Working Meditation

Observations from a life in motion

#97: Compounding effects of innovation

Techno-social optimists tell us that humanity is in a good place. We hear that our innovations have reduced human mortality, increased quality if life across the globe, increased our ability to feed the growing world population and so on. All of this is true.

And we can have multiple things be true at the same time.

Yes, we don’t hear of houses burning down or people dying because their couch caught fire. But we hear of people getting sick because of environmental contaminants, including toxic flame retardants on their couch, their car seat and pretty much every piece of furniture they sit on. Each piece has toxins way beneath any risk threshold. But combined, each exposure builds up enough toxins in our bloodstreams that we can pass them along to our unborn children.

Yes, we live in more comfortable homes and can afford more groceries and consumer goods compared to our ancestors. But we have to own a car to bring home that massive cart of groceries because the grocer is 20 minutes away. We can’t just walk to a store and carry that weight home. Over time, we lose muscle mass and joint health from under utilizing our body such that when our cities start becoming green, most of us don’t feel comfortable just hopping on a bike.

Yes, we can talk to our loved ones on video across the globe every night. We can exchange what’s happening in our lives, give long distance hugs and kisses and never feel disconnected. But the same piece of tech we use to engage with them also has news, entertainment, messages awaiting our attention and endless notifications. After a heated conversation, it’s so much easier to hang up and tune out rather than sit in discomfort and learning.

Yes, our farm equipment, irrigation and bioengineered seeds ensure we don’t starve. But we also have large-scale diversion of freshwater, depleting aquifers and river systems. We have excessive synthetic fertilizer runoff into the soil, water, air, and rainfall. We get toxic algae blooms in lakes, oxygen depletion and “dead zones” within bodies of water, where nothing can survive.

I believe people working at these diverse companies don’t wake up with dreams of harming the planet. But our innovation processes are typically siloed and growth-driven. Isolated innovation makes us move incredibly fast. We aren’t weighed down by anything and can keep experimenting, iterating and launching. One impactful product launch after another, in the service of humanity. But we can still come away with long-term negative impacts that are hard to clean up and reverse.

Our current framework for innovation asks us to zoom in, iterate, speed up, and think in fast approaching time increments. What would happen if we innovated by zooming out, by slowing down, by thinking of a future seven generations down, when we’re not even alive. I can’t help but get optimistic about the compounding effect of a more integrated approach to innovation.

“There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair.”― Donella Meadows, environmental scientist, systems thinker, educator, and writer

#96: Anatomy of micro interactions

I needed customer service from several companies over the last few weeks and had two contrasting experiences. This is an attempt to deconstruct that contrast.

My first interaction was through online chat. I got assigned to an agent named Oliver, who was not only helpful but had an effervescence that leapt across the chat. He gave me a link that I clicked through which, for some reason, disconnected our chat. I had all the information I needed at this point and the link was just extra. But instead of closing out the transaction mentally and moving on with my day, I felt the incompleteness of our interaction. Oliver had helped me but I didn’t get the chance to thank him.

The next day I interacted with Jeff, from another company. This time we were on the phone. It was clear early on that Jeff couldn’t help me because of his company’s policies. But what caught my attention was my rising internal irritation with Jeff. Yes he couldn’t do anything, and we’ve all been in such situations, but what stressed me was his incessant and pause-less talking and limited listening. He seemed to be repeating a talk track and clearly wasn’t skilled at handling customers yet. Part of me felt sorry for him but his talking at me made me want to shush him. I had to interrupt him several times to clarify my request and even after hearing me, he didn’t respond, he parroted the talk track. I desperately wanted to get off the phone and was amazed at the strength of my reaction.

The two interactions were only a day apart but my experience of myself was as different as night and day. I was relaxed and joyful in the first and had a knot in my stomach after the second. Below is that attempt at deconstruction that I mentioned.

In 2021, I arrived at an important conclusion about human connection through my research: The relational “table” is set before we even arrive for an interaction with others. Environmental and internal influences have a massive impact on how we relate to others and they can worsen the relational barriers that already exist.

We can see from the exchange above how some aspects of this table were set. My needs were at odds with the needs of the second company, but I also came to the interaction depleted in every way. Then, I got randomly matched with someone who didn’t listen at all. 50% of the table was set before the interaction and the remaining came into stressful existence during. It’s similar to how we’re born with certain genes but they trigger only in response to specific environmental stimuli.

Our lives are made up of endless micro interactions, where we’re not focused on creating a thoughtful relational space. Yet, we train ourselves and each other through precisely these low-stakes micro interactions…every interaction wiring and rewiring our neural pathways towards empathy and listening or distance and annoyance.

“Sometimes we’re responsible for things not because they’re our fault, but because we’re the only ones who can change them.” ― Lisa Feldman Barrett, psychologist and neuroscientist. From the book “How emotions are made”.

#95: The timing and sequence of experiences

Life experiences shape us, and some leave us drastically altered. We all know this. There is a layer to this equation though that isn’t always visible ― it’s the timing of those experiences and the sequence in which we experience them.

For instance, two 35-year-olds may have both experienced the loss of a parent, the emotional high of a plum job and accompanying financial rewards, parenthood, and job loss but the age and order in which those events occurred will shape them differently. For simplicity, let’s say the rest of their lives, lifestyles, and influences have mostly been similar. Now imagine if one of them lost a parent at 8, became a parent at 25, lost a job right after at 26 and finally got that plum job at 35 after years of struggle. Let’s imagine the other getting that high-paid job right out of college at 22, becoming a parent at 27, losing a parent at 32 and their job at 35.

We can picture how the first person might have been impacted by that early loss of a parent and job loss shortly after new parenthood. When they finally get the financial safety and career success at 35, they’ve likely experienced years of emotional and financial vulnerability. For the latter, we can picture the stability that a complete family and early financial success created such that they were likely better resourced to navigate loss when it eventually came. These examples are of course hypotheticals and our individual stories play out in larger contexts of other lives lived. For instance, if the former had a large and loving extended family, the shock of early loss was likely buffered in some way. If they had a caring partner that was also financially stable, they probably didn’t feel the zing of that job loss as acutely.

There are many other unexamined nuances here so I’m oversimplifying the larger scenario to make this one point ― Who we are is not only determined by what we go through but when we go through it. Because where we are in our lifecycle when we meet different life experiences shapes our experience of those events. The same things land differently at different points in our lives.

“Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.” ― Nathaniel Hawthorne, American Novelist

#94: Body as an instrument

I was recently unwell in a way where a concoction of things, chronic and acute, had me in bed for a few days. Eight punishing issues were cropping up at once. I tried not to add value judgments, which helped reduce mental chatter and made it easier for me to go with the flow. I alternated work-in-bed, Netflix-in-bed, reading and rest based on what my body could handle. By the second day, the observer in me starting seeing each issue as a thread of human experience: gastric distress, back spasms, inflamed adductor, twisted pelvis and grief just to name a few. I thought of people who had dealt with these threads at one point or another. I examined the threads that were new to me.

For example: When people had back problems, I understood theoretically but not until this experience did I really “get it”. I felt from inside how completely debilitating a back spasm could be. How all bodily movements, not some, are silently supported by our core. I knew that our core includes our back and not just the abdomen, and that true abdominal strength comes from deeper muscles and not just the surface-level 6-pack muscle. Yet, not until this event did I patiently isolate and feel the firing of different layers of core muscles. I finally played with the exquisitely designed jigsaw puzzle made of bones, muscles and tendons from inside my animal.

There is sometimes a struggle in spiritual practice about whether it’s more important for us to nurture the spirit or the body. The body is seen as temporary while the spirit more lasting. And I absolutely get this wisdom; I’ve personally benefitted from feeding my spiritual wellbeing in dark moments. But…we are clothed in this earthly bodysuit till our dying breath. If we don’t have a body, we are literally not alive. Like all animals, we have sophisticated abilities for functional activity, growth, reproduction, and continual change before eventual death, and we also face periodic glitches. I have come to see that this glitch-ridden experience inside our frequently painful bodysuit is how we unlock our spiritual practices. Body is where the nuggets of insight, wisdom and empathy live.

We can’t each go through the countless human experiences to be had. But we can go through some. Some of us will face cancers, heart attacks, severe burns, while others will face chronic migraines, irritable bowels and weak bones. Some will have the ache of untimely loss, addiction, and postpartum depression, while others will have to care for a parent with Alzheimer’s or a schizophrenic sibling. Between all of us, we cover the entirety of human experience.

Modern tech would have you believe that intelligent life can operate without a body, while simply simulating the predictive capacity of the brain. What we completely miss is that true intelligence isn’t just prediction, it’s also compassion and resilience birthed from painful surprises. This is the valuable journey that a human body allows. Over time, we can become instruments of all that is tender and powerful at the same time. Like a tree that filters environmental toxins and releases oxygen.

“It is not our job to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves
Like the trees, and be born again,
Drawing up from the great roots.”― Robert Bly, poet

#93: Ecosystem awareness

Let’s start with an experiment. You can select any body part of your choosing; I’ll use the right foot as an example.

So, pay attention to your right foot. Really tune into it and wiggle it if you can. Slowly move it around to feel into the bones and muscles. Is there tightness, fluidity, achiness, a combination of these, or something else? Close your eyes now and continue to do this for 5 breaths. Really. Try it please and then move forward to the next sentence.

Now one question: When you were doing this, were you aware of your knee? Likely not, if your knee is pain free. This exercise is not about your body. It’s a simple way to note that when we become hyper-focused on one thing, we naturally lose awarenss of other things. It’s practically impossible to pay high quality attention to everything all at once. Working-caregivers know this struggle well. We can toggle attention from one thing to the next, but it’s hard to pay attention to everything all at once.

Yet, complex problem solving requires us to be aware of inter-related parts. It needs an ecosystem awareness. Some everyday examples of ecosystem awareness from my world:

  • My husband was replacing the faucet in our clawfoot tub. Mid-way he realized that his movements yanked the pipe connecting the faucet with the shower head, which yanked the curtain rod encircling the tub, which yanked the wall anchor that the curtain rod was tied to. His movement at the faucet split the wall anchor.
  • Years ago, I was cutting my nails while sitting on the balcony at my home in India. Upon seeing me, my Mom requested I do this in the bathroom sink because she didn’t want the sparrows to eat and choke on my sharp nail clippings.
  • When we moved into our new home in Seattle, I did the “Graha Pravesh Puja”. This prayer ceremony is done to bless a new home. I had never personally done this before and was blown away by the sense of connectedness embedded in this prayer. It wasn’t only to request blessings for us, it was also to thank every entity that made space for us in their ecosystem — the insects, animals and plants. I was also reminded to thank the humans that built this home in 1906 and those that took care of it over the decades.

Ecosystems consist of organisms (or parts), their interactions and relationships, and the environments in which they interact. They are relational by definition and interconnected in complex ways. We all live in ecosystems that both impact us and are impacted by us. But it can be overwhelming to understand a system if we keep widening our lens endlessly. So we zoom out and define boundaries to know which pieces of the system we need to focus on for now. This allows us to see the key parts and grasp how they relate to each other.

Without some boundary, our attention doesn’t know where the container ends. Boundaries are a way to invite-in focus and remove overwhelm. But they are often arbitrary and defined by our limited perspectives. At some point in the process, we may be well-served by redefining or even erasing boundaries. Because our ecosystems and their interconnections never end.

“The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those that have not viewed the world.” — Alexander von Humboldt: German geographer, naturalist and explorer