Working Meditation

Observations from a life in motion

#79: Organic signals and the paradox of overengineering

I drink plenty of water because I naturally crave it. I often wonder after a refreshing drink whether plants feel the same way after getting watered: nourished from within. And then I wonder why, despite my affinity for water, I too sometimes fall into a pattern of forgetting and getting dehydrated.

I read somewhere that we can mix up our thirst and hunger signals. When I first read this, I thought “hum, interesting, that’s never happened to me”. But now that I’m cultivating a capacity to observe, I see it happens quite frequently. The common thread in these moments is that I’ve lost my connection to thirst signals because of busyness or distraction (likely missed or overrode initial signals). When I haven’t had adequate water in several days, it feels harder and harder to trace my way back to that faint signal. Then drinking water becomes a task; another thing to track and remember, and not something I do naturally.

I notice parallels with a number of other habits including meditation, writing, movement, sleep, and human connection…essentially anything that feels lifegiving. When I lose that organic signal from within because of modernity’s squeeze, there is pressure to start tracking the when, the how and, the how much. There is pressure to engineer the optimal routine. But once designed, it all backfires. Rather than following that engineered routine, part of me stops wanting to do something that comes so naturally to me.

There seems to be an experiential difference between leaning into the organic nurture of a practice and over-monitoring it for output. For me atleast, one seems to release the creative expansion of the practice and the other somehow robs it. One makes the habit magnetic and the other a bit repellant. It feels as if my psyche is saying: “Give me the tools to make healthful choices, but set me free to interact in those lifegiving pockets without a script.”

I want to build evolving gardens and not static skyscrapers.

“When I refer to ‘creative living,’ I am speaking more broadly. I’m talking about living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, journalist and author

#78: Think global and act local vs. the reverse

I’ve often heard people say “think global, act local” and while the phrase made sense, I never really paused to think about its downstream impact until recently. As a thought experiment, I wondered what would happen if we “think local, act global”. I didn’t have to think very hard to realize that colonialism, the global spread of silicon valley mindset (chasing unicorns, quick-builds and fast-exits), and performative social media interactions are all examples of thinking local and acting global.

Thinking local and acting global makes it easier to lean into our self-protective tendencies. Easier to accumulate more and more material safety for our immediate habitat at the expense of the others that we may not (or may not want to) see. The impact of our actions becomes distant and invisible. We especially don’t stick around to see the long-term effects. It becomes easier to do and harder to feel. Our actions, emotions and impact become siloed.

When we do the opposite to think global and act local,  we instinctively lean into the following behaviors: An awareness that humanity is interconnected in unbreakable ways, and a sense of agency over actions and outcomes in our local habitat. When combined, these ways of operating strengthen our empathy and sense of ownership.

Thinking global and acting local, we may initiate and experiment with small scale localized actions to see what works. We may feel inspired to share learnings with others who are better positioned to add value to their own habitats. Our local becomes an incubator for the global.  We gain the capacity to contribute not only to our own context, but also to our collective intelligence so others may be able to support their local contexts. An apt metaphor might be everyone adding logs to the collective fire for shared warmth. It becomes easier to not only do but also to feel. Community organizing and our approach for Polio and Covid vaccinations are examples of thinking global and acting local.

Which version of our world feels better to live in? How will we choose to think and act?

“To become a different kind of person is to experience the world in a different way. When your mind changes, the world changes. And when we respond differently to the world, the world responds differently to us.” ― David Loy: Professor, writer, and Zen teacher

#77: Sustainable is inherently relational

Transaction: An exchange or an interaction between two or more things or entities. It’s a communicative action involving two or more units that reciprocally affect or influence each other.
Examples: Paying back a friend who covered our dinner when we were short on cash, scheduling a meeting on someone’s calendar and them accepting, saying hello to a neighbor and getting a smile in return, negotiating a business deal.
1. Transaction has a broader definition than simply buying and selling. Our lives are dominated by convenient acts of buying and selling, appropriately called transactions, so we may forget that these acts represent a subset of the exchanges humans conduct daily. Transaction is an exchange, an interaction. We transact not only as consumers but also as friends, parents and collaborators. 
2. Transactions require trust. Throughout human history, we transacted with those that we had (varying degrees of) relationships with. Transactions were simply one part or the last mile, so to speak, of an ongoing engagement.
3. It’s only in the recent past that we’ve been able to transact “facelessly” with another. As more and more of the world opens up to us (more people, more internet-enabled tools, more geographies), we’ve leaned into the comfort of anonymity, distance, and low commitment. We exchange ideas, conversations and goods without any of the relational tethering that transactions and exchanges were historically built upon.

Relation: An existing connection or a significant association between two or more entities or objects.
Relational: The way in which these entities or objects are connected. Anything that is connected will have a cause and effect relationship. Push or pull on one object and you’ll create a reverberation within other related objects.
Examples: Collection of related data in a database; relationship between fertilizer, soil, and plant; our relationships with family, friends, colleagues and neighbors.
4. In every transaction, we look for markers of trust while interacting. Reviews, photos, fidelity of those reviews, public upvotes etc. Even when our tools our designed for the last mile of the engagement, i.e. the transactional part, we look for markers that are typically revealed over the course of a relationship.
5. Our businesses, tools and even societies are mostly designed for the last mile transaction, not the upstream relationship. Our workplaces, healthcare systems, communal areas, shopping, dating, communications – everything – is geared for convenience and efficiency so we can cram in even more transactions into our lives. Be productive, do more, be more. 
6. We thrive when transactions nest within a genuine relationship. We crave to know another and to be known by them, to offer our best and be valued for it. This is only possible if we shift our paradigm from seeing people and places as a means to an end to valuing connection as a fundamental end in itself.

Sustainable: Being able to maintain something at a certain rate or level over a period of time. Sustainable implies continuity for a long period of time.
7. Continued thriving in the long-term (i.e. the definition of sustainable), is possible only if we create relational societies, products, services, and mindsets. We can’t sustain joy, contentment and hope by endlessly taking and moving on. An overly transactional life weighs on our psyche. Thriving depends on nesting transactions back under their larger relational contexts, it depends on expanding our perspective to see human and environmental interconnectedness. In the absence of this, it’s easy to keep harming and depleting ourselves and our commons.

The gold-standard in business is to make our lives frictionless, so we can fit even more transactional handshakes in our cramped life, displacing the time we need to create relationships. So we get more and more seamless handshakes with more and more faceless and bodiless entities. Neighbors, coworkers, friends, all reduced to profile pictures, interests and demographic markers to ease the transaction. What nurtures us for the long-haul are the acts of being in relationship, not the endless transactions. We forget that we crave not just the hand but the whole body.  

“I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I will give myself to it.”  ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Austrian poet and novelist.

#76: Systems of -isms

Like -ing, -ation, -fy, or -itis, -ism is a suffix appended to the end of a word to form a derivative. Suffixes have meanings so -itis indicates inflammatory disease say dermatitis, -fy forms verbs that denote producing like amplify, and -ism indicates a distinctive practice, system, or philosophy. All -isms are preconceived and widely held ideas that are often fixed and oversimplified, they create unjust treatment of different categories of people or things, and are harmful to those on the receiving end. When this prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination is based on race, we call it racism; when based on age, we name it age-ism; and when due to sex, we refer to it as sexism. Capitalism and authoritarianism are -isms too.

As mentioned above, an -ism is a system. A system is a cohesive group of interrelated, interdependent parts that can be natural or human-made. Systems are bound by space and time, influenced by their environment, defined by their structure and purpose, and expressed through their functioning. A system is more than the sum of its parts if it expresses synergy or emergent behavior. Our economies are systems, so is the garden in our backyard, as is our work culture.

I’d like to dissect sexism like a specimen as it’s one of the -isms I’ve faced countless times. I’ll take one very specific example to explore how the -isms we repeatedly navigate are both out there and in here. Even if we are unwilling participants, we live within these systems and they infiltrate us in subtle ways.

I strive to wake up early in the mornings, to have silent time for reflection and writing. I prefer to do all of this before my workday begins and when I don’t, I’m not able to get to it later in the day. My husband in tandem has a packed work schedule that’s typical of big consulting firms; with early mornings and late nights, back-to-back meetings, high-pressure and high-visibility deliverables, and often zero breaks for food. It’s been particularly relentless recently. Because I’m more adept at cooking and I love him, I ensure he doesn’t go hungry. He’s a wonderful partner and puts in his share of work in his limited free time (laundry, gardening and home maintenance are his domains). When his work takes over though, it takes over my life, routine and mind-space too.

Then rather than writing right after my contemplative practices like I prefer, I make breakfast. By the time I get to my desk, my internal silence (which I appreciate for writing) has dissipated. I’d rather just make my tea and start writing but if I don’t first make breakfast, he won’t get a chance to eat…and I feel guilty when he hasn’t eaten. Similarly, when I heat a quick lunch, desperately wanting to get back to work, I worry he hasn’t eaten. When I see his empty water bottle sitting on the kitchen counter, I know he must have been in such a rush that he forgot so I fill it and poke my head in his office inconspicuously to prevent dehydration and headaches. By the time I get back to my work, its often taken far longer than I would have liked and my focus has already dissipated, replaced by self-scolding.

Most modern men will say they respect women and treat them as equals but what we all don’t see is that -isms aren’t as simple. In the scenarios above, where does my guilt and emotional weight come from? Why am I more adept at cooking and he at home maintenance? How is he able to care for me with tenderness and respect but without guilt? Could I just do my work like he does his without worrying about him? (This is why I miss being in an office environment by the way). I couldn’t tell you even if I tried where my love ends and the ingrained gender-normative patterns begin. I’m quite independent and free by all Indian cultural standards. I have a marriage of equals but I can’t shake some of my behaviors because of my cultural exposure, where the fierce strength of women and their subservience is on equal display.

In our trigger-happy social-media fueled world, it’s easy to have an angry knee-jerk reaction when someone brings up the -isms they struggle with. We’re tempted to find someone to blame or to deflect responsibility altogether. But these are very messy, entangled threads that weave invisible webs all around and through us. My husband’s employer, for instance, is as much a part of this system; because there is an underlying assumption that overworked employees are able to ensure their own wellbeing. This is where capitalism meets sexism, an example of -isms intersecting and weighing down certain people in unseen ways. He’s able to work like he does because I stay on top of our nutrition, cleaning, groceries etc. Employers most certainly don’t see their part in feeding our gender-normative behaviors at home.

The first step when navigating an -ism is to see it as a system and do our small part in untangling our own complex and interconnected threads. I’d like to be more like my husband– tender yet boundaried; but I don’t think I will ever be able to just walk by with food and dive right back into focused work when he is clearly hungry. My personal task then is to create some healthy boundaries with his employer and not let them encroach into my work, to erase the guilt and infuse my care only with love. We can work on our -isms only if we first become aware of the patterns.

“Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering – because you can’t take it in all at once.”— Audrey Hepburn, actress and humanitarian.

#75: What is attention?

Is it intense pin-pointed focus on something or is it open awareness of the present, regardless of the object?

Does it come and go or is there an attentive part of us always waiting to be called upon?

Does it live in the body, like in the case of professional dancers or athletes? Where, over time, it takes the shape of muscle memory and mental interruptions are the last thing we need. Or does it live in the mind, like that of a scientist or a writer, deep in focus?

Is it in the achievement of the flow-state, where attention just courses through us without any sense of time? Or is it in the attentive preparation and effort that enables the sought-after flow state?

Is it better for attention to be unmediated by technology, like when we stare at the night sky and dream? Or can technology help us see what we couldn’t without, like a telescope that helps us see the contours of the night sky?

Do we create the world with our attention or is what we give attention to defined by the world we live in?

Is attention scarce or do we have enough of it and the struggle is really about where to apply this attention?

Could all of this be true?

“Before our minds create our world, the world creates our minds.” — Gabor Mate,  Hungarian-Canadian physician and author specializing in treatment of addiction