Alexandersmap

    Tag: Philosophy

    • Incrementally Better

      “A mistake repeated more than once is a decision” – Paulo Coelho

      “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” – Richard Rohr

      When you live long enough you start to lose some of the hard edge that once defined you. That sarcasm you voice to others was nothing like the self-talk you once gave yourself. Quite simply, you stop worrying about the chase for perfection and start living with who you are.

      The Coelho quote above once tortured me for the patterns of decisions I’d made over time that didn’t help me. Eating the wrong food, opting out of exercise, not making the call you know you needed to make, not following through when you should have, and then not following through the next time either. Decisions made, not mistakes. This quote can eat you alive if you let it.

      And then I stumbled upon the Rohr quote, and recognized the incremental improvement in myself over time. When things aren’t going well in some area that self-talk amplifies the worst traits, making it more of who you are. Once you’ve recognized and completely own past decisions, what do you do with them now?

      You work to reduce their impact in your life. You get better each day at the things you once avoided. Slowly, surely, you incrementally grow better and the bad shrinks to memories of the way you once were. Still a part of you, always, but not who you are.

      Freud would rightly point to the Id, Ego and Superego at this point in the game. As you get a couple of years older you recognize each for what they are inside you. When you’re young and wild you run with one voice (Id) and just eat the chips with abandon. A bit later another voice (Ego) will start pointing towards the weight loss goals on your list and tell you to stop eating those chips. The Superego makes you feel guilty for eating the chips or proud for not eating them and working out. (This moment of pop-psychology brought to you by Pringles).

      Today, I’m just trying to be a bit better than I was yesterday so that tomorrow I’m proud of the progress made. It’s not that the Superego cuts me more slack, more that I choose not to wallow in self-criticism. The best way to diminish that critical voice is to show it progress towards the person you’re trying to become. Because that identity you’re aiming for is impressive. And even if you don’t reach it, “close enough” is still pretty good.

    • The Eternal Makes You Urgent

      “Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfillment. The eternal makes you urgent.” – John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

      O’Donohue picked the name of his book with purpose. “Anam cara”, or “soul mate”, suggests that the timeless wisdom buried within might offer the kind of guidance you would get from a cherished friend or spouse. Google it and you’ll find coffee mugs and spiritual retreats and other such things. It would also be a great boat name. And it stirs something in you whether you have one or long for one.

      This idea of the soul awakening isn’t new to us. If this awakening happens at all, it might not be thought of as soul, but as passion or purpose or calling. Some of us steer clear of words like soul. It almost feels intrusive for me to be writing about such things. Not skating my lane, you might say. But I understand eternity, and urgency, and this idea that the things that matter most to us require immediate attention. For our time in eternity isn’t the moments on this side of the turf.

      My own urgency started burning inside of me when I started writing again. It served as a catalyst for exploration and deeper thinking. And when you have it yourself you quickly see the urgency in others. Hikers hiking every available moment, landlocked sailors scrambling to be ready for the warmer days ahead, small business owners pouring every bit of available energy into standing up something special, artists creating brilliant mirrors that reflect back on the rest of us. Urgency senses its kind out in the wild.

      The trick is finding and awakening that soul. And you only find it by trying and doing, tossing aside and finding something else to do. If you’re lucky you find it quickly and embrace it. Or you see it and follow a different path, only to have it pull at you until you finally listen or die embittered at the path you took instead. That’s no way to begin eternity. Is it?

    • We Must Be Still and Still Moving

      Old men ought to be explorers
      Here and there does not matter
      We must be still and still moving
      Into another intensity
      For a further union, a deeper communion
      Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
      The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
      Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
      – T.S. Eliot, East Coker

      Beginning at the end as I do in quoting this masterpiece is admittedly the easy path, but seems appropriate given the context. I’m roughly where TS Eliot was when he wrote East Coker – middle of life (hopefully). Or maybe just past the middle. But who’s counting? Days are days, and here and there does not matter. Time will tell, as it always does.

      This blogger has settled into this rhythm of still and still moving. Moments of quiet contemplation, deep reading and exploration interspersed too infrequently with mountaintop adventures and faraway places. Thoughts of past exploration and schemes of future possibility fill the mind, and are betrayed by more than a few posts. We aren’t sharks, always moving, but humans immersed in life in all its complexity. The thoughtful wrestle with the same ideas, the masses distract themselves with media and games.

      Old folks ought to be explorers. And us not-so-old folks too. We ought to be out seeing the world, exploring vast waters and rounding bends. Bridging gaps in language and understanding and toasting the folly of it all with old and newfound friends. Catching a sideways glance and throwing it back. Dancing in celebration and settling into deep conversations. We will again, we see that now. Where will you go? What will you do with the time you’re given?

      This human journey leads to another, more intense place, or perhaps merely to stillness. Who are we to know, really? Do you choose logic or faith? Which is the real leap? Our path is one of tapping our potential, to struggle and explore the darkest and brightest days alike. To make the best we can of ourselves. To turn it all over and understand where we came from. This seems to me the way, for the end is the beginning. In some ways, we’ve known that all along, haven’t we?

      Beginning

    • Discharging The Loyal Soldier

      “Odysseus is a loyal soldier for the entire Odyssey, rowing his boat as only a hero can—until the blind prophet tells him there is more, and to put down his oar.” – Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

      Richard Rohr planted this seed of discharging the loyal soldier in my mind. He described the ritual used with Japanese soldiers returning from World War II being thanked for their service and discharged to focus on the next stage of their lives – to be productive members of society. I’ve read a fair amount of history of that war and know the fanatical intensity of the typical Japanese soldier, so to shed that character and assume some level of normalcy on a mass scale is itself impressive and instructive. If your only path was total victory or death, how do you process defeat and going back home? So ritualistic discharging saved what was left of a generation of soldiers to rebuild Japan from the ashes.

      “This kind of closure is much needed for most of us at the end of all major transitions in life. Because we have lost any sense of the need for such rites of passage, most of our people have no clear crossover to the second half of their own lives.” – Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

      We’re at a time in our collective lives where we need this ritual for society. Thank you for your social isolation, for your mask-wearing and countless hours trying to keep people alive. Thank you for your passionate political opinions and protests on both sides. Thank you for voicing your opinions so forcefully on social media. You’ve done your service for society. It’s time to focus on rebuilding now, for the world needs you for another mission. To save the planet and humanity.

      I recognize the transition happening in my son’s life – graduated from college, finished with organized sports, and now what? With the pandemic they didn’t even have a graduation ceremony, let alone a discharging of loyal soldiers. Here’s your diploma, mailed without pomp or circumstance. Good luck! No wonder this generation is looking around and saying “What next?” You learn that they aren’t ready to hear everything yet, as you weren’t. But they’re definitely ready to hear the message that they’ve done well fulfilling the first mission – we’re proud of you, now go forth and find the next mission.

      I’m in my own transition, of course, with the responsibilities of parenting shifting to sage advice strategically inserted whenever a teaching moment arrives – sometimes validating, sometimes contradicting the advice from the other parent. But what of us? We’re stepping into the second half of life when we start filling the proverbial container we built in the first half of life. So what do you fill it with?

      “Discharging your loyal soldier will be necessary to finding authentic inner authority,,, When you first discharge your loyal soldier, it will feel like a loss of faith or loss of self. But it is only the death of the false self, and is often the very birth of the soul. Instead of being ego driven, you will begin to be soul drawn.” – Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

      Discharge that loyal soldier and become “soul drawn“? That’s a bumper sticker or a name for an IPA if I ever saw one! The coolest cat surfing life, dispelling timeless wisdom in clever soul drops as you serve your new guiding light.

      We’ve all been in a period of forced transition, timed for some of us in a period of natural transition. It’s time to focus on what comes next, and do the work you were honed to do during the previous you. Time to put the oar down and follow through on that next mission. That soul drawn and fulfilling mission.

    • 7 Observations on Reaching 1000 Blog Posts

      We all write for different reasons, and my observations might not be yours, nor should they be. But reaching a milestone like 1000 blog posts deserves some measure of reflection. As I look forward with anticipation to post number 1001, I pause to give you seven observations about the journey to this point:

      1. The well never runs dry. You just run out of time. Writer’s block is a myth. If you’re earnest and curious you never run out of things to write about. But you will wrestle with perfection and trying to make a post reach its potential. When you post daily you learn to love it as it is and know when it’s time to let it fly. No, it’s never perfect, but you post it anyway.
      2. Everything becomes a potential blog post. I started writing Alexanders Map intending to have a local travel blog with historical sites with visits to amazing places. The name itself infers this. But it quickly expanded to include a diverse (some would say eclectic) mix of topics. You learn to listen to the muse, and embrace the new. And in the unexpected you find your own voice. You are the link between each post, and part of you reflects back on what you’ve visited.
      3. This business of blogging is your own business. You can quickly grow your blog follower list by playing the game of actively following and liking other bloggers. Or you can do the opposite and grow organically. I choose the latter: I’m very selective about who I follow, I “like” what I actually read and appreciated, and I don’t follow to gain followers. You choose what you want to be in the blogging world. I didn’t even mention I had a blog to family and friends until I’d written a hundred or so posts. I do link to Twitter, but rarely on other media. Choose what works for you, because your blog is how you present yourself to the world.
      4. One sentence at a time, you become a better writer. Let’s face it, none of us start a blog thinking we’re bad writers. Bloggers tend to believe they’ve got some skill for writing or they’d start a YouTube channel or build an Instagram or TicTok site. But the craft of writing develops through the daily struggle. I’m nowhere near the writer I thought I was, and I’m nowhere near where I want to be. But I keep chipping away at it, day-by-day. Blogging is an apprenticeship in writing, but you never meet the master.
      5. Some of your favorite posts will be completely ignored. You will work on a blog post that stirs something deep inside you, feel a wave of emotion crash over you as you click publish, and see the world react with complete indifference. Write these posts anyway, and write them often. Because when you tap into this well you aren’t blogging for instant fame, you’re writing to find something inside yourself that you thought, maybe, was there all along.
      6. You develop an eye for the interesting and an ear for the hidden stories. You stop more frequently in fascinating places, detour to find and celebrate the obscure and forgotten, and do things you might not have done otherwise. You become a ghost whisperer, visiting old graveyards and monuments to the past engraved by some soul long forgotten, who was honoring something of note that brought us to where we are today. You learn poetry and philosophy and Latin phrases and stir up the magic in an old pile of words. You hike to places of wonder and seek adventures. In short, you become more alive, and you appreciate this journey more than ever before.
      7. You learn to follow through on the promises you quietly make to yourself. You want to be a writer? Then write, no matter how you feel, and post that work every day, no matter what. Keep that commitment to yourself today. And tomorrow too. As James Clear puts it, every action you take becomes a vote for the type of person you wish to become. Your blog is a stack of votes for your identity. So craft them as best you can and set them free for the world.

      So there we are: 1000 blog posts. As I mulled over this one the last few days, I found myself in a corner of New England I don’t visit enough and chanced upon a couple of roadside wonders I might never have seen had I not set out for an old grave I wanted to visit. And just like that I’ve got three more blog posts in my mind. The world is funny that way – it opens up for the curious observers. I can’t wait to see where the next 1000 take me.

    • Effort and Flow

      “Fatigue can teach us where effort is being misplaced.”- John Jerome, The Elements of Effort

      “The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else.”
      ― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

      Becoming immediately overwhelmed with the list of things that must be done is no way to start a Monday. When it bleeds over into Monday night and Tuesday morning, well, you find yourself confronting misplaced effort. We all have those weeks that start off way tougher than a week ought to start out, but the irony of it happening when I’d teed up the Jerome quote above isn’t lost on me. When things seem overwhelming, find your way towards back to the center.

      You don’t reach mastery and flow without slogging through the tough days. You don’t grow without challenge. If you’re feeling challenged, that’s a good thing. If you’re feeling overwhelmed and exhausted, well, that’s something else entirely. Fatigue is a teacher, pointing us towards a better way that we might not see in the moment.

      Effort and flow each inform. There’s a balance between the two that we intuitively understand. Yin and Yang. Surfing the edge between order and chaos. Flow requires effort, and yet it seems effortless. This is the desired state for the meaningful work we seek out.

      Momentarily forgetting everything else in the pursuit of something of importance is where flow happens. You can reach this state when you focus to such a degree on the task at hand that you literally forget time is slipping by. We’ve all had those moments where everything is clicking, we are in our element, and things flow. It’s a desired state on the path to mastery, where skills and passion and focus are channeled into the task at hand.

      When things seem overwhelming, take a deep breath, reset, and look for another path towards the goal. Place your effort in a place that brings you where you need to be instead of fighting forces that bring you nowhere. Gain strength from adversity, and apply it to insight and direction. This too shall pass. What will we create in the interim?

    • Shared Beliefs

      “Everything that is not a law of nature is just a shared belief.” – Shane Parrish, The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts

      Shared beliefs. Have they ever been as contentious as they are today? People believing the election was rigged, storming the Capital, having their kids burn masks for the optics. Other people thinking those people are delusional and irresponsible. Anger and accusation on both sides. I betray my own beliefs just writing this paragraph. But I know people lash out in strange ways when they perceive a threat to their livelihood.

      For all the madness and anger, there are laws of nature that unite us in this world. Scientific principles are pillars of truth in which society anchors itself. Gravity isn’t a shared belief, it’s a proven law any time you drop something or jump in a pool. Gravity is easy to prove because we live with it every day. The tricky part is in what we believe to be true.

      The last year has been a year of turning beliefs upside down. Beliefs about the role that certain countries play in the relative stability of the world. About mask-wearing and social gatherings. Personal responsibility and accountability. Equality and fairness. Level playing fields and stacked decks. When beliefs are challenged that friction can erupt into fiery rhetoric. We’ve seen plenty of that, haven’t we?

      Shared beliefs can be beneficial if they’re anchored well. We have the responsibility to question that anchorage from time-to-time. Seeking common ground is the stated goal of President Biden, and common ground is the turf of fairness, equality, social responsibility and the laws of nature. The world is slowly tackling the pandemic, inching towards equality, and incrementally embracing the shared values that unite us as fellow humans on a fragile planet. We still have time to get it right.

      In writing this blog post I deleted far more words than I kept. I’m hoping to create something more substantial than my own beliefs. Maybe one small step away from the noise. And back to nature.

    • The Pull of Our Inclinations

      “A stone, because of its makeup, will return to earth if you throw it up in the air. Likewise, the more one pushes the intelligent person away from the life he was born for, the more he inclines towards it.” – Musonius Rufus

      What of our makeup? Are we drawn towards our inclinations, like gravity pulls a stone? Speaking as a sample size of one, I believe it to be true. Certainly the writing poured out of me in every job I’ve ever had, manifesting my own inclinations in quote-of-the-day emails, monthly newsletters and lengthy dissertations on topics lost forever in the ether of bits and bites.

      We often ignore our makeup in favor of the trade du jour. Who wouldn’t want the relative guarantees of a career in engineering or law or programming over the uncertainty of art or music or writing? Your parents certainly wanted the best for you when they reminded you to study hard. Our friends also influenced us, steering us to get the college degrees in fields where the jobs were. The pull of our makeup is in a tug o’ war with the well-intentioned advice of our circle of influence. And of course the anchor of the opposing tug o’ war team: that inner voice, Seth Godin’s Lizard Brain, Steve Pressfield’s Resistance, that quietly conspires against you.

      So whatever you pursue instead, you try to do it well. To honor your commitments, to build your nest egg and support your growing family. But that inclination quietly pulls at you, asking for more of your attention. And you slowly concede a bit here and there. Start selling things on Etsy, playing guitar in a band, writing a blog or creating an InstaGram site to display your photography. A hobby, really. Something to dabble in to keep the mind working.

      Over time you see incremental improvement; finding your stride, your style, your voice. And you find a bit of momentum. You’re still in that tug o’ war, but the flag is inching a bit closer to that line in the sand. And it’s a battle! One side pulls, the flag shifts away, the other gains strength and the flag draws closer to crossing over. Back and forth it goes. Which side wins?

      Well, that’s up to you.

    • The Ultimate Competition is With Ourselves

      “Trust begins to emerge when we have a sense that another person or organization is driven by things other than their own self-gain...

      When you compete against everyone else, no one wants to help you. But when you compete against yourself, everyone wants to help you.“

      “If there were no trust, then no one would take risks. No risks would mean no exploration, no experimentation and no advancement of the society as a whole.” – Simon Sinek, Start With Why

      If there’s one aspect of my personality I work to change, it’s my inherent competitiveness in most aspects of my life. An underlying desire to get the upper hand in conversation. To come out on top in sports. To be atop the leader board in my career. That mindset limits you in what you can achieve, because as Sinek points out, if you’re perceived as pursuing self-gain, then you’re viewed as a competitor in a world of scarcity.

      The thing is, the world isn’t aligned against you at all. The world is doing the best it can to survive another day, put food on the table, to get through the awkwardness of an initial conversation and get back to what they were doing before they encountered you. Sure, some people are completely out for themselves, but they’re easy to spot after a few words or by reading body language. And what do we do when we read that? We recoil a bit and put up our defenses. Why would we expect others to treat us differently should we telegraph “ME” in everything they do?

      Competing with others distracts us from rising to personal excellence. It takes our focus off of our own improvement and onto others. We don’t achieve mastery without focusing on incremental improvement. Keeping up with the Joneses draws us away from our own inner voice and the things that must be done. But worse, it positions us against them.

      Competition has its place, of course. What would sports or chess or debate be without competition? A dull world of participation awards, that’s what it would be. Serena Williams or Tom Brady didn’t rise up to become the best in their individual sports chasing participation awards. They may have started with a personal chip on their shoulders that drove them to succeed at uncommon levels, but each is quick to pull up others around them too. You can be the very best without being an asshole. In reality, the assholes don’t quite reach the pinnacle anyway, because nobody wants to help them.

      Reaching mastery doesn’t mean standing atop the bodies of your conquered enemies, it means reaching deeper into ourselves and pulling out the brightest bits of our own possibility. And then turning around and lending a hand to those making the climb themselves. Trust and mutual respect are built in such moments. They, in turn, will turn to lend you a hand in your own moment of need. And together you can rise to greater heights than you might on your own.

      Trust in ourselves begins to emerge when we develop our own self-worth. And that comes in keeping promises to ourselves in the work we do. In the increments of effort that matter most, done with consistency and honesty. The ultimate competition is with ourselves, and once we begin to master that we view the rest of the world less as a threat than as a barometer of progress.

    • That Moment When Everything Changed

      “I wonder if I should have a change — a year in Europe this time — something new, something better, perhaps. A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think. It is no good telling yourself that one day you will wish you had never made that change; it is no good anticipating regrets. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday…

      It seems remarkable to me at least that if I had not gone to Molo, I might never have seen New York, nor learned to fly a plane, nor learned to hunt elephant, nor, in fact, done anything except wait for one year to follow another… How can the course of a life be changed by a word spoken on a dusty road?”
      – Beryl Markham, West With The Night

      In this last year of the pandemic, with borders closed and wandering spirits limited to adventures of the local kind, it’s easy to throw your hands up in frustration at the “one days” that are postponed. Of one year following another with a measure of stasis unfamiliar and a bit uncomfortable. If we’re fully engaged we learn to make do, to thrive really, in those local adventures and appreciate what we have in our own back yard.

      You want a quick adventure? Click on the link above and read Markham’s book. Put aside the disgust of elephant hunting for this one (it was a different time) and immerse yourself in the perspective of an adventurous soul and a brilliant writer. Growing up in Kenya a hundred years ago, training thoroughbreds before pivoting to flying.

      Markham’s life changed when she met a man repairing his car who flew in the first World War and would soon teach her to fly. He sparked her imagination with possibility, and the rest of her life sprouted from that spark. She quickly charms you and makes you wish you’d met her in the brief time we breathed the same air. If I’d read this book at twenty I might have dropped everything and flown straight to adventure myself.

      So why not now? As with many adventurous role models, she makes you wonder; what is our own pivot? What is your moment that changes everything? It may not be a chance encounter, it might just be a small leap into the unknown. We’ve learned a lot about the world and ourselves over the last year. If there’s one clear lesson from all of it, it’s that the world was always trying to tell us something. But we were too busy distracting ourselves to pay attention.

      “The world does not act on us as much as it reveals itself to us and we respond.” – Shane Parrish, The Great Mental Models, Volume I

      How will we respond to the last twelve months that changed everything? And what shall we make of our future? Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday. Our one day can begin today. We don’t have to rely on some chance encounter with someone who teaches us to fly. That moment that changes everything can, indeed must, be this one. Flying requires summoning the courage to start down the runway and the accumulated experience to soar.