Working Meditation

Observations on Human Connection & Contribution

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#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

#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

#82: Nested commitments

Recall a time when you really wanted to start doing something. Maybe workout a certain number of days a week, learn to ride a bike as an adult, experiment with building a robot, or see friends more consistently. There would have likely been a moment of intense and condensed emotion that helped you imagine and ache for the new normal. Then, if you followed up this imagination with action, you might have encountered initial roadblocks. It’s likely that the imagination was still strong enough to help you summon willpower and bust through a few initial bumps. Hope was still strong and you powered through and did well; maybe for even a few months. Results came but so did more twists and turns on the path. You had a baby, busted your knee, a loved one passed leaving you shattered and scared, and you had little energy to give to this thing you still crave from deep within. Life happened and it feels like you took a few steps back and are now seemingly exactly where you started.

Then you come back to the practice after the break but this time your desire is less acute, more chronic. It’s transitioned from soft youthful hope to a more subtle, less shiny but a deeper-felt hardened goal. Brute willpower won’t cut it anymore because you’ve seen how things out of your control can easily keep interfering. As if imagination and hope held your hand early on in the path but their arms aren’t long enough and as you walk further and further, their fingers slip from your hands. This is when you let go of imaginary perfection and summon adaptation. You ease your clutch on over-monitoring against a set plan and develop a radar for in-moment adjustments. The practice now seems to have a cycle, a going and coming, a breath-like timbre. It’s not actually one foot in front of the other, more like one hop to the side, one step diagonally. Enough of these steps, jumps and hops and you meet another ally called self-compassion, who reminds you to ease your grip on the dream and let joy and ease flow as you get to do this thing you value.

The commitment to begin comes from imagination, the commitment to push through from willpower, but the commitment to stay on the path comes from adaptation and self-compassion.

“The only journey is the one within.”― Rainer Maria Rilke, poet and novelist

#78: Think global and act local vs. the reverse

I’ve often heard people say “think global, act local” and while the phrase made sense, I never really paused to think about its downstream impact until recently. As a thought experiment, I wondered what would happen if we “think local, act global”. I didn’t have to think very hard to realize that colonialism, the global spread of silicon valley mindset (chasing unicorns, quick-builds and fast-exits), and performative social media interactions are all examples of thinking local and acting global.

Thinking local and acting global makes it easier to lean into our self-protective tendencies. Easier to accumulate more and more material safety for our immediate habitat at the expense of the others that we may not (or may not want to) see. The impact of our actions becomes distant and invisible. We especially don’t stick around to see the long-term effects. It becomes easier to do and harder to feel. Our actions, emotions and impact become siloed.

When we do the opposite to think global and act local,  we instinctively lean into the following behaviors: An awareness that humanity is interconnected in unbreakable ways, and a sense of agency over actions and outcomes in our local habitat. When combined, these ways of operating strengthen our empathy and sense of ownership.

Thinking global and acting local, we may initiate and experiment with small scale localized actions to see what works. We may feel inspired to share learnings with others who are better positioned to add value to their own habitats. Our local becomes an incubator for the global.  We gain the capacity to contribute not only to our own context, but also to our collective intelligence so others may be able to support their local contexts. An apt metaphor might be everyone adding logs to the collective fire for shared warmth. It becomes easier to not only do but also to feel. Community organizing and our approach for Polio and Covid vaccinations are examples of thinking global and acting local.

Which version of our world feels better to live in? How will we choose to think and act?

“To become a different kind of person is to experience the world in a different way. When your mind changes, the world changes. And when we respond differently to the world, the world responds differently to us.” ― David Loy: Professor, writer, and Zen teacher

#74: Why do we create what we create? Answer: silent values and incentives

Billions of diverse people live, work and intermingle on the planet like never before. All of this coexists, mostly with grace and without imploding, because of the useful and powerful systems we’ve created to orient our thinking and actions. Two overarching ones being the economic and political systems that determine which ideas we accept without question and which are open to debate and molding. I’ll focus on the economic system here because that is what answers the question above, i.e. why do we create what we create?

By create, I mean both the “what” (the output) and the “how”, which includes countless actions at every step of the creation value chain. Actions that accumulate to create our work culture, then spill out into our lives and societies. The “how” also includes unforeseen byproducts of our economic activity.

Simply put, our economic system is the way we make choices about how to use resources to produce and distribute goods and services. Below are some economic fundamentals to reorient ourselves.

The economic system asks 3 questions:

  1. What to produce
  2. How to produce it
  3. Who gets the benefit

There are 3 main components that flow through it:

  1. Flows of materials
  2. Flows of energy
  3. Flows of information (particularly money)

There are two sides to the system:

  1. Producers that are also providers of capital. We call them firms.
  2. Consumers that are also providers of labor. We call them households.

Money flows between the two sides in the form of wages, that are used to buy goods and that money flows back to the producers as income.

We also have support infrastructures:

  1. Government, which levy taxes and provide regulation, public goods and services.
  2. Banks, which supply capital. They also help convert savings into investment as capital back into the economy.

All this appears in Economics 101 classes as baseline; indisputable facts and foundational concepts upon which all further understanding rests. What’s never clearly stated though are the assumptions underlying this framework.

Some of these assumptions:

  • There is scarcity. We have unlimited wants but limited resources, so we need to make choices in what we produce, how we produce and who gets the benefit.
  • The free market system sorts everything out. The supply and demand curves intersect at a point of equilibrium and those that are willing and able to pay the price of a product or service will do so.
  • Households are consumers.

Our current economic system has elevated our lives in endless ways through an abundance of ideas, services and products. Most of us have better chances of access to these things compared to our ancestors. But we’ve paid dearly for these assumptions that don’t just underpin the economic system, they now underpin how we operate as individuals and societies.

Assumptions drive actions: 

  • Scarcity and competition. When we think everything is scarce and we have to compete to survive, what kind of companies and societies will we create? Will it be easy for us to think long-term as stewards of the environment and people or might it be easier to extract, create, sell and move on?
  • Free market is the engine of economic growth and regulation gets in the way. Combine free market with a scarcity-driven competitive mindset and what will we get? Will we orient ourselves towards meaningful long-term contribution for everyone’s wellbeing or towards the largest short-term gains possible?
  • The purpose of households is to provide consumers and labor. Households are the building blocks of society. They drive our individual and communal wellbeing. They support all the work and innovation under the sun. The nourishment we get at home propels our work and stands between us and burnout and yet, it’s rarely respected and celebrated at work as a driver of impact.
  • Communities can’t take care of their commons. So we privatize and extract every inch of our commons physical and attentional commons leaving no space for calm and unmonetized interactions.

Are we then surprised when:

  • We create a transactional relationship with the environment: Our businesses create flashy and new goods that become defunct only after a couple of years and go into landfills. The repair shops of past are nowhere to be found and it’s cheaper to replace electronics, furniture, shoes and clothes than trying to fix them.
  • We consume more than we need: We live in massive houses with massive refrigerators to accommodate the massive sized food items that we can’t easily carry on a walk home from the store, and we have to get in the massive car (atleast in the United States) to burn gas.
  • We get trapped by efficiency: It’s easier to expend little effort and efficiently “connect” on social media vs. getting to know our neighbors. Easier to buy cheaper on Amazon than support the local main street.
  • We cover every piece of our public commons in advertising: Leaving no space to decompress physically, mentally and emotionally.

We say the free market is neutral and value-free. Every system we’ve created is initially framed and then executed by humans. People whose thinking has been shaped by social, cultural, historic and moral contexts and it’s very hard to transcend these. Being practical, efficient or profit-driven are values.

No rational endeavor is ever without values.  And what we value and deem worthy, we incentivize. Our economic systems have values and incentives embedded in them and these define not just what and how we create, they silently define what we aspire to.

“If we haven’t specified where we want to go, it is hard to set our compass, to muster enthusiasm, or to measure progress. But vision is not only missing almost entirely from policy discussions; it is missing from our culture. We talk easily and endlessly about our frustrations, doubts, and complaints, but we speak only rarely, and sometimes with embarrassment, about our dreams and values.” ― Donella Meadows: environmental scientist, educator, and writer.