Alexandersmap

    Tag: Philosophy

    • Being Frugal With Sand

      When the goal is to seize the day—Carpe diem— then being busy is the natural state. To do everything we wish to do in a lifetime requires our full attention. But the thing about attention is it is quickly stolen away by all of life’s distractions. Focus is thus essential to prioritizing the most important things. We know when we’re being pulled away from the meaningful and important, and when we’re deeply immersed in it. What we lean into makes all the difference in how we feel about those grains of sand moving through the hourglass.

      There’s no doubt that one kind of “being busy” can be viewed as a distraction from other things we ought to be tackling. But there’s also a kind of “being busy” that is living an active, meaningful life. One key indicator is the phrase itself: When we say we’re very busy, it’s usually the distracted kind of busy. When we’re deeply engaged in meaningful activity, we don’t think of ourselves as being busy so much as making the most of our time.

      Taking stock of the year as we close in on the halfway point, we might be amazed by all we’ve done with the time. I hope so, for isn’t that the point? To augment our days with joyful activity at the expense of all of the trivial pursuits that the universe throws at us has always been our underlying mission.

      It’s one thing to be aware, it’s another to be absorbed by the trivial. How many grains of sand would we trade for things that don’t matter in the end? We must be frugal, even as we must be active. Our lives depend on it.

    • The Present

      “And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.” — Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

      “It occurred to him that there must be some state institute, a kind of time bank, where he would be able to change at least some part of his shabby seconds.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge,

      Time is not ours to keep—more a wave we surf to the beach. We dabble in time, thinking about improving our productivity and efficiency and doing more with less, but really, we’re trying to avoid wasting the time we have. Making the most of the present is the only worthy goal as we surf this wave.

      Lately conversations about time have come up a lot in the circles I run amuck in. Talk of people taking more time off, people who feel they’re time hasn’t been used wisely, people quickly running out of time (I’ve had more conversations about hospice recently than at any time in my life). Everybody is going through something in their lives. The surfing isn’t always great in this complex world.

      This writing habit is one of the best things I’ve invested my time in. Writing isn’t passing the time, and it isn’t a celebration of one’s greatest exploits. It’s putting a spotlight on the hourglass and seeing each grain of sand and savoring the seconds. This is living in the present: good, bad and all that lies in between. The secret is to add depth and breadth to each moment of it. And maybe write the chapter in such a way that it lives on beyond the present.

    • The Traveling Stoic Meets a Flight Delay

      “Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music – the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.” — Henry Miller

      There’s no better time to practice stoicism than during business travel using the uniquely out-of-your-own-control limbo of domestic flights. Short delays become long delays, longer delays become cancellations, soon you begin to feel that creeping realization that we’re all just pawns on a chessboard. Who dreamed up this hellscape anyway?

      Amor fati. This is the moment when a deep breath and stepping outside ourselves clarifies. After all, enjoying life, even the grind of travel going badly, begins with knowing it’s all a game. If the why isn’t compelling enough to stay in this particular game, change the game. This applies equally well to the long term as the short. Life is altogether too brief to linger longer than absolutely necessary in the inconsequential.

      Walking helps more than visiting the bar. Seeing how many steps you can get in pulling your carry-on throughout the limits the airport sets for you is a more productive game than sampling the drink menu. Seeing how other people react to the same challenges you’re presented with is interesting, but who wants to live constantly comparing yourself to others? It’s better to take a walk, removing yourself entirely from that part of the chessboard to see how the game is going elsewhere. This offers an immediate change of state, both in what you pay attention to and the changes a bit of exercise offers.

      The things you see in an airport terminal when you have the time to wander can be fascinating…. Or at least interesting enough to make you forget where you could have been otherwise. The thing is, we are here, now, in whatever circumstances life throws at us. So buckle up and enjoy the ride.

    • The Magic of Applied Attention

      “We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.” — Charles Bukowski

      There is a Persian lime tree growing in a large pot on the sunny deck behind my house. This spring there were more than a hundred blossoms on this tree, each developing into tiny fruit that promised a bumper crop of limes. But after a particularly angry thunder storm and torrential downpour dozens of those tiny fruits scattered the deck, their tart potential over before they really began. While mourning the loss of so may limes, I took solace in the dozens of fruit still developing on the tree. It seems the tree had culled itself that it might focus on the ripe potential of the fruit that remained.

      We each bear so much in our lifetime, holding on to things we ought to shed to focus on the essential few. It’s okay to let go of the trivial, that we might nurture the truly important things in our lives. Letting go is painful, but not as painful as diminishing our best work by carrying more than we should.

      Little by little,
      as you left their voice behind,
      the stars began to burn
      through the sheets of clouds,
      and there was a new voice
      which you slowly
      recognized as your own,
      that kept you company
      as you strode deeper and deeper
      into the world,
      determined to do
      the only thing you could do —
      determined to save
      the only life that you could save.
      — Mary Oliver, The Journey

      The night after the thunderstorm, I spent an evening with friends, throwing axes at a target drawn on a wooden wall and building fragile wooden castles in the air (Jenga). There is a unique strategy for each, naturally, being so very different from each other in practice. But there are also similarities. Besides each pursuit using wood, it was the act of applied attention that is common to both. To be good at either you must simply get out of your own head and focus on successfully completing the task at hand. One might utilize this in every pursuit, from writing to navigating any of the essential tasks that fill one’s day.

      We ought to cherish our time together, forgetting the trivial affronts that life throws at us. We ought to find our own voice in a world full of people waiting for us to shut up that they may say something clever. We ought to direct our attention inward, to the ripe potential of our own ideas, calling us to truth and clarity. We know, deep down, that we won’t survive this, but if we give ourselves the time to focus, we may just yet produce something substantial anyway.

    • Accumulated Value

      “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” — George Bernard Shaw

      “Those were steps for me, and I have climbed up over them: to that end I had to pass over them. Yet they thought that I wanted to retire on them.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

      There are times when doing nothing seems better than stumbling along making one mistake after another. There are times when standing still seems far more attractive than sliding sideways off the cliff. We are progressing one step at a time, even as some of those steps feel like a plateau. What are we reaching for but some better version of ourselves?

      As we grow and acquire skills and knowledge we become more useful. Our usefulness to others is a trade-off of sorts, a curriculum vitae of accumulated value used to trade our time and applied energy to the greater good, or at least a paycheck and a place in the room where it happens. But that accumulated value also applies to our usefulness to ourselves. We reach our potential through the climb.

      I spoke with an old college friend recently. Conversations with people you haven’t seen in a long time turn into a gap analysis: What have you done in the time between then and now? Relationships, children, jobs, affiliations, beliefs and habits all fill the gap, determining who we become. Some people grow apart, some grow together. Life is a game of place and time, yet we still have a say in who we might be. The thing is, a conversation like that allows us to see the gap in ourselves too. Those steps passed over summarized as growth and setbacks, lessons learned or missed, all bringing us here.

      Do we like the view? We must remember that we’re simply passing over another step. It’s helpful to ask what value we’re accumulating in this present state, and how that might ease our ascent to the next. For the journey continues this day.

    • The World Lies Waiting

      “Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.“ — Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

      “The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.” — Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

      When those who have achieved mastery in their craft leave this world, what are we to do but reflect on their work? But something else stirs in their passing: Memento mori. A whispered reminder that we too will slip away one day, work and dreams of what might be be damned. It’s now or never, friend. Carpe diem.

      This is the urgency of living. This is the call to produce that which must be finished in our time. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting. But the world deals in reality, not dreams. We must realize the best in us through our actions.

      We must make the most of our days.

    • Heaven, On Earth

      “When conditions are such that life offers no earthly hope, somewhere, somehow, men must find a refuge.” — Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way

      Everybody wants to go to heaven
      Get their wings and fly around
      Everybody want to go to heaven
      But nobody want to go now
      — Jim Collins / Marty Dodson, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven

      Heaven is sometimes believed it to be the light at the end of the tunnel in an otherwise bleak and miserable life. It offers hope when there’s no reason to believe there ought to be any. Others describe it as a place to aspire to—an exclusive club that only the truly enlightened amongst us will ascend to. I’m not sure I’m buying that. We’re already in an exclusive club having been born at all. Do we accept the miracle of being alive each day we wake up? If we don’t celebrate this miracle, what makes us believe we’ll behave any different if we reach Heaven?

      “I don’t feel the slightest interest in the next world; I think it’s here. And I think anything good that you’re going to do, you should do for other people here and not so you can try to have a happy time in the next world.” ― Katharine Hepburn

      I fall in Hepburn’s camp on the idea of Heaven. It’s all very nice to talk of an afterlife and being happy then, but we live here and now. This is our time to fly. We’ve each hit the birth lottery, and thus far have evaded the grip of the Grim Reaper. Isn’t that cause for celebration? We might think of this lifetime as an apprenticeship for whatever comes then, should we be so bold as to believe we’ll ascend to such a place.

      Simply put, when we defer to this “someday when” we do a disservice to ourselves and the universe. Sure, we can’t always control whether our lives at the moment are heavenly or hellish, but we can control how we react to it. And most of us can do a lot more than that.

      “Take care to create your own paradise, here and now on earth” — Omar Khayyam

      Stories about heaven and hell offer guidance that historically helped keep society together. But the same stories can be used to pull people apart. We see a fair amount of that divisiveness in the world today, with people using stories of heaven and hell to justify horrific behavior and violence. If there are indeed Holy Gates I’m not sure I’d walk through the same way some of these characters believe they’ll be going. So maybe save the preaching for someday when. Nothing speaks louder than action. Give me fairness and love and living by the Golden Rule. Celebrate and honor the miracle right here.

    • The Whisper of the Window Seat

      The more I travel, the more I believe there are two types of people in this world: those who would block out all the noise and retreat into themselves, and those who are actively engaged with everything and everyone around them. This might be best observed on a plane, where the window seat becomes a portal to the universe for those actively looking out the window, or alternatively, closed the entire flight that the traveller may forget that they’re propelling tens of thousands of feet above the earth in an aluminum tube. Take those two travelers and bring them into a room or a garden and I’d bet most would behave similarly.

      I’d like to believe that I’m actively engaged in the world, but still own noise cancelling headphones and resent the person in front of me for reclining their seat. I celebrate the input I seek from the world, yet resent encroachment from that which I don’t. Does that make me complex, or practically engaged? I’m a work in progress either way; with stoicism as a lens for which to see the world.

      Given the choice, would you choose an aisle seat over a window seat? Would you take one for the team and sit in the middle seat? These are choices that say a lot about us. The aisle offers flexibility—you can stand up any old time you want to so long as that fasten seatbelt sign isn’t illuminated. Yet you’re constantly encroached upon by (seemingly) every person bumping into you as they pass by. There’s joy but also despair in the aisle seat, presented to you in a jolt just as you doze off.

      That middle seat must be suffered. You know exactly what you’re in for, and usually, that vision is realized. There’s something very stoic about traveling in the middle seat. Amor fati—love of fate. We accept the universe as it comes to us. All we can do is cross our arms and take the air miles. If you’re lucky, the person in the window seat is a kindred spirit and has the shutter open for you to catch a partial view of what might have been.

      The more I travel, the more I want the window seat. Sure, you’ve got to manage your bladder trips wisely, but otherwise you’re in a place of least possible encroachment under the circumstances with the most opportunity for wonder just an open shutter away. We’ve all got such a short trip in the big scheme of things, why not be open to experience as much as possible? Everything but that reclining seat, anyway.

    • To Be a Good Ancestor

      It’s understood that our ancestors lived in a time of darkness and brutality mixed with enlightenment and progress. History is a process of confronting and accepting the evidence we stumble across as we explore the path of humanity. We aren’t a perfect species, but we can make incremental progress towards a better world. We cannot judge ourselves today based on the actions of our ancestors, but we can learn and apply that knowledge towards a better future. This of course applies to the individual as much as the collective species. In either case, progress is active work.

      Our ancestors were the best and worst of us. We are the sum of that history: the survivors, antagonists and witnesses rolled into an underlying identity we either celebrate or work to change. We are the latest revision of our species, and the trick, as Kevin Kelly puts it, is to be good ancestors for futures generations. Just as a scale and the mirror inform us of our progress towards fitness, our work and what we invest our time and energy into determine tangible progress for our collective future.

      History suggests steady progress, even as the news suggests a spiral downward. The only thing certain is that we have our verse to be written. What we do with the opportunity is up to us.

    • Sea Foam Consultation

      I go down to the shore in the morning
      and depending on the hour the waves
      are rolling in or moving out,
      and I say, oh, I am miserable,
      what shall—
      what should I do? And the sea says
      in its lovely voice:
      Excuse me, I have work to do. — Mary Oliver

      The ocean is indifferent to our schemes and stumbles. We go to her for consultation or consolation, and she offers all the time in the world. But the answers are ours to find.

      Every morning, when the ocean is nearby, I walk down to the surf line and think about the day ahead. I wonder at my solitude as the sun rises to meet me. Why doesn’t everyone seek what I seek? The ocean whispers her reply: we each have our time. We only have agency to question our own.