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#79: Organic signals and the paradox of overengineering

June 13, 2022

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

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#77: Sustainable is inherently relational

May 16, 2022

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.

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#76: Systems of -isms

April 18, 2022

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.

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#75: What is attention?

April 11, 2022

Is it intense pin-pointed focus on something or is it open awareness of the present, regardless of the object?

Does it come and go or is there an attentive part of us always waiting to be called upon?

Does it live in the body, like in the case of professional dancers or athletes? Where, over time, it takes the shape of muscle memory and mental interruptions are the last thing we need. Or does it live in the mind, like that of a scientist or a writer, deep in focus?

Is it in the achievement of the flow-state, where attention just courses through us without any sense of time? Or is it in the attentive preparation and effort that enables the sought-after flow state?

Is it better for attention to be unmediated by technology, like when we stare at the night sky and dream? Or can technology help us see what we couldn’t without, like a telescope that helps us see the contours of the night sky?

Do we create the world with our attention or is what we give attention to defined by the world we live in?

Is attention scarce or do we have enough of it and the struggle is really about where to apply this attention?

Could all of this be true?

“Before our minds create our world, the world creates our minds.” — Gabor Mate,  Hungarian-Canadian physician and author specializing in treatment of addiction

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#69: Setting our Pace

February 18, 2022

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 

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