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Observations from a life in motion

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Archives for October 2021

#60: Pauses and cycles

In addition to filters, pauses and cycles are two other concepts that bubble up for me when I start digging my wells. The notion of a pause within a recurring cycle appears repeatedly across cultural, philosophical and faith traditions. We are guided to pause and reflect for a few minutes every day, for a day every week, for a week in a season and for a month in a year; and the smaller pauses seem to nest into the larger ones, creating a throughline of intention and focus.

For instance:

  • Daily: The value of daily meditation or prayer appears across traditions and is present even in non-religious practices like Stoicism where we’re guided to bookend our days with morning and evening journaling and reflection.
  • Weekly: The concept of resting fully, reflecting  and disconnecting from work at least one day a week appears across all faiths and is made familiar to many of us in western culture through the portrayals of Jewish Sabbath.
  • Seasonally: Most societies have seasonal celebrations that remind us that there a time to plant, a time to nurture, a time to reap and a time to rest. The Indian calendar is peppered with festivals that remind us to tune into and work with the changing seasons.
  • Annually: And finally, Ramadan and Lent are the more prominent examples of the annual pauses we take.

Even if we bypass the faith-based traditions momentarily, there is increasing evidence that working with our circadian rhythms to create cycles of activity and rest is more efficient than trying to brute-force productivity. Ayurveda, one the world’s oldest holistic healing systems, offers in-depth guidance for the 24-hour circadian cycle and seasonal living (called Dinacharya and Ritucharya respectively) as cornerstones of preventive health care.

Our life is a hugely psychological and solitary journey where we manage powerful desires, dislikes, judgments and stories on a daily basis. Technically, we are also animals and have instincts that ask for speedy reactions to every event in our lives. But what seems to differentiate us from other animals is the awareness of our awareness. Recurring pauses in our schedules reduce our reactionary tendencies and train us to live in that meta-awareness so we are more thoughtful as we go about living our lives and digging our wells.

Pauses help us regenerate, refocus, and recommit to what’s here with enthusiasm and energy. Over the longer term, pauses, solitude and temporary retreats can also help us become more uniquely us by becoming less comparative, less competitive, and less fearful.

“Human beings left to their own devices—a very rare event—seem to work according to the quality of a given season and learn similarly in cycles. Good work and good education are achieved by visitation and then absence, appearance, and disappearance. Most people who exhibit a mastery in a work or a subject have often left it completely for a long period in their lives only to return for another look. Constant busyness has no absence in it, no openness to the arrival of any new season, no birdsong at the start of its day. Constant learning is counterproductive and makes both ourselves and the subject stale and uninteresting.” ― David Whyte, Poet 

#59: External stimulus and the need for better filters

In the last note I considered the need to dig a few high quality “wells” that are aligned with who we are and what we choose to become. Today I’d like to discuss external stimulus, my key stumbling block when I try to dig my wells with the focus I’d like.

Stimulus is the “detectable change, physical or chemical, in the environment of an organism that results in some functional activity”. We are designed to detect and respond to changes and stimulus in our environment because our survival depends on it. Our receptors detect stimuli (light, heat, sound etc.) and send timely messages to the nervous system, which then guides the appropriate effector (muscles, glands etc.) to take specific action. We are designed to take action when we meet stimuli; this occurs within us at a cellular level and is often outside our control.

No surprises that we live in a world of escalating stimulus; words, products, ideas, notifications all coming at us with the quantity and intensity we weren’t designed to handle. Our nervous system allows for fast-acting but short-lived responses but if it’s constantly in a state of response, when does it get to rest, reconstitute and regenerate? You can buy the best engineered car but if you habitually over-rev the engine, it will end in junkyard faster. That is what’s happening to our nervous systems. That is what’s happening to each of us individually. To our ability to grapple with complex ideas, create something of long-term value with patience, navigate life’s turbulence with resilience, and show up in the world as whole as possible.

Here is what I’ve found helpful:
While external stimulus gets in the way of digging my wells, paradoxically, defining the wells I want to dig with more precision has helped me create effective personal filters.

We all react to different stimulus, and have different points of reactivity and overconsumption— some over shop, some binge-watch TV, some overeat. I’ve done all of the above at different points in my life but my biggest point of overconsumption as I dig my current wells is information. My work leads me to an abundance of useful tools, information and knowledge. Any google search surfaces a multitude of options, making me wade through the noise to get the right signal. But since I have more clearly defined how I want to create what I want to create, I’ve been able to ignore 80% of that noise. I have a mental-model of the knowledge landscape I want to traverse, the ideas I want to explore now and those I might pick up later knowing full well that I may not be able to get to them. And that’s ok.

It has been clarifying and freeing because I’ve stopped poking myself with needless stimulus.

Above all else though, here is my most useful personal filter: I keep reminding myself that my days are limited and they become wastefully shorter when I chase every shiny object.

“Don’t go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all.”― Kenneth Boulding, Economist and Educator

#58: The wells we dig

I recently asked a Vipassana meditation teacher why students who aspire to serious practice are dissuaded from practicing other techniques since they seem quite compatible to me. For those that are unaware, Vipassana or insight meditation is the practice of paying close attention to bodily sensations through which one sees the ever changing nature of existence. It was a longer conversation that covered many ideas but one point struck me particularly hard—she said “if we dig one well, we can get to the water faster as opposed to digging four wells”. 

This makes practical sense. I’ve found that I learn best by toggling between intellectual learning and experiential doing. Each act of doing then brings up additional questions that I can take back to my intellectual digging. It’s a repeatable loop of learning >> doing >> observing and getting curious >> coming back to learn more >> taking deeper action and so on. And it’s not just me. This loop occurs for all of us when we hope to really get to the core of something. This level of commitment takes persistence and patience but most importantly, it takes time.

Then, once we have a certain amount of rooting in one practice, we can better understand other flavors of knowledge and practice within the same broad discipline. For instance someone trained in Tango might be able to better note the differences and similarities with Waltz, and perhaps learn a thing or two from them. An artist who favors water colors can still relate to and appreciate another who favors oil paints. Each practice can lead to a nourishing and generative experience, just the way different techniques of meditation can lead us to equanimity and different entrepreneurship journeys can lead to exponential self-awareness and growth. But it all begins with the discipline of putting on our dancing shoes, picking up the brush, sitting on the meditation cushion or pouring into our business idea day after day without self-judgment.

When we find ourselves spoilt for choice, it’s easy to jump to the next practice and the next, and then another when the going gets tricky. Every time we jump to the next thing, we get a temporary hit of optimism but over time all it does is sap our resilience and our ability to focus and commit. This is human wiring but the world we live in feeds these distractible parts of our nature. We jump from one thing to the next because we don’t want to miss life but that is precisely the recipe to missing life. Digging a few high quality wells helps us get to the water faster but also shapes our character. When we dig one well that is meaningful to us personally, we reclaim the ability to carve ourselevs in a way that we choose to be shaped. We then bring that awareness and commitment to the rest of our life and interactions.

It’s worth defining the wells we want to dig in our very limited time on earth. We owe it to ourselves—to our one precious life—and we owe it to the rest of humanity because when we dig our unique well, the rest of us get to drink that sweet water.

“Let me run
at break-neck speeds toward sceneries
of doubt. I have no more dress rehearsals
to attend.” — Major Jackson, Poet

#57: Anatomy of Love

Our very first interactions of love in life occur in relational contexts that have pretty clear social definitions and expectations. This is for obvious reasons. We come into this world as helpless little mammals and are completely reliant on our caregivers for an extended childhood. Our survival and growth require commitment from others and ourselves. Over time though, if we’re not careful, that primary focus on the I, me and myself can condition us with unhelpful expectations such that any divergence from our personal norm causes harsh judgement of others or ourselves.

Early on in life, we are often too young to see our elders as unique individuals, with their own histories, aches and dreams. We may see them through a very narrow and sometimes selfish relational lens. Of course wanting mutual affection, care and security is quite natural but I’m trying to parse out a speediness of judgment. As we grow up and expand our relational circles, we bring the weight of this conditioning to romantic and platonic relationships alike; a subtle thought pattern of “what have you done for me lately”. This isn’t something others do and I don’t. We all live inside a self-focused animal and it takes practice to stay tuned-in to these thoughts so we can bypass the divisive ones as they appear.

Life is complex so it’s useful to have relational mental models, but these unexamined shorthands can create blind spots. Everyone is teeming with individuality which has joyful and heavy parts. Everyone has an evolving inner world. Being in relationship with another, especially those relationships with a deeper flavor of love, requires us to see the nuanced individual outside of our own expectations. A moment to moment curiosity and openness for them and us especially in difficult interactions. Defaulting to “I can’t believe they said/did that” is less helpful than trying to understand why is it they said/did that. It takes resilience and generosity of spirit to start thinking like this when we are also down in the dumps but it’s worthy exercise if we care for someone.

Love is not magic. It is a practice. A practice of putting aside ego, assumptions, and relational expectations. A commitment to offering judgment-free attention. Of not getting offended or injuring them with retaliation when something difficult inevitably appears. We can behave this way with another only when we behave this way with ourselves, because we will repeatedly fail in this practice; and when we do, we have to practice all of the above with ourselves.

In this way, love is a lifelong practice of creating a moment to moment awareness in tandem, of them and us. Our closest bonds are the best arenas for this practice for they carry our heaviest expectations.

For my Tim, for 17 years of practice.

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.” — Ursula K. Le Guin