That we humans are not machines.
We are not wired to hit 150% productivity levels at all times. We are wired to sleep deeply each night, to allow our mind to cleanse itself and regenerate and create space for creativity and innovation to flow in.
Clare Morin |
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As we move further into this new AI-powered, augmented world, I think there’s one important fact we can all keep in mind:
That we humans are not machines. We are not wired to hit 150% productivity levels at all times. We are wired to sleep deeply each night, to allow our mind to cleanse itself and regenerate and create space for creativity and innovation to flow in.
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This past weekend, I did several things for the first time in 18 months. I stepped out of my normal routines. I donned a mask and moved back into the germ-filled world. And it had a profoundly healing effect on my mind's health.
If like me, you’ve been working at home for the past 18 months. If you live in a rural part of America. Or if like me, many of your family members live on other continents thousands of miles away, most of your human contact may have been reduced to screens in recent months. And perhaps like me, without quite realizing it, a great chunk of your common humanity has become electric, one dimensional, and disembodied. I don't know about you, but all this remote work, all this pandemic living, has got me feeling distinctly odd in recent weeks. Humans have just sent a rocket 126 million miles to Mars. And I have to say I laughed when I saw its first tweet upon landing. And I appreciated the way it snapped my mind out into a much bigger place, the vast space of things.
But the thing that truly impressed me this morning, as I sat in a wooden house in the forest beside the winding streams of this jewel of a planet, is the way that this elderly cat, who has seizures and advanced kidney disease and lungs that don’t work very well anymore, nonetheless dutifully wakes us up every morning. In which I experiment with a social media cleanse, fail miserably at it, then find the teaching within it.
It is the middle of January in the year 2021. There is a spring thaw, although of course it's an illusion and not yet spring. We're still in the middle of a deep Maine winter. It was simply a rain storm that swept in and caused the brook to flow with a spring-like energy. In a few days, that water will freeze over again. And I don't know about you all, but I had to pull myself out of bed this morning. I sat drinking my morning tea and my mind felt rocky and rough and muddy. And mildly annoyed. I felt pushed into a corner. A bit like my elderly cat who jumped into a deep and empty bathtub early this morning and couldn't jump out again. June 4th is a day with vastly different meanings to me. The first is trauma. June 4th is when, as an 11 year old in Hong Kong, I watched on live TV the tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square. The ensuing massacre of thousands of peaceful protesters in Beijing. For every year thereafter, June 4th was/is a day when HK people wear black and stand in vast numbers, holding candles to remember the lives extinguished by violence.
In recent years, June 4 has also become a day of extraordinary hope — perhaps the greatest hope. The fourth of June is Dharmachakra Day, a celebration of the first teachings given by Buddha 2,500 years ago, also known as "the turning of the wheel of Dharma." Today is NKT Day. It is a day to celebrate the founding of the New Kadampa Tradition, a remarkable Buddhist not-for-profit organization of which I am a part. I know it is this day because I was just sitting in the early morning light, on this first Saturday in April, sipping tea while the sun rose over the forest floor. I had flicked to Facebook, to see the wonderful Buddhist blogger Luna Kadampa share this news in my feed (the blog she wrote does a wonderful job of capturing the essence of this day.) In honor of this, I wanted to share this poem below, something I scrawled in my notebook one early fall day.
Two weeks ago, at 5:15pm the day before Thanksgiving, my husband Tim had a major accident. For those of you who are friends with me on Facebook, you may have read what I posted the following morning:
I am grateful for the woman with the calm and kind voice on the 911 call, who told me what to do. To the paramedics who appeared minutes later and carried Tim onto a stretcher, down rain-covered steps and into the ambulance. It was Sunday afternoon, 13 August 2017. The afternoon light was falling over potted plants in my living room. I had spent four days away from my phone and laptop, walking through forests with my family who were visiting from the UK. I had kayaked in the ocean and remembered what it felt like to touch water, air, land.
It was 4pm and I sat on the sofa in the now-quiet house, and flicked my iPhone awake. And there was the Facebook newsfeed. Protests of white supremacists marching in Virginia. Anger. Violence. The shock that hits you deep in your stomach. The horror of seeing humans hurt one another. I scrolled further, switching over to news outlets and learning the facts. But then something else appeared in my Facebook feed. Something so drastically different that it astounded me. July 10, 2014
I walked into my apartment, opened my laptop and the first story was there. Of a Malaysian Airlines flight shot down over the Ukraine. Images of a scarred landscape. Intense, manifest suffering. I got up, put on the kettle, sat down. Felt utter panic. Stood up. Put on the radio. After 30 minutes of radio, internet, and the shock in journalists voices, the tears came. Because this felt personal. As someone who grew up in Hong Kong, I flew with Malaysian Airlines to Europe countless times. That could have been my family. And a thought kept circling my mind: my people, my people, my people. The people of my world are hurting. I finally turned everything off. I saw a young woman yesterday, as I stood waiting for a bus in Portland, Maine. An art student giving out free hugs. A line on her placard read: “Love is unconquerable and constant.”
I was spending the morning putting up posters for our upcoming meditation workshop called 'Overcoming Anger'. The poster seemed specifically designed for this morning after the US Presidential Election of 2016. |
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