Alexandersmap

    Tag: Michel Foucault

    • We Become the Sum

      “What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?” — Michel Foucault

      Walking the pup yesterday during a snowstorm, I considered turning back to slip on micro spikes. Fluffy snow over ice is never a good recipe for reliable footing. Instead I shortened my stride and the leash so the dog wouldn’t pull me down in her snowy exuberance. Some life lessons are learned from a sore backside.

      We know that we are works in progress, but sometimes get frustrated with the pace of that progress. It’s okay to paint over our mistakes now and then. It’s better to make them anyway, if only to learn which paths are not ours to take, if only to not have possibilities haunting us for not having tried them at all. As Nietzsche reminded us, that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. In this way, we may consider each day a lesson in how to live.

      The pup and I have a loop that covers the same ground twice to get us to the desired distance. Double the distance and we’re doubling the frequency of times covering the same ground. Which is noticeable when it’s snowing out and we’re leaving foot and paw prints behind us. In this way, each loop revealed the previous ground we’d covered, but our steps never exactly repeated themselves. Our strides changed with the conditions, we were pulled towards some curiosity just a nose below the snow, a car passed by that changed our path or some such thing. As the snow accumulated, the oldest footprints faded more and more into the layers building up on top of them. Each loop was the same, yet completely different. So too are our days.

      Our canvas transforms with every stroke of the brush. Each offers lessons on where to go next. Each fades further into the background with the addition of yet another. But here lies depth and progress. The richness of life is found not just in the changes we make to our days, but in the rituals that anchor them. It all builds upon itself to form the work of art that is our life. In this way, we become the sum.

    • The Two Characters We Meet Every Day

      “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.” — Michel Foucault

      “When the person you could have been meets the person you are becoming, is it going to be a cause for celebration or heartbreak? ” — Seth Godin, This is Strategy

      It’s been a couple of weeks since I stopped using Duolingo, and even though I grew dissatisfied with the app, I’ve grown more dissatisfied with not consistently working on being multilingual. And so I purchased a competing app, Babbel, to give that a go. I’ve evaluated it before, but at the time didn’t want to invest in a second app. So we’ll see how it goes.

      This will not be a blog post about learning a language. It is (partially) about becoming the person we could be if we just applied ourselves to the task every day. I fancy myself a writer, and so I write. The blog isn’t quite enough for me, and so I’ve set daily goals beyond the blog that I must honor. As with Babbel, we’ll see how it goes, but we learn with everything we aspire to in our lives that it’s now or never.

      There’s a reason that Planet Fitness sponsors the New Years Eve celebration in Times Square. They’re aware that we’re all looking at who we’re becoming as the year turns and deciding whether we’re going to be heartbroken by the encounter or have reason to celebrate. We all want this next year to be our best year ever, don’t we? The trick is in how we realize that. One resolution does not an identity make, but our incremental daily actions carry us a long way.

      The thing is, that character we’re becoming is simply the course we set for ourselves. The character we live with every day ought to be interesting, productive and fun or we’ll inevitably back away slowly to find a better dance partner. Becoming is a daily reckoning of who we are with who we want to be. The key to a successful, joyful life is to make the character who is marching towards the future to meet our desired future self the kind of person we want to be around every day.