Alexandersmap

    Tag: Oliver Wendell Holmes

    • Release the Dancers

      “He was weary of himself, of cold thoughts and intellectual dreams. Life a poem! Not when you perpetually went around inventing your life instead of living it. How meaningless it was, empty, empty, empty. This hunting for yourself, slyly observing your own tracks—in a circle, of course; this pretending to throw yourself into the stream of life and then at the same time sitting and angling for yourself and fishing yourself up in some peculiar disguise! If only it would seize him: life, love, passion—so that he wouldn’t be able to invent it, but so that it would invent him.”
      — Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

      There’s a fine line between imagination and invention. We dream big dreams, or perhaps simply a wee wish or two, and they each dance about happily in our imagination until we do the work to realize them or eventually get sick of being teased by the dancers and find something else with which to fancy for awhile. Life isn’t meant to be a dream, it’s meant to be a gradual realization of our potential. It’s a matter of turning imagination into reality through deliberate and purposeful work. That line is crossed through action.

      “Decide what to be and go be it.”… —The Avett Brothers lyric that lives rent free in my head.

      Incremental experience—the experience that Jacobsen’s character Niels is pining for—in turn forever reinvents us. The person we’ve become is far more capable of doing this next thing than the person we were then. We imagine possibilities we couldn’t imagine from our previous vantage point, and we move along a timeline of steady progression.

      It’s natural to chafe at the limitations of our current level of experience. This discomfort is a catalyst for change—if we allow it to be anyway. Unless we’re forever paralyzed by inaction and low agency. We must develop our voice over time and learn to use it to realize possibility:

      Alas for those that never sing,
      But die with all their music in them!
      — Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Voiceless

      We are forever inventing ourselves or settling into the stasis of an under-developed character. We must raise our voice and sing! This life is flying along with or without our active participation. By all means, step away from the mirage of dreams and do something with this day. Release the dancers!

    • To Live is to Function

      “In this symposium my part is only to sit in silence. To express one’s feelings as the end draws near is too intimate a task. But one thought that comes to me as a listener-in. The riders in the race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to oneself that the work is done.

      But just as one says that, the answer comes: The race is over, but the work never is done while the power to work remains. The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to rest. It cannot be while you still live, but to live is to function. That is all there is. And so I end with a line from a Latin poet, who uttered the message more than fifteen-hundred years ago, Death, death, plucks my ear, and says, ‘Live. I am coming.’”
      – Oliver Wendell Holmes (from a radio broadcast when he turned 90)

      This image Holmes painted of cantering after the race is over, living but not quite in the race anymore, lingers. I’ve seen a few people who’s cantering ended sooner than we all wanted, but bless them, they were cantering to the end. Their work was done, and they functioned as best they could until they left us. And whispered a reminder that soon our own race will end, so best run it well.

      The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to rest.

      My own race took me around a snowy loop in the woods again yesterday, snowshoeing in deep snow, following cross-country ski tracks in a quiet patch of woods that doesn’t see a lot of action from the conservation land walking crowd. Just me and a trusty map, making my way alone in the woods, working up a sweat with a brisk pace as I broke trail next to the ski tracks. This, the morning after, I stepped out of bed gingerly to test the legs and found myself doing okay. Looking back on February so far, I’ve gotten out to snowshoe or hike most days. For I’m still very much in the race, after all, and far be it from me to start cantering now.

      To live is to function – to be out there in the world doing. A challenge to us all from Holmes, all those years ago. To be engaged with those around you, to be charging around the track of life all frothy and full of joyous exuberance at full gallop. Holmes was a Civil War veteran, wounded in battle, a Harvard-educated lawyer who rose up to the Supreme Court and the oldest serving member of that court. A living link between Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He lived in Mattapoisett and Beverly, Massachusetts and by all accounts lived a rich, full life during his own time in the race.

      Death, death, plucks my ear, and says, ‘Live. I am coming.’

      How do you read these words spoken by Oliver Wendell Holmes nearly a hundred years ago? As a reminder to get out and live while you’re still in the race? Or as a dark reminder that death is coming for us all? To me the only choice is the former. To have Holmes quote the stoics near the end of his own life, well into his cantering years, is a wake-up call for the generations lining up for the races after his own. Fast forward to today and now it’s our race. So how shall we run it?

    • Monday Jump Start

      Monday Jump Start

      My week started at 6 AM with a quick walk around the garden to take stock of things, let Bodhi out and then a dive into writing before I shift gears towards work.  It was clear that the first cup of coffee hadn’t shaken the cobwebs off yet, so I indulged in some literary caffeine to get my jump started for the work week.  It started with grabbing a few random quotes from books I own:

      “As long as you live, keep learning how to live.” – Seneca

      “Misspending a man’s time is a kind of self-homicide.” – George Saville

      “A man is rich in the proportions of things he can let alone.” – Henry David Thoreau

      “The shortest and surest way to live with honor in this world is to be in reality what we would appear to be; all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them.” – Socrates

      “The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

      “No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated and disciplined.” – Henry Emerson Fosdick

      From there I started wondering about a couple of the people who were quoted.  I know all of the names but some carry more weight today than others.  Living in the Boston area it’s easy to know about Thoreau and Holmes, but Fosdick was someone I didn’t know as much about:

      Fosdick was a pastor from Buffalo who found fame as a leading voice in Modernism taking a stand against Fundamentalism (ie: taking the Bible at its literal word) with his sermons and books, in fighting racism and for co-authoring Alcoholics Anonymous.  He’s a guy that would look around today and have a few things to say about our society.  I’ll need to find his biography and read some of his sermons to really get a sense of the man.

      Then I moved over to Holmes.  Supreme Court Justice.  Acquaintance of the Concord elite.  Harvard guy…  Civil War veteran?  Interesting.  Another biography I need to read.

      We live our lives with history swirling all around us.  People who lived their lives with focus, dedication and discipline and changed our society in meaningful ways, and thus changed the way we live our own lives.  This ripple effect is profound, and yet we usually don’t know the source of the ripple.  I guess that’s one reason I blog; to learn about the antagonists that bounced around in this pond before me and changed the wave we’re surfing today.  Another reason is to build this writing muscle back up so it doesn’t atrophy.  Whether anyone ever reads it is beside the point, but I do appreciate you getting this far down the page.

      With that it’s time to focus on my job.  The work week has begun.  I’ll try to spend my time wisely this week, move in the right direction and to be honorable.  I don’t always get it right but hopefully I’ll do more good than harm this week.