Alexandersmap

    Tag: Tempus Fugit

    • To Be Productive and Daring

      Give winter nothing; hold; and let the flake
      Poise or dissolve along your upheld arms.
      All flawless hexagons may melt and break;
      While you must feel the summer’s rage of fire,
      Beyond this frigid season’s empty storms.
      Banished to bloom, and bear the birds’ desire.
      — James Wright, To a Troubled Friend

      Winter is thriving. The darkest day of the year is almost upon us, and then Christmas, and New Year’s, and before we know it we’ll be looking ahead to spring. At least that’s the hope of winter days. We look ahead, placing ourselves in some future place, brighter and perhaps warmer than where we are now. But now is the gift we forever ignore at our peril.

      I want to make something of this day—to be productive and daring. To do the things I promise myself I’ll do in the earliest hours, before the sun rises, before the first coffee bolsters my courage, before this blog post is captured and released for your consideration. Before is now for the productive mind. Now is the time to write and create something, now is the time to do that workout that mocks us. Now is before we get to those things. After is like another season altogether for the busiest mind.

      It’s all a blur of restless productivity towards something beyond here and now. Simply do what must be done next, and beyond will be there waiting. How we like to believe it so! Do with today what we only dream about for tomorrow. For all flawless hexagons may melt and break.

    • So Soon

      “How did it get so late so soon?
      It’s night before it’s afternoon.
      December is here before it’s June.
      My goodness how the time has flewn.
      How did it get so late so soon?”
      ― Dr. Seuss

      December came so quickly, and so too did winter…
      Sure, it hasn’t officially begun,
      not until we hit 21.
      I don’t feel all that much older
      and surely not very wise.
      Tempus fugit, they said.
      Ain’t it funny how the time flies.
      We’re all surfing each day
      in our own way.
      Today will fly by like all the rest.
      Doing things worthwhile would be best.

      An admittedly weak attempt at poetry on the fly to mark the 10th day of December. How did we get here? The rapidity of the days flying past shocks the system some days. We know that we cannot control time, only how we use it. But those grains of sand are sneaky fast, and grabbing bunches of them are out of the question. And so we must decide what to be and go be it, today, as best we can before the opportunity is lost.

      Seize what flees, as our old friend Seneca told us. Carpe diem. That’s not a sad refrain, that’s a celebration of the day at hand, and of the hand we may play in making something of it. What a gift! May we use it well today.

    • All the Little Things

      “Use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them. You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself they exist.”
      ― David Allen, Getting Things Done

      When we get really busy (not just a little busy), all the little things start to creep into our thoughts relentlessly, persistently, voraciously to grab our attention again in the quiet moments when we wish they’d not. The devil is in the details, they say, and when the details aren’t polished off just so, the devil comes a callin’. Restful moments turn restless.

      The nature of work nowadays seems to be about doing more with less. Technology enables, but it also steals from us. There is no downtime, no escape from one more question, one little detail that needs clarification, one urgent matter that must be addressed right now, even if it’s a Sunday. The curse of profitability and EBITA (earnings before interest, taxes, and amortization) is that it demands more and more from fewer and fewer. When is enough enough?

      “Do you dream about being remembered for your professional successes?” ― Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength

      There is a time for hustle and incremental gain, and there is a time to take our insight and wisdom (hopefully accumulated) and turn it into something. That may be expressed in our careers, or expressed in writing, music or some other creative way. But the only way to figure that out is to kick that noisy devil out of back of our minds where it’s been nagging us and find some clarity in the ensuing stillness. We may embrace productivity and efficiency in our lives while rejecting those who say it’s never enough.

      So what is the value of work? Money? Health insurance? Status? These things are fleeting, and won’t be carved on our gravestones. We will be remembered for who we were and what we contributed. Not to EBITA, not really, but to the people who mattered most. Success is a tricky word that means something different for each of us, but our worth as humans goes far beyond a quarterly target.

      As we begin yet another Monday, it’s fair to consider all those little things and structure our days in efficient, productive ways that we may accomplish something tangible here and now. But it’s also fair to ask ourselves, are these little things the things we ought to be using this precious time on? We must remember that there’s no time to waste on little things. Perhaps a better thing to ask ourselves is, how might we best profit from this time before it disappears forever?

    • Creating Temporal Landmarks

      “Temporal landmarks could help assuage that terrible feeling of time speeding up as you age. In what researchers call the ‘calendar effect’, we use milestones to form and retain memories – so university students, say, have much better recall of events near the start or end of term, even when you allow for the emotional highs and lows of freshers’ week or graduation. The more landmarks, the less risk of suddenly realising you’ve no idea where last year went.” — Oliver Burkeman, “This Column Will Change Your Life: The Importance of Temporal Landmarks, The Guardian

      As this is published, it’s a Tuesday. What does Tuesday represent? Taco Tuesday, trash and recycling day on my particular street, the second day of the work week, weight circuit day in my fitness schedule, and really not much else that would differentiate it from Wednesday or Thursday this week. And this Tuesday is a lot like last Tuesday and the one before that. They all blend together, don’t they? That’s why life feels routine; because we’ve built a routine for our life.

      If time seems to fly by faster as we get older, maybe it’s because we have fewer temporal landmarks to frame the days into memorable sequences. We slip into a career, work Monday through Friday week after week, and entire years blend together into one block of our lives. I recently spent seven years working for one company, and the only thing about the job that made one year any different from the next were the big work trips and what happened outside of work that impacted the routine. New product releases, version upgrades, company meetings and even trade shows all blended together into a memory of what I did then versus what I do now. Where did the time go?

      The thing is, in that same time period, I took memorable trips of a lifetime to faraway places, had significant milestone moments with family graduations and the passing of loved ones, and of course we all collectively had the pandemic, national elections, wars and a host of other memorable moments that locked time into amber. We don’t remember each day, we remember moments—and these moments are our temporal landmarks. Some are far more significant and far-reaching than others.

      Where were you when the world stopped turnin’
      That September day?
      — Alan Jackson, Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)

      A day like 9/11 is locked into memory, while the world turning in routine on the days leading up to it fade away. We’ll always remember where we were in that moment, just as we do other similar temporal landmarks. We tend to forget the flow of days around those landmarks. And while none of us wish for those kind of 9/11 landmarks to land in our lives ever again, we may use the theory to create more positive temporal landmarks for ourselves.

      So how will today be remembered? What will stand out about this month in five years? How about next year—what temporal landmarks will we schedule into the next year of our lives to make the time really stand out as memorable? The time will flow into our past one way or the other. It’s up to us to make it something more than routine. A temporal landmark is something we’ll remember this time by. Maybe make it something more special than just taco Tuesday.

    • Things That Got Away

      “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.” — James Joyce, Ulysses

      Back in 2018, when this blog was a young pup and its writer was blessedly naive about all that would happen in the next seven years, we stepped into the every day. We can all agree that a lot can happen in seven years. Good Lord, can a lot happen. We’ve all been on this ride together, in so many ways. Yet each of us rides through life in their own way. Some with eyes wide open, some with blinders on, and so many simply staring at a screen for an entirely different user experience. The only thing we all may agree on is that time flies. Tempus fugit.

      I happened upon a blog post I’d written back then about the ten books I meant to read that year. I read eight of those books, and one of them, Meditations, I’ve read three times since. But one in particular still eludes me. Ulysses. I’ve begun it many times over the years, and many times I’ve moved on to other books. Perhaps I’ll tackle the yellowing pages of this classic next, or perhaps it will forever be the one that got away. Time will tell, as it always does.

      If I’ve learned anything in these last seven years, let alone all that preceded them, I’ve learned to talk less about what I’m going to do and more about what I’ve done. We are either dreamers or doers in this world. Less talk and more action, thank you. If that inspires a laugh when I refer to reading a book, well, I shrug in your general direction. I may believe myself to be well-read, while noting how incomplete it feels when some notables evade me for years. When I think about all the YouTube videos or tweets I’ve read in the last seven years, not having read a classic novel feels wasteful of the opportunity.

      We all must choose what we say yes to in this brief go at living. Where do we want to go? Who do we want to be? Just what is that verse we’re writing going to say anyway? We all have agency over what we do in the now. As the future plunges into the past, how will we take stock of the time spent? Some part of us will feel incomplete for having used that time elsewhere. What matters most now? Choose accordingly. We may celebrate all that we’ve done while acknowledging the things that got away from us.

    • Acutely Aware

      “Remember, remember,
      this is now,
      and now,
      and now.
      Live it, feel it, cling to it.
      I want to become
      acutely aware
      of all I’ve taken
      for granted.”
      ― Sylvia Plath

      The urgency of now is amplified by the awareness of time going by. We ought to do the things we believe we ought to do now, while time is ripe and dreams are unfaded by the rapid flow of the days to follow. Tempus fugit, friend: Time flies.

      Plath died young, taking her own life after putting her children to bed. Knowing that, read the poem again and feel how it changes. There is more desperation, more immediacy to the words when life hangs in the balance. A few more minutes, a few more years—it’s all the same. Memento mori.

      Now that we’ve got that out of the way, we ought to go out and live with this bonus time we’ve been given. Seneca reminded us to seize what flees. Carpe diem. Why would we dare to waste our time so carelessly? Accept the fragility of the moment and do something with it.

      A cold water plunge shocks the body into immediacy (I wonder sometimes why nobody follows me in). The body is jolted into sudden awareness of the moment. There is no distraction in cold water, it’s sink or swim. So what will do for your soul? But enough of intellectual discourse; what will jolt us into awareness that this is it? That there is only now? Live it, feel it, cling to it.

    • We Are Stirred

      I don’t want to be demure or respectable.
      I was that way for years.
      That way, you forget too many important things.
      How the little stones, even if you can’t hear them,
      are singing.
      How the river can’t wait to get to the ocean and
      the sky, it’s been there before.
      What traveling is that!
      It is a joy to imagine such distances.
      — Mary Oliver, I Don’t Want to be Demure or Respectable

      When this blogger is finally done (perhaps when he begins to refer regularly to himself in the third person), it may be when the collection of Mary Oliver poems have all been quoted. It could just as easily have been Henry David Thoreau or Marcus Aurelius. Truly, I don’t mean to keep returning to each of them here, but then I re-read a poem like this one, in just the kind of mood I find myself in now, and well, here we are.

      We know when we’re ready for the next. To imagine such distances. Oh, the audacity to try to reach them! We all get tired of being demure and respectable. Don’t we? No, maybe not all of us. But some of us. The kindred fire is easy to feel when encountered. We are fellow schemers, some of us. We dream our dreams and chase some of them. We aren’t satiated by travel or poetry or encounters in the wild—we are stirred. Forever wanting just a bit more than this, please and thank you.

      To be demure is to concede that now is not entirely for us. Now is a time to be present and honorable and a sacrificer of time and energy and that special fire within that longs for oxygen and fuel. To do the right thing is honorable. Honor has its price, but truly, it also offers its beautiful dividend that cannot be ignored. A sense of place and connection keeps us alive and thriving too—just look at those Blue Zone folks for affirmation.

      As a friend recently phrased it, we have competing opportunities in our lives. The only wrong answer is to be a slave to someone else’s dream that robs us of our vitality. In time, we learn what is an empty pursuit and what feeds the flame. Having felt the heat within, how will we now feed it, so it doesn’t peter out like the vitality in so many others who have come before? It’s a joy to imagine such distances we may travel as we grow into our possibilities. Go! Do something with it while there is time.

    • Begin Something

      “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.” ― Willie Nelson

      As an early bird, it should be easy to get a head start on the day. But the day floods in anyway. Even as I awaken, work to-do minutia floods my brain—a clear sign that I didn’t write it all down to release its hold on me before my day was done. The bullet journal method only works if you keep up with it. Lately, I haven’t kept up with it.

      If we are truly on a quest for personal excellence, why do we clutter up our days with minutia at all? Mastery requires singular focus, if we indeed wish to reach closer to it. Just who do we want to be on this one go at things anyway? The work that matters ought to get done, the rest ought to slip away and not impact our sleep score.

      I used to glory in the hustle of outworking the competition. I have other priorities now. When I wake up, my attention doesn’t go right to work, it goes right to attending to the needs of the pets, and then to writing this blog. Does writing deserve a place of honor ahead of income-generating activity? Doesn’t the answer depend on where we want to go today? The answer has always been there, waiting for us to listen and act upon it.

      Why get up early at all, but to heed the call to begin something? To rise and chase the dreams of others for profit is nothing but a trap from which we will never escape. We must always prioritize ourselves first, and then address the needs of others. They tell us this on every flight. It’s on us to pay attention to the flight attendants as we hustle through life.

      To make something of this day seems a modest objective. Why go through the motions or succumb to distraction? Create something of consequence today and see what might build from it. Joie de vivre is derived from doing something meaningful with our days, not from hustling through it. So what is that something?

    • A Brief, Salty Moment

      I love a great beach as much as anyone, but given the choice, give me a rocky ledge with an steady ocean roll crashing into it. The bigger the swell, the higher the foamy spray, the happier I am to be there to witness it. This eternal battle between land and sea will go on as long as there’s an ocean. We only get to witness if for our finite moment—roughly equivalent to the time as that foamy spray leaping into the air for a brief, salty moment before returning to the sea. What is a few seconds or a hundred years to infinity? All the same. It is us that feels the thrill of the brief flight.

      Knowing the score as we do, we might choose to be a little saltier today. There is nothing but now. Make a big splash.

    • Fully-Valued

      “To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.” — Mark Twain

      Joy shifts time. It locks moments in amber. It makes years seem like days, even as days seem like minutes. It’s all a collection of joyful minutes, sprinkled with the jolts that life throws at us all. We learn to value our time together for the shared experience of living as the world sweeps past us like a swollen river after a storm.

      Now everyone dreams of love lasting and true
      Oh but you and I know what this world can do
      So let’s make our steps clear that the other may see
      And I’ll wait for you, and if I should fall behind wait for me
      — Bruce Springsteen, If I Should Fall Behind

      We live in our time machine, my bride and I. I know it’s a time machine because I look at old photographs, or think back on certain moments, and when I compare them with the date they were taken I’m shocked by the time that has flown by. We are betrayed by years, but we aren’t yet old. But tell that to the kids and they’ll laugh. Tempus fugit, indeed.

      May your hands always be busy
      May your feet always be swift
      May you have a strong foundation
      When the winds of changes shift
      May your heart always be joyful
      May your song always be sung
      May you stay forever young
      — Bob Dylan, Forever Young

      Printing out a wedding photo, the clerk commented that I look the same as when the picture was taken. Looks are deceiving, I laughed. Health is its own time machine, and for the most part we’ve been blessed with good health, coaxed by fitness and nutrition and good-enough genes. We know that time always wins, no matter what time machine we fly about in. A joyful life softens the landing, but we’ll land one day like all who have come before us.

      Maybe time running out is a gift
      I’ll work hard ’til the end of my shift
      And give you every second I can find
      And hope it isn’t me who’s left behind
      — Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit, If We Were Vampires

      We learn not to worry about what we cannot control. To always be worrying is to forsake joy for uncertainty. The only certainty is this moment together, so make it count in quiet gestures and unspoken ways. Joy is rooted in love: love of life, love for another, love of the moments built one upon the other for as long as this ride may continue. Nothing lasts forever—we know this all too well. But enjoying each something for all it offers is a path to a fully-valued, joyful life.