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Observations from a life in motion

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#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.

#75: What is attention?

Is it intense pin-pointed focus on something or is it open awareness of the present, regardless of the object?

Does it come and go or is there an attentive part of us always waiting to be called upon?

Does it live in the body, like in the case of professional dancers or athletes? Where, over time, it takes the shape of muscle memory and mental interruptions are the last thing we need. Or does it live in the mind, like that of a scientist or a writer, deep in focus?

Is it in the achievement of the flow-state, where attention just courses through us without any sense of time? Or is it in the attentive preparation and effort that enables the sought-after flow state?

Is it better for attention to be unmediated by technology, like when we stare at the night sky and dream? Or can technology help us see what we couldn’t without, like a telescope that helps us see the contours of the night sky?

Do we create the world with our attention or is what we give attention to defined by the world we live in?

Is attention scarce or do we have enough of it and the struggle is really about where to apply this attention?

Could all of this be true?

“Before our minds create our world, the world creates our minds.” — Gabor Mate,  Hungarian-Canadian physician and author specializing in treatment of addiction

#73: The chokehold of finite games

We all choke at some point in life. When we intend to do something, and the moment arrives and passes without us having done it. Maybe it happened because we didn’t really want to do it in the first place or the complete opposite. That we really wanted to do this thing but it felt difficult and overwhelming; we didn’t feel ready or enough and not trying eased the pressure momentarily.

The stakes either felt pointless or high. But regardless of the emotions underlying the chokehold, the mind likely saw this game as finite.

James Carse, a history professor, wrote the book Finite and Infinite Games in 1986 and it offers a practical way to think about our work and commitments. Per Carse, a finite game is played to win and an infinite game to continue the play. In finite games, we obey rules, play within boundaries and announce winners and losers. In these games, like politics and sports, we seek power and strategize to win in front of an audience. In the infinite game, since our purpose is to continue play, we play with the boundaries themselves knowing they exist to support the goal of unending play. In this game we seek internal strength to keep participating alongside other participants. A symphony or parenting might be good examples.

Two other notable points in this text – 1) Participation in every game is voluntary and, 2) there can be many finite games within a larger infinite game but not the other way around. Extrapolating from these I wonder…even if forces larger than us pressure us to play in a certain (often finite) way, we can exercise a choice in how we operate. We can do the same work and choose to view the larger game as infinite.

When we think of our larger context as a finite, zero-sum, winner-takes-all game, it’s harder to play like an infinite-minded player and summon the perspective, creativity, playfulness or ease that might come with thinking regeneratively. In the finite mindset we strive to dominate through winning but in the infinite mindset we strive to keep on playing.

This doesn’t mean that we’ll never choke when we play the infinite game. It means that the sting will feel more manageable and we’ll have the stamina to keep going.

“Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them…
Infinite players are not serious actors in any story, but the joyful poets of a story that continues to originate what they cannot finish.” — James Carse, Professor of History and Literature of Religion

#72: Eyes in your boat

I was at a silent meditation course recently where one commits to noble silence, i.e. silence of the body, speech, and mind. The goal is to cultivate inward attention so you don’t speak, write, read, touch another human or make eye contact for the duration of the course. The days start at 4am and end at 9:30pm alternating between individual sits, group sits, and breaks to eat and move in silence. A gong is sounded to indicate a break. It’s the purest form of silence possible while being in community.

For the individual sits, one can meditate in their room or the meditation hall. Since this was my second time, I knew individual sits in my room made me sleepy or lax. So I pledged to meditate in the hall even for my individual sits. It was the right call–my focus was better and my practice deepened. Not once did I feel the need to get up before the gong was struck. It wasn’t very hard this time; just hard. I did what I could everyday while paying no attention to others, as was the goal. Until the last day when I heard someone getting up and leaving the hall mid-way. Then another person and then another only to realize that I was the only one left. The hall is relatively empty during individual sits as most people prefer to meditate in their rooms. I had a general awareness but until this day, I didn’t pay much attention to when people came and left. Perhaps a part of me was pleased with how well I’d stuck to my intention so I started noting others. This awareness was top of mind in the next sit and in addition to the mental and physical fluctuations, there was a very clear outward focus on others and when they might leave. When they started filtering out, I noted. I also noted my desire to get up and walk out in the sunshine, to stretch my legs and breathe in the fresh air, just like them. Then the course came to an end and I left with the hope to wake up earlier in my everyday life. I thought if I could manage 4am during the course, I could certainly do 5am when back home. I came home to find a husband who had taxing work week so he needed to sleep in. He slept in and so did I, even though my week wasn’t taxing.

Yes, we are social creatures and this natural osmosis gives us the flexibility to thrive and grow with others. But this strength can become a deficit if we’re not careful; especially when we start anchoring our internal commitments to others’ external actions. We may have clarity around what we want to do in our short life, until we see someone else living differntly. A bit here and a bit there and before we know it, our life feels alien.

The phrase “eyes in your boat” helps redirect attention quickly. It’s a pithy directive I first heard while dragonboating and rowing. In both sports, efficient movement requires a team of people to move in complete unison. Any minor distraction and you feel an immediate impact in the next stroke. So you focus on your own stroke while mirroring the motion of the person right in front of you. When your mind wanders to a competing boat, a beautiful bird, or anything else, the coach will instantly nudge you back with this phrase. It has been helpful to me when I get distracted by worry, fear or judgment. It prevents me from sliding on the slippery slope of mindless imitation. Try it. 

“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.”— Chögyam Trungpa: Tibetan Buddhist meditation master

#71: Thresholds and applied learning

This post builds upon my last one on thresholds and pauses. By threshold I mean any undertaking that is different from what we’re currently doing or have ever done. Once we determine that we are indeed crossing a threshold, we may need to go searching for knowledge and tools to upskill. And we will likely encounter many intriguing and useful ideas during our exploration. Realizing that we know little, there may be an urge to unblock ourselves not just for the imminent threshold but preemptively for future ones too.

There is a bounty of affordable and high-quality knowledge out there; with as many functional frameworks as there are thinkers and organizations. While plentiful information is a blessing in general, it can be disabling if we approach it with a scarcity mindset and binge on whatever ideas we encounter. The key to progress isn’t to know everything and become an expert, it is to understand the context these frameworks are designed for and how they generally fit together. We don’t need to absorb every detail, just make note and categorize compelling ideas, frameworks and tools as resources to call upon when the right time comes.

We don’t prepare for all thresholds, we prepare only for the relevant ones. Because we won’t cross all thresholds in our limited timeline on earth. Every concept under the sun is more helpful and resonates deeper when it is actually applied vs. learned in theory.

“Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”― Rainer Maria Rilke, Austrian poet and novelist.