Working Meditation

Observations on Human Connection & Contribution

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#97: Compounding effects of innovation

Techno-social optimists tell us that humanity is in a good place. We hear that our innovations have reduced human mortality, increased quality if life across the globe, increased our ability to feed the growing world population and so on. All of this is true.

And we can have multiple things be true at the same time.

Yes, we don’t hear of houses burning down or people dying because their couch caught fire. But we hear of people getting sick because of environmental contaminants, including toxic flame retardants on their couch, their car seat and pretty much every piece of furniture they sit on. Each piece has toxins way beneath any risk threshold. But combined, each exposure builds up enough toxins in our bloodstreams that we can pass them along to our unborn children.

Yes, we live in more comfortable homes and can afford more groceries and consumer goods compared to our ancestors. But we have to own a car to bring home that massive cart of groceries because the grocer is 20 minutes away. We can’t just walk to a store and carry that weight home. Over time, we lose muscle mass and joint health from under utilizing our body such that when our cities start becoming green, most of us don’t feel comfortable just hopping on a bike.

Yes, we can talk to our loved ones on video across the globe every night. We can exchange what’s happening in our lives, give long distance hugs and kisses and never feel disconnected. But the same piece of tech we use to engage with them also has news, entertainment, messages awaiting our attention and endless notifications. After a heated conversation, it’s so much easier to hang up and tune out rather than sit in discomfort and learning.

Yes, our farm equipment, irrigation and bioengineered seeds ensure we don’t starve. But we also have large-scale diversion of freshwater, depleting aquifers and river systems. We have excessive synthetic fertilizer runoff into the soil, water, air, and rainfall. We get toxic algae blooms in lakes, oxygen depletion and “dead zones” within bodies of water, where nothing can survive.

I believe people working at these diverse companies don’t wake up with dreams of harming the planet. But our innovation processes are typically siloed and growth-driven. Isolated innovation makes us move incredibly fast. We aren’t weighed down by anything and can keep experimenting, iterating and launching. One impactful product launch after another, in the service of humanity. But we can still come away with long-term negative impacts that are hard to clean up and reverse.

Our current framework for innovation asks us to zoom in, iterate, speed up, and think in fast approaching time increments. What would happen if we innovated by zooming out, by slowing down, by thinking of a future seven generations down, when we’re not even alive. I can’t help but get optimistic about the compounding effect of a more integrated approach to innovation.

“There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair.”― Donella Meadows, environmental scientist, systems thinker, educator, and writer

#90: The discomfort of evolving

Most of us were raised within social structures that nudged us to make a living as an adult. We were told to aim for income in exchange for our talents and skills. To what degree we got to cultivate and use what was innately joyful varied on circumstances. Regardless, the questions of survival remained in the air through our teens and twenties…how will you land on your feet, how will you sustain yourself? We learned that the ideal trajectory was:  Brand name schools followed by brand name companies that, over time, lead to brand name clothing, cars, gadgets, travel and residential addresses. The hope was to work a few decades, build bigger moats of safety and bridges of access that we could pass on to our kids, if we had them. We wanted to pass along a better starting point in life so they didn’t have to start where we did, i.e. on the bottom of this safety, success and happiness mountain. We named this climb “increasing standards of living” and designed our organizations, schools and families around it. Everyone climbed their individual climb.

Then came the trickle of warnings from scientists, academics, and community leaders. They raised alarms about the unsustainability of our structures. They said that our collective climbs were over-extracting from the environment then dumping toxic refuse into it. The warnings felt distant to most of us compared to our everyday safety, so we didn’t really see or hear. Those that heard and tried to tell us more were considered activists. They lived on the fringes of our valued social structures, were typically intense people, and made us uncomfortable. They were hard to handle in heavy doses. They made choices and tradeoffs we needn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t.

The discomfort of current times is that those alarms aren’t distant anymore. The people raising them aren’t fringe to our lives anymore. They are our friends, neighbors and coworkers. They initially succeeded within the current structures but heard the warnings and started making the uncomfortable choices and tradeoffs. They too see that multi-layered extraction, depletion and pollution cycle. They see it impacting not only the environment but their own psyche and that of people they encounter daily. They see that we are depleting both the mountain and the climber. And that if we keep going at this rate, there won’t be any mountain left to climb or any climbers that give a shit about each other*.

They are asking the same question that was in the air in our teens and twenties; except this time, they want to play a different (infinite) game. They are asking if we can all make a living without crippling the planet and the people that inhabit it. They are silently around us, trying to build a bridge to the new, not just for themselves but for everyone’s kids too. Please listen with empathy when they speak and try to formulate their sometimes-broken thoughts. Don’t jump in to defend the current structure. They are not attacking us, our lifestyle, or choices. Like us, they carry fears of survival and alienation. Yet, they are taking on the discomfort of helping us evolve into the new. Before the current structure crumbles and takes us all with it.

*Two examples of extraction and not giving a shit from just this week, and I didn’t even go looking:
  – Over 1,700 environment activists killed in decade
  – China’s 24/7 fishing operations are depleting fish stocks off the Galápagos Islands

“Let me fall if I must fall.
The one I am becoming
will catch me.”—Baal Shem Tov, Jewish mystic and healer

#89: Beginner’s mind (forced)

I randomly tuned-in to the US open tennis tournament while at the gym. Not having followed tennis closely for a few years, these players were new to me so I didn’t know their styles and strengths. I wasn’t connected to the audio so could only see the score and the body language. I had chanced upon the tail end of the match; the final set and match point. The player in the lead was leading by a lot and had to take her match point serve. She kept starting the serve but not taking it. She would toss the ball but then decide to let it drop to the ground instead of hitting it. She did this several times, enough for me to pause and notice. She looked calm, she was ahead, she looked very strong, she could win the match in under 60-seconds. What was hard in that moment? And then I realized: she has the weight of expectations on her. I thought, wouldn’t it be great if she could erase any internal chatter and noisy history and just serve with a beginner’s mind? Shortly thereafter, she served, she won. This match was over and the screen moved to another match. 

While this was happening, a story was unfolding closer to me on my elliptical machine. While I was watching, my run was picking speed. I was starting to break sweat, feeling fluid in my body after having taken a break. I glanced at the speed and distance to see if I was actually building stamina again and then the machine stopped. I was distracted by the match and had pressed the wrong button. I had done about 10 minutes, so not my full planned time. “No problem” I thought and started again with a clean slate. I tuned in to the body, checked for alignment and pain. My body felt good after a long time. Then I tuned-in again to speed and distance. Distractedly, I hit the same button after another 10 minutes or so and the machine stopped. I lost track of my speed and distance once again. This time I noticed…what I wished for that player, I was getting in a very forced way. I was getting unplanned fresh starts. I kept having to let go of my agenda and tune in repeatedly to the here and now, to my beginner’s mind. By the third set, I had stopped monitoring speed or distance as a gauge of my health. I was just feeling the increased stamina in my body compared to the last few times when I felt absolutely sluggish. In the first set, I was having my own micro moment of success and perhaps the pressure to outdo my past self. But the unplanned pauses and erasure forced me into a beginner’s mind repeatedly. I had no clue about my distance or speed, I just got to savor my strength that day.

Practicing beginner’s mind might be the most pragmatic way to experience the full-bodied potential and delight of our endeavors. The measurements and markers, while helpful, then become secondary. When we lead with the markers, we behave like brains on a stick and often exit the visceral experience of being alive. I know beginner’s mind is easier said than done…but it’s easier done after repeated practice.

“But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” ― Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford commencement address

#87: The actual distance

If we zoom out enough on any interactive map, the cities of Seattle and Portland seem to merge. The ~180-mile, multi-hour driving distance gets erased. Someone planning a visit solely from the zoomed out view of a map might think they can cover key West Coast hubs from Vancouver, British Columbia all the way down to San Diego, California quickly. They might dream of popping in and out of Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles along the way to get a feel. But of course, no one really does that. We know a trip like that would require more planning, time and resources. We know this because we have experienced the reality of navigating our own cities and countries, with their roads and delays. If we’ve left home base to explore, we’ve likely experienced upset stomachs from novel food sources, we know that the same piece of luggage can feel heavier as the days go by, we get the strain of finding and relying on an unknown doctor or mechanic mid-travel. In short, we understand the physical, mental and emotional fatigue that accompanies any significant exploration.

But we seem to forget this wisdom while planning explorations related to daily life. In imagination mode, our mind seamlessly zooms out to dreamily plan our days with vibrant work and social life. On a bright and sunny Saturday morning, after we are well rested, it can daydream that we’ll go from epiphany to functioning business in a couple of years. That from here on, we’ll wake up fresh and early everyday. That we’ll have energy to meditate and move in the morning, then give our utmost focus to work, and have energy left over in the evening for family and friends. We might even imagine everyone around the table sharing a lovely meal with laughter. In those moments, the mind is doing what interactive maps do. It zooms out to see the highlights but doesn’t factor in the actual lived-distance between them. It doesn’t see us getting offroaded by home maintenance, echos of grief, unexplained allergic reactions or a sick child. It doesn’t factor in those happy faces needing our support or that meal needing our effort.

It’s a silently harsh experience to fail ourselves because our dreams took longer than imagined to manifest. When in our life’s geography, the highlights aren’t happening so close together one after another. Our daydreams should come with a caution like some maps do: “This map is not to scale”.


“If you can dream — and not make dreams your master
If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same”― If by Rudyard Kipling: writer, poet and journalist

#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