Alexandersmap

    Tag: Ralph Waldo Emerson

    • Turning Inward for Answers

      He went to Paris
      Looking for answers
      To questions that bothered him so
      — Jimmy Buffett, He Went to Paris

      “As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

      And now I will tell you the truth.
      Everything in the world
      comes.
      At least, closer.
      And, cordially.
      — Mary Oliver, Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?

      It struck me reading a book on Existentialism that it’s almost impossible to arrive at enlightenment and sagacity when life becomes relentlessly hectic. Try absorbing deep thoughts from another era when you’re exhausted and grabbing a few pages in between commitments and sleep. We’re all so damned busy that we don’t take the time to understand the universe, let alone ourselves. The maze might have a beginning and an end, but we get so caught up finding the cheese that we forget to figure out where we are.

      Busy never answers, busy avoids answers.

      As we stack experiences one atop the other, do we take the time to sort them into insight? We spend so much time focused on becoming and belonging that we short the time required to being. The quest for answers never really ends, but we can edge closer to that which resonates for us. It seems the benefit of aging is capturing the time that eluded us when we were younger to sit with deep thoughts, reflect on the universe and find ourself.

      The real question is, why do we wait so long to sift through the answers?

    • The Late Night Star Run

      “The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

      Last night offered a small chance to see the northern lights as the skies cleared just enough to open up the universe. What are you to do with an opportunity like that but chase after it? With son and daughter as my two co-conspirators we jumped in the truck and drove northward over twisting country roads. Higher elevations, darker skies, reason for hope to witness that elusive sky dance.

      We never did find the northern lights. Instead we found the starry dome, the wind whispering a chilly welcome, and time to catch up with each other in a random field far from home. The sky above didn’t disappoint, even as we recognized that it wasn’t going to show all its cards to our power trio. As the clouds rolled back in, we jumped back in the truck for the drive home. We agreed the chase was worthwhile, if only for the billion stars dancing infinitely above and for locking us in the amber of the moment in revelatory quiet below.

      We don’t just stumble upon revelation, we must seek it out. Having a spirit of adventure mixed with a sense of place may seem contradictory, as if chasing dreams means leaving home. But the spirit that calls is the universe, and it in turn is our place. You see it more clearly when you get away from the ambient light.

    • And Yet it Moves

      The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for us: Pero si muove. When at night I look at the moon and stars, I seem stationary, and they to hurry. Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but health of body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety or facility of association. We need change of objects. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

      This phrase, Pero si muove, mentioned in passing by Emerson, is famously Galileo Galilei’s. Forced by the Catholic Church to recant the truth of the matter that the earth revolves around the sun, Galileo dropped this little truth bomb after recanting. “Pero si muove” or, “And yet it moves”.

      I think about Galileo’s mic-dropping truth in a particularly dark time for truth in history as reality-based people of the Earth coexist with the buzz of maddening conspiracy theories, flat-Earthers and rigged election believers. The simplicity of truth seems lost in the escalating rhetoric of these online screamers. Imagine for a moment Galileo and Emerson returning to the world of today and listening to this din of despairing dolts. They’d lose all hope in humanity and throw up their hands in despair. There are days when I want to myself. Aren’t we past all this nonsense?

      It’s ironic that all this craziness is happening at a time of brilliant scientific advancement. We see images and hear sounds broadcast from the surface of Mars. We embrace the heroic efforts of the scientific community to develop viable vaccines to fight off COVID, and to stand up a delivery system to get it into the arms of the billions of people on the planet that desperately need it and a return to “normal”. We see the smartest among us looking at the problems humanity has created on this fragile blue ball rotating around the sun and tackling climate change and plastics and clean water and the related list of short-sighted gains that created long-term problems for future generations.

      There’s hope in the world, but there’s also a healthy dose of self-inflicted despair and rage. And we won’t get past it without facing the truth. Pero si muove. Or consider again Emerson’s words: “Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but health of body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety or facility of association. We need change of objects.” I think all of this social isolation has stirred the pot of madness a bit too much. Sanity of mind seems to be a real issue for way too many people looking for something to cling to in the swirling uncertainty of the age.

      I find hope in Galileo’s phrase. For all the forced dogma of his time, the truth prevailed. And it lives on in the majority of people in the world today. There have always been laggards on the bell curve of reality, they just happen to have a louder voice at the moment. Pero si muove. Truth finds a way to shine through in the end. So long as people have the courage to stand for it as Galileo did.

    • A Measure of Health

      “Nature says thou shalt keep the air, skate, swim, walk, ride, run. When you have worn out your shoes, the strength of the sole leather has passed into the fibre of your body. I measure your health by the number of shoes and hats and clothes you have worn out. He is the richest man who pays the largest debt to his shoemaker.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

      Those Concord folks were walkers, weren’t they? Ralph and Henry wandered about, wearing out shoes and building big thoughts. There are a couple of versions of that Emerson quote above, but some online research makes me believe these were his words. I like the alternate quotes just fine, but when I start quoting people I’d like to have it right. I love the idea of transferring the strength of the shoes into the fiber of your body. It applies just as well with shoes as it does time and sweat equity invested in other worthwhile things.

      I’m wearing out shoes more quickly lately. My feet took a beating last year, ankles and knees too, but they merely paid it forward to my heart and soul. Over time the body adjusts and stops complaining about taking another step and just goes. It’s a bit like writing and washing dishes and making the calls, you just teach yourself that there’s joyful bits in every moment of doing.

      I’m a collector of joyful bits. On my deathbed I won’t regret not finishing Breaking Bad, but I’ll surely regret not seeing the Northern Lights or the Southern Cross should I not see each. The last year is a reminder to not take mobility for granted. Wearing out more shoes seems a great goal for our next normal. The correlation seems apparent. Wearing out your gear is an easy measure of your physical and mental health. So lace up; we have places to go.

    • Snowy Morning Bliss

      “In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth…. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

      I admit to a bit of excitement. Adrenaline coursing through me as I anticipate the first steps outside into the freshly fallen snow. A few inches of the fluffy stuff fell from early evening and overnight and still drifts downward in lazy accumulation. Not enough to strap on the snowshoes (pity), but enough to make an adventure of the walk. What is winter for if not to be a kid again when it snows?

      My destination is the woods. The woods grow silent in the snow, and I fill with reverence. The days inside are long, for there is much to do in this forever connected march to quarterly numbers and customer engagement and cross-department collaboration. But the early mornings are mine alone. And there is magic in the air. And underfoot.

      “I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

      The world ought to be filled with wonder, I think. But most people slide into survival mode, leaving their inner child far in the rearview mirror to face all the horrors of the world stoically. But the stoics saw the wonder of nature as Emerson saw it, and shouldn’t we too, while we still have both nature and the capacity to marvel at it?

      I always smile when I come across people from places without snow who walk outside in awe, snapping selfies in a frozen wonderland. Living in the snow globe we sometimes forget to shake it up and embrace the swirling magic. Not us, thank you. We’ll walk and swirl in the magic too.

      Morning Snow

    • Achieving Something Beyond

      “The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond them.” – Alan Watts

      Enjoying being alive is surely a worthy pursuit, but even Watts, in pointing this out, was achieving something beyond himself. For otherwise, what are we contributing beyond a few laughs over drinks? Unsaid, I believe, is contributing joyful pursuits that create those ripples that live on beyond your lifetime.

      I’ve visited the graves of many notable names in history, and generally it’s a chunk of silent stone in a lonely plot. The best graves betray the personality of the person who resides there. A clever line about how they lived, or what they believed. Or maybe it’s the stone itself that signals the character of the person. Ralph Waldo Emerson lies below a chunk of rose quartz, which stands out amongst the weathered gray stones of his family and peers on Author’s Ridge. Whether you ever knew much about Emerson, you’d surely note the personality emanating from his gravestone.

      Of course, Emerson left a big ripple well beyond a rock on a hill through his contribution to the world. Did he enjoy writing and speaking? Certainly. Emerson wasn’t running around in a panic trying to achieve something beyond himself. He just did the work. And so did Watts. And so must we.

      “Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremulous for successful labor. It is a tempest of fancies, and the only ballast I know is a respect to the present hour.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

      There’s a distinction between being alive and achieving something in your life, but they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. And usually the things that make us feel most alive offer more than just a momentary dopamine rush. They’re part of building something beyond ourselves. Family, meaningful work, friendships that transcend convenience, and community. These things aren’t achieved, they’re earned one moment at a time.

    • A Realm of Sunset and Moonlight and Silence

      “My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty; we dip our hands in this painted element; our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

      I’m returning Emerson once again, partly to counter the din of political tweets and headlines that dominated over the last week, and partly because I’d like to read or re-read all of his work in 2021. Which brings me back to his essay Nature, for (I believe) a third reading. And I couldn’t help but linger on the sentence above, which resonates in this time, and for this place I myself reside, in a house in low land, with limited outlook, on the skirt of the village. Emerson had the Concord River to paddle to truth. I have the New Hampshire woods and the wildlife it sustains to show me the way.

      Days like these, a quiet bit of immersion in the forest seems in order. We live in strange times, distracting times, and I’ve seen the impact on my writing lately. Thankfully, I know where to find the remedy: in nature, in tapping into the Great Conversation, and in solitude.

      “Accept what comes from silence.
      Make the best you can of it.
      Of the little words that come
      out of the silence, like prayers
      prayed back to the one who prays,
      make a poem that does not disturb
      the silence from which it came”
      – Wendell Berry, How To Be a Poet (to remind myself)

      A special thanks to Maria Popova and Brain Pickings for pointing out this particular poem in a recent tweet. This poem immediately served as a catalyst on two fronts: to search for more Wendell Berry and seek the silent contemplation I’ve stolen from myself absorbing the madness of the world. Silence, as they say, is golden.

      So outside of paddling off on my own or building a small cabin in the woods, how to bring together the natural world and the silence necessary for contemplation? The answer, for me, lies in early mornings. The conspirator against a quiet mind is the whirl of madness in the world and a desire to keep up and understand it. In these times, finding a way to paddle or walk away from it all, if only for a little while, seems imperative.

      If only to find your own voice again.

    • Poised, and Wise, and Our Own, Today

      “In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us.“– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series, “Experience“ (and all subsequent quotes in this post)

      I got lost in the headlines for a bit before writing today. Getting spun up in politics and pandemics and the bad behavior of others. It’s important to be aware, to have an informed opinion to fight the good fight. I suppose… but indignation doesn’t spark the creativity I aspire to. And so a return to Emerson was in order.

      These are dark, wasted days if you choose to believe it. Alternatively, they’re the best, most productive days of our lifetimes. What do you prefer?

      “Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel and hangs on every other sail in the horizon. Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it.”

      Comparison is a bear. How we’ve spent the last year compared to someone else does us little good. I think of wasted opportunities and stop myself, for there’s no use going down that path. For all the madness of the last eleven months much was accomplished. Much is being accomplished. We might not see it just yet.

      “Life itself is a mixture of power and form, and will not bear the least excess of either. To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. It is not the part of men, but of fanatics, or of mathematicians if you will, to say that the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring whether for so short a duration we were sprawling in want or sitting high. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of today are worth as much to me as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.”

      I’ve used the quote above before in this blog. It’s a favorite and I’ll likely use it again. Emerson whispers persistently, for all who might listen. I return to it now and then to remind myself of the worth of this day. Of this hour. Of these next five minutes. What shall we do with them, that we might record as remarkable in these times?

      “Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremulous for successful labor. It is a tempest of fancies, and the only ballast I know is a respect to the present hour.”

      I began the day with headlines… a tempest of fancies designed to distract and provoke and draw us out of our own heads. But we all have our own ships to sail. There’s urgency in the moment, generational urgency, and we should support those who rise up to meet it. But focus on moving down your own path too. Respect the present hour. Emerson insists.

    • Striving for Prévoyance

      “C’est une prévoyance très nécessaire de sentir qu’on ne peut tout prévoir.”
      (“It is a very necessary forethought to feel that you cannot foresee everything.”)
      – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

      Prévoyance. The word tantalizes me, capturing my imagination, tauntingly just out of reach. It’s a French word, essentially translating basically to “foreseeability”. Prévoyance is powerful when applied to the markets, or business, social trends or simply whether to bring an umbrella with you on your walk. It also helps greatly when managing our own lives. I heard a richer and more profound definition from David Hackett Fischer when describing this trait in Samuel Champlain. He defined prévoyance as “the power of a prepared mind to act upon chance events in a world of deep uncertainty.” My French hasn’t reached that level of nuance just yet (and never will without immersion), so I’m grateful when people point out the magic sprinkled in such words.

      The problem with learning is in learning what you don’t know, or levels that you haven’t yet reached in life. But within that inherent underlying frustration lies growth and progression towards a higher self. And that’s where I find myself: decades into life and scrambling over jumbled bits of acquired knowledge in a climb to wisdom and higher truth. The promised land that I’ll never quite reach, but a step closer than I was yesterday or the day before. Sisyphus has nothing on me.

      “It was better to be in the right place than to be smart and work hard. It was best to be cunning and focus on results rather than inputs. Acting on a few key insights produced the goods. Being intelligent and hard working did not.” – Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle

      In this life I find myself climbing a succession of mountains, looking around with a sigh, and descending back down to climb yet another (refer to yesterday’s post). Perhaps with a bit more prévoyance I might have climbed fewer mountains, and chosen the right one much earlier in life. But such is life: we don’t know what we don’t know until we gain experience or acquire and leverage knowledge from others who have had the experience.

      “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

      That distinction between greatness and meanness lies in which mountains we climb, and how soon we turn back down the path to ascend a different mountain than the one we’re climbing. And that leads back to foreseeability, to prévoyance, and acting upon chance events in a world of deep uncertainty. And so I stuff the brain with as many bits of knowledge from as many perspectives as I can consume, for knowledge, well-used, is the key to prévoyance. This blog, in many ways, is the public-facing library of that accumulated knowledge (such that it is), and the breadcrumbs on the path of where I’ve been recently. And in the 370,000 thousand published words, perhaps it telegraphs where I’m going too.

    • The Cumulative Force

      “Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it.”
      – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

      Re-reading Self-Reliance is always a pep talk with the Master. Sometimes I wonder at (and have written before about) the conversations Emerson and Thoreau must have had taking a walk about Concord, Massachusetts back in the day. Emerson, a dozen years older than Thoreau, might have offered more insight early on, but Thoreau measured up over time, diving deep into Transcendentalism and immersion in Nature (with a capital N). Thoreau was undoubtedly influenced by Emerson, and Emerson by Thoreau, yet each brought their own gift to the world.

      I’ve wondered at the writing lately. The content is a collection of many topics jumbled together, and much of that is by design. The scattered thoughts of one person marching through time. I’ve debated a shift to a once a week newsletter, which inherently would be more refined, more substantial and less clutter in the inbox of those who follow. But changing to a weekly post would change my habit loop in ways I wish to avoid. No, I subscribe to the Seth Godin school of daily blogging.

      So what then? Narrowing the focus to specific topics? Specializing for the pursuit of 1000 true fans? Instead of the trivial many blog posts, focus on the vital few, as Joseph M. Juran would say? If I were to monetize this site, I’d surely do that. But the goal of Alexandersmap is to seek adventure, to understand the place I find myself in (both physically and mentally) and write about it. And so it will continue as it always has been. The rest of the writing necessarily will evolve into a more focused pursuit of those vital few. But there’s something to be said for habit loops and cadence and Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours theory. Just write, often, on a diversity of topics, and the process will necessarily change you and improve the writing.

      And so here we are, one day at a time, building the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation, and seeing where it takes me. Is it a talent to write every day? Or accumulated skill? It would be brash to declare the former, and modest the latter. There’s a mix in there somewhere, but I do believe in sweat equity and making the most of the time we’re given. I’m a writer as long as I’m writing. There are plenty in this world doing the same. Whether the writing is that which I can do best? That will have to sort itself out. But I’m better for cultivating it.