Alexandersmap

    Tag: Tempus Fugit

    • Just the Right Blend

      “I have learned to live each day as it comes and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow.” — Dorothy Dix

      I took a long walk in Manhattan yesterday. It’s all relative of course, but it felt pretty long towards the end of it. If I were on some country path with comfortable shoes I’d have just been warming up, but on concrete sidewalks swarming with people, while wearing dress shoes and a sport coat, a mile walk feels kinda long. I’ll surely need to take a true long walk when I get home just to make up for even admitting to that mile feeling uncomfortable, but all experiences are measured by the minutiae that built it.

      My underlying hope in navigating my series of nows is to find just the right blend of minutiae to make each moment sparkle. We’re building tomorrow’s memories with each today, aren’t we? What goes into today’s blend will fuel our future or set us back. We ought to discriminate on the little things that make now memorable.

      Sure, know the forecast when packing for our future, but don’t wring away the present in apprehension. We can’t borrow time, but we can waste it just as easily as we can optimize it. Those tomorrows will come either way, even if we aren’t guaranteed a starring role in the play. We must accept the fragility of now and offer it our very best, lest we squander it. Not every moment is perfect, we can’t expect that, but we can seek perfection anyway, and celebrate the higher standard we reach.

    • An Iterative Process

      Across the evening sky
      All the birds are leaving
      But how can they know
      It’s time for them to go?
      Before the winter fire
      I will still be dreaming
      I have no thought of time
      For who knows where the time goes?
      Who knows where the time goes?
      — Fairport Convention, Who Knows Where the Time Goes      ?

      Here we go again. October has flown just like the other months, and we find ourselves in November once again. The oak leaves have completely coated the lawn, just a few days after I picked up the first round of leaves. So it must be, autumn cleanup is an iterative process, not ever one and done unless you wait for Thanksgiving weekend, and there are other chores reserved for that timeframe. I wonder at people who choose a lifestyle with no chores, for the sheer amount of available time they must fill. I suppose I’d just read more or play pickle ball or something. But that’s not for me. There’s beauty in the labor we opt into.

      October was one of my most productive and transformative months of the year in many ways, but it’s all last month’s news now. We must begin again today with whatever momentum yesterday gave to us. Each day brings an opportunity to be fully alive and present, whatever that means to us. My day begins with the keyboard—the first of several habits that steer me towards purposeful and productive living. Today will fly by like all the rest, the only question is what will we remember of it? What will carry us into tomorrow a little better than we arrived at today?

      I’ve been told I dwell on productivity too much, and that may be an ongoing theme of this blog, but productivity means something different to each of us. Productivity to me isn’t giving my life to a job, it’s doing something with my life. Productivity is simply building a system for living that brings positive momentum to our lives. Those grains of sand will keep falling through the hourglass far too quickly for our liking (tempus fugit). We can accept that time is flying by and with our awareness begin to realize our place in eternity. Discovering our purpose is an iterative process too. We may do something meaningful in our given time, built one step at a time.

    • Action is Identity

      “Creators create. Action is identity. You become what you do. You don’t need permission from anybody to call yourself a writer, entrepreneur, or musician. You just need to write, build a business, or make music. You’ve got to do the verb to be the noun.” ― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

      If action is identity, so too is inaction. What we say yes to and what we say no to are each a part of who we are. It’s inherently obvious, yet so easy to forget in the day-to-day demand for our time played to the soundtrack of the well-meaning who only want the best for us (thanks a bunch for that). We must pause a beat and get our bearings, then get back to the climb to our potential.

      If I could offer a bit of unsolicited advice to myself, to my children and anyone else paying attention, it’s to simply follow the call for as long as we can get away with it until we meet that person we envisioned. The only way forward is to do that thing. To write, to build, to make: action is our identity. It’s that vote for the person we wish to become that James Clear reminded us of.

      And so a bias towards action is the not-so-secret way to reach the promised land. Hitting the lottery is a fool’s game, hitting our stride by doing the things we know we need to do is how we live fully. We’ve been gifted with being born at a time and place where possibility flows. The people telling us that this is a time of scarcity are getting wealthy with words. There’s an audience for everything, even that thing that we’re telling ourselves to go be. Decide what to be and go be it, as the song goes.

      We ought to give ourselves a gift these last few months of the year. Do the creative work and put it out there for the world to see. Make a bold statement in who we will be today, and build on it in our following days should we blessed with enough of them. Tempus fugit: time flies. Do it now before it all slips away. If action is identity, just what will we think of ourselves if we don’t act now?

    • Making Full Use of the Decade

      “Don’t try to be young. Just open your mind. Stay interested in stuff. There are so many things I won’t live long enough to find out about, but I’m still curious about them. You know people who are already saying, ‘I’m going to be 30—oh, what am I going to do?’ Well, use that decade! Use them all!”
 — Betty White

      If life is a series of time buckets, we ought to be making the most of each bucket we happen to reside in at this particular stage of our life. My entire life transformed from 10 to 20, and again from 20 to 30, and so on to now. The decade I’m in has been revelatory for the transformation it has brought to my life and for the speed with which it’s going by. It all flies by, we just have to make full use of the time.

      Each decade is a climb, and climbs are filled with setbacks, false summits, detours and exhausting ascents that seem to go on forever without relief. Alternatively, we might look at the decade as meandering through a maze, encountering all sorts of interesting or even terrifying paths, with a series of dead ends we must back away from, before we reach the other side. Whatever life means to us, it ought to be exhilarating and interesting as we begin each day, for this stage of our lives is rapidly coming to an end, and the next is just around the corner.

      The key is staying interested, as Betty White pointed out, and with our interest sparked getting fired up for the next. To explore what lies just beyond where we’ve been thus far is a lifetime adventure which we can all subscribe to. Be bold! This next decade will fly by too, and what will our memories be then? We must exploit each leap into the unknown for all it offers in order to live a full life.

    • Time Enough

      “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” — Rabindranath Tagore

      We often get hung up on time and how quickly it all flies by. Yet we have more than enough for one lifetime when we use it well. We just waste so very much of it on things that aren’t all that essential. The moment is all that matters, we keep telling ourselves, and yet we measure time. The instant we recognize the fragility of the moment and our place in it, the more we begin to fully live. This is everything, all at once, and it’s a wonder to behold.

      This morning I reconciled myself to spending money and time on a problem that I inadvertently created several years ago. To spend money and time on things that I once thought were finished forever is frustrating, but instead of getting spun up in the error I’m finding joy in the resolution of the problem. With every decision we have the opportunity to set the future straight. We may celebrate this and move on to the next.

      As a rower I know the value of the current stroke in setting up the next one. Effort and recovery are forever linked in a quest for that elusive perfection. A life well spent isn’t all about the highlight reel stuff seen on Instagram, it’s the daily grind and the challenges we overcome that we may live to fight another day. Effort, recovery and setting ourselves up for the next—again and again. Stitch together enough such moments and we may build something meaningful that transcends the ordinary.

      We have time enough, even as we wish for more. Aspire to make more of the moment instead of wishing for more moments. Excellence is found here, awaiting our rise to meet it.

    • September Song

      Oh, it’s a long, long while from May to December
      But the days grow short
      When you reach September
      When the Autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
      One hasn’t got time for the waiting game
      — Frank Sinatra, September Song

      Labor Day Weekend in the United States is the unofficial end of summer. That in itself isn’t particularly remarkable, but I feel compelled to remark on the fact that it’s now September. In general I love September for the crisp air and epic sunsets that seem to come with it, but that’s tinged with the reality of shorter days and a realization that we never really do everything we wanted to do with summer before it’s gone. Alas, we can’t do it all. We must simply be deliberate about doing the things we most want to do with the time we have.

      There’s a Latin phrase that is often found on sundials, “Serius est quam cogitas”, which means, “It’s later than you think.” We must remember this and live with purpose each day, that we may look back on the season recently passed and feel we didn’t miss the boat. We can’t change seasons already passed, but we can feel the urgency to do something with today. We’re all familiar with that other Latin call to the moment, carpe diem, and ought to embrace it more for the desperate call to pay attention it was meant as. Indeed, we must seize the day before it fades away in our memory with all that is lost.

      Yesterdays carry us to today, either as a stepping stone or a slide into oblivion. I’d rather be climbing, wouldn’t you? Writing saves more of my days than reminding myself to get to it already. Writing anchors me to the moment, forcing me to pay attention to something tangible in the time I have available and do with it what I can. Last week was a series of late, often frenetic posts inserted into spare moments in airports and hotel rooms. Finding something that anchors us to the day makes the day less likely to float away like all the rest. A blog post, a moment shared with people of consequence, a bold act of self-determination and a nod to the time passing by are things we can hold on to.

    • 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!

    • Slicing Out the Moment

      “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” ― Susan Sontag

      There’s a cool feature in iPhone photos where you can view the map of where your thousands of photographs were taken, with thumbnails of the photos overlaying the spot it was geolocated. It’s a great reminder of where we’ve been and what we saw at the time we were there. It’s a momentary slice of our lives from the past, and we get to relive it with a virtual flyover as we zoom in on the place. And in doing so, the pictures from that place come back to us like a flood of memories.

      I’ve taken tens of thousands of photographs, mostly with my collection of iPhones since those became the technology that replaced a camera. But my Instagram feed is only at 1700 posts. We all save the best pictures to show others, don’t we? But that particular platform isn’t always friendly when formatting our favorite pictures, and so they fail to make the cut. Not so with our library, where with time and patience we can scroll through everything to find memories.

      I’m that person at parties and family gatherings taking all the pictures. I do it because I know the moment will soon be gone like all the rest but some fragment of it may live on. I’ve captured people no longer with us, full of hope and happiness or sometimes with a knowing look that this may be the last photo you’ll get of them. My favorite Navy pilot once observed this as I insisted on taking his picture with his grandchildren. It would be years before he passed, but his belief in my motivation for taking the picture stayed with me and does to this day.

      The thing is, all of our past moments are dead and gone. The people and places live on within us for as long as we are alive, and then we in turn live on in others for as long as they are. Beyond that is beyond all of us to know. Immortality isn’t ours to achieve, but our image may live on beyond the living memory of all who knew us. So too may our words, should we be so bold as to write them down for all to see.

      We all know the score. Tempus fugit (time flies), memento mori (remember we all must die) and so the only reasonable answer is carpe diem (seize the day). Capturing a few images along the way allows us to look back on a life well-lived and trigger memories that may have faded. Memories of places and people and moments that once were our entire life for an instant and now a layer of our identity, gently folded within us for the rest of our days.

    • About Time

      ‘In headaches and in worry
      Vaguely life leaks away,
      And Time will have his fancy
      To-morrow or to-day.
      — W. H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening

      I tend to track time differently than I once did. Now I measure time by the length of my hair or fingernails (weeks versus days since my last trim). I don’t generally look at the clock before calling it a night, for what does time have to do with how tired we feel? Nor do I set an alarm to awaken, I simply wake up. In many ways, I woke up years ago to the folly of time, even if I still follow the rules and show up early (as any civilized adult ought to aspire to). In this way, you might say my relationship with time is complicated.

      When we see time for what it is, something inside us shifts. We become collectors of experiences and embracers of moments rather than maximizers of minutes on the schedule. For all my focus on productivity, at the end of the day I only care that I’ve done the essential few things that move the chains forward for me in the direction I wish to go. The rest float away like all the other past initiatives.

      Writing every day forced me to become an efficient writer. There’s no time to waste on things like writer’s block when you must ship the work and get on to other things. Similarly, other things I do every day become automatic for me, that I may check the box and move on to other things. If that sounds transactional, well, so be it, but it doesn’t mean it’s not the most important thing for me in those moments doing it. When we give something our complete attention for the time necessary to complete it, we may surprise ourselves at just how quickly we can do the work.

      One of the people who works for me was stuck on a presentation he had to deliver to the team, simply overwhelmed by how to structure a slide deck and what to talk about. After being his sounding board for all the built-up stress and despair over the unfairness of having to do this in the first place, I made the deck for him in 30 minutes and quietly sent it to him to personalize in his own way, that he might focus on more important things than a peer presentation. When we get wrapped around the pole on the details of things that aren’t all that important in the end, we waste our time. If experience has taught me anything, it’s to quickly create solutions to problems that I may go back to spending time on more important things. Spending time on my employee wasn’t a waste of my own time, it was an investment in his. I’ll take that trade-off.

      The thing is, I recognize the place that he’s in now in his life. Ten years younger than me, with family obligations that can overwhelm you when you’re just trying to get through the day—I’ve been there, done that. My doing his homework for him wasn’t meant to take him off the hook so much as to show him a clearer future. My priority is to develop an employee who can assess the nature of a commitment and allocate the appropriate amount of focus on it, that he may move on to more essential things. Looking back, I’m sure someone did the same for me once upon a time.

      Life always comes back to our operating system. When we ground ourselves in stoicism, we know that time flies (tempus fugit) and we must therefore seize the day (carpe diem). There’s no time to waste on how we feel about the matter. In the end, the quality of our life is measured in how effective we are at navigating the small things that we may accomplish the big things. What’s bigger for us than using our brief time on this earth on things that matter most?

    • A Sequence of Everything Wanted

      “Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” ― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

      Slow down you’re doing fine
      You can’t be everything you want to be before your time
      — Billy Joel, Vienna

      In a dizzying turn of events, last night capped a sequence of things wanted for some time delightfully happening one after the other, from Rome to Athens to Sicily to Florence to… New Hampshire. Life is sometimes simply great timing, realized. To visit the Colosseum and the Sistine Chapel and the Acropolis and Mount Etna, to see Michelangelo’s La Pietà and David to bookend an epic trip and then return home to find the elusive Aurora Borealis dancing in my own backyard hours later is a sequence I’ll be processing for some time, thank you. This isn’t meant to be a brag about how lucky the last couple of weeks have been, rather a realization that patiently working towards something combined with a bit of good luck goes a long way in a lifetime. Amor fati.

      The thing is, I wear my impatience on my sleeve (and blog about it more often than I ought to). Some of us simply want to get right to everything as quickly as possible, knowing that time flies and we aren’t getting any younger. Sure, tempus fugit, but slow down—you’re doing fine… Vienna waits for you. Simply plot the steps, do the work, follow through and hope fortune smiles on you.

      Hope is a tricky word, and that’s where impatience comes in. Perhaps the better word is trust. We must trust the process when we build our systems. Work, marriage, fitness level, artistic contribution, social interactions, and yes, bucket list items are all lifestyle choices built on faith that doing this will lead to that. When it doesn’t arrive promptly we restless types get a bit impatient, so a reminder of all that’s come to pass helps now and then. Gratitude goes a long way.

      Life lessons are all around us, if we simply stop rushing about so much and focus on the journey. The biggest lesson is that the journey continues, and each milestone is simply a marker for where we’ve been and what we’ve seen and who we were at the time. What’s next matters too, doesn’t it? Our past is our foundation for the growth to come. We shall get there some day. For haven’t we thus far?

      Aurora Borealis, New Hampshire 10 May 2024
      Aurora Borealis, New Hampshire 10 May 2024
      Aurora Borealis, New Hampshire 10 May 2024
      Michelangelo’s La Madonna della Pietà
      Michelangelo’s David