Alexandersmap

    Tag: Philosophy

    • Forever and Always Now

      Reflecting on the moment

      You said time makes the wheels spin
      And the years roll out and thе doubt rolls in
      In the truck stops, in the parking lots
      And the chеap motels
      When will we become ourselves?
      — Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Hashtag

      The other day I was talking with a coworker at a hotel bar in Washington, DC. He’s a few years closer to retirement than I am, doesn’t travel all that much anymore in his current role and isn’t the picture of health (probably related to too much time in hotel bars). He mentioned that he’d never visited the Lincoln or Washington Memorials before, let alone the war memorials on the National Mall. He wasn’t sure if he would have the time on this particular trip either. I looked at him, said “why are we sitting here now?!” and summoned an Uber. For the next couple of hours we visited memorials to those who exemplified greatness in the United States. I took a few pictures of and with him and shared them with him afterwards. Memories must be built, not stumbled upon.

      I’ve reached a point in my life where, when I compare the former me to the current version, I usually forgive that former guy for not being better at the art of living than he was. We must figure things out along the way, or be lucky enough to have a guide to show us the ropes. We become ourselves through deliberate acts more than stumbling along through life. When we do stumble, we figure out a way to get back on track again. Being human is full of opportunities to learn and grow.

      The thing is, we must keep challenging ourselves to step out of the box we’ve grown into. It may be bigger than the one we were in before, but it’s still a damned box. The answer to “when will we become ourselves?” must forever and always be, now.

    • The Choices We Make

      “In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt

      We who live in free societies have agency. Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way as the world works to impose its will on us, but we can make choices and take action that will take us towards our desired outcome. No matter how crazy life gets at times, we must remind ourselves that we choose how to react to circumstances. The choices others make may impact our own, but the choices we make are still, and always, the choices we make.

      Some never stop blaming others and fate for the hand they’ve been dealt, without seeing the choices all around them. Without accepting and even embracing fate (amor fati). We must learn to own our choices. It’s part of growing into adulthood. The process of becoming never ends until we do. Knowing this, we ought to always be asking of ourselves, what next? For the process, for now, continues.

    • Illusions of Someday

      First thing we’d climb a tree
      And maybe then we’d talk
      Or sit silently
      And listen to our thoughts
      With illusions of someday
      Cast in a golden light
      No dress rehearsal
      This is our life
      — The Tragically Hip, Ahead by a Century

      It’s no secret that we ought to stop deferring the living of our lives for the illusion of someday. We see the changes in each other and it makes us both feel strange, as Bonnie Raitt put it so beautifully. And seeing the changes around and within us, the urgency to make the most of now burns hotly in our souls.

      I write this in an airport, awaiting my flight, after sending off my daughter on her own flight an hour before mine. That we’re both flying out of the same airport with an hour of each other is serendipitous, that we’re flying to different destinations unfortunate. Such is life: I bought her a sandwich for the flight and hugged an until next time.

      We may look at life flying along and try our best to hold on for dear life. Alternatively, we might simply enjoy the blessing of each moment together and position ourselves well for another day, someday, when we may pick up where we left off. Today will slide into the past just as surely as all the rest. What will we remember of it?

    • Wild, Valorous, Amazing

      “Don’t we all, a few summers, stand here, and face the sea and, with whatever physical and intellectual deftness we can muster, improve our state—and then, silently, fall back into the grass, death’s green cloud? What is cute or charming as it rises, as it swoons? Life is Niagara, or nothing. I would not be the overlord of a single blade of grass, that I might be its sister. I put my face close to the lily, where it stands just above the grass, and give it a good greeting from the stem of my heart. We live, I am sure of this, in the same country, in the same household, and our burning comes from the same lamp. We are all wild, valorous, amazing. We are, none of us, cute.” — Mary Oliver, A Few Words

      There are no doubt days where we don’t feel inclined to do much of anything at all. To bear witness to the passing of time seems quite enough some days. Yet we do ourselves a disservice in the absence of personal valor. We mustn’t be timid. Life is far too short for timidity. Tempus fugit! We must be bold.

      How many sunrises are we to witness in a lifetime? how many sunsets before we see our last? We cannot abstain from living our best day in this one. Planning for the future is responsible, respectable and admittedly quite necessary, but capturing memories and experiences is our essential mission in the now.

      How many ways have we heard the message from those who have faded away beyond the horizon? We must feel the urgency of this moment, and fill each with our full attention. Life is Niagara, or nothing. Carpe diem!

    • Slaying Dragons and Devils

      “My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.” — Carl Jung, The Red Book

      It’s amazing what a few days off will do for the body and soul. Removing oneself from the daily grind mitigates the possibility that we might be ground to dust. The old Cherokee expression about the wolf you feed comes to mind. We either succumb to the darkness within or climb to the light.

      I know deep down that I write to feed the soul and slay the dragons. The daily blog is merely evidence that the journey continues for at least another day. I might have climbed mountain summits or run after a 5K t-shirt collection instead, but no, it’s the writing that got a hold of me. That doesn’t make me a one trick pony, just curiously focused on publishing a few paragraphs each day.

      There’s nothing wrong with trying a diverse range of pursuits to see where they may take us. There’s nothing wrong with work for that matter. The soul knows when we’re on the right path and when we’ve gone astray. But we must ask ourselves regularly, what occupies us? If it’s not nourishing us, we must change our diet. Sip enough poison and you begin to love the taste, and worse, begin to serve it to others.

      The thing is, the pursuit we choose is merely our way of reaching closer towards our own truth. And the truth is, we’re all running against both the clock and our worst inclinations. We must ignore the roar of the dragon and listen for the whisper of the soul, increasing its volume through regular practice until our purpose is loud and clear.

    • What We Make Of It

      “A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

      I walked out to catch the sunrise this morning. If I looked overhead or behind me it was all dark, foreboding clouds, but looking east at the new day arising there was a break in the clouds and a bit of sunrise color lighting up the sky. as I walked down to the waterline it began to rain, a reminder from the angry clouds above that I ought not turn my back on them. We can’t ignore darkness but we can seek something better for ourselves. I lingered with the whispering sunrise and turned back to the shelter of the house. Sitting with my coffee, this Goethe quote greeted me. Who says we don’t manifest what we most want to see in this world?

      Manifest Destiny once drove American expansion westward. The term is thus forever linked to that part of our collective history in the United States, but we may borrow the phrase as we contemplate our own beliefs about the world and our place in it. We may see beauty where others only see darkness. We may find our own path towards a brighter future still. Life is often nothing more than what we make of it.

    • The Way

      “The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life. Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves...
      Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul? You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that? There is only one way and that is your way.” — Carl Jung, The Red Book

      There is no book that will show us our way, books merely serve as an example of how those before us navigated the world. But we are the sum of all who came before us, no matter how beautiful or ugly that human history is, and knowing how to navigate a similar river of time they traversed might help us avoid hitting the rocks they hit in their time. There are lessons in the swirling waters of history that may be learned and relied upon for insight. Still, this is our way.

      We all have our compass heading to our true north. The conditions are what they are, the navigational hazards life throws at us may impede a direct route to that which calls to us, but we may still find the course through life that works for us. We simply have to avoid being foundered on the rocks before we get there. Simple… sure. Human history is full of people who couldn’t clear the rocks of their time, yet we exist in our time because it’s equally full of those who found a way.

      There’s no staying put, for stasis is decay. Knowing we must go forward, what sets our compass? We are surrounded by forces that influence our direction but ultimately it’s up to us to set it and go. Examples show us what is possible (and what is not), and fate will surely play its hand, but our own voice is telling us where our actions will take us next.

    • The Audacious Turn

      “There’s no glory in climbing a mountain if all you want to do is to get to the top. It’s experiencing the climb itself – in all its moments of revelation, heartbreak, and fatigue – that has to be the goal.” — Karyn Kusama

      This week has been filled with moments of revelation, heartbreak and fatigue. Sure, the Olympics has been jammed with such moments, but really, I’m talking about my own unique combination of work week, exercise regime and writing. Anything that represents the climb for us is bound to be full of highs and lows. The trick is to learn to accept it all and keep climbing.

      What makes life more interesting—the view at the top or the obstacles we navigate along the way? Perhaps a better way to ask that question is, which makes the better story? Life isn’t simply that Instagram post capturing the sunset, pretty as it may be, it’s the hike up to earn it and the careful descent down the rock scramble afterwards that we’ll talk about in the days that follow. The thing about climbing is that even while we’re constantly facing challenges, we grow more and more prepared to tackle such things. We grow more fit, more resilient, more determined to do just a little bit more tomorrow. And live to tell the tale.

      This summer has been a reacquaintance with cycling. There are rides I’ve done recently that I wouldn’t have done a month ago. I’ve noticed that the more I ride the less I go to the rail trails. Sure, we can ride them every day and avoid most climbs and vehicle traffic, but what have we experienced? The steep hills I opted out of climbing before are worth tackling now because I’m less intimidated by the climb and because flat gets boring. We do the work that we may climb, and so it follows that we must climb when we’ve done the work.

      That nagging voice is reminding me that there are other hills that I keep riding past in my life in favor of easier rides. There are chapters to write that haven’t been written, awaiting a bolder version of me. We can go an entire lifetime saying we’ll do the tough work tomorrow and never make the audacious turn up that hill. Then again, we can simply be bold today and see how it plays out. We are here to experience it all, aren’t we? So what perceived limitations will we test in our life today?

    • Time. Warped

      “We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery.” ― H. G. Wells

      In a time warp kind of year, where the very idea of time seems askew, some perspective from H. G. Wells seemed appropriate. When we think about all that’s happened this summer, let alone this year, it might feel as if someone is playing with the clock and calendar to jamb more transformative change into ever tighter increments of time. Personally I’ve seen more twists and turns and backflips to my sense of what makes up normal than you see in an Olympic gymnastics floor routine. And August is stacked—doubling down on the crazy.

      None of this is new, only our perspective has changed. The world marches along at maddening speed, and we are either witnesses or active participants. Predictable is nice, but surprising developments and plot twists are what take our breath away. Life should be a fascinating page-turner, not some tedious slog through required reading. Instead of feeling overwhelmed we might simply say, “Wow, I didn’t see that coming” and muster up the courage to write the next scene.

      This is our time, for all its glory and ugliness. We may revel in the former while finding some way through the latter to better days. It all may feel warped in some moments but the pace of change has always been relative to how we look at such things anyway. All that ever matters is what we make of this—our day. Leaving the rest to history.

    • Solitude and Service

      “He who delights in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

      I recently spent some time on an island, and fancied what it might be like to live there. A boat could bring me back to civilization as needed for provisions and conversation. The rest of the time? Blessed solitude. Libraries of books being read and re-read. Volumes of prose written. Time to meditate on the meaning of life. Processing elbow room for the mind and soul. Wonderful, sacred solitude.

      It’s nice to ponder, but I suspect I wouldn’t be truly fulfilled in a life of solitude. I feel another gravitational force pulling me in the other direction. My attention always comes back to a familiar world of contribution to and appreciation for the circle of people who make up my identity beyond the self. For most of us, service to others is our primary purpose.

      Blame it on growing up in a big family or participating in a team sport instead of individual pursuits, but I just seem to be built for social interaction. That doesn’t make my time in solitude any less valuable, but does make it obvious that it’s a now and then thing not an all the time existence. But is it enough?

      The most interesting islands are full of connection to others. Fellow inhabitants, bridges and ferries to connect you to the mainland, Internet and cellular telephone service. Each brings connection for those times when solitude is just too much. We don’t have to live on an island to find solitude any more than we need to be off the island to find connection.

      As with everything, life is about balance. Balance is something we feel, and perhaps the best thing we can do for ourselves is to build a life where we feel our balance between solitude and service are mostly in blessed equilibrium. Surely it’s something to aspire to in our creative, engaged and productive lives. Wherever we may find it.

      Solitude