Here’s to grace, bridging the knowing-doing gap

An eventful 2018 has drawn to a close, and 2019 is here, rich with possibilities. 

As we reflect on, and assess our lives in the year gone by, I would like to share some articles, a TED Talk and a poem, that address what matters, and hope they will be of some use to you.

Anne Lamott’s marvelous TED Talk on the 12 truths she learnt from life and writing: https://bit.ly/2rMryy0 

“Number one: the first and truest thing is that all truth is a paradox. Life is both a precious, unfathomably beautiful gift, and it's impossible here, on the incarnational side of things..”

The penetrating commencement speech by David Foster Wallace “This is Water” https://www.metastatic.org/text/This%20is%20Water.pdf

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.” 

The incomparable Maya Angelou on Living (excerpted from her book ‘Letter To My Daughter’ by Farnam Street) https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/09/maya-angelou-living/

“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them. Try to be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud. Do not complain. Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.”

Ingrid Srinath on ‘Questioning scale as we know it’: https://idronline.org/questioning-scale-as-we-know-it/

“It is a truism that the scale of India’s problems requires solutions of commensurate scale. However, prioritising scale over every other consideration—equity, justice, dignity, even relevance—has innumerable costs.

Scale leans towards reducing people to passive consumers of ‘development interventions’.Not only does that approach tend to ignore the all too real challenges of India’s diversity, it also leans towards reducing people to passive consumers of ‘development interventions’ rather than citizens who have the greatest stake in building their own lives, communities, and futures.

The pursuit of scale also privileges narrowness of focus, ignoring the reality that each issue is usually a mere symptom of deeper, interconnected factors. Unsurprising then, that each will achieve sub-optimal outcomes. Finally, this approach leads us to dismiss any solution that seems unamenable to scale on these limited terms.”

Tristan Harris (Magician and Google Design Ethicist) on ‘How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind’ and how it needs to be fixed. https://medium.com/thrive-global/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3

“When using technology, we often focus optimistically on all the things it does for us. But I want to show you where it might do the opposite.

Where does technology exploit our minds’ weaknesses?

I learned to think this way when I was a magician. Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people’s perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. Once you know how to push people’s buttons, you can play them like a piano.

And this is exactly what product designers do to your mind. They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention.

I want to show you how they do it.”

Prof Scott Galloway on his ‘Advice to My Younger Self’: https://www.l2inc.com/daily-insights/no-mercy-no-malice/segmentation-love

“Love and relationships are the ends, everything else is just the means. We, as a species, segment love. When we are young, we take love, our parents’, teachers’, caregivers’. When we enter adulthood, we find transactional love; we love others in exchange for something in return — their love, security, intimacy, etc. Then there’s complete love, surrendering to loving someone regardless of whether they love you back, or get anything in return for that matter. No conditions, no exchange, just a decision to love this person and focus solely on their well-being.

Love received is comforting, love reciprocated is rewarding, and love given completely is eternal. You are immortal. Our role, our job as agents of the species, is to love someone unconditionally. It’s the secret sauce cementing the survival of homo sapiens. And to ensure we continue to enlist in this act, it’s also the most rewarding. To love someone completely is the ultimate accomplishment. It says to the universe you matter, you are an agent of survival, evolution, and life. You are still just a blink of an eye, but the blink matters.”

Voltaire famously had said: “Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.” Here is Darius Foroux on “The 21 Most Important Questions Of Your Life” including ‘What questions am I not asking myself?’ https://dariusforoux.com/21-questions/

In closing, I would like to share something I wrote, on the struggle to bridge the knowing-doing gap, and wish you and family grace in the new year, along with love and laughter, magic and meaning.

Grace

The gap

between

knowing  and  doing 

can be as wide

as a universe

says Debbie

Bridging it

is a struggle

a daily toil 

and on some 

luminous days

sometimes succeed

in narrowing 

the gap

and even 

slip 

from doing

to being -

PS: Here are the annual reports of two nonprofits I work with:

SNEHA https://snehamumbai.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/SNEHA-Annual-Report-2017-18.pdf 

Pratham Books https://prathambooks.org/annual-report/