Working Meditation

Observations from a life in motion

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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

#95: The timing and sequence of experiences

Life experiences shape us, and some leave us drastically altered. We all know this. There is a layer to this equation though that isn’t always visible ― it’s the timing of those experiences and the sequence in which we experience them.

For instance, two 35-year-olds may have both experienced the loss of a parent, the emotional high of a plum job and accompanying financial rewards, parenthood, and job loss but the age and order in which those events occurred will shape them differently. For simplicity, let’s say the rest of their lives, lifestyles, and influences have mostly been similar. Now imagine if one of them lost a parent at 8, became a parent at 25, lost a job right after at 26 and finally got that plum job at 35 after years of struggle. Let’s imagine the other getting that high-paid job right out of college at 22, becoming a parent at 27, losing a parent at 32 and their job at 35.

We can picture how the first person might have been impacted by that early loss of a parent and job loss shortly after new parenthood. When they finally get the financial safety and career success at 35, they’ve likely experienced years of emotional and financial vulnerability. For the latter, we can picture the stability that a complete family and early financial success created such that they were likely better resourced to navigate loss when it eventually came. These examples are of course hypotheticals and our individual stories play out in larger contexts of other lives lived. For instance, if the former had a large and loving extended family, the shock of early loss was likely buffered in some way. If they had a caring partner that was also financially stable, they probably didn’t feel the zing of that job loss as acutely.

There are many other unexamined nuances here so I’m oversimplifying the larger scenario to make this one point ― Who we are is not only determined by what we go through but when we go through it. Because where we are in our lifecycle when we meet different life experiences shapes our experience of those events. The same things land differently at different points in our lives.

“Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.” ― Nathaniel Hawthorne, American Novelist

#93: Ecosystem awareness

Let’s start with an experiment. You can select any body part of your choosing; I’ll use the right foot as an example.

So, pay attention to your right foot. Really tune into it and wiggle it if you can. Slowly move it around to feel into the bones and muscles. Is there tightness, fluidity, achiness, a combination of these, or something else? Close your eyes now and continue to do this for 5 breaths. Really. Try it please and then move forward to the next sentence.

Now one question: When you were doing this, were you aware of your knee? Likely not, if your knee is pain free. This exercise is not about your body. It’s a simple way to note that when we become hyper-focused on one thing, we naturally lose awarenss of other things. It’s practically impossible to pay high quality attention to everything all at once. Working-caregivers know this struggle well. We can toggle attention from one thing to the next, but it’s hard to pay attention to everything all at once.

Yet, complex problem solving requires us to be aware of inter-related parts. It needs an ecosystem awareness. Some everyday examples of ecosystem awareness from my world:

  • My husband was replacing the faucet in our clawfoot tub. Mid-way he realized that his movements yanked the pipe connecting the faucet with the shower head, which yanked the curtain rod encircling the tub, which yanked the wall anchor that the curtain rod was tied to. His movement at the faucet split the wall anchor.
  • Years ago, I was cutting my nails while sitting on the balcony at my home in India. Upon seeing me, my Mom requested I do this in the bathroom sink because she didn’t want the sparrows to eat and choke on my sharp nail clippings.
  • When we moved into our new home in Seattle, I did the “Graha Pravesh Puja”. This prayer ceremony is done to bless a new home. I had never personally done this before and was blown away by the sense of connectedness embedded in this prayer. It wasn’t only to request blessings for us, it was also to thank every entity that made space for us in their ecosystem — the insects, animals and plants. I was also reminded to thank the humans that built this home in 1906 and those that took care of it over the decades.

Ecosystems consist of organisms (or parts), their interactions and relationships, and the environments in which they interact. They are relational by definition and interconnected in complex ways. We all live in ecosystems that both impact us and are impacted by us. But it can be overwhelming to understand a system if we keep widening our lens endlessly. So we zoom out and define boundaries to know which pieces of the system we need to focus on for now. This allows us to see the key parts and grasp how they relate to each other.

Without some boundary, our attention doesn’t know where the container ends. Boundaries are a way to invite-in focus and remove overwhelm. But they are often arbitrary and defined by our limited perspectives. At some point in the process, we may be well-served by redefining or even erasing boundaries. Because our ecosystems and their interconnections never end.

“The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those that have not viewed the world.” — Alexander von Humboldt: German geographer, naturalist and explorer

#92: Action after awe

We’ve all experienced awe at some point in life. It’s the feeling of wonder when we’re in the presence of something that alters our understanding of the world. It’s often an encounter with vastness that snaps us out of our small realities. Some awe-inducers include: endless stars in the night sky, majestic redwood forests, birth of a child, the overview effect astronauts experience upon seeing our fragile earth from space, hearing an accomplished musician live, being in the presence of a wildly respected human, or learning about say the theory of relativity*.

This fascinating research on awe mentions that all forms of awe are characterized by two phenomena: “perceived vastness” and a “need for accommodation”. “Perceived vastness” comes from encounters with something or someone that is vast or profound, or from observing something physically large. Since this vastness often violates our normal understanding of the world, awe-experiences evoke a “need for accommodation”. This means that this state lends itself to modifying the mental constructs that we implicitly use to make sense of the world and act in it.

Here’s a perfect summary, verbatim from the awe-researchers —“This need for cognitive realignment is an essential part of the awe experience. Awe is also accompanied by feelings of self-diminishment and increased connectedness with other people. Experiencing awe often puts people in a self-transcendent state where they focus less on themselves and feel more a part of a larger whole. In this way, awe can be considered an altered state of consciousness, akin to a flow state, in addition to an emotional state.”

So now that we know this, think back to your last encounter with awe: What did you do after that memorable camping trip in the great outdoors? What action did you take after absorbing ancient wisdom from that wise sage? How did you cultivate the awareness that your local symphony orchestra unlocked? What did you do after hearing that brilliant and engaging professor speak? How long did the heart-opening after the birth of your child last? 

There is power in awe but there is forgetfulness in life. We can feel dwarfed and tap into wonder in the presence of the vast night sky, ancient wisdom, music, deep intellect or a tiny human. But what we do after feeling joyfully speechless is the key to creating the world we want to live in. We are taught discontent at every turn but awe drops us squarely in the middle of gratitude and human-connectedness.

Awe is a profound gift in our short-term focused and often fear-driven lives. But it’s only a gift if we channel this fleeting awareness back into our thoughts and actions somehow. The ultimate promise and value of awe is full-bodied, openhearted presence and action…we can’t stay stuck in awe. 

“However many holy words you read,
However many you speak,
What good will they do you
If you do not act on upon them?”— Buddha

*In case you’re interested – Albert Einstein, in his theory of relativity, found that space and time were interwoven into a single continuum known as space-time. And events that occur at the same time for one observer could occur at different times for another.

#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