“The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you. To do this, you first need to overcome the protective habits of home and open yourself up to unpredictability. As you begin to practice this openness, you’ll quickly discover adventure in the simple reality of a world that defies your expectations. More often than not, you’ll discover that “adventure” is a decision after the fact—a way of deciphering an event or an experience that you can’t quite explain.” — Rolf Potts, Vagabonding
Inevitably I awaken well before my alarm goes off, and I believe it to be because I rarely set an alarm anymore. It’s saved for early flights and precious little else. As such, my mind is wrapped around the process of travel instead of deep, restful sleep. Did I pack everything? How does traffic look today? What’s the weather at my destination and have I properly prepared for it? Such is the restlessness of a traveler’s mind.
This idea of being properly prepared is a form of control. We don’t control all that much when we travel, other than our own actions. A series of random events can turn an itinerary upside down in the blink of an eye. And so we create contingencies and build extra time in to ensure we don’t miss the trains, planes and automobiles that bring us from here to there and back again.
As we open ourselves up to encounters with the unexpected, we face the very things we can’t always be prepared for. Adapting to the challenges we face builds resilience and a higher level of worldliness than we had before. As we become more worldly we condition ourselves for the unexpected.
Louis Pasteur said that “fortune favors the prepared mind”. When we feel ready for the unexpected we become more open to receiving it when it arrives. Openness is a developed skill as much as it is a mindset. So as I rose to meet the day, I took comfort in the preparation that would carry me through the host of unexpected that will surely greet me.
“Quitting, for me, means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn’t agree with you, but because you don’t agree with something. It’s not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one’s journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting–whether a job or a habit–means taking a turn so as to be sure you’re still moving in the direction of your highest dreams.” — Pico Iyer, “Quit Pro Quotes”, Utne Reader, Sept./Oct. 1996
We all have moments when we contemplate quitting and doing something else with our brief time. What stops us? Persistence? Faith in the future we’re building? Or is a sense of obligation? We slide into lethargic habits built over time and don’t see that there may be another way. I used to call this an attractive rut that one could easily stay in until the end of time. Maybe having a drink every day at 5 PM is the proper response for a long day of work, or maybe simply walking until you forget what your troubles were does it. Then again, maybe the proper response is to quit altogether the life built around what we believe to be all there is in our world. The answer is different for each of us, but the way we react when someone suggests quitting something deeply ingrained within our identity is telling, isn’t it?
When you read the word ingrained, did you immediately think of the spelling? I often debate internally whether to use ingrained or engrained when I write it, which says as much about me as anything I suppose. But the point is, we all have traits and defaults within us that seem natural (like obsessing over the right way to use a word that 99% of the world won’t give a thought to). Whether those traits and defaults are productive or detrimental to our progress is a question worth asking ourselves now and then.
I encourage you to either click the link to read the rest of Iyer’s thoughts on quitting, or Googling the article if you’re rightfully suspicious of clicking links random bloggers throw at you (although you can trust this random blogger—I promise). There’s magic in Iyer’s words, as there usually is, and they may change you profoundly, as they have me even as I write this. The quote above is easily found (Rolf Potts points to it often), but, as with any quote, mining deeper into the place it was drawn from offers so much more. For me, Iyer landed a knockout punch with this nugget:
“Continuing the job would represent an invisible kind of quitting–an abdication of possibility–and would leave me with live unlived that I would one day, and too late, regret”.
Don’t read this as a public admission that I’m quitting my job anytime soon, but a spotlight on the key message here: we all abdicate possibility that we will one day regret if we don’t go for it immediately. For now is all we have, and there’s living unlived to get to. See the world. Write the book. Hike that mountain. Sail to that faraway destination. Ask the question. Take the chance…. LIVE.
“Whatever takes you to a place is less important than what you find when you get there.” – Rolf Potts
Do you feel the pull of certain places? I do, and quite frequently. Local and faraway places call to me, even as I stay busy in the garden and with small projects in the home. It’s the venturing forth to the unknown that I miss in these moments. What have you not been experiencing in your bubble that could be experienced by going there? That’s the draw of travel. Discovering the previously unknown bits of the world and in the process finding something in yourself that you didn’t know was missing.
Instagram, YouTube and other media bring the unknown to us every day, without leaving your chair. But this is the highlight reel stuff that just scratches the surface on what’s really happening in the world. There’s nothing immersive about a selfie in front of the Eiffel Tower, but it offers a check on a box we all feel compelled to get to one day. The interesting part of that moment is what you do next; rush off to check the next bucket list item or immerse yourself in the nooks and crannies of a place?
Over the winter I spent many days on snowshoes walking through the conservation land in the town I live in. I felt and saw things that I’d never encountered before in the 25 years I’ve lived in this town. And when walking the narrow streets in town, I’ve experienced something similar walking the opposite route from what I’d normally walk. And I recognize in those moments that you don’t have to go very far to discover what you’ve been missing out on, you just have to change your perspective.
Perspective can only be changed by altering your viewpoint. Seeing your place in the world in a different way than you’ve always seen it. And that requires something more than checking a box, it requires seeing what you’ve been missing along the way. And understanding what’s changed in you when you’re back again.
If you watch a commercial on television, or a reporter out on a city street, or even the cast intro on Saturday Night Live in February 2021, everyone is wearing masks. A year ago you’d have wondered at it, even as the pandemic rapidly descended on the world. Today it’s commonplace, and I’m more often surprised at the outliers walking into a store without one. I stood in a line for snowblower parts and a mechanic walked briskly through the store unmasked. In a crowded grocery store I saw an elderly woman(!) without a mask on. In both cases I had the same reaction I might have had two years ago to someone wearing a mask. Isn’t it funny how the world has changed our perceptions in such a brief turn of the calendar?
I chafe at restrictions, favoring wandering, crossing borders, friendly conversations with strangers and simply getting out there. But we all sense a light at the end of the tunnel, and we’ll reach a tipping point with vaccinations as we did with mask wearing. With more and more people I know joining the ranks of the vaccinated, a sense of optimism grows. Travel will soon be a reality again, even if a bit different from the travel of a few years ago. There’s plenty of travel available today, without worrying about the complexity of borders, just outside.
“My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walking
Many times during the past year I’ve thought of Thoreau walking the landscape I know today. There’s plenty that’s changed since his time, but there’s also plenty that remains just as it was then. Much of it remains undisturbed, as if in a time warp, awaiting a visitor. I doubt he ever got up to the corner of New Hampshire where I walk, but I’ve walked in his woods near Walden and note the similarities.
“Walk until your day becomes interesting — even if this means wandering out of town and strolling the countryside. Eventually you’ll see a scene or meet a person that makes your walk worthwhile.” – Rolf Potts, Vagabonding
With a hint of the coming snow in the air, I took my snowshoes out to find new prospects. I quickly moved off the packed trail into virgin snow, crunching along on the snowdrifts through woods and fields. Cold hands soon warmed as I worked up a good pace past old stone walls and silent trees. Snowshoeing offers a slow burn, steady state workout similar to cross-country skiing. There’s a small thrill in hovering over the frozen land while blazing a new trail on snowshoes, and I felt a bit like I was flying as I crunched along.
Reconnecting with the blazed trail at a frozen stream crossing, I noted the collection of prints of those who had come before me. Snowshoes and fat tire mountain bikes, micro spikes and dog prints spiraling in circles from the trail in patterns of joyful exuberance and the freedom of the winter woods. It occurred to me that my own tracks were more similar to the dog prints than those of the trail walkers. Wandering spirits are rarely contains for very long on defined paths.
A simple walk in the woods, off trail, can change a person. In winter what was familiar ground becomes a voyage of discovery. Perception is how we frame the world around us, and I find it best to turn my perceptions upside down now and then. Every walk suggests something profoundly new, and winter transforms both the landscape and the visitor alike. Pausing a moment, I listened to the sound of silence. My snowshoes and I had walked our way to interesting, embracing the cold indifference of the woods to pandemics and masks and turns of the calendar.
Walking along on familiar trails transformed into strange country, I stopped worrying about the neglected collection of stamps in my passport. Feeling a million miles from anywhere I’d every been before, I came across a border marker deep in the woods indicating I’d crossed over from the town forest of my neighboring town into the undeveloped forest of my own town. I smiled and noted that not all borders are closed. And the unfamiliar isn’t very far at all from home.
Into the snowy woodsSnow blanket on an old stone fence
“What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there’s another force from inside battling to make us something else.”– Nadine Gordimer
I don’t know much about Nadine Gordimer that you can’t find in her obituary or on Wikipedia. She was a South African writer who helped expose the darkness of apartheid for the world to see. She won a Nobel Prize for her writing and was on the short list of people that Nelson Mandela wanted to see first when he was released from prison. By all accounts she was a pretty remarkable woman.
“…with an understanding of Shakespeare there comes a release from the gullibility that makes you prey to the great shopkeeper who runs the world, and would sell you cheap to illusion.”
You know remarkable when you see it. There’s a life force exuding out of certain people that pulses. It’s not celebrity, though some celebrities, athletes and leaders have it (certainly not all). You learn to spot the authentic energy from the great shopkeepers and cons. It’s an intangible force from inside that is magnetic but genuine. People are drawn to them, because they see something in them that they haven’t quite let out of themselves.
“If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.”
I understand Nadine Gordimer better through her words. And in her words she shows us the way. Learn from the great observers of the past. Write it down (Rolf Potts recommends a “commonplace book” where you can record the best ideas you find – blogging certainly helps achieve this too). Keep improving over time. With patience but earnest effort.
“Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place – a single book written from different stages of your ability.”
I’ve come to focus on remarkable recently. Having come across a few people with that extraordinary life force exuding out of every pore, you begin to think about how you might reach some level of that yourself. Gordimer hints at the journey we’re all on with this last quote. We’re all climbing at different paces, at different stages of our ability, towards our own peak. Towards remarkable.
“Make of yourself a light,” said the Buddha, before he died.” – Mary Oliver, The Buddha’s Last Instruction
Last night I lay quietly in the backyard well past my bedtime watching bits of billion-year-old space dust streak across the sky in brilliant dying gasps of white light. The dust is debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle, which takes 133 years to orbit the sun. The Earth, orbiting the sun every year, meets this debris field every August. I won’t be alive when the comet Swift-Tuttle visits again, but every year I look for her cosmic wake in the form of the Perseid Meteor Shower.
“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” – Carl Jung
If ever there was a year during my lifetime to bring more light into the world, its 2020. I’m not sure yet how much light I have to offer, but I know the answer is… more. And so I’m going to double down on the writing for the next hundred days to get through the first draft. And then do the work to make it sparkle, for surely it won’t sparkle in 100 days. Ah, but writing kindles a light in me, and I must stoke that kindling until I get a good flame going.
“A good book is [one] you can feel [is] alive. You can feel it vibrating, the character comes alive, you can sense the brain matter of the writer is like flickering on the page. They’re alive. And a dead book the author doesn’t have any energy, the person they’re writing about doesn’t come to life, ideas have no sparkle to them. So you have to bring energy and aliveness to the process. It shows in your writing.” – Rolf Potts, from his Deviate podcast
One thing I’ve often lectured myself about is a tendency to announce what I’m going to do instead of just doing it and talking about it later. Yet here I am talking about the next hundred days like I’ve actually done anything meaningful. A way of forcing my writing hand to fish or cut bait. I’m tired of cutting bait. And holding my own feet to the fire seems to work for me. I rowed a million meters in four months because I said to my world that I would. And now I’m saying this will be done. Sometimes a measure of audacity puts you on the spot just enough to get you over the hump.
I’ve firmly established the habit of writing early in the morning. Demonstrated by the consistency of published posts to the blog. But writing a book requires a different level of focus. I’m just not producing enough focused material towards the book… yet. November 19th is 100 days from yesterday, when I began this journey of 100,000 pages. What’s that?! Day one is already gone. A lot can happen in the next 99 days, but only with sweat equity and commitment. I believe it to be one of those five big things, so why not treat it as such?
The comet Swift-Tuttle last visited in 1992, but was only visible with binoculars at the time (like NEOWISE last month). I was cosmically indifferent to it then, but I’ve never been indifferent to the Perseids. Comets seem more timeless and steady in their travels across the universe. Meteors are only here for a moment of flash and streaking brilliance and then they’re gone forever. We’re a lot more like meteors than comets, aren’t we? Why not kindle a light in the darkness of mere being in this brief time?
I heard a Rolf Potts podcast interview with Alastair Humphreys during a long walk around town. I listen to podcasts when walking on loud roads because I can never fully immerse myself in nature when heavy objects traveling at terminal velocity are close enough to know the deodorant of choice of the driver. Of course, I always keep an eye on the driver and the relative distance between their passenger mirror and my rib cage. But a podcast gives me something else to think about during this regular dance on the narrow shoulders of New Hampshire roads.
Potts and Humphreys captured my imagination during my dance with the drivers with a discussion of microadventures. Microadventures is Humphreys’ term, but the pursuit of adventures isn’t a new concept. I’ve been doing many of the things he lists on his site already, and think of them as exclamation points on a day of living on this planet. But impressively he does take it to another level. This well-made video explains the concept, or do a deeper dive on his web site (I felt a bit of web site envy visiting his site, and it once again prompted me to up my alexandersmap.com game. You can see my ongoing progress on the site). There are many microadventures available for the able and willing, I could get in my car and drive to the White Mountains for a hike, or drive to a waterfall for a shower under bracingly cold water, or camp out on a sleepy beach for sunrise. But I wanted something close to home and on a somewhat smaller scale as a nod to the spirit of microadventuring.
And so it was that I found myself getting in my car with a camera and tripod and driving a couple of miles away from home to an entirely different world: the soccer fields my kids once competed on, which last night transformed into a dark and mysterious upside down world with vaguely familiar fences and sheds providing anchors of bearing. I was challenged by three separate people to go out and see the Comet Neowise, dancing just below the Big Dipper just after sunset. It seems people have noticed my affinity for the stars over the years. I’ve silently been plotting a viewing all along, but the weather proved frustratingly unreliable for comet gazing. Last night was a micro adventure of comet hunting, confirming that my Nikon Coolpix B500 camera wasn’t up to the task (or more likely its owner), and learning from the experience. Perhaps I’ll get that evasive picture tonight or in the next few days before Neowise travels on for another thousand generations, or maybe I’ll just bring the binoculars out and just view it. Plenty of better photographers are taking stunning photos of Neowise already. My micro adventure wasn’t for a picture anyway, but for the experience of trying something new right in my own town. It was me alone in a dark field, strange noises in the forest beyond, constellations and planets spinning above and satellites zipping past. Memorable even without a digital image to post on social media.
Here’s the thing: we get caught up in the big bucket list stuff. Hiking the Appalachian Trail, sailing across the ocean, hiking to Machu Picchu, visits to Amsterdam, Paris, London and a hundred other great cities. Heck, even hiking the 48 NH 4000 footers in my home state requires time investment and planning on a larger scale than a simple microadventure. Life should be full of the great exclamation points that a bucket list offers, but lifetimes are made up of a collection of days. Why not downsize the scale of the adventure and do something interesting today? So when someone asks you tomorrow what you did last night, you aren’t replaying the same old soundtrack of streaming Netflix series or watching YouTube videos of other people’s adventures. Yesterday, in between the traditional fare of a random Wednesday, I began my day with a plunge in the pool at 6 AM and ended it with a hunt for Comet Neowise until past my bedtime. So a memorable yesterday, if only for the endcaps. So what shall today bring?
“What’s a more soulful way to live? What’s a way that I can benefit from the dynamism and prosperity of American society without having to play by these rules that keep us in a holding pattern?” – Rolf Potts, from his Deviate podcast
Leave it to Rolf Potts to ask the question. The question that drives much of what I write about, and seek in travel and reading and gardening and hiking and in lingering solitude in the early light of dawn and the spaces in between notes and in the eyes of kindred spirits. What’s a more soulful way to live? And this is the path I live my life on. Travel might not be as readily available in this moment, but it will return in time. In the meantime there’s this living thing to do, and why not make it a dance instead of a holding pattern?
The world is alive around us. I see it in the trees as the wind swirls the leaves and branches bounce in delightful prances. In the leaves and flower buds earnestly unfolding and reaching for the light. I hear it in the birdsong and buzz of pollinators and I feel it in the dampness of the earth after a night of rain. And we are alive as well, at least for now. Shouldn’t we dance while the music’s still playing?
I’m very good at creating to-do lists. Projects to complete, places to go, bucket lists of experiences and other such compilations. The question, what’s a more soulful way to live? is a useful lens for planning the future, but I find it as valuable as an earnest sounding board for the moment. How do I highlight this moment in time soulfully? How do I fill my remaining days with a more soulful life? Both questions have value. Life is best lived in the moment, but with a realistic eye on where you’ll be tomorrow, should it arrive.
Collectively it feels like we’re all in a holding pattern, but that doesn’t mean we can’t live more deeply. Thoreau showed you don’t have to travel far to explore soulfully. And so it is that the trees dance, the dappled light sparkles on lingering droplets and the world wakes up around me. I find myself a witness in the moment but also a willing participant, alive and grateful for the opportunity at hand.
“The process of life should be the birth of a soul. This is the highest alchemy, and this justifies our presence on earth. This is our calling and our virtue.” – Henri Amiel
I’ve managed to finish three books this year, a disappointing total to be sure. But I’m actively reading every day, and balance a stack of virtual books on the Kindle app that I read through often with an actual stack of books that I return to now and then. I’m reading a lot, and yet I’m not finishing a lot of books. Go figure.
I’ll often read a quote like the Henri Amiel quote above and immediately research the author’s work on Wikipedia, scroll through highlights of their publicly available work and if inspired I go on Amazon and add to the stack. I added to the stack with Amiel’s Journal, widely declared his master work (free on Kindle)… and published posthumously. Which brings me back to the quote that inspired the search, and emphasis on the quote that wasn’t there previously. Quotes are funny things, we pull out a set of words that seem especially powerful, tag the author and leave it out there like a neon sign on a dark night. Knowing something of the author brings context and resonance. It’s something that Maria Popova is masterful at with Brain Pickings, and you’ll see my own attempts at it here now and then.
I’ve learned over the years to dig a bit deeper in my own process of life. To linger on something that others might skim over. And most of all to learn, and to hopefully add a bit of value to the rest of the souls walking this earth now, and maybe some future then too. To pursue the highest alchemy, if you will. And I’m seeing some return on investment with my two adult children. Both are deeply empathetic, thoughtful observers with strong leadership traits. If nothing else comes of my time on this earth, the ripples from these two might be enough. But that shorts my own time here, doesn’t it? We’re all a work in progress in our time, from day one to the final day, and there’s still plenty of time to add more. Today anyway.
Alexandersmap started out as a blog about the places I was visiting, digging deeper into the history of the place, occasional insight into the best fish and chips or whatever. And I surely will dabble in these observations again when travel isn’t limited. But the blog evolves as I read more, think more, observe more…. and write more. It turns out I’m digging deeper into myself, and putting it all out there for the world to see (thanks) or not see (yet). That’s writing for you: taking you places you didn’t expect to go. Then again, maybe deep down I did expect to get here, I just needed to write about fish and chips enough to reach this point.
“You get better at the craft of writing the more you do it, and that’s the beauty of non-fiction writing being a craft rather than an art. You can practice it, you can get better, whereas with an art, you’re either a genius or you’re not.” – Alex Perry (via Rolf Potts interview)
Writing, like life itself, is a process. We’re all just birthing our souls here. Some remain soulless (I’m not naming names) while some illuminate the darkness for all to see. Personally, I’m on the journey and marking the trail as I go. I’m not sure I’m illuminating darkness for anyone, but I’m lighting the way for myself one post at a time.
