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Archives for May 2021

#37: The endless shelf of disengagement

I enjoy books and found out about Libby last year. It’s a mobile app that allows people, in some countries, to borrow audiobooks and eBooks from their local Public Library for 21 days. If you’re not done reading within the loan period, you can renew or (if others are waiting) put another hold to get back in line. There are all sorts of amazing books at one’s fingertips for free. What’s not to like!

I have noticed however that now I might put holds on books that I’m just moderately interested in. Perhaps it’s a recommendation from someone but not what I need or want to read right now. Maybe I don’t even have time for it but because it has a long wait time, I get in line thinking I’ll have the space to absorb when my turn comes. Sometimes I’m too swamped to borrow when it’s my turn so I postpone my hold, while on other occasions I’ve excitedly borrowed a book I really wanted only to realize there are other books with fast approaching due dates that need to be finished first. Occasionally I finish the books before return date, which is very satisfying, but mostly I’m at various stages of completion when time runs out and I just don’t have the bandwidth to put another hold…so I let it slip. At these moments I feel like I have “failed” my intent. All kinds of amazing books in different genres―business, psychology, social commentary, history, fiction―partially read or unread. As if I’m juggling expiration dates, my reading moods and work rhythms, and they rarely match. The stakes to borrow are low, and the options and moods endless. The result: a very low start-to-finish rate confirming a distracted and uncommitted mind, which leaves me dissatisfied and displeased with myself, and sometimes even mildly anxious. But then I pause to notice an array of finished and deeply consumed books. The difference most often is that they are physical books, with higher stakes to acquire and maintain. I buy what I really want to read.

You might not have the same problem with books but this “endless shelf” of convenience and eventual disengagement is a fixture of our modern lives. It permeates culture and morphs our behavior in unexpected ways. You see it in how we consume products, interact with one another over social media, while dating, in friendships, and while tending to relationships in general. The endless shelf follows us unexpectedly into life’s nooks, molding us in the process without us even realizing. What starts off as convenience becomes an overabundance of options in a way that distracts us from committing to something meaningful that’s within reach. We see the next thing that piques our interest and drop what we had almost commited to without realizing that we dropped it. Over time, this history of perpetual motion without any real anchors makes us feel unmoored. Not connected to anything, anyone or even ourselves meaningfully to notice. And who might notice and help correct our lack of commitment anyway when everyone’s attention is getting scattered and splintered the same way? Who is committed enough to us to notice and help address our lack of commitment?

We are all wired differently and we move to different personal rhythms. But what is common is that we all need the weight and strength of commitment to live lives that are saturated with meaning and love. What doesn’t help create this heft and joyous saturation is the endless digital shelf where we keep looking to what’s next instead of commiting to what’s right here in front of us. Fear of Better Options (or FOBO) makes us continually disengage and surf the surface, which is antithetical to a well lived life. The first step in reclaiming our commitment is to notice our endless shelves and the second, arguably harder, step is to recommit to engagement because that is where all of life’s nectar is.

“May your fears yield
Their deepest tranquilities.” ― John O’Donohue

#36: Anchoring in practice

My friend Anna lives in the Peruvian Amazon and was recently treated for both malaria and dengue. She was plucked away from the daily rhythms of her life to face severe symptoms, the limits of her body, and a sometimes lonesome and sometimes communal fight. She spent a week away from home battling intense breathlessness, fluid around her organs and fever dreams; it must have been extremely disorienting.

Since we exchanged voice messages, it felt like I had a front-row seat to her evolving situation. From the first breathy message where she thought she may have Covid, to the one where she craved a toothbrush, and the one where she mused how not being able to write for several days felt “completely bizarre” (Anna is my writing buddy and has written almost daily for years). In one message, she asked how I was doing with Covid’s rampage across India. Then one day she told me how it felt to look up from her wrapped up body in the infectious diseases ward to see twelve other patients wrapped up in their own, dealing with their own bugs. She noted everyone’s rituals with their families: someone brushing his wife’s hair, another reading bible verses, yet another putting lotion on their loved one’s feet, and some sleeping in weird arrangements on the floor. “If you look a couple of feet away from you, there is a person with their own infectious disease right there!”. She’ll write about this experience in her own poetic words but what bubbled up for me was Anna’s ability to stay fully and compassionately present to herself while also being fully and compassionately present to others’ experiences.

Throughout her journey, she seemed to have one barometer inside and another outside. She embraced her “mind-altering experience” with a blend of tenderness and pragmatism that gave her stamina to think of others’ battles. She didn’t fake strength, she had innate strength and I wondered how she fired up her emotional cylinders while battling fierce diseases herself. Then it clicked―it was her writing practice. She had learned to separate life’s threads to observe them with curiosity, letting them be without forcing change. I often tell Anna that her writing feels meditative but I now see that writing is also her meditation. I was fortunate to have been invited-in as an observer, to see first-hand the power of her anchoring practice. I honestly don’t think she realized that she exuded this capacity. She was just being…herself.

This is the beauty of having an anchoring practice; it roots us to our personal core. It can be anything at all―hiking, photography, sitting with the elderly, rowing, gardening, running, dancing―as long as the soul’s posture is of silent attention, so we can be completely present to whatever comes up without getting swept away by emotions. We may not even see a difference from one day to the next but over time, our way of being evolves in subtle yet powerful ways as we become this anchored version of ourselves. It’s quite likely that no one will be in the front-row seat to notice our evolution. It doesn’t matter. What will matter is how this repeated connection to self creates the capacity to relate to life and others in it.

“My powers are ordinary. Only my application brings me success.”― Isaac Newton

#35: In praise of lived experiences, in aging bodies

  • Ruth Bader Ginsburg became a supreme court justice at age 60 and was crowned as cultural icon “Notorious R.B.G.” at 80, after she delivered a scathing dissent in defense of voting rights. 
  • Maya Angelou directed her first film at 68 and wrote four books during the last ten years of her life, in her late 70s to late 80s.
  • Pablo Picasso produced 347 engravings in one year, at 87. His final works were a mixture of styles and his means of expression kept morphing and growing until the end of his life.
  • Susan B. Anthony was past the age of 80 when she formed the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. In the final six years of her life, she spoke at six NAWSA (American Woman Suffrage) conventions and four congressional hearings, completed the fourth volume of the History of Woman Suffrage, and traveled to eighteen US states and Europe.
  • Benjamin Franklin was 70 when he signed the Declaration of Independence. He did not retire from public service until he was 82.

Many more examples but I’m guessing you get the point. None of these people took their foot off the gas pedal because of ageist messages. In fact, they seem to have done quite the opposite. They produced a torrent of work, became more daring and their works became more expressive with age. The world is better for it. Despite these shiny examples, ageism runs rampant in modern society. Over the last few years we’ve heard a lot about valuing lived experiences but why are they less valued in the workplace when they come in aging and aged bodies? The lack of intergenerational work and collaboration feels like massive waste of wisdom. And this bias feels so arbitrary across disciplines. While some professions like science, humanities and academia seem to value the wisdom of age, others―like business―generally don’t. We’re not discussing physical disciplines here. How can humans appear sharper and more seasoned with age in some intellectual disciplines and not the others?

Just when a person gets comfortable being themselves, just when one taps into their sense of purpose, and just when a person gains enough lived experience to contribute meaningfully, others turn their backs in favor of tight skin and sharp eyesight. We may have it backwards. Our institutions and communities are complex and no single generation can adequately address these issues without the cooperation and contributions from others. We are so fixated on how best to divide the economic pie that we forget we can increase it.

“And as, methinks, shall all,
Both great and small,
That ever lived on earth,
Early or late their birth,
Stranger and foe, one day each other know.”― Henry David Thoreau

#34: Building our energy

Years ago, I came across a Harvard Business Review article titled “Manage your energy, not your time“. Because I worked in startup roles on around-the-clock international teams, I could work endlessly and there would still be much left to do. The article resonated with me. Then I forgot about it. Until a couple of weekends ago where after a focused and uplifting work week, I crashed hard because of emotional stress from Covid-19’s India surge. The combination of first-hand news, urgent check-ins on family and friends, and a desire to support from afar created an energy-vortex. In two days I went from significant vitality and sharp focus to a bit off the rails. How did this happen?

While I had made a conscious decision to pour myself into loved ones, I wasn’t conscious of topping up my own energy. We can’t give what we don’t cultivate. Living in India right now feels like being in a warzone and I simply wasn’t prepared. I thought if I could pour a little more of myself into just one more person or one other situation, I could make a difference. I didn’t even notice that I myself had situational stress from this crisis and by the time I realized, I was too depleted and needed to disconnect and hibernate. Like an overheated machine with a faulty internal thermostat. How strange for this to happen to us repeatedly when we live inside our respective human animals! Why is it hard to check-in with ourselves? It may be a combination of productivity addiction, feeling selfish when we focus on our own needs, or a host of other things. I won’t dig into the reasons here because my focus is on understanding how we build energy. This life force. Chi. Prana. For a long time I thought prana was this esoteric concept and only serous yogis and meditators had the skill to generate pranic energy. It’s actually quite simple. How did I recover? I got out of bed and started cleaning while listening to an interesting audiobook. I took the easiest action I could take without needing to think. As I put my space in order, I started noticing a shift inside. Once I got some energy back, I walked in the sunshine and sniffed spring flowers like a bee. The next day, I got more of my rhythm back and worked out. Nothing magical or esoteric here. But certainly a real contrast in what little bit of self-care can do.

Energy is that feeling of buoyancy on days we are well-rested, well-moved, well-fed, and well-loved. By well-loved I mean that we are tuned into not only others but also ourselves such that we are able to give and receive care. This combination creates a sense of inherent vitality that we then bring to our actions and interactions. Prana is not a vague concept at all. It is the foundation for everything we do in life. What seems to be key in our recovery and strength building is the ability to tap into our energy building practices at a repeatable cadence so we don’t even have to think about them. It can be whatever feeds our unique souls and to whatever degree is practical.

We’ll run into a million different situations and we cant game theory our way out of each. If we keep topping up our prana through repeatable personal practices―aka routines or rituals― we will become more grounded, adaptable and resilient in the face of twitching circumstances, thoughts, and emotions.

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”― Anne Lamott

#33: The pain of the moment is not the pain of life

I remember these moments from my teenage years where whatever I was dealing with felt so enormous that I’d be bereft of hope. I recall how intensely I felt that emotion of the moment―abject pain, deep angst, and the many hues in between. Then life continued on and while the emotions may not have been that strong, the internal posture was similar in its tendency to overemphasize the negative. There was always the next thing and then the one after…and then the next one to worry about. And not only was there always something to worry about, the thing that was worrying in the present moment seemed to color everything else in life with its brushstroke. We are sometimes told that life is a roller coaster with breathtaking highs and sudden drops but what we aren’t told is that those drops have a tendency to obstruct joy in the rest of our life. We also forget that a lot of our days are lived at the moderate-speed-completely-manageable ground level of experience. This means self-determination is possible for a big chunk of our life. Then why do the dips spill over to life’s highs and the moderate hums? Why do we color the whole canvas of our existence with the color of pain that we’re experiencing in the moment?

(To be clear: when I say pain, I don’t mean grief and trauma which are a whole different experience, I mean the less jarring dips we face).

While we may be a collection of body parts and lived experiences, we live in this unified animal which is hell-bent on protecting itself from harm in any shape. For our ancestors, being on high-alert for threats was a necessity because those who were more attuned to danger were more likely to survive…you know, they wanted to live! And this programming has been lovingly and evolutionarily handed down to us. It’s what scientists now call negativity bias. It means where something very positive will generally have less of an impact on a person’s behavior and cognition than something equally emotional but negative.  It shows up in our modern lives as not just being more in touch with potential threats, it means that we remember trauma better than joy, insults better than praise, absorb and react more strongly to negative stimuli, ruminate on the rough parts of life; and all this takes space away from the positives. We feel the results of this bias in our relationships and in our decision-making because of how we perceive others and situations. Negative experiences impact our attention by becoming thought-magnets. They take over cognition as we think more about negative events to work out things in our minds. They also impact memory and learning which are direct consequences of attentional processing, i.e. the more attention is devoted to something, the more likely it will be learned and later remembered. In their famous work, Nobel Prize-winning researchers Kahneman and Tversky found that when making decisions, people consistently place greater weight on negative aspects of an event than they do on positive ones so that potential costs are more heavily considered than potential gains.

But worry not fellow humans…now that we know what we are up against, we can hack a solve. 

When we are clutched by our negativity bias, it’s hard to intercept it via a long list of recommendations. And so, I’ve started employing the scientist archetype as a shorthand: curious, patient, open-minded, courageous, collected, and fact-based. So next time, say you have that injury that creates a thought bubble jumping drastically from this little injury to a disabled future, please think like a scientist and reframe. Perhaps the next 10 minutes are better spent on that physical therapy exercise that made you feel stronger, and not on feeding thoughts of an unlikely future of living out the rest of your days in a wheelchair.

And one more thing we’re not told―roller coasters have strong foundations and support beams; as do we. Our roller coaster of emotion sits on top of a very strong internal foundation.

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”― Mark Twain