Working Meditation

Observations on Human Connection & Contribution

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#85: Everyday reminders of belonging

When we think of belonging, we often think of a place, people, or culture that makes us feel welcome. We crave kinship and emotionally available humans. The implied focal point is usually the self and we gauge how another may create a sense of affinity in us. If we flip the coin though, we’ll see that the other side of this equation is us. These humans that we crave belonging from crave all of the same things back. If belonging has been a consistent desire across cultures and time, and everyone desperately craves it, what gets in the way?

Our modern lives reinforce a few recurrent themes:

  • We don’t decipher the need: Belonging was easier to achieve when we lived in close-knit collectives and became intertwined with others across generations through biological likeness and cultural shorthands. In modernity, we increasingly bump up against those with different cultural shorthands from us. We can’t always accurately decipher another’s emotional rhythm and don’t realize when we’re drawing inaccurate assumptions and conclusions, often in haste.
  • We don’t overlap enough in terms of time: Connection can happen quickly, belonging takes time. True belonging, the one where our roots go deep into the communal substrate, needs time. A few interactions are great but consistent interactions over a long period are what informs us that we aren’t just fair-weather companions. Belonging then, is a sense of affinity that is derived over a period of time through our seemingly small interactions with others. We now flit around more easily from geography to geography, job to job, relationship to relationship, and context to context. No one context gets enough of our attention unless we intentionally make it so.
  • The relational sheen wears off up close: The more we are with another human, the more sides of them we’ll see. There is more opportunity to witness messiness and sticking points. Every real relationship goes through moments of stress followed by the potential for shared sense-making. Belonging gets unlocked when we show up after these stressful moments for imperfect practice with a committed other. This implies two things: mutuality and showing up despite feeling inadequate. But if after these moments of stress, we turn to the endless online shelf of humans where the next shiny person awaits, we’ll keep repeating loops of shiny discovery followed by heartache without ever learning how to be in relationship.

In our modern context, everything―except the desire for belonging―has changed. We don’t have overlapping histories, biology, norms and time. We are surrounded by countless potential sources of belonging but they come with bodies, identities, mindsets and experiences unlike ours and with time as limited as ours. We don’t always depend on the same set of people and contexts for both survival and thriving. We rarely get to know all of another, often seeing them in a specific context which is reduced and distributed. We hardly get to see the integrated whole of each other, even when we’re emotionally close. Finally, we encounter a lot more people which cultivates the behavior of “infinite-swipe”. If not this, then there’s always another and then another.

The repeatable outcome is that it’s easier to surf the surface of humanity without dropping anchor. Easier to accumulate judgments and faulty stories about others. Easier to hurt each other and move on without realizing that, in the process, we changed ourselves for the worse. Easier to feel compelled to guard ourselves, and easier for everyone to end up guarding themselves to the brink of isolation.

But tuning back into belonging isn’t overly difficult work, it’s just uncomfortable at times. It requires everyday attentiveness and responsibility. It’s a psychological shift to reorient our focus from short-term material accumulation to the humans in front of us. To bypass the inclination to compare, acquire, and dominate. To remembering that every single thing we get to do, dream about, and achieve is enabled by humans we know and those we’ll never know.

We have rich ancestral wisdom to help us here. While modernity has added layers of complexity, forgetting our connectedness is not a new problem. Our ancestors too felt the need to remember. For instance, versions of the golden rule―treat others as you want to be treated―appear across all cultures. Some additional examples:

  • The African philosophy of Ubuntu is summarized as “I am because you are”.
  • The Zulu greeting Sawubona means “I see you” and it’s common response Shiboka means “I exist for you”. They remind us to recognize each other’s worth and dignity.
  • The same Indian greeting Namaste is used while bowing to the divine and greeting other humans.
  • Ojigi, the Japanese greeting, is a physical bow and a signal of respect, gratitude or apology in social and religious situations.

I’m certain we have timeless wisdom in every culture to remind us of our interconnectedness. These greetings, rituals and philosophies aren’t antiquated. They are psychological reminders and everyday shorthands to break the circuit of self-absorption, fear and disconnection. They help us turn to each other as lovingly and fully as we want to be turned to, to accompany each other as we want to be accompanied.

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”― Edith Wharton, writer and designer

#79: Organic signals and the paradox of overengineering

I drink plenty of water because I naturally crave it. I often wonder after a refreshing drink whether plants feel the same way after getting watered: nourished from within. And then I wonder why, despite my affinity for water, I too sometimes fall into a pattern of forgetting and getting dehydrated.

I read somewhere that we can mix up our thirst and hunger signals. When I first read this, I thought “hum, interesting, that’s never happened to me”. But now that I’m cultivating a capacity to observe, I see it happens quite frequently. The common thread in these moments is that I’ve lost my connection to thirst signals because of busyness or distraction (likely missed or overrode initial signals). When I haven’t had adequate water in several days, it feels harder and harder to trace my way back to that faint signal. Then drinking water becomes a task; another thing to track and remember, and not something I do naturally.

I notice parallels with a number of other habits including meditation, writing, movement, sleep, and human connection…essentially anything that feels lifegiving. When I lose that organic signal from within because of modernity’s squeeze, there is pressure to start tracking the when, the how and, the how much. There is pressure to engineer the optimal routine. But once designed, it all backfires. Rather than following that engineered routine, part of me stops wanting to do something that comes so naturally to me.

There seems to be an experiential difference between leaning into the organic nurture of a practice and over-monitoring it for output. For me atleast, one seems to release the creative expansion of the practice and the other somehow robs it. One makes the habit magnetic and the other a bit repellant. It feels as if my psyche is saying: “Give me the tools to make healthful choices, but set me free to interact in those lifegiving pockets without a script.”

I want to build evolving gardens and not static skyscrapers.

“When I refer to ‘creative living,’ I am speaking more broadly. I’m talking about living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, journalist and author

#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.

#62: The delicate blue sky

One thing that all astronauts seem to have in common is the awe at witnessing our earth from afar. They speak of the deep emotion and tenderness they felt in the moment and the lasting perspective shift. They mention the thin blue line of our fragile atmosphere, the thing protecting our precious planet from the onslaught of space to make life possible. The same sky that appears to those of us on earth as infinite, everlasting and indestructible. While we enjoy the sky and its many stories―the dawn, the multihued sunsets, the star-studded night sky, and the enchanting moon―we don’t really think about the sky itself. It’s such a constant that it’s often invisible to us. We think it has always been there and it will always be there.

But the astronauts see it differently. They know what’s on the other side. Their veil of illusion has been lifted, making them aware of our small yet important part in maintaining or breaking this natural order. They know how fragile this nourishing blue sky actually is.

Certain life events have the power to show us our version of the delicate blue sky full of similar paradoxes. Each of us will experience these mind-bending and soul-altering events at some point in our lives. Childbirth and loss of a loved one are two examples that come to mind. They will make things more visible and impossible to take for granted. They will highlight the life-giving qualities of something alongside a sharp reminder of its fragility. They will pluck us away from our everyday to shove us in the presence of the divine. They will create a desire to tend to something deeper alongside a primordial reminder of our impermanence. They will create anxiety and discomfort.

If we sit long enough in this discomfort though, we’ll see a kernel of fearlessness amidst fear. We will see more clearly the things we have control over and those that we don’t. We will realize how truly miniscule we are compared to the limitless life. But we might also see that each of our lives has significance and a unique assignment the way each cell in the body does. And that this significance lies In shaping ourselves and contributing in ways only we can; in tending to our unique little footprint in time and space with integrity and love, not in the outsized actions and wins that popular culture might have us believe. Life asks us to tend to only our footprint, no more and no less, not because it wont fade but because before it fades it will impact another and through them another.

When you wake up to your own realization of the delicate blue sky, pause long enough to soak-in the questions that animate you. Note your version of the delicate blue sky. Note what you are called to tend to. Because when we each tend to our small footprint, we ensure every version of the delicate blue sky is tended to across time.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
…There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”― Carl Sagan, Astronomer and Astrophysicist. Pale Blue Dot, 1994

#57: Anatomy of Love

Our very first interactions of love in life occur in relational contexts that have pretty clear social definitions and expectations. This is for obvious reasons. We come into this world as helpless little mammals and are completely reliant on our caregivers for an extended childhood. Our survival and growth require commitment from others and ourselves. Over time though, if we’re not careful, that primary focus on the I, me and myself can condition us with unhelpful expectations such that any divergence from our personal norm causes harsh judgement of others or ourselves.

Early on in life, we are often too young to see our elders as unique individuals, with their own histories, aches and dreams. We may see them through a very narrow and sometimes selfish relational lens. Of course wanting mutual affection, care and security is quite natural but I’m trying to parse out a speediness of judgment. As we grow up and expand our relational circles, we bring the weight of this conditioning to romantic and platonic relationships alike; a subtle thought pattern of “what have you done for me lately”. This isn’t something others do and I don’t. We all live inside a self-focused animal and it takes practice to stay tuned-in to these thoughts so we can bypass the divisive ones as they appear.

Life is complex so it’s useful to have relational mental models, but these unexamined shorthands can create blind spots. Everyone is teeming with individuality which has joyful and heavy parts. Everyone has an evolving inner world. Being in relationship with another, especially those relationships with a deeper flavor of love, requires us to see the nuanced individual outside of our own expectations. A moment to moment curiosity and openness for them and us especially in difficult interactions. Defaulting to “I can’t believe they said/did that” is less helpful than trying to understand why is it they said/did that. It takes resilience and generosity of spirit to start thinking like this when we are also down in the dumps but it’s worthy exercise if we care for someone.

Love is not magic. It is a practice. A practice of putting aside ego, assumptions, and relational expectations. A commitment to offering judgment-free attention. Of not getting offended or injuring them with retaliation when something difficult inevitably appears. We can behave this way with another only when we behave this way with ourselves, because we will repeatedly fail in this practice; and when we do, we have to practice all of the above with ourselves.

In this way, love is a lifelong practice of creating a moment to moment awareness in tandem, of them and us. Our closest bonds are the best arenas for this practice for they carry our heaviest expectations.

For my Tim, for 17 years of practice.

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.” — Ursula K. Le Guin