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

#81: The compost of work

I find myself constantly documenting and taking notes as I work through new ideas and learnings. When I show up to actually combine these ideas into some sort of an output or hypothesis, I only surface a subset of all that went through my mind and hands. I slice off parts that felt so critical only a few weeks ago and add parts that I wasn’t aware of even a few days ago. I clean, toss, add, and subtract information that always seems fluid. But as I take in new information, I feel the weight of responsibility to honor what came my way. To use as much of the good stuff. I feel guilt when I see the massive amounts of thinking that didn’t make it into the final product. The more I get exposed to, the more I want to respect and bring forth in my work in visible ways. This internal burden to go back and extract every last ounce weighs me down and makes forward momentum harder.

Then I started seeing all that work as compost, and it softened something inside. I imagined the yumminess of a nourishing meal with vegetables of all colors: like a roasted vegetable pasta with feta. I saw the mountain of compost with unused stems and peels in green, red and orange. I saw myself picking up the pile and adding it to a compost bag without an ounce of guilt, safe in the knowledge that all those parts would regenerate soil.

Everyone has inputs that propel their work. These inputs are often someone else’s output, like the vegetables in my pasta example. I can make my meal because farmers offered me their valued output. Could I do it any other way? My using key parts of their vegetables and discarding others is a part of the process of evolution. Of creation. The discarded parts, the stems and peels, sustained the vegetables while they were growing and even when unused by me, they’re still not trash. They hold power to replenish the earth; like the compost of all our past work holds power to replenish our future work.

“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” — Isaac Newton, physicist and mathematician

#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. 

#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