Working Meditation

Observations on Human Connection & Contribution

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#70: Thresholds and pauses

There seem to be two ways of orienting to any new task. The first way is to jump in head-first without a pause and the second is to pause and understand the structure of the task, and our role and skills in relation to it. The pause-less action may be because of well-earned confidence or lack of awareness. If we take a pause, it may be short or long, noticeable or invisible even to us.

Like everyone else I’ve followed both approaches at different times but I’ve never really reflected on this because my approach to a task wasn’t the noteworthy part, the task was. I’ve recently experienced the comfort of doing something hard without thinking much and the discomfort of feeling unprepared and stuck mid-task. I’ve had to perch above my shoulders as I worked to observe what I was doing and what needed to change. I’ve had to pause and reflect on whether I had the tools, skills, information, context and mindset that I needed.

How do we know that a pause is in order and how can we make this process instinctive without overthinking? Two tell-tales have been helpful to me:

  1. Is the next task sufficiently different from what I’m doing or anything I’ve ever done? In other words, am I crossing a threshold? 
  2. Am I stuck spinning my wheels?

“People who wonder whether the glass is half empty or half full miss the point. The glass is refillable.”— Simon Sinek, author

#69: Setting our Pace

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 

#68: Room for doubt

There are times where even a hint of doubt is undesirable. For example, high-stakes situations with immediate consequences; like landing an aircraft or performing life-saving surgery. For a lot of other things however we carry more doubt than we show and we tend to hide it even from ourselves. Maybe because action requires certainty and commitment to follow through and we fear if we dwell too long in doubt, we’ll melt our resolve to act. But suppressing doubt doesn’t nullify it. We carry uncertainty, hesitation and indecision perpetually.

A particularly poignant example for me is Mother Teresa, who continued in her good works despite a 50-year crisis of faith. She says in one of her letters to her spiritual advisor – “When I try to raise my thoughts to heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. I am told God loves me, and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great, nothing touches my soul.” This is was written in the 1940s, relatively early in her work and roughly 30 years before her Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. These doubts never abated but she didn’t abandon her belief or her work.

It’s a difficult place to operate from…when something speaks to us intrinsically enough that we commit to it but know on some level that we know little and will never know the full picture. Parenting, faith, and entrepreneurship are some common examples but the biggest example is the human life itself. Most of our discomfort is tied to the existential questions. Can any of us say with 100% certainty, without any doubt why we are here, what the purpose of a human life is, and what happens after we die? We fill in the blanks with high-judgment estimates and go about focusing on our daily life and goals. We let the act of living guide and consume us enough to create a sense of certainty in aspects: “I don’t know what happens after but know I was made for this work”. “The only thing I’m certain of is that I love my kids”. “Math has always made sense to me”. “I feel at home when I play the piano”. And so on. Micro doses of certainty on the macro path of unknown. Moments of clarity interwoven with moments of doubt, fear and loss. 

My evolving theory on doubt is this:

  1. The clearest indicator of what we should pursue and how we should live is a faint and sometimes hard to hear signal that we carry somewhere inside. Even though we carry it within, it comes across only when we silence the noise of daily pursuits, and listen without judgment. Because we may resist what we hear.
  2. We have to act despite doubt. The action doesn’t need to be big or all at once.
  3. A shared space with other people doing similar work is a huge boost, especially if we aren’t comfortable with what we’re being called to do. If this space or collective doesn’t exist, we need to create it.

#3 is perhaps the most important part in working alongside doubt. It ensures that in difficult moments, we have the wisdom of others doing  their own but similar work. That we have a safe space to air doubt, gain perspective and courage to keep going. It’s important that they understand this specific practice we have chosen. Its nuance, its promise, its fear, its draw and terror, the joy of having taken this path and the ache of having given up other options. If we want to keep going, it’s important we create a space that helps us recommit when we stumble. 

“It’s not necessary to be a saint to do good. You need willing hands, not clean ones. If we wait for our souls to be totally clean, our time on Earth may slip away.”― Mother Teresa: Roman Catholic nun

#63: Work as craft

We tend to think of creative work as a craft. Something that requires focus, genuine care, patience and practice, which eventually turn to skill. We respect and prize this level of commitment. Yet most of us likely hesitate from referencing our own work as craft. We may shy away for a litany of valid reasons― seems like a lofty ideal that might attract eye-rolls, others may think we’re posturing, our work environment is so transactional that it laughs in the face of such care, we had this attitude once but circumstances have beaten it out of us, we never got the chance to practice our work like it mattered. Our reasons will come in many flavors and feel relatable to others. We might also note that most of these reasons have an external orientation, where we look to others for definition.

What if, rather than making external proclamations, we change our internal orientation and start thinking of our work as craft regardless of external incentives. What if we defined our work in terms that are personally meaningful to us? Then, what if we commit only to ourselves to show up everyday with that internal rudder?

Would we color outside the expected lines to come up with novel solutions, stick with a hard task despite hurdles, commit to something without needing external nudges? Would we be able to think beyond our self-interest? Would we show up not only with an open mind, and open heart but also an open will*? Essentially, would we do the creative work of inviting in a future we truly want for ourselves and others?

This level of silently powerful presence in our work requires a recurring choice. It’s easier to make this choice after we allow ourselves to see our own work as craft.

P.S.: The idea of job crafting is another practical way to go about shaping our work. Harvard Business Review offers a few pithy articles on this idea. Here are a couple:

*Credit: Otto Scharmer and Theory U

“When you stop downloading, you realize that you actually have a choice — a choice in how you respond to any situation. You can respond by turning away, or by turning toward. Turning away means closing your mind, heart, and will — in other words, acting from ignorance, hate, and fear. Turning toward means opening your mind, heart, and will — acting from curiosity, compassion, and courage. These are the choices we face in any moment: Do we turn away and close down, or do we turn toward and open up, activating the deeper levels of our humanity?” (Read full text here) ― Otto Scharmer, Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management and co-founder of the Presencing Institute. 

#60: Pauses and cycles

In addition to filters, pauses and cycles are two other concepts that bubble up for me when I start digging my wells. The notion of a pause within a recurring cycle appears repeatedly across cultural, philosophical and faith traditions. We are guided to pause and reflect for a few minutes every day, for a day every week, for a week in a season and for a month in a year; and the smaller pauses seem to nest into the larger ones, creating a throughline of intention and focus.

For instance:

  • Daily: The value of daily meditation or prayer appears across traditions and is present even in non-religious practices like Stoicism where we’re guided to bookend our days with morning and evening journaling and reflection.
  • Weekly: The concept of resting fully, reflecting  and disconnecting from work at least one day a week appears across all faiths and is made familiar to many of us in western culture through the portrayals of Jewish Sabbath.
  • Seasonally: Most societies have seasonal celebrations that remind us that there a time to plant, a time to nurture, a time to reap and a time to rest. The Indian calendar is peppered with festivals that remind us to tune into and work with the changing seasons.
  • Annually: And finally, Ramadan and Lent are the more prominent examples of the annual pauses we take.

Even if we bypass the faith-based traditions momentarily, there is increasing evidence that working with our circadian rhythms to create cycles of activity and rest is more efficient than trying to brute-force productivity. Ayurveda, one the world’s oldest holistic healing systems, offers in-depth guidance for the 24-hour circadian cycle and seasonal living (called Dinacharya and Ritucharya respectively) as cornerstones of preventive health care.

Our life is a hugely psychological and solitary journey where we manage powerful desires, dislikes, judgments and stories on a daily basis. Technically, we are also animals and have instincts that ask for speedy reactions to every event in our lives. But what seems to differentiate us from other animals is the awareness of our awareness. Recurring pauses in our schedules reduce our reactionary tendencies and train us to live in that meta-awareness so we are more thoughtful as we go about living our lives and digging our wells.

Pauses help us regenerate, refocus, and recommit to what’s here with enthusiasm and energy. Over the longer term, pauses, solitude and temporary retreats can also help us become more uniquely us by becoming less comparative, less competitive, and less fearful.

“Human beings left to their own devices—a very rare event—seem to work according to the quality of a given season and learn similarly in cycles. Good work and good education are achieved by visitation and then absence, appearance, and disappearance. Most people who exhibit a mastery in a work or a subject have often left it completely for a long period in their lives only to return for another look. Constant busyness has no absence in it, no openness to the arrival of any new season, no birdsong at the start of its day. Constant learning is counterproductive and makes both ourselves and the subject stale and uninteresting.” ― David Whyte, Poet