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#124: Beating up on past self is easy, and unhelpful

Learnings from momentum, failure, and recovery
(Read the first two in this series here and here)

When we fail at something we care about, it’s easy to fall into a blame-vortex. We look for someone to cast doubt on. When this accusatory gaze turns inwards, we invariably blame our past self for messing things up. I certainly did when I failed recently; I blamed my past self from a decade ago. I’m noticing that I frequently do this. I am often frustrated with my past self, for not doing this or that thing when she could have. I constantly chide her for not having her shit together. Sometimes this past self is recent, from the month or week prior.

This time I also examined my current self and current life. The present-day self came across as a work-in-progress and the present-day life, a complex web of things. Always evolving, always in the process of becoming the next iteration, and never fully where I’d like it to be. I’d like to try some things out, and I know I will in the future when the time is right. So if life feels messy now and I’m not ready for some things, it was messy in the past too and I wasn’t ready to give certain things a shot because of valid reasons.

When I try something later in life than I or culture imagine, it’s because that is usually the first point in time I feel resourced enough to attempt this thing; given the unique way my life is unfolding. 

Then why does my mind keep harping about this magical past self? Who does it imagine her to be? There was no magical past self with all her ducks in a row.

With this honest realization, I see my psyche start loosening its grip on my throat and self-compassion flows. The focus shifts from blame to learning from this experience of failure. I scan my present to see what I might be holding back from trying right now, and whether this holding back is actually wise or fear based. With this knowledge, I can build capacity and skill to try what I want to try, and learn from what didn’t come to pass.

The longer I live, the more past selves there are to be frustrated at. But there is no pristine past life and no magical past self to blame. 

“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”— Marcel Proust, French novelist

#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.

#113: Psychological trash

I just got back from a trip, with a stomach issue that has lingered. In my fatigue, I watched the house slowly fill up with messiness. An open box here, a glass of water there, unprocessed laundry and unpacked bags there and there. The kitchen also filled up with recycling, compost and dishes; squashing any desire to go there and cook. 

When I got a bit of energy, I slowly started cleaning. The first thing I addressed during cleanup was the trash that was piling up. I took it out of the house and deposited it in the bins sitting outside so it could be hauled away and processed. I feel responsible for the trash I create and yet I create it daily. I reduce my use, reuse what I can and recycle what’s possible but I still create mountains of it week after week.

I also create mental and emotional trash daily. What creates this trash, and where does it go?

My interactions—with myself or another—create new physical sensations, thoughts and emotions or embellish pre-existing ones. I may process these with joy or with pain, with ease or with difficulty; by myself, with another or both. Regardless, every interaction creates an experiential residue that lingers and forms a psychological imprint that primes me for future experiences. How I processed this one interaction often sets my template for how I process future interactions. This internalized imprint is what can potentially become my psychological trash if I’m not watchful.

How do I know if a psychological imprint is trash? I try holding on to it long enough and see if it creates a low-grade feeling of dis-ease inside. Does it make me contract emotionally, leak on me in the form of shame or on others in the form of blame? If yes, then it’s psychological trash that needs to be processed further.

Just like physical trash, the first step is to notice it with unattached and blameless awareness. The second step is to process it into compartments: is it outright trash that has served its purpose, a recyclable that can be used anew, or shapeshifting compost with potential to make something else thrive? The final step is to pick it up and let it go, often repeatedly. So life can flow without the burden of yesterday’s trash. 

She ran after the garbage truck, yelling, “Am I too late for the garbage?” “No, jump in!”— Henny Youngman, Comedian and musician

#109: The two core building blocks for everything we create

There are only two building blocks for all that we do and create in life: what we get from nature (sun, earth, water, plants and animals) and, what we get from humans (attention, ingenuity, effort…).

That’s it! Only two core building blocks1 and this is not an exaggeration. Look around. 

As an example, I’ll list out the building blocks for planning my week using my linen-bound notebook:

  • Me
    • My body, time, attention; which are impacted by my emotional, mental and physical state
  • My planner
    • Designs that humans came up with, using knowledge passed down from others plus their own creative riffs +
    • Computers to design and exchange information; also built from a combo of human and natural resources +
    • Paper and cloth from plants +
    • Manufactured in factories that were built by humans using their creativity using resources mined from earth +
  • My mechanical pencil
    • Made of plastic, rubber, metal, graphite and clay. Each of these parts is an amalgam of materials extracted from earth.
  • Bought online
    • Used the internet, ecommerce and shipping infrastructures humans built using the same two building blocks repeatedly

I’m keeping it high level because we can double-click endlessly with just this one example and find these two core building blocks everywhere. Seen with this lens, every physical artifact of human life starts appearing like a fractal2, built from the recurring partnership between natural and human resources.

And what’s a core feature of these resources? Some of these building blocks are non-renewable (like minerals and time) and others renewable (like trees and human attention). However, being able to renew something doesn’t mean being able to renew it automatically or immediately. It means that replenishment is possible over time and under certain conditions. If we keep chopping that tree repeatedly or keep binge-watching Netflix day after day, neither tree nor attention will replenish.

So, given our absolute dependency on these two building blocks for literally everything we do and create in life, it’s surprising that we don’t hold them more sacred.

“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”― Wayne Dyer, author and speaker

  1. Nature is really the core building block because humans are also a part of nature. Even so, it made sense to call us out separately because we have an outsized influence on the planet.
  2. Fractals are infinitely complex never-ending patterns that appear similar at various scales. Snowflakes, tree branches, and coastlines are examples.

#93: Ecosystem awareness

Let’s start with an experiment. You can select any body part of your choosing; I’ll use the right foot as an example.

So, pay attention to your right foot. Really tune into it and wiggle it if you can. Slowly move it around to feel into the bones and muscles. Is there tightness, fluidity, achiness, a combination of these, or something else? Close your eyes now and continue to do this for 5 breaths. Really. Try it please and then move forward to the next sentence.

Now one question: When you were doing this, were you aware of your knee? Likely not, if your knee is pain free. This exercise is not about your body. It’s a simple way to note that when we become hyper-focused on one thing, we naturally lose awarenss of other things. It’s practically impossible to pay high quality attention to everything all at once. Working-caregivers know this struggle well. We can toggle attention from one thing to the next, but it’s hard to pay attention to everything all at once.

Yet, complex problem solving requires us to be aware of inter-related parts. It needs an ecosystem awareness. Some everyday examples of ecosystem awareness from my world:

  • My husband was replacing the faucet in our clawfoot tub. Mid-way he realized that his movements yanked the pipe connecting the faucet with the shower head, which yanked the curtain rod encircling the tub, which yanked the wall anchor that the curtain rod was tied to. His movement at the faucet split the wall anchor.
  • Years ago, I was cutting my nails while sitting on the balcony at my home in India. Upon seeing me, my Mom requested I do this in the bathroom sink because she didn’t want the sparrows to eat and choke on my sharp nail clippings.
  • When we moved into our new home in Seattle, I did the “Graha Pravesh Puja”. This prayer ceremony is done to bless a new home. I had never personally done this before and was blown away by the sense of connectedness embedded in this prayer. It wasn’t only to request blessings for us, it was also to thank every entity that made space for us in their ecosystem — the insects, animals and plants. I was also reminded to thank the humans that built this home in 1906 and those that took care of it over the decades.

Ecosystems consist of organisms (or parts), their interactions and relationships, and the environments in which they interact. They are relational by definition and interconnected in complex ways. We all live in ecosystems that both impact us and are impacted by us. But it can be overwhelming to understand a system if we keep widening our lens endlessly. So we zoom out and define boundaries to know which pieces of the system we need to focus on for now. This allows us to see the key parts and grasp how they relate to each other.

Without some boundary, our attention doesn’t know where the container ends. Boundaries are a way to invite-in focus and remove overwhelm. But they are often arbitrary and defined by our limited perspectives. At some point in the process, we may be well-served by redefining or even erasing boundaries. Because our ecosystems and their interconnections never end.

“The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those that have not viewed the world.” — Alexander von Humboldt: German geographer, naturalist and explorer