Working Meditation

Observations on Human Connection & Contribution

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#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

#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

#79: Organic signals and the paradox of overengineering

I drink plenty of water because I naturally crave it. I often wonder after a refreshing drink whether plants feel the same way after getting watered: nourished from within. And then I wonder why, despite my affinity for water, I too sometimes fall into a pattern of forgetting and getting dehydrated.

I read somewhere that we can mix up our thirst and hunger signals. When I first read this, I thought “hum, interesting, that’s never happened to me”. But now that I’m cultivating a capacity to observe, I see it happens quite frequently. The common thread in these moments is that I’ve lost my connection to thirst signals because of busyness or distraction (likely missed or overrode initial signals). When I haven’t had adequate water in several days, it feels harder and harder to trace my way back to that faint signal. Then drinking water becomes a task; another thing to track and remember, and not something I do naturally.

I notice parallels with a number of other habits including meditation, writing, movement, sleep, and human connection…essentially anything that feels lifegiving. When I lose that organic signal from within because of modernity’s squeeze, there is pressure to start tracking the when, the how and, the how much. There is pressure to engineer the optimal routine. But once designed, it all backfires. Rather than following that engineered routine, part of me stops wanting to do something that comes so naturally to me.

There seems to be an experiential difference between leaning into the organic nurture of a practice and over-monitoring it for output. For me atleast, one seems to release the creative expansion of the practice and the other somehow robs it. One makes the habit magnetic and the other a bit repellant. It feels as if my psyche is saying: “Give me the tools to make healthful choices, but set me free to interact in those lifegiving pockets without a script.”

I want to build evolving gardens and not static skyscrapers.

“When I refer to ‘creative living,’ I am speaking more broadly. I’m talking about living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, journalist and author

#77: Sustainable is inherently relational

Transaction: An exchange or an interaction between two or more things or entities. It’s a communicative action involving two or more units that reciprocally affect or influence each other.
Examples: Paying back a friend who covered our dinner when we were short on cash, scheduling a meeting on someone’s calendar and them accepting, saying hello to a neighbor and getting a smile in return, negotiating a business deal.
1. Transaction has a broader definition than simply buying and selling. Our lives are dominated by convenient acts of buying and selling, appropriately called transactions, so we may forget that these acts represent a subset of the exchanges humans conduct daily. Transaction is an exchange, an interaction. We transact not only as consumers but also as friends, parents and collaborators. 
2. Transactions require trust. Throughout human history, we transacted with those that we had (varying degrees of) relationships with. Transactions were simply one part or the last mile, so to speak, of an ongoing engagement.
3. It’s only in the recent past that we’ve been able to transact “facelessly” with another. As more and more of the world opens up to us (more people, more internet-enabled tools, more geographies), we’ve leaned into the comfort of anonymity, distance, and low commitment. We exchange ideas, conversations and goods without any of the relational tethering that transactions and exchanges were historically built upon.

Relation: An existing connection or a significant association between two or more entities or objects.
Relational: The way in which these entities or objects are connected. Anything that is connected will have a cause and effect relationship. Push or pull on one object and you’ll create a reverberation within other related objects.
Examples: Collection of related data in a database; relationship between fertilizer, soil, and plant; our relationships with family, friends, colleagues and neighbors.
4. In every transaction, we look for markers of trust while interacting. Reviews, photos, fidelity of those reviews, public upvotes etc. Even when our tools our designed for the last mile of the engagement, i.e. the transactional part, we look for markers that are typically revealed over the course of a relationship.
5. Our businesses, tools and even societies are mostly designed for the last mile transaction, not the upstream relationship. Our workplaces, healthcare systems, communal areas, shopping, dating, communications – everything – is geared for convenience and efficiency so we can cram in even more transactions into our lives. Be productive, do more, be more. 
6. We thrive when transactions nest within a genuine relationship. We crave to know another and to be known by them, to offer our best and be valued for it. This is only possible if we shift our paradigm from seeing people and places as a means to an end to valuing connection as a fundamental end in itself.

Sustainable: Being able to maintain something at a certain rate or level over a period of time. Sustainable implies continuity for a long period of time.
7. Continued thriving in the long-term (i.e. the definition of sustainable), is possible only if we create relational societies, products, services, and mindsets. We can’t sustain joy, contentment and hope by endlessly taking and moving on. An overly transactional life weighs on our psyche. Thriving depends on nesting transactions back under their larger relational contexts, it depends on expanding our perspective to see human and environmental interconnectedness. In the absence of this, it’s easy to keep harming and depleting ourselves and our commons.

The gold-standard in business is to make our lives frictionless, so we can fit even more transactional handshakes in our cramped life, displacing the time we need to create relationships. So we get more and more seamless handshakes with more and more faceless and bodiless entities. Neighbors, coworkers, friends, all reduced to profile pictures, interests and demographic markers to ease the transaction. What nurtures us for the long-haul are the acts of being in relationship, not the endless transactions. We forget that we crave not just the hand but the whole body.  

“I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I will give myself to it.”  ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Austrian poet and novelist.

#67: Thriving alongside cobwebs

Simply being alive creates mental impressions. There is no way around it. What so and so said or did that was loving or hurtful. What we did, didn’t do, or couldn’t do. And the longer we live, the more impressions we file away in our brains. The present passes through the prism of time and inevitably turns to sweet memories, painful ones, or regret. Then there is the future, where our goals, hopes and fears that are yet to materialize keep churning dreams and worries. All of these threads tangle up to become mental cobwebs.

We are often reminded that life is lived in the present but that is also where the endless cycle of thoughts, emotions and actions live; one constantly feeding the other and being fed in return. Thoughts: the maker of every action and a gateway to sneaky emotions. Emotions: the often invisible contributor to action, the yanker of our most painful chains and fussy thought patterns. Actions: our primary tool of outward expression, the creator of mental impressions and the fertilizer for more thoughts and emotions.

Simply put, the act of living spins daily cobwebs that may cocoon our psyche and limit our potential to flourish.

Meeting each moment with curiosity and non-attachment is a big part of contemplative practices. We train to drop the weight of past and future so we can move through life lightly with more fluidity and awareness. Some other terms used to describe this idea— A fresh mind, beginner’s mind, child-like, the place of now etc.  The invitation is to show up completely present in the service of the now so we don’t color our actions with regret, worry or fear; so a fresh new trajectory can open up in the moment. A feeling of calm might be what drew us to contemplative practices initially, but we’d be remiss if we stopped there. A sense of calm fills only our vessel but a sense of openess and presence fills every vessel we encounter. Thriving happens when we channel the gift of the human mind, when new growth sprouts amidst the cobwebs.

“What does the Earth ask of us? To meet our responsibilities and to give our gifts. Naming responsibility is often understood as accepting a burden, but in the teachings of my ancestors, responsibilities and gifts are understood as two sides of the same coin. The possession of a gift is coupled with a duty to use it for the benefit of all.”― Robin Wall Kimmerer: scientist, professor, author of Braiding Sweetgrass.