopardi, Pensieri (Thoughts)

      Leopardi wrote this in his latter years, with understanding of the sufferings of old age. As his work goes, Pensieri was published unfinished. We all leave something unfinished when we leave this life. If our legacy is what we leave behind us, our unfulfilled potential is all that we never got around to. Thoreau’s “quiet desperation” is knowing the gap exists between the two.

      I’m one of those people who say to the world that I will live to be 100. I know the statement is foolhardy, brash and unrealistic. It’s said tongue-in-cheek, like many things I say. We simply don’t know when our expiration date is. Given the rate of decline in our latter years that I’ve observed in the generations ahead of mine, I aspire only for good health and sound mind for as long as possible, that I may kick the sufferings of old age down the curb right to the end of this joyride.

      Each day we wrestle with fear and desire. The trick to aging gracefully is to focus on filling those gaps in our potential with applied experience. We produce and share and move on to the next stage of our lives to the end of our days. If our health span allows, we may expand our legacy. So above all else, it seems, focus on increasing that health span. Fitness and mental acuity are far better desires than simply growing old.

    • Life and Love and Wings

      i thank You God for most this amazing
      day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
      and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
      which is natural which is infinite which is yes

      (i who have died am alive again today,
      and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
      day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
      great happening illimitably earth)

      how should tasting touching hearing seeing
      breathing any—lifted from the no
      of all nothing—human merely being
      doubt unimaginable You?

      (now the ears of my ears awake and
      now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

      — E. E. Cummings, i thank You God for this amazing

      We dwell so often on our limitations; Limited time, limited capacity for learning new things or for being patient with the things in our life that overstay their welcome. We are bound by commitments, with reasons, with a lack of imagination for breaking free from all of that and living an expansive life. We are locked into routine and measure our days incrementally. How are we to grow when we are forever held captive by a lack of audace créatrice (creative audacity)?

      To be unbounded and unlimited is of course a fantasy. We all will die one day (memento mori). Infinite growth is not for mere mortals. And yet we may live a far more expansive life than we mortals usually attempt. We are no more and no less than what we do with our time.

      Why worry about all that today when we can simply do what must be done and defer hopes and dreams indefinitely? Because now is all we have. Growing into our possibility begins now. It always has and always will be so. But thinking in terms like “always” is its own trap. Because it lets us off the hook of immediacy. We must steer clear of such traps and simply think of now. For this is the birth day of life and of love and wings. So do begin.

    • Another Day Forgoing Mortal Nature

      Four Seasons fill the measure of the year;
      There are four seasons in the mind of man:
      He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear
      Takes in all beauty with an easy span:
      He has his Summer, when luxuriously
      Spring’s honied cud of youthful thought he loves
      To ruminate, and by such dreaming high
      Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves
      His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings
      He furleth close; contented so to look
      On mists in idleness—to let fair things
      Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.
      He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,
      Or else he would forego his mortal nature.
      — John Keats, The Human Seasons

      I’ll admit that I don’t often revisit Keats poems, but when I do, it’s usually in the cold, dark winter months. This morning the dog food stored in the garage was frozen (frozen!), so I had to bring it in to thaw so the pup could have a bit of wet food mixed in with her dry. These are first world problems I admit, but on the last day of January 2026, let it be known that I fasted in sympathy with the dog until her food thawed out.

      Today is just another day forgoing mortal nature, but there are only so many days. We ought to live like we were dying, as that twangy formulaic song goes. To kick mortality down the curb with a better fitness routine and better choices about what we eat. To read and learn and sharpen the senses while sharpening is still possible. To go and do while going and doing are still in the cards for people in our particular season. Our routine determines the season we find ourselves in as much as the accumulation of years does. We mustn’t get old before our time.

      Consider that Keats poem again. The man was frisky! Delighting in lusty Spring and satiated Summer, acknowledging that in Autumn he was more inclined to let the fair things pass without some inappropriate gesture from the aging poet. It’s only in Winter that he calms down, recognizing that growing old and brittle is a trade-off for death’s final embrace. For all our human nature, it’s eternity that we will sleep with forevermore. We just don’t have to be in a hurry to get there.

    • Third Things

      “Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly.” — John Hall, The Third Thing

      We have our self, we have our selves, and we have what we are mutually focused on in our time together. Like being on teams, whether sports or companies or projects worked on with mutual focus and effort, that thing we focus on together becomes a link that bonds us in the moment and forever after. A long-term relationship is simply coexisting with someone else with mutual attention on a series of third things we carry with us for the rest of our days.

      Our hiking friends have the mountains and expanding red lines on trail maps as their third thing. Our sailing friends scheme of bigger boats and tropical anchorages. Our lake friends are quietly carving out a life as snowbirds and the idea of growing old in a forever summer lifestyle. My sister and brother-in-law have found pickleball a useful third thing bringing them fitness and an expansive social life. We’re all different, and so too are the things we give our lives to in mutual focus.

      Third things capture a time in our life that we’ll remember one day when the math is no longer one plus one plus one more thing. We may be aware of such things as subtraction without dwelling on it. We all know the score. For it’s a thing too. Sha-la, la-la-la-la, live for today…

      What do we—together—focus on other than ourselves? The list comes easily at times. The frisbee-loving pup. The house and whatever the latest project is that my bride has deemed essential to our well-being. Always, the children, then aspiring student-athletes, now adults. Increasingly, the parents, and all that aging parents mean for them… and for us. Travel and collecting experiences once deferred for other third things. Third things are our common ground, focused on together yet differently. A part of us, yet not us.

    • Do Your Thing

      “I myself think that the wise man meddles little or not at all in affairs and does his own things.” — Chrysippus

      We have a serious issue on our hands. There is simply not enough time today to do all that we might do. Spending time on anything is serious business when we recognize how little of it we have left to spend.

      Knowing that time is our precious currency in a brief life, why do we carelessly toss it away on things beyond our control? The affairs of others is not our concern when those affairs are beyond our control. We ought to use this time more wisely, lest we fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way. Hum the tune, but hear the message.

      Just look at how we burn through this very time thinking too much about how to use it. That’s the philosopher’s curse. To be or not to be, that really is the question. But remember to be now, for there is no later. So stop thinking so much and do your thing. Tomorrow will be far too late in the game for such things.

    • Shake the Grass

      And the days are not full enough
      And the nights are not full enough
      And life slips by like a field mouse
      Not shaking the grass.
      — Ezra Pound

      There is a compulsion to fill my days and nights with experience. Perhaps you share this too. There is an equally pressing sense that time is slipping past us at shocking speed. Tempus fugit. We humans are bound to notice it eventually.

      Forever chasing experience. Forever working to be here, now. It’s a blessing and a curse to be aware. Mostly a blessing, for awareness offers a glimpse of all that flies past. Awareness locks a few moments in amber, that we may cherish them for the rest of our vibrant days. Awareness makes us do things like getting out of a warm bed at 3 AM to attempt a glimpse at the northern lights, or to plunge into a cold mountain stream or the bay late in the season—simply because we may never pass this way again.

      Don’t waste a moment. We ought to spend the time as we know we should. We ought to avoid distraction and waste whenever possible. And be bold and daring when we least expect it of ourselves. Shake the grass and dance all night. For today will fly by like all the rest.

    • 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.