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#84: Personal sensemaking through etymology

Words are sensemaking tools, a common knowledge base that we count on everyday to communicate with each other and to think quietly inside our heads. However, interpretations evolve in the hands of the collective where every use and misuse carves and re-carves meaning. Etymology is the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed over time. Every once in a while, I’ll look up the etymology of a word to better grasp its evolution and subtle references. These exercises help me make sense of the world by shining a light on the push and pull of culture and society. Sometimes I prefer the older meanings.

I’ll share three words here as a thought experiment: Competition, chaos and professional. See if these help with your personal sensemaking.

First, a quick note:

  • The portions with etymology may be hard to read. They aren’t complete sentences and are interspersed with italicized root words. 
  • This is a good resource to look up roots and meanings of words.

Competition:

  • Current meaning: The activity or condition of competing, an event or contest in which people compete. Interaction between organisms, populations, or species, in which birth, growth and death depend on gaining a share of a limited environmental resource.
  • Related word: Compete, which means to strive to gain or win something by defeating or establishing superiority over others who are trying to do the same.
  • Etymology: From com- ‘together’ + petere ‘to strive, seek, aim at, rush at’. From Late Latin competere “strive in common, strive after something in company with or together”. In classical Latin “to meet or come together; agree or coincide; to be qualified”. Revived from late 18c. in sense “to strive (alongside another) for the attainment of something”. Use in market sense is from 1840s, in athletics sense attested by 1857.
  • Read more: For competition, and compete
  • Notice: How the meaning evolves from “strive after something together” to >>> “to strive (alongside another) for the attainment of something” to >>>  “to gain or win something by defeating or establishing superiority” in the economic sense.
  • Reflections: The classical definition makes me think that one can stive towards a goal alongside dedicated others and could potentially move fluidly between competing and collaborating. That if one fails to achieve what they hoped to, they could potentially gain strength from others working towards the same goal. Competition as defined originally orients me towards the goal and task at hand while the current definition seems to focus more on goal attainment so the individual can thrive while limiting others. The goal feels like a means to a self-serving end and when one loses, as we often do, the loss feels existential. Doesn’t the classical definition feel more psychologically strength-inducing? 

Chaos:

  • Current meaning: Complete disorder and confusion.
  • Etymology: Late 14c. “gaping void; empty, immeasurable space,” from Old French or directly from Latin chaos. From Greek khaos “abyss, that which gapes wide open, that which is vast and empty,” from *khnwos, from PIE root *ghieh- “to yawn, gape, be wide open.” Meaning “orderless confusion” in human affairs is from c. 1600. Chaos theory in the modern mathematical sense is attested from c. 1977.
  • Read more: Chaos
  • Notice: How the meaning evolves from “that which is vast and empty” to >>> “orderless confusion”
  • Reflections: Personally, the classical definition of chaos feels like an invitation to step into the gaping void and create something fresh. The mention of the yawn invokes the subtle connection to boredom, which can be a stepping stone to creativity. Compare this to the modern definition that tunes me into my helplessness vs. the sense of agency and creativity.

Professional

  • Current meaning: Engaged in a specified activity as one’s main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.
  • Etymology: Mid-15c., profeshinalle, in reference to the profession of religious orders (see profession). By 1747 of careers, “pertaining to or appropriate to a profession or calling”, especially of the skilled or learned trades from c. 1793. In sports and amusements, “undertaken or engaged in for money” (opposed to amateur), by 1846.
  • Related words:
    • Profession: “Vows taken upon entering a religious order”, “public declaration”, noun of action…“declare openly”.
    • Profess: “To take a vow” (in a religious order), “avowed,” literally “having declared publicly”, “declare openly, testify voluntarily, acknowledge, make public statement of”. From pro- “forth” + fateri (past participle fassus) “acknowledge, confess”, akin to fari “to speak,”.
    • Amateur: “One who has a taste for some art, study, or pursuit, but does not practice it”, from French amateur “one who loves, lover”.
  • Read more: For professional, profession and profess, amateur
  • Notice: The evolution from “vows taken upon entering”, “declare publicly” and “appropriate for a profession or calling” to >>> one’s main paid occupation
  • Reflections: Three themes jump out at me from the original meaning –
    1. Declaration and taking vows: In the west, people publicly take marriage vows in front of loved ones. The idea is to make your commitments known to self and others so when you falter, you have something to anchor back to. Professionally, vows seem to have been reserved for those practicing religion, medicine or law, i.e. professions with a higher fiduciary duty. But all professions are undertaken in the service of others (vs. amateur, which is mostly for oneself). Vows seem helpful in creating both an internal grounding during times of struggle and a public commitment in how we want to show up in the service of others. We can fashion our vows for our vocation however we want, even if they are said mostly to oneself.
    2. Practice and action: The meaning implies that we will pursue something actively as opposed to passive interest. We move towards what moves us.
    3. Money:  Of course one has to sustain themselves through work but our modern lives push us to make professional decisions primarily on the last-mile transaction of getting paid instead of upstream engagement and commitment. Research shows that people are willing to earn less if they get to do more meaningful work, so it’s clearly not all about the money. The modern definition makes us think so. 

The etymology for all three seems to have one thing in common ― the old definitions felt expansive and humane. They invoked us to step into broader and better parts of ourselves. The current ones feel constrained and transactional. They invoke us to step into fear. Meanings evolve in response to society but society also evolves based on the meanings we create. Reduction happens gradually, with enough repetition, and it impacts our day-to-day. 

We don’t have to go digging into the meaning of every word but if our life is being commandeered by a word, it’s helpful to zoom out and see if it might be more liberating to anchor our thinking to a more expansive definition. 

“In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better.” ― Edward de Bono: Maltese physician, psychologist, author, inventor and philosopher

#83: The curvature of dreams

I didn’t have a clear sense of what I could do in life when I was growing up in India. I was drawn to many things, but they were either unavailable to girls or if they were, I opted out because of constrained resources. The desire to be an independent woman capable of taking care of loved ones butted heads with the stark reality of limited resources, options, and role models. We didn’t have internet so I couldn’t think very big, just big enough for me and even that felt overwhelming. I remember moments with my mom as I would inarticulately share my worry and she would quickly see the core of the matter and offer strength-inducing wisdom. I recall that glum teenager’s internal sentiment: “but you don’t understand how hard this is, how different my goals are from my reality”. I also know that after this kid wiped her tears, she made the seemingly limited choices on offer. When I look back now, I did everything that I could imagine doing as a 16-year old. My life and work may not feel like a big deal to the current-day me, after all I created this gradually. But when I pause and look back, I see the massive ground I have covered outwardly but more important, inwardly. I am floored by the precision with which most of my dreams came true.

I came to Los Angeles on a scholarship and frequently drove through the Malibu canyon while living there. As a new transplant and an even newer driver, I paid high-quality attention to the road and the beautiful scenic turns. These early drives left an emotional mark. I would often think that the curve of the canyon roads was like the curvature of our dreams and longings. At any given time, we can only see so far.

So, today when I look up towards the scary future that I’m now capable of imagining, I do so with more patience and courage. The words that my mother shared with me now come from within. I now understand why she had faith in the small steps. We get the gift of seeing further only when we travel the seemingly insignificant path in front of us.

“Again and again in history some people wake up. They have no ground in the crowd and move to broader deeper laws. They carry strange customs with them and demand room for bold and audacious action. The future speaks ruthlessly through them.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, poet and novelist

#82: Nested commitments

Recall a time when you really wanted to start doing something. Maybe workout a certain number of days a week, learn to ride a bike as an adult, experiment with building a robot, or see friends more consistently. There would have likely been a moment of intense and condensed emotion that helped you imagine and ache for the new normal. Then, if you followed up this imagination with action, you might have encountered initial roadblocks. It’s likely that the imagination was still strong enough to help you summon willpower and bust through a few initial bumps. Hope was still strong and you powered through and did well; maybe for even a few months. Results came but so did more twists and turns on the path. You had a baby, busted your knee, a loved one passed leaving you shattered and scared, and you had little energy to give to this thing you still crave from deep within. Life happened and it feels like you took a few steps back and are now seemingly exactly where you started.

Then you come back to the practice after the break but this time your desire is less acute, more chronic. It’s transitioned from soft youthful hope to a more subtle, less shiny but a deeper-felt hardened goal. Brute willpower won’t cut it anymore because you’ve seen how things out of your control can easily keep interfering. As if imagination and hope held your hand early on in the path but their arms aren’t long enough and as you walk further and further, their fingers slip from your hands. This is when you let go of imaginary perfection and summon adaptation. You ease your clutch on over-monitoring against a set plan and develop a radar for in-moment adjustments. The practice now seems to have a cycle, a going and coming, a breath-like timbre. It’s not actually one foot in front of the other, more like one hop to the side, one step diagonally. Enough of these steps, jumps and hops and you meet another ally called self-compassion, who reminds you to ease your grip on the dream and let joy and ease flow as you get to do this thing you value.

The commitment to begin comes from imagination, the commitment to push through from willpower, but the commitment to stay on the path comes from adaptation and self-compassion.

“The only journey is the one within.”― Rainer Maria Rilke, poet and novelist

#81: The compost of work

I find myself constantly documenting and taking notes as I work through new ideas and learnings. When I show up to actually combine these ideas into some sort of an output or hypothesis, I only surface a subset of all that went through my mind and hands. I slice off parts that felt so critical only a few weeks ago and add parts that I wasn’t aware of even a few days ago. I clean, toss, add, and subtract information that always seems fluid. But as I take in new information, I feel the weight of responsibility to honor what came my way. To use as much of the good stuff. I feel guilt when I see the massive amounts of thinking that didn’t make it into the final product. The more I get exposed to, the more I want to respect and bring forth in my work in visible ways. This internal burden to go back and extract every last ounce weighs me down and makes forward momentum harder.

Then I started seeing all that work as compost, and it softened something inside. I imagined the yumminess of a nourishing meal with vegetables of all colors: like a roasted vegetable pasta with feta. I saw the mountain of compost with unused stems and peels in green, red and orange. I saw myself picking up the pile and adding it to a compost bag without an ounce of guilt, safe in the knowledge that all those parts would regenerate soil.

Everyone has inputs that propel their work. These inputs are often someone else’s output, like the vegetables in my pasta example. I can make my meal because farmers offered me their valued output. Could I do it any other way? My using key parts of their vegetables and discarding others is a part of the process of evolution. Of creation. The discarded parts, the stems and peels, sustained the vegetables while they were growing and even when unused by me, they’re still not trash. They hold power to replenish the earth; like the compost of all our past work holds power to replenish our future work.

“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” — Isaac Newton, physicist and mathematician

#80: Metabolizing hard emotions

Ants seems to have a focus, a sense of connectedness and resilience I aspire to. I see hordes of them walking their path with purpose as a collective, sometimes carrying objects that appear too big for their small frames. Put your finger in their path and they walk around it, making a new path without fuss. And they always pause to interact with an ant coming from the opposite direction, as if exchanging important everyday intel. If we zoom out on a human life, as if looking down from an airplane, we are no different. We commute literally and figuratively on a path towards our goals alongside others. We encounter roadblocks, we bump into other humans and exchange information.

I don’t know if ants are able to go about their business without internal turbulence, but humans are a constant swirl of emotions. You can bet that our emotions will arise and fall every few minutes the way waves crash onshore repeatedly; especially when we interact with others or do work that matters to us. It’s in our cells to experience emotional waves in response to others and to create waves in them whether our interactions are deep or shallow. Our emotional waves create thoughts, which drive actions, which in turn drive more emotional waves…and on and on we go rippling. I’m assuming ants don’t go through this.

Sometimes these internal swells become all consuming and throw us off our path entirely. Our instinctive response to such moments is to either spew emotions or suppress them to live lives of control. In the latter option, we create barriers so the waves don’t crash so hard. But over time, we not only smother that difficult feeling, we block our ability to feel and express in general. The barriers we create to protect ourselves end up locking us in our psyche where unfelt and unexpressed parts of ourselves create layers of density. Suppressed emotions only have two avenues for release ― our reflexive reactions and unexpected bursts of emotion ― so under the right pressure, our dense emotional layers tend to blow up like volcanoes. This brings us down the long winding road back to option 1…the indiscriminate spewing of emotions. 

There is a third option. Over the last few weeks, I’ve created a mental model that I’ve found productive in navigating my own raw emotions. I’ve started viewing quiet moments as spaces to metabolize life and emotion. To digest and move through whatever comes up in the course of my days. To see how like waves, my emotions churn up mud and sediment, making it hard to decipher reality. That the waves feel scary only when they’re tossing me around without my control. But when I sit on the shore and observe without judgment or involvement, they eventually subside. Rather than shutting the door to my difficult feelings like I used to, I now invite them in for a silent coffee when my house is quiet. At some point in this self-accompaniment process, it feels like I’m metabolizing life, learning, and growing with it. I also find important information contained in my hard emotions, that within the ache and fear is the intel for my next step. What’s more surprising is that once I gather that intel, the waves subside on their own and I start walking on the path again with more ease.

Until the next wave ofcourse. I still see myself flinging raw and unmetabolized emotions on others or into my own actions but now I have a framework to anchor back to.

“The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.” — Gabor Mate, physician and author specializing in treatment of addiction