Alexandersmap

    Tag: Philosophy

    • On Place and the Tilt of the Earth

      “I am summer, come to lure you away from your computer… come dance on my fresh grass, dig your toes into my beaches.” — Oriana Green

      Maybe it was appropriate that today, June 21, the Summer Solstice, I awoke at 4 AM—just in time to mark the exact minute (4:13 AM CST) of the tip of the planet back towards shorter days. But let’s worry about that tomorrow, for today is the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. After bouncing from Vienna to Boston to Nashville, my body isn’t quite sure which time zone it currently resides in. Yet the mind is fully rested and ready to hit the day.

      By the time of the solstice it usually feels like summer has been with us awhile. This year feels different, like I’m running away from the season. Travel will do that. I spent a day at home assessing the neglected garden before flying off once again. Is that a tragedy or simply a new way of experiencing the season? The weeds seem to enjoy my absence, while the cats seem surprisingly annoyed when I packed a suitcase as soon as the laundry was done from the previous trip. Sorry felines, the world calls.

      Do you wonder why we heed the call at all? Isn’t summer a chance to slow down and relax for awhile? Tell that to a farmer. Europeans know how to take a proper holiday, Americans jump right into the next thing. Which is right? It depends on what you want your life to be.

      Ultimately summers, like life, are made by what we do with the time. Whether our longest day or our shortest matters little if we don’t make something of the moment. Experience begins with presence, the rest is just finding a place to land and the tilt of the earth.

    • Where Our Heart Takes Us

      “I am proud of my heart alone, it is the sole source of everything, all our strength, happiness and misery. All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

      I was thinking about Goethe after my traveling companion asked me why I was so happy to come across a statue erected in his honor in Vienna. I suppose this quote offers some insight. Goethe distinguished himself as a deep thinker in a city jammed full of them. We all seek knowledge in our quest to become something more, but our heart points the way and determines how far we actually go. Our knowledge quest isn’t unique to us, many of us seek amelioration. The heart ultimately tips the scales for how rich and fulfilling our lives will be.

      Absorbing knowledge is helpful when we do something with it. The homeless man asking me for money in the park easily pivoted from German to English when I responded with my basic skills in his native language. Which of us has more knowledge? Which of us can read Goethe without translation? We are what we either seek or ignore. Knowledge is but a starting point for becoming what we might be.

      Traveling, reading, learning a language, and trying to capture experiences in words are each forms of seeking knowledge. Goethe’s hard stare and his translated words remind me that I have work to do. Do I have the heart to get it done?

    • Silencing Voices

      “If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” — Vincent van Gogh

      When we figure out the truth in van Gogh’s words dictates exactly how creative we’ll be at any given stage of life. He didn’t achieve “success” until he’d left this world, for us the world spends little time worrying about our feelings on the matter. The truth is we have but precious little time to silence our own voices and chase dreams. Why wait?

      The problem we have is we see what the masters do in any field, and compare our work to that. We have difficulty reconciling our incremental step towards mastery with the brilliant work of others before us, without ever considering the stumbles they took on their path. The work evolves when the mind puts aside resistance and gets to it.

      We’ve already made our mark on the world, subtle as it might seem. Our splash ripples even as we contemplate our next dive into the unknown. Knowing this, why not stretch our limits a bit on this next one? Silence our doubters one small step at a time.

    • Shall We Sparkle?

      “The last stars will die out 120 trillion years from now (at most) followed by 10^106 years of just black holes.
      Condensed, that’s like the universe starting with 1 second of stars and then a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion years of just black holes.
      Stars are basically the immediate after-effects of the Big Bang. A one-second sizzle of brightness before settling into an essentially endless era of darkness.
      We live in that one bright second.”
      — Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy)

      When we think of our infinitesimal smallness in this context, in relation to the stars and the eventual endless darkness of the universe, we might feel a bit overwhelmed by it. We might feel existence itself is pointless in the vast emptiness to follow… this. Then again, we might celebrate the spark of time we’ve all collectively lived in—you and me and every human who ever existed or ever will in a brief spark of magnificent light. Doesn’t that feel a bit more extraordinary?

      If infinity is endless darkness, and we aren’t currently residing in said infinity just yet, we ought to settle into the moment and savor it. We think we’ll live forever. Well, forever is somewhere beyond that 120 trillion years, isn’t it? Forever is folly. The only thing that matters is this instant.

      Shall we sparkle?

    • Love and Limes

      In the empire of the senses
      You’re the queen of all you survey
      All the cities all the nation
      Everything that falls your way
      There is a deeper world than this
      That you don’t understand
      There is a deeper world that this
      Tugging at your hand
      Every ripple on the ocean
      Every leaf on every tree
      Every sand dune in the desert
      Every power we never see
      There is a deeper wave than this
      Swelling in the world
      — Sting, Love Is the Seventh Wave

      We’re aware of the hate-mongers pitching their mantra of fear and scarcity and race theory. We’re aware of wars and desperation and greed even as we wake in relative peace, paying for the sins of the world with higher supply chain prices and a distinct and distressing shortage of limes due to climate change and drug cartels playing games. What are we to do in this scenario? Hoard? Buy more ammunition and higher fences?

      Maybe the answer is to be better ambassadors of truth and understanding. To embrace our community, warts and all, and make something of it. To go out into the world and embrace cultures distinctly different from our own and show them that we’re not as bad as what they’ve heard about us either. Maybe we ought to double down on love and respect.

      The carefully curated news washes over us, wave after unrelenting wave. We either accept their view of the world or we make one of our own. They say that the seventh wave is the largest of all, the one that surfers seek out and sailors watch out for. We might think of it as the wave that will wipe us all out or the wave that will wash away all the madness in the world. I guess the answer lies in which wave has the most mass and momentum as it heads for the beach.

      Creative optimism and a healthy dose of love ought to trump hate and madness. When life gives you lemons make lemonade. When it gives you limes make margaritas. But let’s stop all this bickering and enjoy a drink together. For we have work to do.

    • How Much Alive

      “It matters not where or how far you travel—the farther commonly the worse—but how much alive you are.” — Henry David Thoreau

      Sitting outside, listening to birdsong in the magic hour before the world shook the cobwebs off, I watched a couple of large birds fluttering tree-to-tree. I wondered at them, thinking perhaps pileated woodpeckers who tend to behave this way, or maybe a couple of young turkeys waking up from their roost. Definitely not hawks on the hunt. Black and white with a bit of duck-like appearance to them, I quickly exhausted my list of possibilities and remained mystified. The binoculars and camera remained safely in the house where they offered the least amount of help in the moment. So I quietly thanked them for their visit and released them from my attention as they worked their way away from my own perch. I may find out yet who my visitors were, but it wasn’t our moment for a proper introduction.

      We aren’t meant to know everything, but we ought to be curious. We all seek answers in this world. We climb to high summits, fly to faraway places, seek solace in the new. Shouldn’t we celebrate the world as it comes to us? Why do we feel compelled to fly across the globe? Because we know it’s out there, and like those birds, once we’re aware of that fact we want to know a bit more about it.

      Thoreau traveled too, he just wasn’t collecting frequent flyer miles or navigating security lines. He sought faraway places relative to his time and place, traveling to Cape Cod and Maine and paddling down the Concord and then up the Merrimack Rivers. He sought what was just out of reach just as we do. Credit the pace of travel if you will, but he didn’t postpone his aliveness for when he arrived at his destination, he encountered it in each moment along the way. Shouldn’t we do the same?

    • Get Outside

      If you can’t decide what you want to do
      If you can’t stand what people say to you
      If you can’t see when your eyes are open wide
      If you ask yourself what your doing and there’s no reply
      Get outside
      — Robert Palmer, Get Outside

      Sometimes you reach the end of the day and you don’t know what you’ve done with it. You check the boxes, have the conversations, do the work… and everything seems off anyway. These are days to get outside and feel the world.

      Yesterday, after entirely too much madness in my life, I walked outside to seek answers in the blooming lilacs. Like so many flowering woody plants their blooms are here today, gone tomorrow. Yet their fragrance is one of the most familiar of all. They make their mark on the world and recede from the scene as summer heat approaches.

      I want to tell them not to go. Stick around a bit longer. But of course this isn’t the way the world works. The lilacs remind us not to blink. It’s now or never, friend. Get outside and linger with them before your opportunity is gone. How many more lilac seasons do we have left in us anyway? We throw out our days as if our account is unlimited.

      Why do we spend so much of our time indoors when the world whispers to us in this way? We ought to be more present with the larger world. We ought to embrace the changes that wash over us whether we want to pay attention or not.

      The lilacs will surely return again next year—but will we be here to enjoy them? To every thing there is a season. The future is a fool’s game. Our moment is now. Get outside and find it.

    • Where Deep Roots Grow

      From the bottom of my heart
      Off the coast of Carolina
      After one or two false starts
      I believe we found our stride
      And the walls that won’t come down
      We can decorate or climb or find some way to get around
      Cause I’m still on your side
      From the bottom of my heart
      — Jimmy Buffett, Coast of Carolina

      Long-term relationships are about finding the space to grow together. We’ve all seen examples of couples who find a way to make things work because they want to make it work. We’ve seen the opposite too. The thing about walls is they’re always there—we either find a way around them or we let them close us off from the people who are most important for us.

      Relationships work when we break down barriers. They fall apart when we let the barriers define the relationship. None of us has to think too long about a friendship or romantic relationship that suffered from one or both parties seeing the differences of opinion but not the way around it. Nothing grows very well in a tight box.

      We live in a world that amplifies our differences. What might grow if we knocked down a few walls instead of throwing up more? The very question prompts a new level of thinking, doesn’t it? Thinking in possibilities instead of limitations opens us up for deeper relationships, wider experiences, and stronger bonds.

      It brings us to a place where deep roots grow.

    • Gone From My Sight

      I am standing upon the seashore.
      A ship at my side spreads her white
      sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean.

      She is an object of beauty and strength.
      I stand and watch her until at length
      she hangs like a speck of white cloud
      just where the sea and sky come
      to mingle with each other.

      Then, someone at my side says;
      “There, she is gone!”

      “Gone where?”
      Gone from my sight. That is all.
      She is just as large in mast and hull
      and spar as she was when she left my side
      and she is just as able to bear her
      load of living freight to her destined port.
      Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

      And just at the moment when someone
      at my side says, “There, she is gone!”
      There are other eyes watching her coming,
      and other voices ready to take up the glad shout;
      “Here she comes!”
      And that is dying.
      — Henry Van Dyke, I Am Standing Upon The Seashore

      When we lose someone, what do we miss the most? Their physical presence? Or their fresh perspective? They may always be with us, even without these things, but these things matter too. They matter deeply.

      When we lose someone we lose the essence of that person in our lives. Yet we still feel them with us. It’s not our time to sail off over that horizon. But we wonder at just what’s over it just the same.

      In time…

    • Something Mighty and Sublime

      Rest not!
      Life is sweeping by
      go and dare before you die.
      Something mighty and sublime,
      leave behind to conquer time.
      — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

      Goethe once wrestled with the desire to accomplish great things while enjoying the comforts of a bourgeois lifestyle. By all accounts he succeeded in transcending the ordinary with his writing. And what of us? Are we so comfortable in our domestic lifestyle that we fail to seize the moment? Are we doomed to be the forgotten masses or will we create something mighty and sublime in our time?

      These are grandiose expectations for a lifetime. Who are we to rock the boat when there’s such good sailing? We ask of life what we will, it hands back harsh unfairness and tempting distractions and entertaining beguilements that quickly rob us of the one thing that matters most: time. What of it? Plenty of people have transcended all of these things and more. The only thing we can control is our focus and consistent effort towards the achievement of our hopes and dreams.

      “Do or do not. There is no try.” — Yoda

      There’s no judgement in these words, just the facts. We have our time and then it will be gone, intentions be damned. We must ask ourselves, in the quiet moments of truth, what is it we wish to do before it all ends? Rest not! Get to it already.