Alexandersmap

    Tag: Philosophy

    • Delight Is in the Details

      “The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.” — William Morris

      Our level of interest in the details of life dictates how much we get out of it, and yes, how much we are delighted in the living of it. Case in point, I am as interested in the proper capitalization of the title of this blog post as I am with the view out the window I find myself next to as I write this near a bay alive with choppy fetch, bouncing boats and hunting birds soaring above.

      Why should we care about every little detail? Because it’s the stuff of life! More precisely, the stuff of our life. This, friend, is it. And making something of it is our purpose. Indeed, the devil is in the details, so draw delight from the lot of them. That is the recipe for an expansive life.

      We are each collectors of days, with a stack of them making up our lifetime. Within each day in turn are a collection of moments and minutia that are the stuff of life. Paying more attention to that stuff allows us to appreciate all that we have or have held as uniquely ours. Gratitude and delight follow closely behind awareness of all that is.

    • Something

      “I am only one, I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.” — Edward Everett Hale

      Absorbing the latest foolishness in the world, I wonder whether I ought to care more. The thing is, I care a great deal about everything, but I can’t control hardly any of it, so I focus on something instead. That, I believe, is the trick to getting through life with the soul intact. The nicks and bruises of everything may sting and surely are unpleasant for the logical mind, but remember that everything cannot get past a hardened mind. Alternatively, we may let something in to nurture and grow.

      Decide what to be and go be it. Just who do we wish to become in future versions of the self? We’re flying along towards the future anyway. What something today will make the biggest difference in who we will be then? If we stop focusing on everything, something more essential becomes easy to focus on.

    • A Thrilling Something

      Do you still remember: falling stars,
      how they leapt slantwise through the sky
      like horses over suddenly held-out hurdles
      of our wishes—did we have so many?—
      for stars, innumerable, leapt everywhere;
      almost every gaze upward became
      wedded to the swift hazard of their play,
      and our heart felt like a single thing
      beneath that vast disintegration of their brilliance—
      and was whole, as if it would survive them!
      — Rainer Maria Rilke

      August is ending, and so are longer days. I don’t mind the darkness so much, for it opens up other opportunities. Have a look up and see all that we miss scurrying about in the daylight. Just this morning the brilliant kaleidoscope of sunrise greeted the pup and me as we ventured beyond the threshold. She had her nose to the ground, while my own was pointed at the skies. We survey all but the middle, the pup and I.

      The Perseids came and went this year, with the inevitable ill-timed overcast skies blocking the show at peak where I live. Still, I saw a few shooting stars this month—enough to keep me looking for more. A meteor is a shock to the senses as it streaks across the sky. Where a moment before there was vast sameness, for an instant there’s a thrilling something burst upon the scene, before it disappears as quickly as it came.

      We aren’t so different from shooting stars, are we? We think we will live forever until we realize we won’t. That realization in itself is a jolt to the vast sameness of living. Memento mori. Make this streak through the dark a little brighter, buckaroo! We ourselves are a thrilling something, if we seize the day. Hurry now: the ride goes quickly.

    • How Swell Thy Sting

      I was sitting outside with a good book, minding my own business, when in the blink of an eye a yellow jacket flew into my face just below my lower lip, panicked and stung me. I only knew it was a yellow jacket when I saw it fall to the deck after brushing it off. I’d done nothing to provoke it, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. All I could do was put an ice cube on my face to mitigate the swelling, take an antihistamine and get back to the book. Sure, it would have been better if it had never happened, but it also could have been worse.

      Amor fati (love of fate) is easy to say, harder to practice. We are constantly offered opportunities to accept the world on its terms. Do we? Another opportunity will surely bump into us sooner or later.

    • You Are Young. Live!

      “Live all you can. It’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t matter what you do — but live. This place makes it all come over me. I see it now. I haven’t done so — and now I’m old. It’s too late. It has gone past me — I’ve lost it. You have time. You are young. Live!” — William Dean Howells

      I’m writing this on the opposite end of the day from the norm. The reason is a keen inclination to live today, despite the usual distractions that life throws at us. And oh, the distractions! But it’s now or never, when it comes to living. Tempus fugit.

      It doesn’t matter what we do, so long as we live. There are no do-overs, there are no second-chances, there are only regrets if we wait any longer. There is only now.

      As The Grass Roots put it, Sha-la, la-la-la-la, live for today. Sure, plan for tomorrow, but never defer that living part. We are young, or at least as young as we’ll ever be. So carpe flippin’ diem, already.

    • Drawing New Circles

      “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another is drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”

      “The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment. The great moments of history are the facilities of performance through the strength of ideas, as the works of genius and religion.”
      — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles

      Reading Emerson is like having a conversation with an old mentor we haven’t seen in awhile. We’ve grown, formed new ideas and opinions, and began to believe the hype generating between our ears that we’ve got it all figured out. Then our mentor comes along and reminds us that we’ve only read part of the story. There are larger circles being drawn as we speak, and the longer we linger in this one, the more behind the curve we will be in this new reality unfolding before us.

      Life is indeed change. Life is indeed unfair. What of it? Unfair compared to what? Be the change you want to see in the world, and stop focusing on all that we cannot control. The profiteers, bigots and fools be damned. We must forever change in the face of constant change. I grow so weary of people trapped in the unfairness of the world, instead of stepping out into something far beyond the trap of that particular vicious circle of thought. Be bold with your one precious life!

      Pendulums swing all the time—what is the axis point from which it pivots? There lies the truth. “Everything looks permanent until its secret is known”, Emerson wrote in the essay quoted above. Find the secret if you dare. Not bullshit conspiracy theories, but the truth within, that limits growth beyond this circle.

      To be resilient, we must abandon who we were and become what we are meant to be. We must forever draw new circles, or be imprisoned by the circle we current reside in. Every end is a beginning. Circle that if it helps. And go seize what flees.

    • The Harmony of Life

      In my eyes, the garden is beaten down and tired right now. Between a trifecta of the heat and occasional torrential downpours and a family of rabbits that find living amongst delicious plants delightful (to the chagrin of my fence-leaping pup), it’s going through a lot right now. And just as we compare ourselves to our own peak days of fitness and learning and view anything lower than that standard poorly, I compare the garden to where it was a month ago or in its peak in past seasons. It’s a bit unfair of me, I think.

      This week we hosted our neighbors, who delighted in the garden. They saw the beauty that I’d been ignoring while scrutinizing what’s faded. And in seeing it, they reminded me to stop looking at what’s missing and look instead for what is here. We are as happy in life as what we focus on.

      The French have an expression that I’m trying my best to adopt in my own life: l’entente de la vie, which translates directly as the understanding of life, but deeper, means the harmony of life. In other words, living a balanced life with time and attention to actively savoring all the joys available to us. So it pairs well with joie de vivre.

      A big part of savoring is simply being present with what is bringing us joy in the moment. Sure, there will always be something nagging at us that isn’t perfect in our world, but whispering quietly to us in that chorus of misery is something beautiful awaiting our attention. Turn the senses towards that and watch life transform into something more delightful, more delicious, and more harmonious with the act of living. Magnifique!

    • That Better Character

      “In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.” ― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

      Most people remember the latter half of this quote, but I love the entire paragraph. Perhaps because it’s a reminder that we’re all deeply-layered characters, with good bits and not-so-good. Life is a journey of discovering each layer and being proud or chagrined by what we find. In the end, how we’re remembered is for what we show the world of ourselves.

      Memento mori. So show up. Be that better character in the time that we have left. Not to be remembered differently, but to be more engaged and interested in all that we encounter, top to bottom. This is our life, such that it is. So what of it will we double down on? Set the course accordingly.

    • One Who Seeks

      “I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.” ― Hermann Hesse, Demian

      There’s a scene in the movie Good Morning, Vietnam where the song What a Wonderful World is playing while scenes of horror unfold. I used to hate that scene, for taking a beautiful song and associating it with the ugliness of war. Now I understand that the world is always filled with ugliness, and yet it’s also beautiful and yes, wonderful. War is horror, and so sometimes is living. The dichotomy is both external and within us. We are drawn towards that which we seek. But it’s all there, isn’t it?

      As this is published, there are humans executing wars on other humans at the same time as other humans are exploring the void of space. It’s not much different than 50 years ago, is it? Vietnam and the Apollo missions and Civil Rights in the 70’s. Have a look at the headlines today and we see the same stories unfolding. Humans are complicated, and we never really change all that much.

      I may fancy myself a philosopher or a writer tapping away at my keyboard, but the rubber meets the road when we get out into the world and see the ugliness. Sometimes we ourselves are the ugliness. Sit in traffic long enough and you begin to resent the world. Sit in a meeting listening to others ramble about nonsense and we become nonsensical ourselves. In such times, the journey must turn inward. Just who do we want to be anyway?

      I may look around one day at 94 and realize that I’ve got everything figured out, but it’s folly to believe it so. To reach 94 would be an epic journey in and of itself. To reach old age with a sound mind, with the clarity of purpose burning within and a body capable of sustaining the drive, well, that would be a miracle. The odds are stacked against us humans. And yet people get there, and thrive well beyond that random number we call our age.

      Let’s see how it goes. I’d like to survive the madness we live in now, let alone try to skip to the end of the book to see how it ends. One page at a time is the proper way to immerse ourselves in a great book or a compelling life. It all goes fast enough already—tempus fugit—so do try to be here, now. All change begins within. The worst in us and the best in us are both awaiting which side we truly want to have emerge.

    • The Nature of a Sunbeam

      We speak of the sun’s light as “pouring down on us,” as “pouring over us” in all directions. Yet it’s never poured out. Because it doesn’t really pour; it extends. Its beams (aktai) get their name from their extension (ektainesthai).
      To see the nature of a sunbeam, look at light as it falls through a narrow opening into a dark room. It extends in a straight line, striking any solid object that stands in its way and blocks the space beyond it. There it remains—not vanishing, or falling away.
      That’s what the outpouring—the diffusion—of thought should be like: not emptied out, but extended. And not striking at obstacles with fury and violence, or falling away before them, but holding its ground and illuminating what receives it.
      What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.
      — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

      The first day of April is often thought of as April Fool’s Day. That can be fun or tedious, depending on how one thinks about trickery and which side of the prank we find ourselves on. At the risk of being overly serious, I think I’ll sit this one out and reread a favorite book instead.

      It’s April, and that brings us to the birth month of Marcus Aurelius. Perhaps that means more to me than to you, and that’s okay. But consider the nature of the man through the work that extends through time to us. The man transmitted light.

      And what of us? What do we transmit in our daily lives? Are we like sunbeams, extending hope and beauty and love as far as we can reach, or are we blocking the light from entering altogether? We must be active illuminators, friends, if we are to leave any room we enter better for our having been there. The nature of a sunbeam is to extend into the darkest reaches to bring light to these places too. Consider that a mission if you like, just to see how bright we can make the world this day.

      Have a look at the night sky sometime. Do we focus on the dark void or the stars? We are inclined towards light, for this is where life is sustained. We may choose to be light transmitters ourselves, and thus sustain life in the most inhospitable times. Isn’t it nice to shine a light on others, instead of shadow? Unlike darkness, light reflects when it reaches a surface. And the life we save may indeed be our own.