Alexandersmap

    Tag: Michel de Montaigne

    • Monsters and Miracles

      “Whilst we seek out causes and solid and weighty ends, worthy of so great a name, we lose the true ones; they escape our sight by their littleness. And, in truth, a very prudent, diligent, and subtle inquisition is required in such searches, indifferent, and not prepossessed. To this very hour, all these miracles and strange events have concealed themselves from me: I have never seen greater monster or miracle in the world than myself: one grows familiar with all strange things by time and custom, but the more I frequent and the better I know myself, the more does my own deformity astonish me, the less I understand myself.” — Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

      We are, each of us, walking contradictions in identity. We can be lazy or vigorous, distracted or focused, incompetent or prolific contributors to the causes most meaningful to us. And most every time beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We are our own worst critic, and ultimately the one who pull ourselves out of a tailspin to soar once again.

      Today I aim to do better than I did yesterday. Now yesterday was memorable for a few good reasons but not nearly as good as the day before was. Yesterday the ego got in the way a bit too much, the lazy me got the upper hand. I didn’t reach the level I aspire to for myself in many ways. But today is a new day and anything is possible. Just who will I be today?

      Self-awareness is our scorekeeper. We can assess our performance against the standard we set for ourselves and face the truth of who we were in the moment. Sometimes we let ourselves down, sometimes we surprise ourselves with the heights we reached. In the morning we may mourn or celebrate these realizations, but always with the intent to aspire for better. Today is a new day, and a new opportunity to reach higher.

    • Top to Bottom

      “On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.” — Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

      Collectively, we tend to elevate some people in society to positions of power and influence. Some people crave power at all costs. And luckily for them, some people want to follow a compelling leader at all costs. This following takes many forms, from religious to political to celebrity. There’s a belief that some people are above us because they’re born into a certain family or went to a certain school or have a certain position that infers authority.

      And yet we’re all human. We all hit the birth lottery and will eventually pass from this world. We all carry the weight of expectations for who we might be in this world because of the stories we and society tell us based on nothing but commonly held beliefs. But stories change all the time, as people do.

      We ought to evaluate the stories we tell ourselves now and then as a level-set. We’re all just people, from the top of the heap to the bottom, and doing the best we can to figure things out as we move through life. We do have a say in how our story goes, and so ought to set our aim higher. Decide what to be and go be it.

    • To Learn and Grow and Discover

      “There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.” ― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

      We have an opportunity to learn and grow and discover until our very last days. On the other hand, we might consign ourselves to the corner of closed up people waiting to die. What kind of life is that? Life isn’t easy, but why turn off the lights years before last call?

      Lifelong learning is well beyond our formal education. I actively rebelled against a good chunk of that formal education, by some miracle earning both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree. Admittedly, I might have gone further along the arc of human potential if I’d just followed that formal education a bit more stringently. Maybe I’d have gone to Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard. But that wasn’t meant to be my arc. Maybe it wasn’t yours either. Each of us runs the race of maximizing our personal potential at our own pace.

      Formal education teaches you rules others want you to live by. Those who master it early enough get a strong lead and a key position in the pack. What some of us realized in navigating that formal education is we didn’t really want to be part of the pack anyway. Sometimes we confuse indifference for incompetence. The first time I tacked Calculus I thought I was incompetent. It turns out I just didn’t care about it enough to try. When I did care enough the experience was wholly different.

      Lifelong learning is a personal quest for understanding, but it ought to sparkle and pop and illuminate for the thrill of it all. For it is a thrill to remove the “un” from aware or familiar. It’s a thrill to master a simple phrase in a foreign language or to try to cook something that seemed outside your skillset before. That excitement can build on itself for the rest of our lives.

      Who says we have to be bored and lonely and used up at the end of our days? We get to reinvent ourselves every day, if we don’t squander the opportunity to learn and grow and discover. There’s enchantment in that moment when we finally realize what we’d been missing all this time. Who says we can’t carry that sense of enchantment to the end of our time? Sounds like a hell of a ride.

    • 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.

    • Every Day A New Fancy

      “We are carried along by our thoughts, “now gently, now violently, according as the water is angry or calm … every day a new fancy, and our humors shift with the shifts in the weather.” It is no wonder that the mind is like this, since even the apparently solid physical world exists in endless slow turmoil.“ – Sarah Bakewell, quoting Montaigne, who was quoting Heraclitus

      I’ve had the Montagnie’s Essays for some time now, but keep pushing it aside for other reading material. So when Bakewell’s book How To Live or A Life Of Montaigne was recommended by an author I follow closely I decided to dive in. While also reading the excellent Erik Larson book The Splendid And The Vile and Tristan Gooley’s How To Read Water and a business book recommended by the company President. So five books in various stages of completion, and a desire to complete them all. This happens now and then: every day a new fancy. I’m treating the business book like a homework assignment and read it for an hour then put it down for the day. But what of the others? You can’t read everything at once.

      The answer is you put aside the books that aren’t capturing your imagination at the moment. Get out and live, return and see where the mind settles. At the moment I’m settled on The Battle of Britain with Larson’s book. There’s only so much time for reading, just as there’s only so much time for anything else meaningful. We prioritize and complete what we can in this tumultuous world, and accept the day as it is when it ends.

      Being carried along by our thoughts is a very human condition. We all have the tendency to get distracted by the buzz around us, which has grown exponentially since Montaigne’s time. We do a disservice to ourselves having so much to consume, for we can’t possibly consume it all. Instead I’m trying to raise the bar. Consume, but make it nutrient-rich consumption. What are you getting out of this book? is as fair a question to ask as What are you getting following this person’s Twitter account? The price you pay to read it is time you’ll never get back and attention you could have spent on something else. So by all means make it worthwhile.

      In all the madness that is 2020 I forgot that this was a Leap Year. There are 366 days in 2020 – as if we needed another day added to this crazy year. Looking back on the last 250 days that have passed, I’ve managed to read 13 books so far, fewer than anticipated but overall a higher level of reading. I’m barely skating by on learning French and Portuguese, doing just enough to keep the streak alive. And of course I’ve recommitted to hiking and local travel. 2020 will go down as the most unusual year in my lifetime, but it won’t be a lost cause.

      “If you understand everything you consume, you’re probably going to be the same person 6 months from now.” – George Mack

      So there’s the challenge: stretch your limitations and grow. To turn Mack’s quote and look back six months ago when this pandemic really started locking things down, I can say I’ve accomplished a lot in spite of the pandemic (or because?). The time hasn’t been lost at all: filled with learning and family time and local travel I might have otherwise put aside in favor of the faraway. And so to turn that quote back around as a challenge to myself and look out six months from now, what will I have accomplished? When you ask this question of yourself and take it seriously it stills the tumult of the mind and lends focus to the march we’re on. Sure the stack of distractions remain, but the path becomes more defined. A tumultuous river and a still river both arrive at the same sea eventually. Which has the better journey?

    • Knowing Your Place

      “Even on the most exalted throne in the world we are only sitting on our own bottom.” – Michel de Montaigne

      There’s a tiny house wren that acts like it owns the place, and carries on about it when I have the audacity to linger near her nest. I understand and concede the space. There will be a time soon enough when the space won’t be as important to her and her young and I can linger there again. We all have our place in this world. Here and now, this is hers.

      Coexisting with others offers humility.  I’m tolerant of the wren and the cardinal who nests in the shrub out front that’s in need of a trim.  Far less tolerant of the chipmunks who tunnel under the hard won ground I’ve toiled with, or the hornets who wish to reside in the grill or the weep holes for the windows.  But all of them are telling me that we’re just bit players in the game, just like they are.  Eventually we’ll move on one way or the other, just as they do.  So how do you behave while we’re all sitting here in the same place?

      From the beginning Americans have acted like we own the place, moving in and sweeping aside those we wouldn’t coexist with.  I heard a great analogy for this on Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast, where we might get a little freaked out about a spider that may or may not be dangerous.  If we know for sure it’s not going to harm us we might gently sweep it outside.  But if there’s any doubt about it’s venomous nature we’d kill it in a second.  Such was the fate for the Native Americans as Europeans settled North and South America.  In the early stages of King Philip’s War peaceful “Indians” were rounded up and shipped to islands in Boston Harbor, just in case.  Eventually those same people would be used to help end that war.  Look at any war and you’ll see a similar level of suspicion of who might be peaceful and who might be venomous.  Russians rounding up people of German descent and sending them to Siberia, Americans rounding up people of Japanese descent and sticking them in internment camps in the west, the English rounding up the Scots and Irish and kicking them out of first one place, then another.  When in doubt, evict or destroy.

      The beautiful thing about America is that we’re a country designed under the rule of law, not the rule of a king or tyrant.  Checks and balances exist to ensure that those in power don’t abuse their power.  That’s being tested like never before in American history, ironically by a guy sitting on his own bottom tapping away unchecked on Twitter.  For all the abuse and fixing of the system going on by those in “leadership” positions, nature has a way of balancing things out.  First, that pesky rule of law provided delay tactics to slow the spread of tyrannical tendencies.  Then a swing of the House of Representatives as Americans reacted to the wave of indignities perpetrated on the country.  And then the tsunami of a pandemic with the associated economic gut punch and a massive reaction to social injustice reared up to test the leader, who is showing he’s not up to the task.  But many Americans are showing that they’ll coexist with a big scary spider only until they feel that it represents a danger to all of us.  Time will tell, but I’m generally optimistic about humanity and my fellow voters.  They might not have been paying enough attention four years ago, but surely they are now.

      Ultimately, we all need to get our own houses in order so we can focus on the more pressing global concerns like climate change.  Mother Nature is peacefully coexisting with us for the moment, but she’s showing her irritation.  We might think we’re perched at the top of the food chain on our exalted throne, but we’re just bit players in the timeless cycle of history.  It would be good to show a little more humility.  We’re all in this place in time together, maybe for a reason, and ought to embrace our role and get to work.

       

    • Rejoice In This Moment

      “Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee.” – Michel de Montaigne

      “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it . . . but love it.” – Friedrich Nietzsche (borrowed from Ryan Holiday)

      “Be still my heart; thou hast known worse than this.” – Homer, The Odyssey

      One thing that’s impressed me over the last three months is the resilience and grace of so many people facing adversity.  Is the world unfair?  Yes, of course it is, but that doesn’t mean we have to be bitter about where we are in this moment.  Embrace the suck, love the moment and learn from it.  And really, it doesn’t all suck, does it?  There’s so much good happening in every moment – change the focus of your internal lens and you’ll see it more clearly.

      The Homer quote above has stuck in my head since I read The Odyssey at the age of 19.  It’s sitting on a shelf waiting patiently for me to come back to read again like Penelope waiting for Odysseus to stop pissing off the gods and get home already.  Anyway, it’s come in handy over the years, right up there with “this too shall pass” on my list of phrases I say to myself when things get challenging.  And let’s face it, things are challenging at the moment.  But how we react to it is more important than what we’re reacting to.  Amor fati: love of fate, seems to have worked for the stoics, for George Washington, Friedrich Nietzsche and countless others over the centuries, and it will work for us too.

      I’ve been guilty of complaining about things a bit too much, and I’m working to change that little character flaw.  If I’ve learned anything, it’s that complaining just fuels the suck.  It all ends badly for all of us, or it all ends as it should for all of us; it’s all a state of mind either way.  Rejoice in what you can control, forget what is beyond you, and love the moment you’re in.  For this moment, even if it’s not what we might want, is the only moment we have.  This, and we, too shall pass.  Rejoice in this moment.