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Observations on Human Connection & Contribution

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#130: The power of our “slogful” years

I’m in the middle of a multi-year slog and I can see that it is an endurance game. Working hard over a long period of time isn’t the same as working hard for an afternoon or a week. We often use the analogy of marathon vs. sprint to land this difference. The longer slog is less about a looming deadline and more about a vision that we are trying to bring closer with every step. There are a lot of steps on a “slogful” journey. There are also a lot of thoughts! Our personal state of mind is an ever present companion.

The brain is a three pound personal universe that processes 6,000 to 70,000 thoughts each day. Over 90% of our thoughts are repetitive and over 80% are negative*. So as we are slogging, we may appear silent on the outside but the inside is constantly chattering. Imagine trying to do something important while the brain is quietly whispering “trouble…fear…caution…pain ahead…trouble…fear…caution…pain ahead….” Most of this happens subconsciously.

All contemplative practices are designed to free us from this deeply encoded pattern, and you can find one that’s a fit for you. However, what I find most useful is first acknowledging that nothing is wrong with any of us. This pattern exists quite naturally in every single person. It’s just how our nervous systems are designed. The second thing that helps is to notice first-hand how our thoughts change our everyday experiences. For instance, we behave differently when thoughts of doom are replaced with curiosity before a meeting.

People who go through a long slog note that the journey changed them. Of course it did! Long-term intensity leaves a mark and the thoughts that kick around inside us have a big role in shaping us. The years of slog can be empowering when they become more than just about reaching that precious goal. They are a perfect training ground for the mind because hard times trigger even more negative thoughts.

Most of what happens inside our brain is subconscious but we do have agency. Life yanks us around during our slogful years. Not sure we can fully stop, but we can limit how much we yank ourselves from the inside. We can use the slog as a golden opportunity to become more aware internal observers.

This is important because while we are not our thoughts, in time we become our minds.

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” ― Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist

*  These numbers change depending on the study referenced but the point remains. We have a lot of thoughts and most of them are repetitive and negative.

Our negativity bias is a survival mechanism. Since the brain is designed to keep us alive, it over indexes on scanning for threats.

#129: Yearning for what we already have

(Renewed awareness, continued. Read related observation here.)

The first city I lived in outside of India was Los Angeles, California (L.A.). Until then, I had only experienced in-person sense stimuli in an Indian context. The concoction of smells, sights, sounds, touch, and taste all came from the culture I was raised in. While I often delighted in the bounty my culture offered, it became intimately known to me and I stopped reacting to every stimuli like I might have as a child.

When I came to L.A., my senses felt heighted like they had never been before as an adult. All at once, I encountered real life sense stimuli from a culture that evolved differently. It was sometimes hard to parse out why I was experiencing what I was. For example, I noticed that some homes and buildings had a distinct smell. It felt old and comforting; like the smell of wood from a long time ago that mixed with the bright L.A. sunshine and the crisp air. I loved those days when the old and new mixed up in my body.

When I moved away from L.A., I stopped smelling that specific smell in my everyday. Miami, Florida felt like a newer or different build somehow and the climate was different. Sometimes I’d encounter that familiar smell in old bookstores or during travel. Then I moved to Seattle, Washington. Also a different climate compared to L.A. but abundant with old structures. I smelled that smell a lot more, and when I started living in a 118-year old cottage, I was enveloped in it daily.

Then I got acclimatized, just like I had to all the Indian stimuli. The smell was so present in my everyday that I stopped noticing it. This is normal and called Olfactory Adaptation*. I was recently away for almost a month and that smell hit me so hard the minute I opened my front door. But now I’ve lost it again. I’m slathered in it everyday but can’t smell it. I notice it a little when I step out for the day and come back inside. But a few hours aren’t always enough to heighten my noticing. That level of presence happens when I get completely plucked out and then re-embedded again in my context.

If adaptation is built into our biology and I can only smell our house when I go away, what else do I crave that I already have? And how might I regain my sensitivity to it?

“Forever – is composed of Nows –
‘Tis not a different time –
Except for Infiniteness –
And Latitude of Home –

From this – experienced Here –
Remove the Dates – to These –
Let Months dissolve in further Months –
And Years – exhale in Years –”

― Emily Dickinson, American poet

* Adaptation is a common feature of all sensory systems. It helps organisms maintain sensitivity to new stimuli while being able to respond to new or changing ones.

Olfactory adaptation, also known as olfactory fatigue, is the temporary inability to smell a particular odor after being exposed to it for a long time. Some characteristics of olfactory adaptation:

  • Elevated odor thresholds: People are less responsive to odors after adaptation.
  • Reduced responsiveness: The decrease in responsiveness depends on the concentration of the odor and how long someone is exposed to it.

An example of olfactory adaptation is when the smell of food is strong when you first walk into a room, but fades after a few minutes.

#128: Fasting for renewed intention

Growing up in New Delhi, India, I knew water was a scarce and valuable resource. The city’s water supply came through for a few hours daily and every household had to install pumps to haul it to rooftop tanks, so it could be stored for on-demand use. This is still the case in Delhi and I imagine many places around the world. Sometimes in the summer, the city’s supply would get interrupted and taps would run dry. We would then pool resources with neighbors to buy water privately; these big water trucks would come and fill our tanks instead.

Everyone knew that constant supply was only an illusion created by our overhead tanks. Over time, I started noticing the amount of effort it took to make water usable and drinkable.*

Then I came to the United States and saw that some people had a very different relationship to water. Many people brushed their teeth after lunch at work and a few would leave the faucet running at full force for the entire duration of their brushing session. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this made my insides convulse. We lived in Miami, Florida, which is surrounded by water so perhaps this created a subconscious sense of abundance.

While I never leave the faucet running quite like that, I noticed this sense of abundance quietly seeping into me over the years. I saw myself taking slightly longer showers when I was tired but what really bothered me was that on such days, it felt burdensome to turn off the warm water while lathering.

Then recently I visited Bogota, Colombia, where the city is facing a water-crisis due to lack of rainfall and each neighborhood has 24-hr water cuts a few times a month. We filled buckets with water in our Airbnb to ensure we could bathe and use the bathroom. Business establishments are impacted too, so the toilet at the neighborhood coffee shop was also non-functional.

I believe one of the most difficult tasks for humans is to keep our sensitivity and awareness fresh. It’s easy to forget the hard-earned lessons we learn during hardship. It’s easy to slide back into excess in the face of perceived abundance. I believe this is why most cultural and religious traditions have an element of periodic fasting.

Daily life keeps us spinning many plates with too many things to keep track of. So we deploy surface level awareness, which is perfect for managing overwhelm but doesn’t always create values-aligned action. I believe the goal of fasting is to re-sensitize us to the building blocks of a thoughtful life through intentional action. In fasting, we can’t partake in abundance unthinkingly. We are asked to remove ourselves from stimuli we take for granted, enough that we experience discomfort and take proper notice.

When we come back to re-engage with our daily life, we relate to it differently. Fasting is not an experience of lack, it’s an act of intentional forgoing. Conservation and waste, compassion and self-centeredness, gratitude and greed, self-discipline and overindulgence are all orientations and each of us carries their seeds. Any of us can slip into any of them given the right conditions.

Spiritual traditions liken intentions to seeds that grow roots when nurtured by attention, to create fruits of action. We mostly think seed to fruit, right? From intention >> to attention >> then action. But the seed is also in the fruit. We are products of our repeated actions. Our wise ancestors knew this. They knew that action sometimes needs to come first, especially when we have decision fatigue. That’s why all traditions also prescribe specific spiritual actions like fasting, selfless service and charitable giving (daana/tithing/zakat). Considerate action has the ability to wake up our intentions.

Fasting forces us to act first, notice discomfort, then notice the benefit on us and our environment as we slide towards a more thoughtful orientation.

When I got back home from Bogota, I found it easier to pause the flow of water while lathering. My awareness has re-sharpened and new habits have followed with ease. My showerhead has a pause slider that keeps the temperature mix while stopping water flow. It causes me zero-inconvenience to use it. Now when I’m tired, I leave the slider slightly open so I can get comforted by a warm water while lathering but it’s a trickle and not a deluge, and a choice not a default.

“Sow an act, and you reap a habit.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and philosopher

*Only 3% of Earth’s water is fresh water and of that, only around 1.2% is drinkable. A lot of energy and effort goes into making water consumable.

#126: Purring our way to strength

I woke up today in a deeply satisfying cat hug. My cat had installed herself on my pillow overnight, and I hugged her as I slept. As I woke up to this realization, I couldn’t help but move my hands through her silky smooth fur. Her softness is quite addictive and I have to make an effort to tone it down and not escalate the pressure, especially in response to that cute purring. So she purred and I cuddled…and the purrs became louder and consistent, like the engine of an idling SUV.

Then a forgotten fact popped into my head: cats purr for many reasons, including contentment, communication, and even to self-soothe during stressful moments. The frequencies at which they purr (25-150 hertz) are similar to the frequencies used to treat bone fractures, pain, and joint flexibility issues in humans. The thinking is that purring helps cats self-heal in similar ways.

So does this mean the more I love and cuddle with my cat, the better she can heal herself? My hugs, kisses, snuggles and squeezes make her stronger? It’s not so hard to believe, because it’s certainly true for humans.*

Another thing I notice with her: she only purrs when I give her high quality attention. It doesn’t happen when I’m multitasking. If I try to read or watch something while playing with her, her initial reactions are more muted and then she completely tunes me out. She only responds when my words, play and touch are in lockstep with her.

When I miss her subtle cues, she realizes that I’m not with her and in turn loses interest. Again, not so different from humans.

“Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.” ― Voltaire, French philosopher and writer

*People with healthy relationships and strong social connections tend to live longer and healthier lives; more here.

**Happy love day, to my Tim ― co-purrer, co-cuddler, and co-imagineer

#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