Life

There are 73 posts tagged Life (this is page 1 of 4).

One Day

Planning ahead, whether to the next week or the new year, always has me asking a familiar question: what do you want?

That's a question that propels me into the future, a place where it's easy to live, where there's endless potential and where anything is possible but nothing really happens, that place where we can pretend to make choices and pretend to know their consequences but experience the truth of neither.

Imaginary choices have no real consequences.

Life doesn't happen in the future. It happens here, today. Life is an adventure made one day at a time. How you spend your days is how you spend your life. The next week, the next month, the next quarter, and the next year are all made up of days.

What choices can I make today that will positively influence my future?

If that question propels you back into future-thinking, bring yourself back to the present by asking "What's next, right now?" The answer doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be good enough, for now.

Sentenced to Life

This year I have found myself becoming, ever so slowly, more and more interested in poetry. A few poetry readings have been instrumental in this increasing interest, including this one by Clive James called Sentenced to Life, which I heard the other day on NPR (originally published on BBC Radio 4 - Today on May 26th, 2014).

As I listen to Clive read his poem I find myself reflecting on the totality of life--past, present, and future--and observing how circular life can be, the way it ebbs and flows, the way it changes, but how, when you really take the whole thing in, it remains much the same.

The Big Picture

Its been a while since my last update to this journal. The monthly payment notifications that I receive from subscribers like you feel to me like little nudges, reminders that I haven't published anything in some time. I apologize for not keeping you as updated as I should be.

My life priorities have shifted a lot since the birth of my daughter, who, at three months old yesterday, is at this moment bundled in a soft pink blanket sound asleep in my left arm, my iPhone in my right hand typing this in between glancing out the airplane window at the Earth far below. We're somewhere over Delaware right now, en route back to Boston after spending two weeks in Florida. She has done amazingly well with flying and hasn’t cried at all. In fact, she does better flying than she does driving. Maybe it has something to do with how she flew fourteen times before she was born.

I say that my priorities have shifted, but maybe that's not true. I feel the weight of responsibility in my life has shifted dramatically, yes--suddenly it's no longer just me that I need to think about--but I still have the same personal goals and ambitions as I did before Ananda was born. I still want to write and publish. I still want to find a way to contribute to humanity. I still want to travel. I still want go to Mars.

Sure, I have family responsibilities now--father and spousal responsibilities--but everything else is still there, everything else is pretty much the same. None of it is number one of course, but it's not all irrelevant or unimportant either.

In many ways what has been the biggest challenge for me is finding a way to continue pursuing my personal goals--or for that matter, just finding the focus to work on something--while having someone else in my life to whom I am a father, someone who depends on me and who will, over the course of her life, look to me for wisdom, support, attention, and love.

I'm a big picture thinker. I’m always considering the long-term implications of a decision or an action, but since the day I learned that I was going to be a dad I've felt the need to stay away from the big picture, to not worry so much about the future. It feels too big now, too complex and blurry.

Yes, my decisions and choices will directly affect Ananda as she grows into her own person, but she will be her own person, someone who will make her own choices and blaze a path through life that is uniquely her own. I feel the best thing that I can do for her as a father is to provide her with what I feel are the best tools for trail blazing and to be there for her when she needs me, to be present when I’m present.

It's her future, not mine. It's her big picture and I'm just the lucky dad who gets to make sure that she has the best tools with which to create her life.

Raam and Ananda

Your Anniversary

A few days ago a friend emailed me with some bad news: his friend and his friend's daughter recently died in a plane crash in Kenya along with the pilot. The plane went missing in bad weather and the wreckage and remains were found shortly thereafter.

We never know when it will be our time, which is, ironically, much the same as for our birth.

My daughter is due any day now (officially on the 19th, but it could be any day) and it feels like a waiting game. Will today be the day? I just don't know.

In the same way I could wonder, will tomorrow be the day I die? I don't know that either. We never really know until it happens.

I heard something once that really stuck with me: Every year we pass over the anniversary of our death.

We may not know which day--will it be a Friday? or a Wednesday? or the 20th of July?--but we do know that it will happen, and every year that day silently passes through our lives unannounced.

While walking outside yesterday and thinking about this I realized that the opposite is also true: Every year we pass over the anniversary of our birth. Right now, I don't know when that date will be for my daughter, just as I don't know when the opposite date will be true and settled for me.

In some ways this sounds depressing, but to me it feels freeing. If I don't know, and I have no way of knowing with certainty, then how can I let it worry me? And if there's nothing to worry me, then only now remains to be enjoyed.

We know that life comes and goes. This is fact. What we don't know is how much we'll get to enjoy it.

Arrive a Tourist but Leave an Explorer

The ocean stood before me like a glistening blue tidal wave at peace with not proceeding. The South Adriatic engulfed nearly a third of my vision as steep hills littered with trees and orange roofs met the sea somewhere below me.

It was like an ocean sandwich, the whitish blue sky motionless on top and the noisy, earthy crust covering the bottom.

For some reason I find myself constantly needing to remember where I am, to remind myself that I'm still on Earth. Sometimes I'll open Google Maps on my laptop just to find Montenegro, that tiny squarish country nestled between Croatia and Albania across the ocean from the backside of Italy's boot. "That's where I am," I'll tell myself, feeling as though I need convincing. "That part of the world is real and it looks like this."

A butterfly breezes past, and then a bird. The birds are everywhere, the slow noisy roof-loving ones chattering away while aerial masters of the sky swoop down and past you in an instant, dogfighting invisible enemies with their black boomerang-shaped wings and their tiny sleek bodies that bulge out underneath, an agile dive-bomber perfectly designed by nature.

Somewhere in the distance to the left, across the valley of orange-tiled roofs where a few tall apartments stand looking out of place, over the tall slender coniferous trees nearer to the ocean, a chained machine whirrs to its master. And then the echo of a hammer, and then a skill saw.

The tiny town of Ulcinj is getting ready, preparing for the onslaught of tourists who will soon be flooding in, people like me who might greet the glistening blue tidal wave and dodge the playful dive-bombers.

Or not.

We all come into this world a tourist. Sadly, most of us leave the same way.

Photography As Art

Why do so many people spend so much time photographing things? We take photos of ourselves, our babies, our friends, and our pets. We photograph the things that make us feel, those moments that appear to give our life meaning, to make it worth having lived.

We witness the beauty of nature but quickly separate ourselves from it, sacrificing the purity of that moment, for what? With such haste we dutifully capture as if witnessing some alien landscape, as if we were alien explorers sent to an unknown world to document for a future generation the fleetingly precious moments that make up our transient existence.

We make baseless uneducated assumptions about what importance future generations will place on the interestingness of our lives, while the truth is they'll likely be just as preoccupied with their own existence as we are with ours, doing whatever activity helps them avoid the unbearable thought of their own impending doom.

The self-portrait speaks the loudest to me. It's as if the soul inside turned the camera on itself and cried out, "I am here! I exist! My life has meaning!"

What is it about human nature that attracts so many of us to capturing moments of time? Is there something in our subconscious, something that remains aware of the limit on our lifespan, something that feels driven by a sense of self-preservation to seek out anything that might help slow or preserve time?

And where is all of this heading? For how much longer will the human race be obsessed with this newfound ability to capture reflections of time, to create something that appears to be uniquely ours but in reality whose value and meaning fades as quickly as the memory of its creators' existence?

When I was a teenager I came across a nature calendar that contained the exact same photo I had taken of a particular waterfall in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The photographer must have taken it from the exact same spot that I stood to take mine. But there was one difference: he used a slower shutter speed and that made the waterfall look misty as it came down the rocks. It was more beautiful and aesthetically appealing than mine, which, having been taken with a faster shutter speed, showed the water frozen in its tracks.

At first, the photo in the calendar filled me with a sense of pride. It was proof that I probably had an intuitive eye for composing 'good photos'. But that's where the story ends. I never again looked at that photo in the calendar. I didn't keep a copy of it and I never saw it again. Instead I enlarged my photo of the waterfall, along with several other photos that I deemed 'frame worthy', added it to a cheap frame, and hung it on the wall.

It didn't matter to me that someone else had taken the exact same photo, of the exact same waterfall, at around the exact same time of the year. It didn't matter to me that the other photo was better than mine. My photo meant more to me because I took it, because it was my photo, a frozen moment of my time captured by me.

But is there really any difference between my time and your time? If ten thousand people take a photo of the Taj Mahal, is there really any reason for me to take a photo of it? And then why take any photos in the first place? What happens in the distant future when everything has been photographed? When every single angle that could be captured, has been captured?

These thoughts lead me back to photography as art.

We create art as a way of expressing ourselves, as a way of capturing and communicating to others what we feel, but true art is not created because the artists' feelings have great importance, but rather because what the artist expresses -- the expression itself -- allows others to experience more of life.

If we focus our time and effort on creating art, then that is time well spent. But what is art? Art is not capture (what the camera does) but rather expression (what is done with the camera). The difference is subtle but important. One requires thinking about what you're doing, understanding why you're doing it, and constantly seeking to improve, while the other lets you get away with laziness and ignorance, pointing a device in the direction of your feelings and pressing a button.

After decades of taking photos, I can see that I have the skills to pursue photography as art, but is that what I want to do? Is my time better spent pursuing writing as art? Or is there some intersection of the two that will allow me to create better art?

And with a newborn on the way, I can't help but wonder: How much of my daughter's life will I be a photographer-dad and how much will I be a dad-dad?

An Explosion of Gratitude

I was standing by the open window with a mug of freshly brewed Pu-erh tea in my hands, enjoying the colder than expected breeze blowing in over the sweet sound of chirping birds, underneath a crisp sky with hints of orange beginning to paint the evening with firey colors of the setting sun, when I realized that I needed to run.

It wasn't because I hadn't run in six months, or because the weather was nice. It wasn't because I was finally living in a neighborhood where there were nice running paths or because I had been feeling my fitness level deteriorate ever so slowly.

No, I needed to run because I was so damn lucky to have legs that allowed me to run, to actually still have my feet attached to my body.

A few hours earlier, while I was walking home from the Alewife subway station, I heard a number of sirens in the distance. There was nothing particularly unusal about that, but intuition told me that something big had just happened.

As I walked home, I opened Twitter on my phone and searched for "Cambridge". Someone else had tweeted that something big must have happened because they heard lots of sirens. I then searched Twitter for "Boston" and immediately started seeing photos of what at taken place just minutes earlier.

Two explosions, presumably bombs, exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing several people and injuring dozens, horrifically dismembering people. I was on the subway when it happened, just a few miles away.

When I got home, I began following what was unfolding in Boston. I found a video clip and photos of the blasts online, showing in graphic detail what had just happened (warning: some of these photos are extremely graphic).

It was horrible, but what caught my attention in the videos was the incredible way in which the majority of people rushed, not away from the blasts as you might expect, but towards them. Within seconds of realizing what had happened, people converged on the areas that were affected.

People ripped the shirts off their backs to use them as makeshift tourniquets on those who had just had their legs blown off. Several marathoners who had been running for more than four hours and 26.2-miles continued running straight to the hospital so they could donate blood.

On Twitter, I found a link to something that comedian Patton Oswalt wrote on his Facebook page shortly after the explosions. His words articulate my thoughts quite well:

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, "Well, I've had it with humanity."

But I was wrong. I don't know what's going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

But here's what I DO know. If it's one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we're lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they're pointed towards darkness.

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We'd have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, "The good outnumber you, and we always will."

So as I stood there at home by the open window, with a mug of freshly brewed Pu-erh tea in my hands, enjoying the colder than expected breeze blowing in over the sweet sound of chirping birds, underneath a crisp sky with hints of orange beginning to paint the evening with firey colors of the setting sun, I couldn't help but feel an absolute sense of gratitude.

There were humans, only a few miles from where I was, whose lives had been ripped apart today, some quite literally. Others had awoken this morning just as I had, but with the intention of running or watching others run a marathon, who now were lying in a hospital bed somewhere with the knowledge that they will never again wiggle their toes or feel the earth beneath their bare feet.

I needed to run. I needed to run for them.

Expect the Unexpected

How did I get here? I don't know. It's hard to say. Sometimes my life moves so fast that I can't keep up and when I look back at the past six months that's exactly how I feel: unable to keep up. I feel unable to find the words to describe the journey, that same journey that I need to describe to fulfill my commitment to sharing it with you.

As a writer, I try to understand not just the world around me, but also the world within me. But how can I explain to you what to me feels unexplainable?

How can I describe the landscape outside the window when my ship is going a thousand miles an hour?

Perhaps that's the challenge of all writers, to keep up with the endless flow when it arrives, to master the skill of deduction, deciding what gets shared and what gets left out, like a detective removing all possible suspects until only the best candidates remain.

This writing is evidence of my attempt to put aside for just a moment the amazingness of what has happened, to pull the emergency brake on my life and slow down just enough to get this message across to you so that I can stop looking backward for answers around how to best convey this.

I don't want to be looking backward, especially not when this thousand-mile-per-hour ship is about to get upgraded to warp-speed. I need to be looking forward, and I want to be looking forward, and sharing that forward journey with you.

All the best journeys in life are lifelong journeys, those adventures that don't really have a clear beginning and whose ending appears as a climax that does not lead to an ending but instead undergoes a metamorphosis that by some play of magic recreates a beginning where there was no ending.

This is my attempt to explain that magical recreation of a beginning without an end.

***

Six months ago I was a solo-traveler, not really sure of where my life was going. Today, I'm a husband to a wife, with a daughter on the way.

Yes, you heard that right. If that sounds hard to believe, trust me when I say that it's just as strange for me to write.

I met my wife Anna, also a solo-traveler, and we connected as unexpectedly as we started a family. Both of us believe the universe has a reason for everything. But that belief is equally matched, perhaps paradoxically, with a shared belief that our destinies are not pre-written, that we decide and choose our reality.

We're now learning to embrace roles that neither of us ever thought or imagined we'd need to embrace at any point in our lives. We had both accepted that such roles were simply not in the cards for us. How wrong we were. But that's okay. We're both adaptable, a trait that any solo traveler will tell you is an essential skill.

So how do two solo travelers, whose love for travel is only matched by a respect and reverence for family, start a family of their own? How do two people who feel uncomfortable using the terms 'boyfriend' and 'girlfriend' find a way to embrace each other as 'husband' and 'wife' and prepare themselves for spending a lifetime together? How do two independent individuals who love doing things on their own come together to share the responsibility of bringing a new life into this world?

I haven't been writing or publishing very much for the past few months because I don't like skirting around issues or hiding things. I don't like writing for the sake of writing. If I'm going to write and share something with you, it needs to be real and true, an actual representation of what I'm going through. I knew that I could not honestly do that until I announced this because nearly everything I've been thinking about over the past four months, as you might imagine, has been thought about against the backdrop of this new and incredible shift in my life.

One thing that I'm struggling with right now is figuring out where my boundaries are when it comes to writing and publishing. I don't yet know when I will announce all of this to the rest of the world (i.e., outside of this journal). In addition to you, I've only told family and a few close friends.

How much of my private life -- how much of my family life -- am I willing to put out there? On one hand I've always been very transparent about almost everything: my finances, my travel schedule, my thoughts and feelings on life. However, at the same time I'm also a very private person and I value my privacy, even if that privacy is only confined to a few thoughts in my brain.

Until now, its been easy to determine what I want to share and what I don't. But now I have two other people to think about. I'm grateful that Anna is carefree, perhaps even more so than me, so I have no doubt that whatever I choose to share she'll be okay with me sharing. However that doesn't help me figure out what, if anything, should remain private.

I'm a writer who writes about things that are close to his heart and it's important to me that I continue to write that way. I intentionally created this journal so that I would have a place to share the very things that I might not otherwise want to share, at least not immediately, with the public, and this journal was created as a place to share those things with a smaller group of people who wanted to support my work.

So, at least initially, I will start sharing a lot more here with you through the journal.

Anna and I intend to keep traveling once our daughter is a year old. We want to spend 6-8 months every year living in a different country, picking up the culture, learning a bit of the local language, and perhaps finding ways that we can contribute to the local economy. (Anna has aspirations of starting an orphanage in southeast Asia and she's finishing up her Master's degree in Non-Profit Management.)

We're both aspiring minimalists with a distaste for consumerism. We believe strongly in reusing and maintaining things over throwing out and replacing them and these are values we want to pass on to our child.

I might make it sound like we've got this all figured out, but I know that there will be many challenges along the way. We've already faced several. But like any solo-traveler, and with someone else in the middle now for whom we need to drop our stubborn individuality and think beyond ourselves, we remain adaptable.

Am I any more sure where my life is going? No, not really. But it's sure about to get a lot more real.

***

I'm convinced that nature has a way of signaling big changes and that if you pay attention you can read those signs and see things coming. I certainly didn't see any of this coming, but I do see the signs now when I look back. It all began when I was in Darwin, Australia, almost ten months ago.

But let me stop there. This journal entry is already getting a bit long and I need to add more wood to the fire. I'm camping with my dad in the White Mountains of New Hampshire for the weekend; this was, I think, the emergency brake that I needed to articulate all these thoughts in a coherent manner and get them out into a format that I can share with you.

My dad is already asleep. The fire is getting low and the cold is creeping in. My fingers are getting stiff on the keyboard.

Now that I've made this announcement you can expect a stream of journal entries to follow. There are a few other things I've been getting interested in that I've wanted to share here but haven't because I felt a responsibility to share this first. One of those things is my growing interest in Bitcoin, a decentralized digital currency that I realized is exactly what was missing back when I wrote my Income Ethics series two years ago.

Life is an adventure, and just as I was starting to feel that perhaps my adventure was missing a little something, it got a lot more interesting. I want to start sharing this journey with you and I hope that you'll join me for the ride.

##

Heart Challenges

When I talk about following my heart and doing what feels right it may sometimes sound like life becomes a cakewalk, an easy and sunny path you walk down without a care in the world.

The reality couldn't be further from the truth.

Your heart wants you to grow, to be challenged, to face difficulties that seem insurmountable. It wants to nudge you closer and closer to the edge of oblivion, to hold your hand when you're unable to walk and then slowly let it go, challenging you to walk on your own.

It does this with love, the same way a mother holds her child's hand as she's learning to walk, guiding the her to grow to new heights and new potential, encouraging the child to risk what seems like everything, and doing so because the mother knows through experience that falling is part and parcel of living.

But not all difficulty is created equal and not all challenge is meaningful.

It's difficult to climb a hundred stairs, but the meaningfulness of that difficulty changes dramatically when you're climbing those hundred stairs to save someones life. You can climb stairs all day and night and they won't mean as much as that one sprint to save a life.

It might be stressful to manage a team of people and tackle a big project, but the meaningfulness of that project and the worthiness of that stress changes dramatically when the project you're taking on is aimed at accomplishing a goal that, when reached, changes someones life for the better or leaves the world in a better state than you found it.

No matter how many meaningless projects you accept and no matter how many pointlessly stressful situations you face, you can be sure that neither are making you a better person. They're not helping you grow and they're not helping the world become a better place, no matter how much pain you endure.

Your ego wants you to believe that all challenge and difficulty has meaning, that all sources of stress have value and purpose. Your heart intuitively knows that this isn't true. It knows that without spending your time doing things that actually have meaning and purpose behind them, you have no reason for existing.

Your heart is allergic to things that are meaningless, so wear your heart on your sleeve. Put it right out there for the whole world to see. Let it guide you. Let it take you wherever it takes you. Trust it no matter how risky or how illogical it may seem. A true heart calling will always bring you to a place that's worthy of the challenges you face.

If you follow your heart, if you give it your trust and let it guide you, it will lead you to your purpose for existing. Life won't be easy. You won't get through unscathed. You'll fall down and face challenges that seem insurmountable, but every single challenge you do face, every fall and every scratch, will be worth it. It will be meaningful.

If you follow your heart, every challenge you face will make you a better person and for that you'll grow to love your life.