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Being: Observations related to embracing the present moment

#129: Yearning for what we already have

(Renewed awareness, continued. Read related observation here.)

The first city I lived in outside of India was Los Angeles, California (L.A.). Until then, I had only experienced in-person sense stimuli in an Indian context. The concoction of smells, sights, sounds, touch, and taste all came from the culture I was raised in. While I often delighted in the bounty my culture offered, it became intimately known to me and I stopped reacting to every stimuli like I might have as a child.

When I came to L.A., my senses felt heighted like they had never been before as an adult. All at once, I encountered real life sense stimuli from a culture that evolved differently. It was sometimes hard to parse out why I was experiencing what I was. For example, I noticed that some homes and buildings had a distinct smell. It felt old and comforting; like the smell of wood from a long time ago that mixed with the bright L.A. sunshine and the crisp air. I loved those days when the old and new mixed up in my body.

When I moved away from L.A., I stopped smelling that specific smell in my everyday. Miami, Florida felt like a newer or different build somehow and the climate was different. Sometimes I’d encounter that familiar smell in old bookstores or during travel. Then I moved to Seattle, Washington. Also a different climate compared to L.A. but abundant with old structures. I smelled that smell a lot more, and when I started living in a 118-year old cottage, I was enveloped in it daily.

Then I got acclimatized, just like I had to all the Indian stimuli. The smell was so present in my everyday that I stopped noticing it. This is normal and called Olfactory Adaptation*. I was recently away for almost a month and that smell hit me so hard the minute I opened my front door. But now I’ve lost it again. I’m slathered in it everyday but can’t smell it. I notice it a little when I step out for the day and come back inside. But a few hours aren’t always enough to heighten my noticing. That level of presence happens when I get completely plucked out and then re-embedded again in my context.

If adaptation is built into our biology and I can only smell our house when I go away, what else do I crave that I already have? And how might I regain my sensitivity to it?

“Forever – is composed of Nows –
‘Tis not a different time –
Except for Infiniteness –
And Latitude of Home –

From this – experienced Here –
Remove the Dates – to These –
Let Months dissolve in further Months –
And Years – exhale in Years –”

― Emily Dickinson, American poet

* Adaptation is a common feature of all sensory systems. It helps organisms maintain sensitivity to new stimuli while being able to respond to new or changing ones.

Olfactory adaptation, also known as olfactory fatigue, is the temporary inability to smell a particular odor after being exposed to it for a long time. Some characteristics of olfactory adaptation:

  • Elevated odor thresholds: People are less responsive to odors after adaptation.
  • Reduced responsiveness: The decrease in responsiveness depends on the concentration of the odor and how long someone is exposed to it.

An example of olfactory adaptation is when the smell of food is strong when you first walk into a room, but fades after a few minutes.

#115: Who we become on the sidelines of conflict

I’m part of many different professional tidepools, each with a group chat on Signal or Whatsapp. The Israel-Gaza conflict has surfaced in these spaces over the past month with layers of aches and perspectives. The personal and collective histories like a messy bundle of electrical wires: inextricably enmeshed and full of charge.

While Israel and Palestine isn’t the land of my ancestors, my elders experienced identity-driven geopolitical conflict alongside the fear, anger, hate and violence it generates. Their forceful expulsion from their birthland is full of stories of slaughter. I was also raised in a beautifully plural society and have experienced the turmoil that sometimes rears its head in true diversity. I’ve seen the nature of individual and collective conversations we have with each other during such times.

Our first step is ususally to share and explain our side. If we are genuinely and fully met in our grief, we feel more secure stepping out further to try and understand the other side. Most conversations get stuck at the first stage because we don’t typically acknowledge another’s pain in public (or private) discourse. We also shy away from acknowledgement because it invites action of some sort; which may be unclear, hard, or even impossible.

So the spaces for shared sense-making—where people bring in their deepest emotion, truest thoughts and questions, with a desire to shape a healthier future—are rare. This shared sense-making is hard enough face to face with people we love and issues we have known about all our lives. It’s even harder in group chats or social media with people and issues we know little about.

Although we all sense that group chats are a choppy tool for perspective sharing and sense making, we have the constraints and tools that we have so we engage. And like most spaces, a few voices step into the circle to share, some with more comfort and assertion than others. Whether we are inside the circle or silent on the periphery, we listen and digest. We learn about human nature and our own nature by coming to terms with our comfort, discomfort and boundaries. We gain a sense of how we like to learn and engage. We create perspectives about ourselves, people groups, and whole cultures. Often without realizing, we veer towards hope, helplessness or cynicism. All these become muscle memory.

Then one day down the line, even if we stand quietly in this conversation, we will step inside some other circle and share our thoughts. We might do this with nuance or binaries, with an attitude of sensing or ripping apart another’s perspective. One thing is for sure, how we behave when we enter that circle in the future will be guided by who we are becoming while on the sidelines today.

“At our best, we serve as inadvertent triggers for each other’s eventual illumination.”— Mark Nepo, Poet

PS: This is a good one about not having a hot take on everything, which forces us to have a definitive stance on issues when first a posture of learning and inquiry is better suited— Pick a Side. Pick a Side. Pick a Side. Now.

#69: Setting our Pace

Ever try to run fast to slow and somber music or meditate to loud heavy metal? Certain tempos just don’t jive with the task at hand. The same holds true for our internal rhythms. We all operate at varying baselines but every person functions within a range of energy and activity. It’s valuable to understand our personal range and what determines our fluctuation so we can, to the degree possible, match our internal rhythm with the pace of our tasks. It also ensures we don’t blindly slump into rhythms of those we cohabitate with, and makes for more joyful and constructive days.

A side note: When people mention rhythm and pace in a modern context, it’s often a reminder to slow down. That’s not what this is.

The pace of our days is determined in some part by us, then by our responsibilities, and the rest by our environment and culture. However, as we progress through life, our vocation and environment tend to command how we anchor our days so we often lose sense of our innate wiring. Our pace also shifts when we or our context evolve. This is an invitation to explore inputs that feed our pace and adjust what we need to. One may need to slow down or stop in places and engage or speed up in others.

Innate tendency:

  • Is my natural tendency to lower the gears so much that inertia sets in or fire them so much that stress and burnout sets in? We’re all somewhere in the middle but it’s a big continuum; where do I fall on it?
  • How do I like to spend my downtime when not influenced by others? Asked another way: what does my ideal Sunday look like?

Stamina:

  • Which of these comes easily to me and which do I struggle with: sleep, movement, nutrition.
  • When and how do I naturally like to sleep/move/eat when not influenced by others or my environment?
  • What type of stamina comes easily to me and what might I want to cultivate: mental, physical or emotional?
  • How else do I like to build my energy, and am I lacking that input (mental stimulation, human connection, play etc.)?

Type of work:

  • What does my work need of me – expansive and creative thinking, more focused and critical evaluation, a combination, or something else?
  • Am I lacking any tools or skills that could help me work more effectively?
  • Do I use tools that in a different context become hindrances? 

Seasonality:

  • Do certain tasks go more smoothly at certain times of the day or week, in certain types of places, in silence or with sound, surrounded by people or without?
  • Do I naturally structure my days or weeks a certain way?
  • How do I function at different times of the day, different seasons?

Focus:

  • How much time do I need time to warm up and settle into focus? Does it vary by task?
  • When am I easily distractible?
  • What causes 80% of my distractions? Is it external or internal?
  • When it’s internal, is it physical, mental or emotional?
  • When it’s external, is it something I can control or is it outside my influence?

Stakeholders:

  • Which humans or creatures depend on me?
  • What do they need from me? I.e. what is my role within each context?
  • Who needs energy from me and who offers energy to me?
  • What is their pace and “seasonality”? Do they need me more at certain times than others? Do I need others more at certain times?

We can sometimes latch onto identities and internalize them. This obscures the truth so when observing oneself, it’s best to ignore internal judgments.

For instance, I’m not (or perhaps no longer) a “night-owl” or “have the stamina of a marine” as I’ve been told. I do best when I eat early, ideally by 7:00pm, and sleep by 10:00pm. This was initially unsettling to me and while it rarely happens given my schedule, it’s my reality. Many useful learnings have come about by observing my rhythms without judgment. You might be startled or delighted by what you uncover.

“If we can allow some space within our awareness and rest there, we can respect our troubling thoughts and emotions, allow them to come, and let them go. Our lives may be complicated on the outside, but we remain simple, easy, and open on the inside.”— Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Nepalese Tibetan Buddhist teacher and author 

#67: Thriving alongside cobwebs

Simply being alive creates mental impressions. There is no way around it. What so and so said or did that was loving or hurtful. What we did, didn’t do, or couldn’t do. And the longer we live, the more impressions we file away in our brains. The present passes through the prism of time and inevitably turns to sweet memories, painful ones, or regret. Then there is the future, where our goals, hopes and fears that are yet to materialize keep churning dreams and worries. All of these threads tangle up to become mental cobwebs.

We are often reminded that life is lived in the present but that is also where the endless cycle of thoughts, emotions and actions live; one constantly feeding the other and being fed in return. Thoughts: the maker of every action and a gateway to sneaky emotions. Emotions: the often invisible contributor to action, the yanker of our most painful chains and fussy thought patterns. Actions: our primary tool of outward expression, the creator of mental impressions and the fertilizer for more thoughts and emotions.

Simply put, the act of living spins daily cobwebs that may cocoon our psyche and limit our potential to flourish.

Meeting each moment with curiosity and non-attachment is a big part of contemplative practices. We train to drop the weight of past and future so we can move through life lightly with more fluidity and awareness. Some other terms used to describe this idea— A fresh mind, beginner’s mind, child-like, the place of now etc.  The invitation is to show up completely present in the service of the now so we don’t color our actions with regret, worry or fear; so a fresh new trajectory can open up in the moment. A feeling of calm might be what drew us to contemplative practices initially, but we’d be remiss if we stopped there. A sense of calm fills only our vessel but a sense of openess and presence fills every vessel we encounter. Thriving happens when we channel the gift of the human mind, when new growth sprouts amidst the cobwebs.

“What does the Earth ask of us? To meet our responsibilities and to give our gifts. Naming responsibility is often understood as accepting a burden, but in the teachings of my ancestors, responsibilities and gifts are understood as two sides of the same coin. The possession of a gift is coupled with a duty to use it for the benefit of all.”― Robin Wall Kimmerer: scientist, professor, author of Braiding Sweetgrass.