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Observations from a life in motion

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#88: Tithing in attention and action

I sometimes meet well-meaning professionals who crave to support a cause but their desire is almost always coupled with overwhelm. Real-time reports of calamities and injustices show acute and chronic problems that need solves everywhere. But it’s hard to fully absorb them when our individual lives are bursting at the seams with commitments and responsibilities. Our response may progress from self-protection by tuning out, then perhaps to minor guilt for ignoring, and then into the calloused emotion of apathy over time where we simply turn off that part of ourselves. A progression that wastes human spirit and capacity.

Between the binaries of turning off or massively caring about everything, there is a third way that’s more practical and over time, collectively more impactful. We can invite ourselves to care for a very specific cause that speaks to us because of our personal struggles and tithe* to that cause with our attention and action. Despite our many spinning plates vying for attention, emotion and time, there are some pieces of news and information that seem to dig deeper in our psyche than others. The key to unlocking our causes is to sit in that discomfort long enough to figure out the common thread in the pains and triumphs that manage to imprint us. Marinating in this discomfort is also critical in activating the compassionate action that this world sorely needs.

I’ve also found that the unexpected precursor to this sought-after compassionate action is patience and kindness with self. Tithing in action churns up all sorts of fears of inadequacy and helplessness. It does no good if our actions flame out before taking root because of our very natural human fears. Patience and kindness with ourselves creates the strength to keep going despite obstacles. We keep reminding ourselves that there is no need to rush, that even the smallest actions amount to invisible impact, that this process can take months or even years. We make our actions small and manageable and our timelines longer. We remind ourselves that it’s not all on us and that there are others in it with us. Over time, these practices even out our focus from over-fixating on self or to a healthy dose of self-respect and agency in light of our general smallness. We start to focus less on ourselves and more on the collective. Imagine, if everyone did this, how big our small acts of tithing could become?

*A note on tithing for those new to this concept

There is a concept called tithing or dana across all faiths. It’s a voluntary practice where one offers a part of their income for use in the service of others or a cause. Of course, like any practice, this concept has also suffered misuse at times through guilt or exploitation. Regardless, the practice has immense power to orient us to generosity. In eastern philosophy (that I’m more familiar with), dana can take any form ― material or energy, the donor’s intent while giving is as important as the dana itself. The amount doesn’t matter; what matters is the posture of goodwill and generosity. We’re invited to cultivate a sense of hospitality, abundance, goodwill and faith with a focus on our spiritual growth and other’s benefit. This practice gets under our skin in the most positive way. It teaches a willingness to make others happy, to get in touch with our natural impulse to care that gets covered in the busyness of daily life, and most importantly in letting go of our craving for applause and attachment to specific outcomes.

“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”― Pablo Picasso, painter and sculptor

#86: Influencers

According to a 2019 survey of 2,000 Americans ages 13-38, 86% were willing to try out social media influencing for work. Truthfully, at first, this headline fueled my cynical side but a quick look at the motivations cited helped me see people’s underlying humanity. People weren’t just motivated by making money or getting free products, they wanted to make a difference, have flexible working hours and share ideas with others. They also wanted to have fun. Fame ranked lowest on the list. There’s a market for influencers because people trust those that appear to be everyday folk like themselves vs. those with too much celebrity and fame. But there is a bit of a trap here. In the same study, only 12% of people considered themselves influencers.

Influence is the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something. When we think of the term “influencer”, our default is to think in a social media marketing sense given popular jargon. In this context, the influencer’s goal is to typically make us buy something. This is neither everyone’s passion and skill, nor should it be. I would hate to live in a world where every human became a walking billboard. Besides, lets not forget that each of us is an influencer with far more weight than we realize.

My life has been influenced by the everyday presence, words and examples of my parents, husband, aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins, in-laws, friends, teachers, mentors, co-workers, neighbors and acquaintances. I’ve even been influenced by strangers. I’ve absorbed the most profound lessons of love, compassion and generosity, of courage and humility, of patience and sacrifice. These lessons and experiences came silently and without fanfare or observers. When eventually I picked books from wise sages and they invoked these traits, I didn’t have a hard time relating because I had everyday examples. The realization that I was surrounded by exemplary people day in and day out made me more thankful, peaceful and joyous in my existence.

On the flip side, I’ve also been negatively influenced by others when I shrank myself after I was made to feel less-than. We humans have the power to do that to each other. Let’s never forget that our every interaction is an opportunity for influence and that we can choose to be constructive and generative. 100% of us are influencers.

Written in honor of my biggest influencer, my precious Mother. Happy birthday, Ma!

“My daughter is strong. My daughter is brave.”― My Mom, during my weakest moments

#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

#78: Think global and act local vs. the reverse

I’ve often heard people say “think global, act local” and while the phrase made sense, I never really paused to think about its downstream impact until recently. As a thought experiment, I wondered what would happen if we “think local, act global”. I didn’t have to think very hard to realize that colonialism, the global spread of silicon valley mindset (chasing unicorns, quick-builds and fast-exits), and performative social media interactions are all examples of thinking local and acting global.

Thinking local and acting global makes it easier to lean into our self-protective tendencies. Easier to accumulate more and more material safety for our immediate habitat at the expense of the others that we may not (or may not want to) see. The impact of our actions becomes distant and invisible. We especially don’t stick around to see the long-term effects. It becomes easier to do and harder to feel. Our actions, emotions and impact become siloed.

When we do the opposite to think global and act local,  we instinctively lean into the following behaviors: An awareness that humanity is interconnected in unbreakable ways, and a sense of agency over actions and outcomes in our local habitat. When combined, these ways of operating strengthen our empathy and sense of ownership.

Thinking global and acting local, we may initiate and experiment with small scale localized actions to see what works. We may feel inspired to share learnings with others who are better positioned to add value to their own habitats. Our local becomes an incubator for the global.  We gain the capacity to contribute not only to our own context, but also to our collective intelligence so others may be able to support their local contexts. An apt metaphor might be everyone adding logs to the collective fire for shared warmth. It becomes easier to not only do but also to feel. Community organizing and our approach for Polio and Covid vaccinations are examples of thinking global and acting local.

Which version of our world feels better to live in? How will we choose to think and act?

“To become a different kind of person is to experience the world in a different way. When your mind changes, the world changes. And when we respond differently to the world, the world responds differently to us.” ― David Loy: Professor, writer, and Zen teacher

#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.