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#125: Subjective life experiences, and the value of listening

Learnings from momentum, failure, and recovery
(Read the first three in this series here: 1 , 2 and 3)

We may think that the person next to us, going through the same tumble in life at the same time as us, is having the exact same experience of ache as us. The reality is that our experiences can be similar but never exactly the same.

Our experience of ache or joy is unique, even when our day-to-day lives overlap significantly with another and we share deep emotional closeness. This holds true even when loss or reward come knocking at the exact same time for us. That’s because the moment-to-moment experience of a life lived is internal, silent, personal and subjective.

An 80-year old has lived 42 million minutes. We are shaped into unique entities over the course of these millions of moments through the constant interplay of what happens inside us (the me), what happens between us and others (the we) and what happens around us (the environment and context).

We meet the same life experience as different entities, with different histories and different patterns of sensemaking. Sure we can understand each other and empathize but the emotions and thoughts that rattle inside us, and shape-shift at a moment’s notice, carve and re-carve us differently. This is why problem-solving on behalf of another is rarely helpful but full-bodied listening is.

I used to think that listening was a passive act and I needed to come up with a helpful solution to “make their time worth it”. I thought problem-solving showed I cared. I didn’t realize that my solves might not fit them. I now see how good listening is a keystone behavior that exercises so many human virtues in a seemingly simple act.

Good listening, ultimately, is a tool for clear seeing. The listener provides attention with a beginners mind so the speaker can fully articulate. The listener brings non-judgmental curiosity that invites information and trust. The listener asks clarifying questions to gain as complete a picture as possible. The listener doesn’t add their own unnecessary color to the mix, since the goal is to uncover what’s going on inside the speaker. The listener serves as a reflection tool for the speaker so they may see more clearly inside themselves.

When we take turns doing this in the same interaction, it becomes a dialogue. An ideal dialogue is where each participant is in the service of clear seeing so that all perspectives can be understood. The conversation becomes a collective sensemaking tool.

A good conversation teaches us humility, patience, curiosity, and respect. It leaves us changed and is one of the highest uses of shared attention.

I know this is a gold-standard that we can’t always reach, and it feels even more removed from attentionally-deficient and emotionally-supercharged modern lives. But why would we strive for a standard if we don’t understand its full value?

The world each of us carries inside is singular and yet we crave to be known in that singularity, especially during our deepest aches and our highest joys. Offering the gift of listening to one another is the only way we can fulfill this craving to be known and matter. Good conversations leave both the speaker and the listener changed for the better. They are one of the most active things we can do with our attention, and a precursor to human connection.

Final note: We can only achieve something if we practice it consistently. Full-bodied listening is quite like deep abdominal strength. Just how a strong core feeds the integrity of every other physical movement, strong listening skills create integrity in every other psychological movement. And both strengths are developed through attention and repetition.

“Everyone’s music is made of their own life experiences.” ― Ilaiyaraaja: Indian musician, composer, and conductor

#124: Beating up on past self is easy, and unhelpful

Learnings from momentum, failure, and recovery
(Read the first two in this series here and here)

When we fail at something we care about, it’s easy to fall into a blame-vortex. We look for someone to cast doubt on. When this accusatory gaze turns inwards, we invariably blame our past self for messing things up. I certainly did when I failed recently; I blamed my past self from a decade ago. I’m noticing that I frequently do this. I am often frustrated with my past self, for not doing this or that thing when she could have. I constantly chide her for not having her shit together. Sometimes this past self is recent, from the month or week prior.

This time I also examined my current self and current life. The present-day self came across as a work-in-progress and the present-day life, a complex web of things. Always evolving, always in the process of becoming the next iteration, and never fully where I’d like it to be. I’d like to try some things out, and I know I will in the future when the time is right. So if life feels messy now and I’m not ready for some things, it was messy in the past too and I wasn’t ready to give certain things a shot because of valid reasons.

When I try something later in life than I or culture imagine, it’s because that is usually the first point in time I feel resourced enough to attempt this thing; given the unique way my life is unfolding. 

Then why does my mind keep harping about this magical past self? Who does it imagine her to be? There was no magical past self with all her ducks in a row.

With this honest realization, I see my psyche start loosening its grip on my throat and self-compassion flows. The focus shifts from blame to learning from this experience of failure. I scan my present to see what I might be holding back from trying right now, and whether this holding back is actually wise or fear based. With this knowledge, I can build capacity and skill to try what I want to try, and learn from what didn’t come to pass.

The longer I live, the more past selves there are to be frustrated at. But there is no pristine past life and no magical past self to blame. 

“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”— Marcel Proust, French novelist

#123: Moving from habitual internal stories to deliberate metaphors

Learnings from momentum, failure, and recovery
(Read the first one of this series here)

Stories are how we metabolize life situations. When we try to understand why something happened, the first thing that sprouts inside our head is an internal talk track. One internal story layers on top of another and—over time—they crystalize into mental models, or the default lens with which we view the world. Our brains are designed for survival and favor efficiency, so this process of solidifying repetitive thoughts into permanent shorthands is simply what our brains do. That’s how we learn and file away events for future reference.

Sometimes these stories and mental models can be adaptive and make us more resilient, but they can also be maladaptive and create psychological burdens that get in the way of thriving. Either way, all internal stories and mental models are subjective and never the complete picture.

Why habitual internal stories get in the way
It’s hard to know when our mind has become littered with maladaptive stories. We face three big challenges in clear seeing:

  • We don’t realize we have a talk track. Because we’re so used to living with this incessant sound, it camouflages as if it’s a part of our insides.
  • We wholeheartedly believe our stories. They are ever-present inside our head and we mistake this presence as the truth. 
  • Our stories act as psychological balms in our time of loss, so it’s even harder to disassociate from them when we’re in pain.

How metaphors can assist
Metaphors are when we refer to one thing by painting a picture of another. They help us bypass the habitual internal chatter and stories because:

  • Image first, words later. With metaphors, we don’t get lost in words right away. We experience the experience we’re having in that moment and then create a mental image to capture how we feel. Only after we have an image, we use words.
  • Words describe the image and not the event. When we finally use words, we describe the image of our experience and not the potentially charged event we’re dealing with.
  • Nuanced, yet not exhaustive. Metaphors don’t try to slice, dice and explain every little thing. They can help us zoom in or out and extract a key flavor of the situation without getting lost in unhelpful details or spurring rumination. We try to get to the core of “what is” going on inside us. Also, we can be more nuanced with images because sometimes words fail us.
  • The process is deliberate. The metaphorical images we create are deliberate (vs. habitual internal thoughts) and if one metaphor doesn’t resonate, we can adjust it till it does. This process itself offers clarity because we try to accurately see the experience we’re having.

My metaphor during this last round of injury was an ant working at the base of a massive tree, and believing that the world was entirely made of dirt. Through this metaphor I realized that there’s a lot I can’t know and will never know, so my stories and judgments about why I was dealt this blow will always be incomplete. There was comfort in simply letting go of the need to know definitively. Paradoxically, reminding myself of my profound smallness helped me move through this harsh experience faster. 

I know I’ll keep using stories as healing balms to adapt to a new realities. I also know that I’ll keep another eye on the imperfection of those stories, and use deliberate metaphors to hold complexity and nuance, and pierce through my internal chatter.

“Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured.”— B.K.S. Iyengar, Yoga pioneer and teacher

#119: The leaking faucet, unlocked door, and boiling kettle

My bathroom faucet has two knobs, one for hot and another for cold. On a particularly busy day, I rushed out of the bathroom and didn’t turn off one of the knobs fully. I came back later to running water that was more than just a minor trickle. I was disappointed in the waste I had contributed to and surprised by my lack of attention.

Then another day, my husband (Tim) left our primary key fob hanging at the lock on our front door. His hands were full so he left the key in the lock intending to come right back out to grab it. Meanwhile, I locked the door from the inside. We realized what had transpired after a couple of hours. The key fob had all our keys: the house, garage, car and mailbox. This was a big deal because we’ve personally seen an uptick and consistency in petty crime since Covid—stolen mail, packages, garbage cans, and most recently a smashed car window.

This last example is the most recent. We were stepping out for a walk when I felt a nudge to go back inside the house and check the stove. I found one of the burners on at low flame. We had just wrapped up brunch and Tim meant to make a second round of coffee in our moka pot but reduced the flame when he got interrupted. It went unseen by both of us.

After these events I became hyper-aware of turning off faucets and burners after use, and ensuring keys weren’t left hanging on external-facing locks. I was very tuned-in to the potential of harm from each of these scenarios. I knew that countless other random things can happen and do, but the ones I fixated on and learned from were those that happened to me.

I see this tendency in all of us and even for the bigger things in life. I knew a person who had almost drowned in her teens and had been on a life-long journey to overcome her fear of water. Another friend had difficult experiences in foster care and hadn’t seen healthy examples of family life growing up, so she chose to not have kids. Yet another highly competent surgeon friend was publicly brutalized by her boss even during intense surgeries, so she’s working on making medicine more humane for patients and providers. I have repeatedly experienced unexpected and out of turn deaths. This created an outsized fear of losing my loved ones and a heightened awareness of our limited time on earth. My experiences have shaped how I value human relationships and the work I’m choosing to do moving forward by centering relationality in my vocation.

There are countless human experiences and we can’t have them all. We are designed to tune into and learn from our leaky faucets, our unlocked doors and our boiling kettles. Experience is the primary tool for learning and once we embrace our own painful experiences fully, they become gateways to see another more completely. Difficult experiences may not be life’s weapon against us, they might be its most potent growth, connection and empathy tool. 

“Tears water our growth.”— William Shakespeare, playwright and poet

#115: Who we become on the sidelines of conflict

I’m part of many different professional tidepools, each with a group chat on Signal or Whatsapp. The Israel-Gaza conflict has surfaced in these spaces over the past month with layers of aches and perspectives. The personal and collective histories like a messy bundle of electrical wires: inextricably enmeshed and full of charge.

While Israel and Palestine isn’t the land of my ancestors, my elders experienced identity-driven geopolitical conflict alongside the fear, anger, hate and violence it generates. Their forceful expulsion from their birthland is full of stories of slaughter. I was also raised in a beautifully plural society and have experienced the turmoil that sometimes rears its head in true diversity. I’ve seen the nature of individual and collective conversations we have with each other during such times.

Our first step is ususally to share and explain our side. If we are genuinely and fully met in our grief, we feel more secure stepping out further to try and understand the other side. Most conversations get stuck at the first stage because we don’t typically acknowledge another’s pain in public (or private) discourse. We also shy away from acknowledgement because it invites action of some sort; which may be unclear, hard, or even impossible.

So the spaces for shared sense-making—where people bring in their deepest emotion, truest thoughts and questions, with a desire to shape a healthier future—are rare. This shared sense-making is hard enough face to face with people we love and issues we have known about all our lives. It’s even harder in group chats or social media with people and issues we know little about.

Although we all sense that group chats are a choppy tool for perspective sharing and sense making, we have the constraints and tools that we have so we engage. And like most spaces, a few voices step into the circle to share, some with more comfort and assertion than others. Whether we are inside the circle or silent on the periphery, we listen and digest. We learn about human nature and our own nature by coming to terms with our comfort, discomfort and boundaries. We gain a sense of how we like to learn and engage. We create perspectives about ourselves, people groups, and whole cultures. Often without realizing, we veer towards hope, helplessness or cynicism. All these become muscle memory.

Then one day down the line, even if we stand quietly in this conversation, we will step inside some other circle and share our thoughts. We might do this with nuance or binaries, with an attitude of sensing or ripping apart another’s perspective. One thing is for sure, how we behave when we enter that circle in the future will be guided by who we are becoming while on the sidelines today.

“At our best, we serve as inadvertent triggers for each other’s eventual illumination.”— Mark Nepo, Poet

PS: This is a good one about not having a hot take on everything, which forces us to have a definitive stance on issues when first a posture of learning and inquiry is better suited— Pick a Side. Pick a Side. Pick a Side. Now.