Just Be And You Are

Zorba invoked a very specific feeling for me: FREEDOM. Reading it as I got situated into life again in New York, it provided me the sense of escape from reality I had on my trip to India. The feeling that life goes on without you. And how comfortable that is, because you’re free to do what you like and truly understand how your unique ripple affects the flow of things.

Apathy has become such a vice and the majority of time I believe it is. Occasionally though, you get a glimpse of the beauty within apathy, seeing in it not despair but rather a serene peace knowing that if nothing matters, then you can simply be yourself.

Zorba keeps at this theme with a nonchalant frivolity of letting things be and being one with them by letting yourself be. You get the feeling that you can’t understand something by controlling it. Instead you must set yourself free of the biases surrounding you and understand where you personally stand. Realize where your confidence comes from so when the storm comes you know if and how you’ll weather it. You can’t understand life so free yourself to the chaos it presents. Don’t try to find order. Try to find your internal meaning because reality may change and you have to be ready for it.

I got all of that from Zorba and much more. I purposefully didn’t finish it because I want to nakedly go back in to bathe in that feeling. To come out of the subway knowing my mind will breathe fresher air for having read it for 10 minutes.

Thoughts of Haiti or any natural disaster like Katrina or the flash floods in India make me consider how unjustified the loss of life is. Who deserves such an unexpected fate? Is it fair? Why them? Why now? What possible meaning can we derive from this?

Our petty worries of “Why me?” when we don’t make the team or get pulled over lose their value in the face of such disasters. Eventually though we all go back to our daily routines and such menial things start once again taking on more value. I remember feeling this strongly a year after 9/11. Business as usual.

How can we learn to stay with that keen focus that results from realizing how ephemeral life is – how random fate can be? We can’t control for the unexpected. We can try preparing for it with sandbags and supplies and extra food, but to preserve what? To go back to live the way we’ve been living and prepare for the next big catastrophe?

It doesn’t add up. The preservation of life as it is seems banal. The trauma of loss can be an opportunity to evolve at an accelerated rate. To maintain the foresight of seeing life almost gone and suddenly saved at the last moment. To take advantage of a second chance that we so rarely get as adults unless we put ourselves through the minor trauma of moving, changing jobs, or leaving a loved one.

I like the way Viktor Frankl puts it in Man’s Search for Meaning:

Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.

The alternate reality of the internet becoming one with the offline world:

The Internet’s primary effect on how we think will only reveal itself when it affects the cultural milieu of thought, not just the behavior of individual users. The members of the Invisible College did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of ‘comes from everyone’ and ‘goes everywhere.’) We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won’t matter much, but the norms we set will.

Full post by Clay Shirky here.

If we’re all oarsmen on a ship, who’s manning the sails?

The golden rule, both in economics and ethics, aims to find the balance with what we have today and we aim to have tomorrow. Knowing either can be very subjective; it’s defined relative to where you are in the world. It’s possible that boundaries exist for this very reason. To allow a society of individually capable members to construct a vision that balances the present and the future. To that effect, are boundaries actually working?

One of Drucker’s key qualitative metrics of success for an organization is each member having a general idea what the top three goals of the organization are. From the janitor to the middle manager to the CEO, being able to state 1, 2 and 3 without much effort. It could be the mission statement, but most often its much simpler; make money for stakeholders, increase speed of delivery, improve quality of care, educate X% of the population, and so on. That’s cohesiveness. The sails are set and the ship is moving.

The golden rule goes well beyond this in trying to optimize the decision making behind the three objectives. “Why?” do we set these goals in the first place and “How?” did we come to agree upon them. Put simply,

…if a society could choose a savings rate that maximized its own consumption, it would save nothing and consume everything. But that would leave future generations in a lurch as no capital would have been built to enhance future output and consumption. If, conversely, the current generation saved so much that future generations would in fact be better off than the current, then we are also violating “Golden Rule” as we are not doing unto ourselves what we have done for posterity. Thus, the “Golden Rule” condition is that the collectively-chosen or policy-imposed savings propensity is such that future generations can enjoy the same level of consumption per capita as the initial one.

When I studied economics, it was mathematically proven that in our current state, one generation (approx. a 25-year cohort) would have to maximize savings and reduce consumption to such an extreme point in order to create the foundation for an optimum savings rate for future generations. Implying our savings/consumption ratio in the past generations has been highly skewed to the lower end. Not much of a surprise.

I wonder now if we’re creating the psycho-social environment for that “sacrificial” generation to emerge. They certainly won’t view themselves this way and taking a step back and doing less will seem like the right thing to do. The trends towards reduced consumption didn’t just start with the recession. They’ve been building for a while, along with ethnic and gender equality, at least in some parts of the world. The global power struggle is still ongoing, but there’s definitely a trend towards the “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” philosophy. It’s certainly been repeated enough. Time to practice it. Daily.

You showcase and you prepare to showcase. The latter builds character, strength, perseverance, confidence, yet it’s the former that’s judged, rewarded, critiqued and talked about. There’s an enormous amount of pressure to reach the end goal when the process is much more valuable. The end is a fabricated expectation that gets you to do the things that make you who you are. Usually people become the versions of themselves they want to be (or others want them to be) well before they reach their destination. The word, “perfectionist”, is an unfortunate result of people working to exact measures of success that, once achieved, leave them wanting for more. More they have to fabricate once again.

If you quit, make a mistake or get lost, it’s your recovery not your breakdown that matters. My piano teacher taught me to practice how to continue when I slipped, because she said, “what makes a master pianist is no one notices when he hiccups.”

A results-oriented culture tips the favor to those who are naturally meticulous and driven. A theme or mission or goal creates a dividing line between the haves and the have nots, defined relative to the what that society values. Can you make the cut? And if you can’t, why do you stay?

There’s a conflict of interest to note here. I love watching Dinner:Impossible, those “making-of” shows on Discovery and reading howstuffworks.com. I’m naturally a process guy and hence I’d prefer a world much more process-oriented. There is certainly self-interest involved in this post and that bias is echoed throughout the blog. Recognizing this, I make an effort to understand the reasoning behind result-orientation, though I usually come up lacking. The winners write history and it goes without saying that the more active, driven and goal-minded have primarily been the authors. The internet offers each one of us a voice to create the history we see in the moment, and this is mine.

The hyperlink is amazing. It’s pay-it-forward in action. It reduces the six degrees of separation. It connects us to people and ideas we may never have heard of simply because we stumbled upon a site.

It also contributes to trends and groupthink. Hyperlinks sometimes remind me of the buzz and gossip of the overvalued blue chips that ultimately bubbled out at the start of the century. The value of what you’re being linked is your own judgment call, but so often we empower the person that’s linking us with that judgment. Take it to the extreme. If Al Gore – as opposed to Joe Schmo – recommended a green company, you’d check it out. Al Gore certainly has the credentials, but is he becoming outdated? Maybe his personal branding campaign has started outweighing his community service message? Your call.

Too often we allow others to make judgment calls for us. The blogosphere is ruled by professional marketers and those that already have celebrity value (think Ashton Kutcher vying for 1,000,000 followers on twitter). It’s not a collusive atmosphere, but there’s a “club” mentality emerging with friends linking to friends. I still click on hyperlinks, but just like I look for conflicts of interest and financial disclosures when reading scholarly articles, I evaluate the information trail of the link itself. It’s really easy to do with any generic rss aggregator (i.e. google reader).

Why bother? Because when you open your mouth to talk about the cool thing you read or saw on the net, you’re voicing your support of it. You become a representative. Your word-of-mouth sponsorship is as much a hyperlink as the digital url hiding behind the attractive text. The value of the link is up to you.

John Robb does a fantastic job discussing bandh dynamics in this post. Bandh means “closed” in Hindi and in this case is used to describe various close-outs that occured in India over the last few weeks. In Punjab, it was a clear case of an “eye-for-an-eye”. The events go like this:

1984

2009

I was in India for the Punjab Bandh and it was a ghost town that day. I still went out to run a few errands and a couple of shopkeepers were open to take advantage of th situation. At tremendous risk though, since the bandh initiators could have easily called them out and made trouble for the long run. The scary thing was my parents were driving in that day from New Delhi (which suffered its own bandh a week later) and buses, trains, roadways and such were the first to be blocked off by the boycotters. They got lucky and ended up cruising the empty streets, shaving an hour off their trip.

Robb describes the impact the best:

In short, it is pure global guerrilla. For example:

It exacts “taxes” on local businesses and individuals.

It promotes and participates in a thriving black market (which is made even more important due to suppression of “legitimate activity”).

It can rent the Bandh to politicians and businessmen for their own purposes. Competitive Bandhs from labor and politicians (aka non-violent strikes), are disrupted and can often turn violent when the Naxalites enforce their monopoly.

The last point – especially in essentially corrupt political environments such as in the East – is the scariest. Politicians renting out the black market and disguising it as a mercenary force gives little control to a “democratic” populace. When everyone agrees the wrong thing is OK, change management is nothing but showmanship.

Why don’t you take a good look at yourself and describe what you see, and baby, baby, baby, do you like it?
There you sit, sitting spare like a book on a shelf rustin’,
ah, not trying to fight it.
You really don’t care if they’re comin’; oh, oh,
I know that it’s all a state of mind.

- Led Zeppelin from Misty Mountain Hop

It breaks old habits. Especially those learned in stress, during times you couldn’t control and reacted to instead.

Personally, I’ve made great strides stopping myself from biting my nails and cracking my knee. These simple but annoying habits were a natural part of my day and signaled various emotional states; nervousness, hunger, exhaustion, so on. The sabbatical has eliminated the cause – the root stressors – which in turn got rid of the effect – the bad habit.

Will they reemerge? Most likely. Yet I have a deeper understanding of how relative a state of mind really is. It’s a matter of time and place. Your context affecting your self. Change your setting and you change how you react, how you feel. I’m counting on this to make a difference.

1. Regifting is an art form. When daily (unannounced) visits are common and always with food or sweets in hand, it has to be. The result is a strong sense of community, but also a loss of control over your schedule.

2. There’s a shifting of dust. Everyone’s sweeping into their neighbor’s shop, yard, or porch and the cycle continues forever onwards. I’m not sure where it all ends up.

3. Respect for elders. Bowing down to touch an elderly person’s feet to receive their blessings is respectful and commonplace. It places the elderly on a higher rung in society. Still people to learn from instead of ignore.

4. The young religious fervor. Whether +/-, teenagers and young adults go to temple on their own. While poverty and religion may be correlated, the cultural community promotes the temple as simply a place to gather and even hang out.

5. Advanced cell phone market. 1 cent/second policies and a soon to come universal charger are great benefits for consumers. Cell phones are so affordable that the rickshaw drivers have them to schedule their routes more efficiently. Awesome.

6. Being a germaphobe in India sucks.

7. Energy conservation is big. Going green is tough because of the volume of people, but the commercials and billboards are rampant with water and electricity conservation tips.

8. Exercise craze. Jogging parks, gyms, and playgrounds are everywhere. From young to old, you’ll see people walking, doing yoga, playing badminton, cricket, or soccer at all hours except midday. The midday heat in fact promotes waking up early (I mean 4 or 5am!) and doing all these things.

9. Free market traffic. There’s no traffic control system that’s adhered to. People obey sign posts and traffic signals at their own discretion. It’s really wild at railway crossings when some folks maneuver their motorcycles/scooters/bicycles/rickshaws under the gate to get across before the train comes. Riding on the back of a scooter or motorcycle is always a wild thrill by American standards. We just don’t take these risks, mainly because we don’t have to.

I stayed in a small metropolitan city in North India so I can’t speak for the whole country. My experiences with people were almost always positive. I didn’t have to bother haggling down the price because I was always accompanied by someone local. Indentured servitude is still very common, again because of the population density – 954 people/sq. mile as opposed to 84 in the U.S.

While there’s a brain drain, many return as the lifestyle continues to get better. I’m looking forward to future visits because of the rapid growth near the urban areas. Amen globalization.

Regardless of what religion might represent to each individual person, the prayer process resonates with positive thought. Whenever I walk into a church, mosque, temple, synagogue or any religious site, that “holy” feeling symbolizes to me a collection of positivity externalized by a group of strangers brought together by a common belief.

The wrongs (and rights) done in the name of religion are primarily territorial. Never-ending land rights contests legitimized by religious fervor (i.e. the Middle East), community building exercises aimed to fill a lacking need (i.e. schools), festivals celebrating the harvest (i.e. Thanksgiving) or gatherings invoking rain for the harvest (i.e. Zuni rain dance).

While the above activities may be religiously selfish, prayer seems to have its own place outside of religion. People pray whether they’re religious or not, and it’s generally of a positive nature. Of course there are individuals who may pray for another’s downfall, but I’d like to think they’re in the minority. People tend to pray for money, health, love, happiness, and support for themselves or others.

When you think of the millions of unfocused thoughts that flit through our brains daily, the idea of prayer as a direct, clear, positive thought has a powerful energy to it. I don’t pray very often, yet when I’m surrounded by people who do (any religious place), the sense of purpose astounds me. I feel a communal longing for something more.

A single person’s prayer has a vibe of dependency; hoping another will fulfill what you believe you can’t do. As a collective though, that combined hope becomes a positive externality of prayer and religion as a whole.