On measurements and perspectives

Postcards from Equanimity #013

“Wandering the immeasurable”, homage to our journey in discoveries in Physics so far, and those still to come. CERN, France.

Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. And within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life. you could have lived.  To see how things would be. if you had made other choices ... - The Midnight Library – Matt Haig

Here it is.  A baker’s dozen.  To all of you, the few and the brave readers of my missives, a thank you from the bottom of my heart for being a part of this journey so far.  When I started, I suggested that I may write to you each week.  Now I accept your thanks that I didn’t follow through on that threat. 😉

For me there is an ongoing evolution with every post.  And my sincere hope is that to some extent it is true for you as well.  Should I lose you in what may be a long post, allow me to say now, I have a favor to ask and an offer to make.

Favor: If you read this, and think someone else would like to read it, please share with them and/or share their email address with me so I may add them to the list.  Or visit at www.jeevun.com/blog

Offer:  I am exploring the human condition, living itself.  If there is anything that keeps you curious, that you would want to read more about or share, please drop me a line. I would love prompts to explore as we keep this caravan going.

Onward.  The opening quote above is from one of my reads from this year and easily one of my most favorites books of all times, The Midnight Library.  I won’t spoil it for you, but it is the story of a young woman at life’s crossroads and what choices may lie ahead.  This is a lovely treatment of the idea of dealing with who we are so we can become who we want to be.  If you haven’t read it, please consider doing so; this book has resonated with many in my social circles.  If you have read it, I’d love to hear from you on what it meant to you.

As many of you may know I certified as a life coach in mid-2021, my personal angle at sublimation of the calamity of COVID.  I also turned 50 this year.  Through my readings and contemplations, I have arrived on this understanding about age: you need sufficient lived experience in any given arena, and certainly life overall, before you can start figuring out what it’s all about.  I dare not wax philosophical on the math of it, but I guess that’s why there is a mid-life, which should be a point of assessment and hopefully not a crisis.  May our past inform our future but not dictate it.

The other related thing I sort of knew already but intend to start putting some deliberate weight behind for general consumption is that in the realm of causality we humans often tend to look for a singular answer.  Maybe it is our schooling or maybe the heuristics that come from the simpler cause and effect experiences of early life. But when you study philosophy and religion even at a topical level you may start to see common themes of duality, trinity, and more numerical combinations.  So my evolving state of thought is that nearly everything lives on a spectrum, not in singular states.  Most of us are capable of thinking about 11 things at a time, and at other times of blocking everything out to focus on something that we enjoy.  Similarly, in the realm of opinion, there is no one truth but the unique perspectives of each of us from where life finds us.  We have many thoughts seemingly at the same time and sometimes even in conflict to each other.  They are kept sorted by relying on context. (Content matters but context is king!). As thoughts lead to feelings, thus we are able to experience many feelings, even opposing ones, at the same time.

So, try an exercise.  Outside of hard sciences, and established matters like how to drive your car or bike, give some deliberate space to the idea of multiples.  I say deliberate because you do it already maybe without thinking about it. e.g., you go to work and deal with problems while also looking forward to going home and enjoying a show or time with family.  It is as if we grow from seeing causality and outcomes as dots to lines then maybe at times as two (train) tracks running parallel but not merging due to irreconcilable aspects. Eventually, we can arrive at a point where this thoughtscape is like a loom with threads going in multiple dimensions in a plane with some fluff (distractions) flying above and below.  That is the evolution of our intellectual lives; we are weavers at this loom, the masters of our dominion.

There are lessons in literature and social media about how to feel better or how to feel more in control. Some focus on unitasking, others on massive actions, yet others on various gamuts. To say that there is any one way that is the only way may be driven by marketing or agenda of a given author, but it doesn’t negate that you are capable of handling opposing emotions and conflicting views and need not discard parts of yourself to feel any which way by someone else’s measure. Yes, deep work requires focus on one thing and shallow work can be multitasked. You need not give up your authority as the loom weaver to satisfy someone else’s view of a linear or parallel outcome. Be you. Revel in your growth and trust your abilities.

I wrote a note some time ago where I mentioned I am in the bardo.  And I said I would explore what that means to me.  I can’t say I am ready to leave that construct but I can say that my state of mind about the experience has substantially shifted.  As I reflect on the fact that a year ago I shared thoughts on how we see ourselves and our experiences in comparison to other humans, I want to end this post with this one lesson from my corner of the bardo.

It is in our nature to set expectations, attempt to accomplish them, and then sometimes to measure the outcomes.  What has been a truth hidden in plain sight, perhaps laid bare by our pandemic driven focus on self-assessment and healing, is that more often than not we undervalue what we accomplish and overvalue what we think didn’t work out.  Humans are loss averse, even at the risk of giving up some gains: we see what we did not accomplish as a loss.  Which brings me to another wonderful book that landed in my lap this year, The Gap and The Gain.  The authors explore how we see progress, or lack thereof, in our life.  One of their conclusion is about why we set goals in the first place:

I don't think we set and achieve goals in an effort to become happy. We do it because we are happy and want to expand our happiness.

Dan Sullivan, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

So if we set out to feel accomplished what is a more balanced approach to dealing with unmet ones?  The authors share another conclusion:

The way to measure your progress is backward against where you started, not against your ideal.” —Dan Sullivan

Benjamin Hardy, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

The image below addresses the notion of ‘accomplishment’ in the context of circumstance and timeline.  We are much more likely to use the ‘common narrative’ where at the end of our effort we may find ourselves disappointed by a goal not met.  But we must ‘shift the narrative’ and start to see with a wider lens that more often than not we are farther along from where we started, even if we didn’t make the initially set goal.  This progress is the basis for future growth just as it can be the basis of equanimity.

December is the heart of winter holidays in our part of the world.  The ending of the year, or the holidays, will bring a natural time to reflect on what the year has meant to us.  I hope you will be able to give yourself the grace of a fair timeline with respect to your self-assessment of achievement.

I will take my leave with a joke, which stresses the simplicity of solutions we sometimes don’t see until we change our perspective.

How do you stop a bull from charging?!?

Well… you cancel its credit card.

Happy holidays my friends.  ’Til next time.

P.S. Again, if you enjoyed these reads, please share far and wide, or direct your friends to reach out to me so I may share future postcards with them as well.  I would love to add more people to our tribe.  They can email me at akash@jeevun.com  Or you can direct them to this blog. 🙏🖖

Relearning the intentional living

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

Oscar Wilde

Today is my 50th birthday. While I am still exploring the meaning of that duration of my existence on this planet, here is an adjacent short experience I can share, in intentionality.

As I approached this “big one” as many like to call it, I have been taking a stock of my physical body so that I may effect repairs. I was always lucky to have a low resting heart rate but my blood pressure has been rising. Now that my back pain has abated, I have been revisiting yoga and breathwork.

Yesterday, when I was feeling a bit out of sorts, I checked my blood pressure and it was high. As I have begun the process of medical visits, I also thought I might play with numbers a bit.

So I sat down in my office chair, reconfirmed my high blood pressure, and proceeded to do a deep breathing exercise. After 5 minutes or so of doing that, I rechecked my pressure and it had reduced.

While I explore long-term solutions, this short term bandaid of breathing reminded me the power of living intentionally. If 5 minutes of breathwork can start to show measurable improvement in my body, imagine what I can do with 30 minutes of breathwork and yoga three times a week.

As long as we live, our life will have both good and bad in it. We create a sustainable peace of mind, even happiness, by being deliberate about what to tackle and how. I hope this short birthday post will serve as a reminder for you to check your mindset, start moving your body more/regularly, and reach out to friends and mentors when needed to evaluate your ongoing choices.

Detours and Pauses

Postcards from Equanimity # 008

"Dearly beloved, we’ve gathered here today to get through this thing called life." - Prince 

Built into this life thing, there are detours and there are pauses.  The detours may or may not be distractions, are just as often unintended as not.  But the pauses are quite often instructive, a lesson bundled into a packet of time, presented to us as an offering to teach a lesson.

I was planning to write about clothing in this post, the next block in our Maslow's hierarchy grid after the last post's discussion of food.  But my Mom was hospitalized last Thursday for acute decline complicating her late stage Parkinson’s disease.  I was actually scheduled to go to San Francisco to attend a family wedding.  Since I already had time off, I diverted my plans to Ohio and was able to spend time from Friday night thru Tuesday visiting with my Mom.  She was diagnosed with unexplained encephalopathy, was stable after initially presenting with severe hypothermia, was occasionally responsive but showed some progress from my first day to the last during my brief visit.  Heading home from that visit, I began writing this post.

For those three days in Ohio, a part of my brain was on pause.  No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t focus on anything well.  Given the situation, that was ok, and understandable.  As I was sitting in a corner in my Mom's room, between her paroxysmal waking spells, the steady beats of an ICU room pacing my thoughts, l was starting to think that this was a pause, not a detour.

Beyond trying to engage my Mom to see if she would respond, suctioning mouth and nose secretions and adjusting her pillow and the towel rolled under shoulder to better position her neck, there were long moments of holding her hand, talking with her, telling her how much I love her, and that she is, of course, the best mom in the world.  The pause was not stillness.  It was a deliberate collecting of myself, stepping off the fast paced road of daily to-dos, to walk back and forth from memories of my past to the hopes for my future.

My mind was looking to create sense and meaning of that moment, and my brain was the switchboard operator offering to connect so many wires of thoughts traversing the length of time.  My Mom was comfortable; she needed a thermal blanket to help regulate her body temperature for most of my visit although there were a few hours after the lumbar puncture when she managed without it.  I devoted time to reviewing all her imaging and lab tests; all were normal with regard to the acute situation, and I felt frustrated that I didn't have an answer.  I thought of all the past events and imagery at my disposal to replay in my mind, in short or in toto.  I tried to tell my mom a joke or two to see if she would chuckle as she usually does.

By the time I was leaving, my elder sister was in town (my middle sister lives in town).  We were exchanging information and making plans of care.  I was feeling guilty for leaving but had to go back to Florida to attend to my job, and all the other humans who depend on my showing up at certain places.  After working a few days, and getting news of stability, I returned this weekend to spend more time with my Mom, and be here with my sisters and my Dad.

To put salt on wounds, OhioHealth hospitals only lets one person go in at a time under Covid rules (two person policy at my hospital), and the front staff was being difficult about changing the designated people with or without proof of vaccination and screening.

My mom has managed to protect her airway, no intubation, temperature has normalized, is slightly more responsive, and is minimally recovered with the tube feeds.  I had a long chat with the hospitalist taking care of her this weekend, to layout a plan toward being able to bring her home.  He agreed with my suggestions.

My closest friend is a palliative care physician.  He listened to me and counseled me on my choices, which I am conveying to my non-physicians family members.  There are many misconceptions around the word 'hospice' and different people need different amount of time to come to terms with the illness of a loved one, especially when there is a sudden downturn.

I guess I have been going through stages of grief too.  In my mind there has been the prolonged experience of letting go of my Mom, watching her decline over the years.  But she surprised me by recovering so well from Covid last summer that once again, perhaps as I did when I was a child, I felt that my Mom will be around forever.

Now as I am exploring the nuances of home care vs hospice care, my mind jumps ahead to next fall, perhaps without my Mom around.  Human beings are strange in how we process information that isn't "live" in front of us.  I am jumping ahead to that future life without her but also jumping back to all the years gone by, looking at photos of my Mom and I, when I was a baby, a teenager, and through adulthood.

Sitting here late at night, I am holding on to this pause, where there will be a lesson.  If not now, then later.  At least it feels like a pause.  My Mom going through Covid last year felt more like a detour, where she came out slightly worse off but still with us but I didn't learn any particular lesson.  Now I am at risk of losing her in the near future. Once you lose a parent, you become a very different person.  I know I am not ready and also that I am.

"You, me, or nobody, is going to hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward." - Rocky Balboa, 2006

I know I have what it takes to keep moving.  I appreciate being able to share this processing of my feelings, and hope to also someday share the lesson.  Some lessons from prior pauses when it comes to caring for my parents have been:

1. You must have a hobby, something you look forward to other than work. If you don't, and you stop working, you brain will die a slow, agonizing death.

2. You must have a conversation with loved ones about how you want to be cared for when extremely sick.

3. We must cherish all the moments with our loved ones, even the ones where we didn't see eye to eye. We must learn to love hard, be easy to forgive, and truly let bygones be.

Grief can take our strength away but mourning can restore it.  I am mourning the loss of vitality and awareness for my Mom.  She is still with me, and will still have moments of lucidity, for which I will forever be grateful.

As a physician who sees cancer patients, I have seen my share of death and explored people's thoughts on dying. We must do a better job of discussing our expectations around end of life care.  We must communicate well, and clarify how we want to die.  We must balance the needs of those who live and need to come to terms with letting go and the one who is ill and must be able to live their final days with dignity and quality of life intact. We must do so in order to attend to the more desirable task that comes before dying, living an intentional life.

This holiday season, above all, I will wish peace and clarity to all.

This Body of Food

Postcards from Equanimity # 007

What does a nosey pepper do?

Gets jalapeno business.

Speaking of getting up in your business, what did you eat for lunch say 3 days ago?  Was it healthy?  Does it matter?

Do you eat to live?  Or live to eat? Are you a foodie?

Enough questions?  

Here are my answers in brief.

Hummus and bread sandwich with pickles before leaving for a flight on Thursday afternoon.  I definitely live to eat (though I truly admire people who eat to live).  As much as I love food, yeah I am probably what you may call a foodie.  If taking pictures of your food counts, guilty! Sigh.

While you indulge this beta exercise in fleshing out my method and message, and while I am still learning how to make full on questionnaires that would allow us to quantify Maslow’s hierarchy, let’s enjoy some short term gains. 

Food is a cornerstone of Maslow's hierarchy.  While there are platters of opinions and smorgasbords of literature about food, we all come to some personal understanding of the matter that is evident in our habits and health.  The fact that what we eat often quite directly affects how we feel is evident in good and bad ways.  The fact that many of us eat emotionally is mostly maladjusted behavior, though common, and could use some attention.

But why is food a basic level component in the hierarchy?  Because regardless of the nuance of quality and composition, one thing that pretty much all experts agree on is that food provides energy as well as building blocks for our physical bodies.  What we eat literally becomes us.

I have been overweight most of my adult life.  Emotional eating, mindless grazing, and eating for entertainment have been a part of my existence at various times.  So recently, when I started some serious reading about food and sleep (courtesy of my excellent doctor) I was contemplating not just the eating but what it leads to… my body.

Despite my weight, I have done some active things.  Ran a marathon.  Done hiking and attempted mountain climbing.  This week I am starting a new experiment with caloric deficit by logging and proactively managing what I eat.  Though ultimately I hope to lose weight, my goals in doing so is not aesthetic but functional.

Our physical bodies allow us to interact with the world around us.  Depending on our chosen professions and recreational pursuits, we need not all look the Instagram models of fitness.  But what we really must ask ourself is a simple question: is my body serving my needs?

My body is currently not serving all my needs.  My day job is sedentary but through Pilates and rehab I have overcome back pain to a substantial extent and now want to be more active again.  Probably not going to run a marathon but will walk a half marathon before the year is up. Ultimately, I am aiming to lose 3 stones and change; let’s see how long it will take.

Logging what I eat, sitting with perceived need when the mind just focuses on food out of habit not hunger, and re-learning to enjoy the texture and taste through prolonged chewing.  Human joy can come from very simple changes.  But the multitasking world can sometimes make us go astray.

Most of the readers of these posts are actually quite healthy.  But some may still have the same concerns about food as mine.  I invite you to think about the questions I posted above.  And is your body serving your needs?  One of the natural consequences of this Maslow exercise will be that we spend more time than before in exploring and evaluating ourselves, and not just paying attention to all the external information that is directed at us.  I’d love to hear from y’all about how food figures into your life.

Have a nourishing week ahead!

A Tuesday night...in Fall

Postcards from Equanimity # 006

Okay, it's already been 336 hours ago since I wrote to you. Random and semi-regular, funny or otherwise.  This share is time sensitive.

Fall is my favorite time of the year.  To be honest even more than winter. You want to know why, right?  Because sometimes the anticipation is almost as good as, no, it's better than, the experience that we seek.  It's true, human psychology and all.  I bet you can think of at least one situation where the lead-up to something you had been looking forward to was full of tangible joy, that you hold and twist and turn in your imagination, almost to the point of being better than the experience. When you are in the middle of a very enjoyable experience a part of your mind is already dreading that it will end.  Plus once the experience begins a satiety factor also goes into effect.  Together these start to take away from the joy a bit.  This attrition of joy may actually be almost protective in keeping your mindset from suddenly falling apart when the end comes. But when you are in anticipation phase you don't have these concerns.  Basically, all your mental energy is focused on the joy of the experience.  Silly, isn't it!

So fall is my favorite time of the year.  It is the sound of the warbler and the nightingale, as they flock to fly south for the winter, the preparation for the actual event that is to come.  For us humans that event is the holiday season.  But more than that, depending on where you live fall also stands just fine on its own, offering a lovely closure to summer, a change in the weather, and hopefully a change in the foliage.  Winter was my favorite time of the year growing up; I looked forward to snow days off from school.  Then as a resident in New England I was lucky to experience some magical falls.  Those memories call on me every October.  Wherever I have lived since I have been able to appreciate the subtle shift in the collective mood of humanity around me.

So what about you?  Do you have any fall memories you cherish?  Fall traditions?  (I'll be honest Halloween is my least favorite holiday though I do my best to enthusiastically support others who love it.)  

How do you recall your memories? My memories have soundtracks.  The natural go-to for fall, especially on a crispish morning when one may be on a walk or driving to work, is the quintessential fall song- Autumn Leaves.  If you know the song then you know it has been recorded by many performers, the most popular versions are in English and in French, and there are instrumental versions as well.  Here are my two of my favorite versions, and a fall bonus:

Edith Piaf - Autumn Leaves (Les Feuilles Mortes)

Frank Sinatra - Autumn Leaves

Diana Krall - Autumn In New York

While these tracks flesh out my mind's memory palette, this fall has also gifted me a new experience, the making of a new fusion memory.  This past Tuesday, as my Floridian self was reminiscing fondly about those New England days, and enjoying the background play of the above links, my "smart" phone offered a follow up song it decided was related.  I was about to change the track but it was evening, and being in a relatively mellow mood, I let it play on.  That song was Walking in Memphis by Marc Cohen. It whisked me away to a whole new dimension.  As the melody of a song will attach itself to your amygdala, it's the lyrics that can help construct the 3D fabric of space where an event happens.  Verse by verse Beale Street materialized, on a dark evening, with cold rain, as the singer, and I, found our way to a cafe.  A sandwich plate, a whiskey to warm us up, and a piano in the corner with a capable musician.  I have not been to Graceland yet though if memory serves there are hardwood trees on Beale street that change colors in fall.  It was as if the undercurrent of fall found its way into this song's narrative.  From there my mind took an unexpected journey across my life and times.  Fall in Jacksonville giving way to fall in St. Louis.  Then Chicago.  And Seattle. Even Wilmington, Delaware, my hometown in my teens.

For a good 10 minutes I was able to summon the autumn of many cities, and relive the joy of them all.

In reading about the eastern traditions, the notion of meditation is one that is a bit hard to pin down for a beginner, sometimes even for a practitioner.  There are many way to meditate.  Though the "classic" approach is to emptying the mind vessel, it may be more practical to try to focus the mind on a single moment in time or a desirable event that happened to us.  This is nothing more than intentional manifestation of an idea.

There is great power in our memories.  Using sound, in this case music, to focus our mind on a particular moment, a place, or a phase of our life can effectively be a form of meditation.  As you experience fall wherever you live, I invite you to explore your memories of this season.  If you can, create a space, a favorite nook of your house, perhaps with comfort of a beverage, and take 10 minutes to drop all agendas and just sit with your memories of fall.  You may find this journey relaxing and refreshing.  You may find you come out of it with a new, easy energy. While it is likely that we all have a myriad of emotions and memories of each season, the goal here is to pick a positive moment and build on it to see what comes forth.

Give it a go and if you do I'd love to hear how it went for you.  Wishing you productivity as well as peace for this weekend and the week ahead.  

The iterative continuum

Postcards from Equanimity # 005

What did the earth say to the giant rock hurtling through space in its direction?

Comet me bro!

How is your fall going mon ami? For some reason I have never been crazy about the word friend in addressing an actual friend.  Crazy, I know.  It isn't really an issue only I am slow to come around on some things, as we may discuss eventually.  So 'mon ami' just sounds so much better, no?  A rose by any other name perhaps? But I digress. (Already?!)

I had an eventful middle of the year, partly from the unrelieved monotony of many summer days, though that may be hard to explain.  The highlight of the summer was a short trip to NYC with family and friends.  I will write about it at a later date.

I hope we are settling into the idea that these postcards are not as regular as the moon circling the earth rather more like a comet that takes longer to come around.  Yup, I'm that tiny white dot at the bottom left, coming back around again! 🙂

When last I wrote to you there was a monumental task ahead; I may have thought it would be a short hike up a hill known to me but it turned out to be a strenuous climb up a proper mountain that was a new beast.  In literal sense it was my goal to read the original paper by Abraham Maslow, 'A Theory of Human Motivation', originally written in 1943.  I won't lie that it was a dry start.  But once I got into it I found it to be quite insightful.  I aim to share my reflections in the coming months.

Okay, you know you want a preview.  A few simple, clean observations:

1. The idea that our basic drives don't entirely explain our behavior fully leaves room for the ethereal nature of what it is to be a human, and not another animal.  Maslow acknowledges this unique trait readily but doesn't explore it in much detail in this paper, leaving the introspection up to the reader.

2. Religion is one form of "world-philosophy" that allows humans to organize the universe into "some sort of satisfactorily coherent, meaningful whole..."  This is in part motivated by safety-seeking, a second level need.

The biggest takeaway from reading that article was that the hierarchy and its basis are far more nuanced than is made apparent in that pyramid schematic we have all seen.  And so there will be much to contemplate on repeat reads.  I look forward to carving it up some more and bring you choice pieces to bite into.

When I delay writing the underlying emotions of doubt and fear are borne partially from the relative lack of safety in leaving the comfort of my mind, and sharing words with others, knowing full well that they may be rejected or ignored.  Overcoming this doubt is the goal, and the path to growth.

While I have been moving like a glacier through a trough I am fortunate to have a great peer coach and also friends who are encouraging.  As I said earlier, sometimes we are slow to come around.  But adversity in various arenas may actually cause us to grow in a way that we didn't think was possible. In my case working my body through Pilates has helped me understand the saying shared by the Buddhist Zen and Stoic traditions:

"the obstacle is the path."

What does that mean to you?  Have you explore zen philosophy or the stoic tradition? I am still racking my brain on creating a way where we can discuss these things as individuals and as a community. I am not sure what level need that is on Maslow's hierarchy. Well, I have an inkling but I really want to hear from others too.

Here's my invitation to you : think about how your summer transpired.  Was there any sticky point?  How did you overcome it? And if not how are you working through it?

Y'all are most welcome to write back.  I'd love to hear about your experiences.