Enlightened Living

So simple? A pupil asks an elder monk who was thought to be enlightened, "what does an enlightened being do?" The elder responded, "I wake, I eat, I work, I play and I sleep." The pupil was surprised by this answer, and said "but I wake, eat, work, play and sleep too." ... "Yes", said the elder, "but when I eat, I eat; when I work, I work; when I play, I play; and when I sleep, I sleep." Insofar as meditation is practice for life, life can and should be practice for meditation. With sufficiently narrow attention, even 30 minutes on the treadmill can be truly liberating. Try it!

The Astronomy of Relationships

It is not often that astronomy offers salient analogies for relationships, probably half as often for anyone to even notice, but, in reading about solar systems in our galaxy and beyond, I found a few: More than four-fifths of the single points of light we observe in the night sky are actually two or more stars orbiting together. The most common of the multiple star systems are binary stars, systems of two companion stars. Some people even think that our sun is part of a binary system, with an as yet to be observed companion. There are 'wide binaries', consisting of two stars whose orbits are spread apart from one another, leaving them to evolve separately; 'close binaries', consisting of two stars that orbit one another so closely that one might actually transfer mass to the other or be pulled into the other completely; and everything in between, including categorizations that have more to do with how we perceive these stars: 'visual binaries', which can be distinguished visually through a telescope; 'spectroscopic binaries', which can only be distinguished by the wavelengths of the light that each one emits; 'eclipsing binaries', whose angle with the earth and our line of sight, so to speak, makes it so that we see these stars in alternating eclipses; 'astrometric binaries', where a visible star appears to be dancing around empty space, when, in reality, it is dancing with an unobservable companion; and 'double stars', which are two stars that appear to be binary stars, based on our angle of observation, but, in reality, are nowhere near one another. I think that we can all attest to either living through or observing relationships that align with these categorizations, and, perhaps, some of us are clear about how we want our heart to orbit another heart. The beautiful break from these analogies is that we create our own gravity. You can pull the heart you love straight to yours, if you choose to, or you can tether it at a distance and risk it being pulled away by other gravitational fields. My take, pull with everything you have, and don't be afraid to spin so closely as to become one, bright, shiny star. 

The Simpler-Better Past

Plato (428-346 BC) criticized the practice of writing (i.e. the written word) as something that would erode one's mental faculties (he called it a recipe for reminder not memory) and depersonalize human interaction, as the need for face-to-face communication would no longer be required to exchange ideas. Although we can all speak to the benefits of the written word, we can also acknowledge that Plato's assertions were still, for the most part, correct. Between Plato's time and our time, there have been many generations, each with its own introduction and adoption of new technologies and practices, with pros and cons relative to both generations past and generations future, and too much complexity and variability in how things will evolve to say for sure what will be beneficial or detrimental. As one generation longs for a simpler-better past, we can be sure that the generation before longed for the same, and we can be sure that, to a varying degree, each generation was partially right and partially wrong. My point is, if Plato's nostalgia for a simpler-better past (i.e. one without the written word) prompted the next generation to forgo the written word, then we would likely not even know who he was or what he thought, as surely as I would not be able to recount it here. The next time you find yourself feeling nostalgic about the past and perplexed by the next generation, you might want to reflect on how you perplexed the generation that preceded yours!

Love in Action

Two people in love. When one says to the other, “I love you”, they mean “I want to enjoy every moment of life with you; I want to grow up and grow old with you; I want to make a life with you; I will take care of you when you are sick; I will sit with you if you are dying”. In short, they mean “you will never be unloved or alone”. When the other responds in kind, what does he or she mean? There is no shared definition for the term “love”. I have heard stories of one person trading in their life to save the one they love. I have heard stories of one person leaving the one they love upon learning of a terminal cancer diagnosis. And yet, each person uttered the words: “I love you”. To the extent that, even if you ask, you cannot necessarily rely on the words behind the word, you can only rely on the love you are shown, as surely someone else can only rely on the love you show them in kind. Love defined is love in action, so… act now <3

Warranted Intolerance

In 'The Open Society and It's Enemies', Karl Popper asserted that we are warranted in refusing to tolerate intolerance. Just think about it. What if a society was 100% tolerant? The intolerant would be tolerated. They would act accordingly, marginalizing others and accruing power, until, finally, tolerance itself would be obliterated under their reign. Justice itself relies on intolerance: murder is illegal, because we are not tolerant of it, for good reason. It is only when we pass the threshold of clear, negative externalities (i.e. one person's actions causing material harm to another person) that the question of tolerance vs warranted intolerance becomes more difficult, and I can see how large the struggle looms in the minds of Americans, as we seek to embrace fellow Americans whose beliefs have been erroneously conflated with evil, with a seemingly endless supply of recruits willing to reinforce this bias by committing acts of evil. Aside from exacting huge, asymmetric financial costs on the U.S. economy, I think that part of the goal of terrorism is to skew our collective minds towards unwarranted intolerance and drive a wedge between us. That is what we have to counter at every turn, or else play right into this goal. 

Work the Love

In the 1990s, I worked for a start up and ran a group of Oracle PL/SQL developers and DBAs. One day, one of my DBAs, a very shy and soft spoken woman from China, slowly shuffled into my office in tears. I stood up and asked, "what's wrong?". She answered, "I deleted the database". I attempted to qualify: "You deleted some data?" ... "No" ... "You dropped a table?" ... "No" ... "You dropped a schema?" ... "No" ... "You dropped a tablespace?" ... "No" ... "Then what?" At this point, the tears accelerated, as she said, "I deleted the database file on Unix". Indeed, she had nuked the database, our eCommerce site was down, restoring our archived backup was not going to be straight forward, due to the manual cleanup we would need to perform first, so getting things back online was going to take 8 to 12 hours and the database would be out of sync from the get-go. One of the founders told us that "we just drove a spear through the heart of this business", while the other founder immediately left to buy a gallon of ice cream, in keeping with his habit of stress eating. Meanwhile, my shy, teary-eyed DBA stood at my side, paralyzed. I turned to her and asked: "Did anyone die?" ... "No" ... "Did anyone get physically injured?" ... "No" ... "If we both get fired, do you think we'll find new jobs?" .... "Yes" ... "Then cheer up! and go delete the rest of those database files so we have a clean slate to restore." The relief on her face and near-joy in her step as she made her way back to her desk was enough to make me fully satisfied in the job ;-) I would venture a guess that, for most of us, job satisfaction transcends the job and is rooted more in the empathy and assistance that we are able to deliver to our fellow travelers, so while I do believe that it is important to love the work that you do, I would say that it is equally important to 'work the love', and this can be done across a variety of jobs.

Scary-Movie-Scene-Moments

We've all experienced them in our lives from time to time. I had one yesterday. I was under the weather, 100% sure that I had a sinus infection, therefore my usual strategy of waiting things out was contraindicated, so I opted to go to the doctor's. While in the waiting room, I sat across from a woman wearing a leg brace who was abjectly unable to prevent whatever she was thinking or feeling from being verbally uttered on an ongoing and immediate basis. For 45 minutes straight, all I heard was "my back hurts", "my phone's battery is low", followed by, "does anybody have an iPhone charger?", "wow, that is a low co-pay", after over hearing someone's $5 co-pay amount, "I can't believe that", referring to ABC's 'Divorce Court' on the TV, etc. They finally called her back, so I enjoyed 15 minutes of peace until they called me back. After my time with the doctor, I headed to the check out desk. To my dismay, there she was, fully engaged in arguing with the receptionist about how they should be able to Google information that she was being asked to provide, occasionally looking back at me to say "unbelievable". She was rather bossy, and a bit manipulative in an addict kind of way - i.e. no sense of limits, as in "hey, can you hand me your baby so I can sell it for $100 and score some smack?". This is going to sound a bit cruel, but it looked like she might have been attractive a few thousand cigarettes, beers, and whatever else ago, so I imagine (perhaps, just my imagination) that she may have grown accustomed to a wide domain of manipulation and control. Finally, and thankfully, all issues were resolved and she left the premises. I signed some forms, paid my bill and headed to my car. Halfway from the office to my car, I hear "hey!", "yo!", "wait up!". It was her, furiously hobbling towards me, presumably to ask for a ride. Now, anyone who knows me, knows that I am the first to offer a helping hand to someone in need, but her? No! And this, my friends, was my scary-movie-scene-moment. As I pretended not to hear her, I accelerated the pace to my car, thanked God for my hands free door locks (else it would have been doubly scary, as I would have surely been hard pressed to align my key and unlock the door in time), thanked God for my push button start (for the very same reason), didn't even put my seat belt on, contemplated not even disengaging my emergency brake, though the engineer in me overruled that one, slammed it in drive, thanking God yet again that I backed into my spot, and narrowly escaped before she reached me. Typically, I would make two left turns to get back to the main road, but I could see her in my rear view mirror, already hobbling toward that route to cut me off at the pass, so I continued forward, ready to take the long way home at whatever cost. Does this make me a bad person, or simply someone with an uncanny zest for life. I think it's the latter :-)