Working Meditation

Observations from a life in motion

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Thinking: Observations related to thoughts

#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

#70: Thresholds and pauses

There seem to be two ways of orienting to any new task. The first way is to jump in head-first without a pause and the second is to pause and understand the structure of the task, and our role and skills in relation to it. The pause-less action may be because of well-earned confidence or lack of awareness. If we take a pause, it may be short or long, noticeable or invisible even to us.

Like everyone else I’ve followed both approaches at different times but I’ve never really reflected on this because my approach to a task wasn’t the noteworthy part, the task was. I’ve recently experienced the comfort of doing something hard without thinking much and the discomfort of feeling unprepared and stuck mid-task. I’ve had to perch above my shoulders as I worked to observe what I was doing and what needed to change. I’ve had to pause and reflect on whether I had the tools, skills, information, context and mindset that I needed.

How do we know that a pause is in order and how can we make this process instinctive without overthinking? Two tell-tales have been helpful to me:

  1. Is the next task sufficiently different from what I’m doing or anything I’ve ever done? In other words, am I crossing a threshold? 
  2. Am I stuck spinning my wheels?

“People who wonder whether the glass is half empty or half full miss the point. The glass is refillable.”— Simon Sinek, author

#68: Room for doubt

There are times where even a hint of doubt is undesirable. For example, high-stakes situations with immediate consequences; like landing an aircraft or performing life-saving surgery. For a lot of other things however we carry more doubt than we show and we tend to hide it even from ourselves. Maybe because action requires certainty and commitment to follow through and we fear if we dwell too long in doubt, we’ll melt our resolve to act. But suppressing doubt doesn’t nullify it. We carry uncertainty, hesitation and indecision perpetually.

A particularly poignant example for me is Mother Teresa, who continued in her good works despite a 50-year crisis of faith. She says in one of her letters to her spiritual advisor – “When I try to raise my thoughts to heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. I am told God loves me, and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great, nothing touches my soul.” This is was written in the 1940s, relatively early in her work and roughly 30 years before her Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. These doubts never abated but she didn’t abandon her belief or her work.

It’s a difficult place to operate from…when something speaks to us intrinsically enough that we commit to it but know on some level that we know little and will never know the full picture. Parenting, faith, and entrepreneurship are some common examples but the biggest example is the human life itself. Most of our discomfort is tied to the existential questions. Can any of us say with 100% certainty, without any doubt why we are here, what the purpose of a human life is, and what happens after we die? We fill in the blanks with high-judgment estimates and go about focusing on our daily life and goals. We let the act of living guide and consume us enough to create a sense of certainty in aspects: “I don’t know what happens after but know I was made for this work”. “The only thing I’m certain of is that I love my kids”. “Math has always made sense to me”. “I feel at home when I play the piano”. And so on. Micro doses of certainty on the macro path of unknown. Moments of clarity interwoven with moments of doubt, fear and loss. 

My evolving theory on doubt is this:

  1. The clearest indicator of what we should pursue and how we should live is a faint and sometimes hard to hear signal that we carry somewhere inside. Even though we carry it within, it comes across only when we silence the noise of daily pursuits, and listen without judgment. Because we may resist what we hear.
  2. We have to act despite doubt. The action doesn’t need to be big or all at once.
  3. A shared space with other people doing similar work is a huge boost, especially if we aren’t comfortable with what we’re being called to do. If this space or collective doesn’t exist, we need to create it.

#3 is perhaps the most important part in working alongside doubt. It ensures that in difficult moments, we have the wisdom of others doing  their own but similar work. That we have a safe space to air doubt, gain perspective and courage to keep going. It’s important that they understand this specific practice we have chosen. Its nuance, its promise, its fear, its draw and terror, the joy of having taken this path and the ache of having given up other options. If we want to keep going, it’s important we create a space that helps us recommit when we stumble. 

“It’s not necessary to be a saint to do good. You need willing hands, not clean ones. If we wait for our souls to be totally clean, our time on Earth may slip away.”― Mother Teresa: Roman Catholic nun

#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 

#44: Changing perspectives

We’re often advised to see things from a different perspective when opening up to creativity or while building figurative bridges with others. I have a non-strategic and a somewhat delightful example of the usefulness of perspective shifts.

I sometimes play the New York Times Spelling Bee, a puzzle in which one tries to make words from a set of seven unique letters which are set in hexagonal tiles, with one tile at the center surrounded by six tiles touching each side of the central hexagon. The center letter needs to be used at least once for each word. It’s a simple and fun word game with one important feature: players can press a button to shuffle the six outside tiles. I can’t emphasize enough how useful this one feature is in making the game enjoyable and less-taxing. I’ve noticed repeatedly that the press of this button all but guarantees that when the tiles land in their new random spots, they will fire new mental links and words will pop out more easily. Every time I get stuck, I shuffle as a first line of defense and I am offered the gift of a new word. All I have to do is rotate the tiles and I naturally start seeing words that I didn’t before.

Although we don’t have an easeful button to “shuffle the tiles” in real life, we have endless ways to move ourselves if we so desire. We can expose ourselves to new stimuli through information, environments, and activities. We can also see life’s inevitable changes as this shuffle function. However, the key to gaining a new perspective is to engage in active observation and not unconscious motion. We can think like a designer and observe the environment with specific intent. We can dislodge stuck thoughts by engaging in the new stimuli while keeping the core questions we’re considering top of mind. There are countless threads to decipher in any environment and a focused inquiry helps us hone in on the relevant themes. We can think like a designer, or a Spelling Bee player looking for new words.

“Perspectives are like batteries. You can see the positive or the negative, and they’ll keep you charged up, if you replace them often enough.”― Curtis Tyrone Jones