Working Meditation

Observations on Human Connection & Contribution

Home » Zooming Out » Seeking » Page 4

Seeking: Observations related to pursuit of self and purpose

#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

#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

#77: Sustainable is inherently relational

Transaction: An exchange or an interaction between two or more things or entities. It’s a communicative action involving two or more units that reciprocally affect or influence each other.
Examples: Paying back a friend who covered our dinner when we were short on cash, scheduling a meeting on someone’s calendar and them accepting, saying hello to a neighbor and getting a smile in return, negotiating a business deal.
1. Transaction has a broader definition than simply buying and selling. Our lives are dominated by convenient acts of buying and selling, appropriately called transactions, so we may forget that these acts represent a subset of the exchanges humans conduct daily. Transaction is an exchange, an interaction. We transact not only as consumers but also as friends, parents and collaborators. 
2. Transactions require trust. Throughout human history, we transacted with those that we had (varying degrees of) relationships with. Transactions were simply one part or the last mile, so to speak, of an ongoing engagement.
3. It’s only in the recent past that we’ve been able to transact “facelessly” with another. As more and more of the world opens up to us (more people, more internet-enabled tools, more geographies), we’ve leaned into the comfort of anonymity, distance, and low commitment. We exchange ideas, conversations and goods without any of the relational tethering that transactions and exchanges were historically built upon.

Relation: An existing connection or a significant association between two or more entities or objects.
Relational: The way in which these entities or objects are connected. Anything that is connected will have a cause and effect relationship. Push or pull on one object and you’ll create a reverberation within other related objects.
Examples: Collection of related data in a database; relationship between fertilizer, soil, and plant; our relationships with family, friends, colleagues and neighbors.
4. In every transaction, we look for markers of trust while interacting. Reviews, photos, fidelity of those reviews, public upvotes etc. Even when our tools our designed for the last mile of the engagement, i.e. the transactional part, we look for markers that are typically revealed over the course of a relationship.
5. Our businesses, tools and even societies are mostly designed for the last mile transaction, not the upstream relationship. Our workplaces, healthcare systems, communal areas, shopping, dating, communications – everything – is geared for convenience and efficiency so we can cram in even more transactions into our lives. Be productive, do more, be more. 
6. We thrive when transactions nest within a genuine relationship. We crave to know another and to be known by them, to offer our best and be valued for it. This is only possible if we shift our paradigm from seeing people and places as a means to an end to valuing connection as a fundamental end in itself.

Sustainable: Being able to maintain something at a certain rate or level over a period of time. Sustainable implies continuity for a long period of time.
7. Continued thriving in the long-term (i.e. the definition of sustainable), is possible only if we create relational societies, products, services, and mindsets. We can’t sustain joy, contentment and hope by endlessly taking and moving on. An overly transactional life weighs on our psyche. Thriving depends on nesting transactions back under their larger relational contexts, it depends on expanding our perspective to see human and environmental interconnectedness. In the absence of this, it’s easy to keep harming and depleting ourselves and our commons.

The gold-standard in business is to make our lives frictionless, so we can fit even more transactional handshakes in our cramped life, displacing the time we need to create relationships. So we get more and more seamless handshakes with more and more faceless and bodiless entities. Neighbors, coworkers, friends, all reduced to profile pictures, interests and demographic markers to ease the transaction. What nurtures us for the long-haul are the acts of being in relationship, not the endless transactions. We forget that we crave not just the hand but the whole body.  

“I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I will give myself to it.”  ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Austrian poet and novelist.

#76: Systems of -isms

Like -ing, -ation, -fy, or -itis, -ism is a suffix appended to the end of a word to form a derivative. Suffixes have meanings so -itis indicates inflammatory disease say dermatitis, -fy forms verbs that denote producing like amplify, and -ism indicates a distinctive practice, system, or philosophy. All -isms are preconceived and widely held ideas that are often fixed and oversimplified, they create unjust treatment of different categories of people or things, and are harmful to those on the receiving end. When this prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination is based on race, we call it racism; when based on age, we name it age-ism; and when due to sex, we refer to it as sexism. Capitalism and authoritarianism are -isms too.

As mentioned above, an -ism is a system. A system is a cohesive group of interrelated, interdependent parts that can be natural or human-made. Systems are bound by space and time, influenced by their environment, defined by their structure and purpose, and expressed through their functioning. A system is more than the sum of its parts if it expresses synergy or emergent behavior. Our economies are systems, so is the garden in our backyard, as is our work culture.

I’d like to dissect sexism like a specimen as it’s one of the -isms I’ve faced countless times. I’ll take one very specific example to explore how the -isms we repeatedly navigate are both out there and in here. Even if we are unwilling participants, we live within these systems and they infiltrate us in subtle ways.

I strive to wake up early in the mornings, to have silent time for reflection and writing. I prefer to do all of this before my workday begins and when I don’t, I’m not able to get to it later in the day. My husband in tandem has a packed work schedule that’s typical of big consulting firms; with early mornings and late nights, back-to-back meetings, high-pressure and high-visibility deliverables, and often zero breaks for food. It’s been particularly relentless recently. Because I’m more adept at cooking and I love him, I ensure he doesn’t go hungry. He’s a wonderful partner and puts in his share of work in his limited free time (laundry, gardening and home maintenance are his domains). When his work takes over though, it takes over my life, routine and mind-space too.

Then rather than writing right after my contemplative practices like I prefer, I make breakfast. By the time I get to my desk, my internal silence (which I appreciate for writing) has dissipated. I’d rather just make my tea and start writing but if I don’t first make breakfast, he won’t get a chance to eat…and I feel guilty when he hasn’t eaten. Similarly, when I heat a quick lunch, desperately wanting to get back to work, I worry he hasn’t eaten. When I see his empty water bottle sitting on the kitchen counter, I know he must have been in such a rush that he forgot so I fill it and poke my head in his office inconspicuously to prevent dehydration and headaches. By the time I get back to my work, its often taken far longer than I would have liked and my focus has already dissipated, replaced by self-scolding.

Most modern men will say they respect women and treat them as equals but what we all don’t see is that -isms aren’t as simple. In the scenarios above, where does my guilt and emotional weight come from? Why am I more adept at cooking and he at home maintenance? How is he able to care for me with tenderness and respect but without guilt? Could I just do my work like he does his without worrying about him? (This is why I miss being in an office environment by the way). I couldn’t tell you even if I tried where my love ends and the ingrained gender-normative patterns begin. I’m quite independent and free by all Indian cultural standards. I have a marriage of equals but I can’t shake some of my behaviors because of my cultural exposure, where the fierce strength of women and their subservience is on equal display.

In our trigger-happy social-media fueled world, it’s easy to have an angry knee-jerk reaction when someone brings up the -isms they struggle with. We’re tempted to find someone to blame or to deflect responsibility altogether. But these are very messy, entangled threads that weave invisible webs all around and through us. My husband’s employer, for instance, is as much a part of this system; because there is an underlying assumption that overworked employees are able to ensure their own wellbeing. This is where capitalism meets sexism, an example of -isms intersecting and weighing down certain people in unseen ways. He’s able to work like he does because I stay on top of our nutrition, cleaning, groceries etc. Employers most certainly don’t see their part in feeding our gender-normative behaviors at home.

The first step when navigating an -ism is to see it as a system and do our small part in untangling our own complex and interconnected threads. I’d like to be more like my husband– tender yet boundaried; but I don’t think I will ever be able to just walk by with food and dive right back into focused work when he is clearly hungry. My personal task then is to create some healthy boundaries with his employer and not let them encroach into my work, to erase the guilt and infuse my care only with love. We can work on our -isms only if we first become aware of the patterns.

“Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering – because you can’t take it in all at once.”— Audrey Hepburn, actress and humanitarian.

#74: Why do we create what we create? Answer: silent values and incentives

Billions of diverse people live, work and intermingle on the planet like never before. All of this coexists, mostly with grace and without imploding, because of the useful and powerful systems we’ve created to orient our thinking and actions. Two overarching ones being the economic and political systems that determine which ideas we accept without question and which are open to debate and molding. I’ll focus on the economic system here because that is what answers the question above, i.e. why do we create what we create?

By create, I mean both the “what” (the output) and the “how”, which includes countless actions at every step of the creation value chain. Actions that accumulate to create our work culture, then spill out into our lives and societies. The “how” also includes unforeseen byproducts of our economic activity.

Simply put, our economic system is the way we make choices about how to use resources to produce and distribute goods and services. Below are some economic fundamentals to reorient ourselves.

The economic system asks 3 questions:

  1. What to produce
  2. How to produce it
  3. Who gets the benefit

There are 3 main components that flow through it:

  1. Flows of materials
  2. Flows of energy
  3. Flows of information (particularly money)

There are two sides to the system:

  1. Producers that are also providers of capital. We call them firms.
  2. Consumers that are also providers of labor. We call them households.

Money flows between the two sides in the form of wages, that are used to buy goods and that money flows back to the producers as income.

We also have support infrastructures:

  1. Government, which levy taxes and provide regulation, public goods and services.
  2. Banks, which supply capital. They also help convert savings into investment as capital back into the economy.

All this appears in Economics 101 classes as baseline; indisputable facts and foundational concepts upon which all further understanding rests. What’s never clearly stated though are the assumptions underlying this framework.

Some of these assumptions:

  • There is scarcity. We have unlimited wants but limited resources, so we need to make choices in what we produce, how we produce and who gets the benefit.
  • The free market system sorts everything out. The supply and demand curves intersect at a point of equilibrium and those that are willing and able to pay the price of a product or service will do so.
  • Households are consumers.

Our current economic system has elevated our lives in endless ways through an abundance of ideas, services and products. Most of us have better chances of access to these things compared to our ancestors. But we’ve paid dearly for these assumptions that don’t just underpin the economic system, they now underpin how we operate as individuals and societies.

Assumptions drive actions: 

  • Scarcity and competition. When we think everything is scarce and we have to compete to survive, what kind of companies and societies will we create? Will it be easy for us to think long-term as stewards of the environment and people or might it be easier to extract, create, sell and move on?
  • Free market is the engine of economic growth and regulation gets in the way. Combine free market with a scarcity-driven competitive mindset and what will we get? Will we orient ourselves towards meaningful long-term contribution for everyone’s wellbeing or towards the largest short-term gains possible?
  • The purpose of households is to provide consumers and labor. Households are the building blocks of society. They drive our individual and communal wellbeing. They support all the work and innovation under the sun. The nourishment we get at home propels our work and stands between us and burnout and yet, it’s rarely respected and celebrated at work as a driver of impact.
  • Communities can’t take care of their commons. So we privatize and extract every inch of our commons physical and attentional commons leaving no space for calm and unmonetized interactions.

Are we then surprised when:

  • We create a transactional relationship with the environment: Our businesses create flashy and new goods that become defunct only after a couple of years and go into landfills. The repair shops of past are nowhere to be found and it’s cheaper to replace electronics, furniture, shoes and clothes than trying to fix them.
  • We consume more than we need: We live in massive houses with massive refrigerators to accommodate the massive sized food items that we can’t easily carry on a walk home from the store, and we have to get in the massive car (atleast in the United States) to burn gas.
  • We get trapped by efficiency: It’s easier to expend little effort and efficiently “connect” on social media vs. getting to know our neighbors. Easier to buy cheaper on Amazon than support the local main street.
  • We cover every piece of our public commons in advertising: Leaving no space to decompress physically, mentally and emotionally.

We say the free market is neutral and value-free. Every system we’ve created is initially framed and then executed by humans. People whose thinking has been shaped by social, cultural, historic and moral contexts and it’s very hard to transcend these. Being practical, efficient or profit-driven are values.

No rational endeavor is ever without values.  And what we value and deem worthy, we incentivize. Our economic systems have values and incentives embedded in them and these define not just what and how we create, they silently define what we aspire to.

“If we haven’t specified where we want to go, it is hard to set our compass, to muster enthusiasm, or to measure progress. But vision is not only missing almost entirely from policy discussions; it is missing from our culture. We talk easily and endlessly about our frustrations, doubts, and complaints, but we speak only rarely, and sometimes with embarrassment, about our dreams and values.” ― Donella Meadows: environmental scientist, educator, and writer.