Working Meditation

Observations on Human Connection & Contribution

Home » Time

#99: Becoming a person through other people (India Diaries)

I was back home in India for a few months. As is to be expected, the longer visit allowed for more quality time with loved ones and the long absence that preceded it made me more aware of their impact.

People often brought up something I said or did as a child, a teenager, or even on a prior visit. Frequent interactions like these and it started to feel like my actions had turned into memory confetti, spread out in the minds of my loved ones. And when they reflected back, I received a piece that I could recombine with my pieces to get a glimpse of who I was at a certain point in my life. I was especially taken aback when I remembered little and they remembered much. I saw this old me, sometimes with surprise and at others with delight. Still similar in some aspects and changed in others.

For instance, I had little memory of writing letters to a dear cousin as a teenager and was touched that she saved them all. I’m still that person. I still write cards and save the meaningful notes written for me. Another cousin remembered a long-forgotten teenage crush in much detail; I’ve moved on from that one (Ha!). I also noted how much my moods and moments impacted others, whether it was humor, angst or anger.

Our daily attention is mostly tied to lining up the wobbly set of resources we’re given into a life path. As we blaze through that path, we embed memories in each other through interactions. The closer we are, the more those memories are cherished and when we circle back to these beloved humans, we see ourselves more fully. We add back long-forgotten details to our psyche, color to our life, and meaning to our path. If we never circle back to those we’ve walked the path with, we forget big and important pieces of ourselves.

The African philosophy of Ubuntu is summarized as “I am because you are” and I felt the full force of this wisdom surrounded by the many who shaped and continue to shape me.

“Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.”
― “So Much Happiness” by Naomi Shihab Nye: poet, editor, songwriter, and novelist

#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

#88: Tithing in attention and action

I sometimes meet well-meaning professionals who crave to support a cause but their desire is almost always coupled with overwhelm. Real-time reports of calamities and injustices show acute and chronic problems that need solves everywhere. But it’s hard to fully absorb them when our individual lives are bursting at the seams with commitments and responsibilities. Our response may progress from self-protection by tuning out, then perhaps to minor guilt for ignoring, and then into the calloused emotion of apathy over time where we simply turn off that part of ourselves. A progression that wastes human spirit and capacity.

Between the binaries of turning off or massively caring about everything, there is a third way that’s more practical and over time, collectively more impactful. We can invite ourselves to care for a very specific cause that speaks to us because of our personal struggles and tithe* to that cause with our attention and action. Despite our many spinning plates vying for attention, emotion and time, there are some pieces of news and information that seem to dig deeper in our psyche than others. The key to unlocking our causes is to sit in that discomfort long enough to figure out the common thread in the pains and triumphs that manage to imprint us. Marinating in this discomfort is also critical in activating the compassionate action that this world sorely needs.

I’ve also found that the unexpected precursor to this sought-after compassionate action is patience and kindness with self. Tithing in action churns up all sorts of fears of inadequacy and helplessness. It does no good if our actions flame out before taking root because of our very natural human fears. Patience and kindness with ourselves creates the strength to keep going despite obstacles. We keep reminding ourselves that there is no need to rush, that even the smallest actions amount to invisible impact, that this process can take months or even years. We make our actions small and manageable and our timelines longer. We remind ourselves that it’s not all on us and that there are others in it with us. Over time, these practices even out our focus from over-fixating on self or to a healthy dose of self-respect and agency in light of our general smallness. We start to focus less on ourselves and more on the collective. Imagine, if everyone did this, how big our small acts of tithing could become?

*A note on tithing for those new to this concept

There is a concept called tithing or dana across all faiths. It’s a voluntary practice where one offers a part of their income for use in the service of others or a cause. Of course, like any practice, this concept has also suffered misuse at times through guilt or exploitation. Regardless, the practice has immense power to orient us to generosity. In eastern philosophy (that I’m more familiar with), dana can take any form ― material or energy, the donor’s intent while giving is as important as the dana itself. The amount doesn’t matter; what matters is the posture of goodwill and generosity. We’re invited to cultivate a sense of hospitality, abundance, goodwill and faith with a focus on our spiritual growth and other’s benefit. This practice gets under our skin in the most positive way. It teaches a willingness to make others happy, to get in touch with our natural impulse to care that gets covered in the busyness of daily life, and most importantly in letting go of our craving for applause and attachment to specific outcomes.

“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”― Pablo Picasso, painter and sculptor

#87: The actual distance

If we zoom out enough on any interactive map, the cities of Seattle and Portland seem to merge. The ~180-mile, multi-hour driving distance gets erased. Someone planning a visit solely from the zoomed out view of a map might think they can cover key West Coast hubs from Vancouver, British Columbia all the way down to San Diego, California quickly. They might dream of popping in and out of Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles along the way to get a feel. But of course, no one really does that. We know a trip like that would require more planning, time and resources. We know this because we have experienced the reality of navigating our own cities and countries, with their roads and delays. If we’ve left home base to explore, we’ve likely experienced upset stomachs from novel food sources, we know that the same piece of luggage can feel heavier as the days go by, we get the strain of finding and relying on an unknown doctor or mechanic mid-travel. In short, we understand the physical, mental and emotional fatigue that accompanies any significant exploration.

But we seem to forget this wisdom while planning explorations related to daily life. In imagination mode, our mind seamlessly zooms out to dreamily plan our days with vibrant work and social life. On a bright and sunny Saturday morning, after we are well rested, it can daydream that we’ll go from epiphany to functioning business in a couple of years. That from here on, we’ll wake up fresh and early everyday. That we’ll have energy to meditate and move in the morning, then give our utmost focus to work, and have energy left over in the evening for family and friends. We might even imagine everyone around the table sharing a lovely meal with laughter. In those moments, the mind is doing what interactive maps do. It zooms out to see the highlights but doesn’t factor in the actual lived-distance between them. It doesn’t see us getting offroaded by home maintenance, echos of grief, unexplained allergic reactions or a sick child. It doesn’t factor in those happy faces needing our support or that meal needing our effort.

It’s a silently harsh experience to fail ourselves because our dreams took longer than imagined to manifest. When in our life’s geography, the highlights aren’t happening so close together one after another. Our daydreams should come with a caution like some maps do: “This map is not to scale”.


“If you can dream — and not make dreams your master
If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same”― If by Rudyard Kipling: writer, poet and journalist