Sharing in the Long Now
I virtually attended this year’s Wisdom 2.0 conference. The defining question the organizers put to attendees was How can we live with wisdom, awareness, and compassion in the digital age? Speakers on the main stage included people Noah Shachtman profiled for Wired magazine last year in his piece Enlightenment Engineers, like Arturo Bejar, Director of Engineering at Facebook, and Meng Tan, an in-house Google guru, along with cultural and political luminaries like Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, and Alanis Morissette (“Conscious Communication in the Digital Age” in case you were wondering).
Since this is a short blog post, I’ll focus on a few of the more interesting events from Saturday. The day opened with some exercises to get the room going. Two people representing ImprovHQ demonstrated their mindful affinity for one another by saying the same sentences in unison after the audience called out a topic. They had everyone throw up their arms and shout I’ve failed! and then turn to someone next to them and repeat I’ve failed! This got a lot of applause. Improv is beneficial because it makes use of the “neuroplasticity of the brain…reprogramming our brains to celebrate risk.” The people in the room, and everyone, need to learn to “not just survive, but thrive under these conditions.”
In the next connecting exercise, one of the two presenters opened by asking if anybody else was experiencing “a moment of having a ‘shy’ in room full of 2,000 people.” They led everyone in a partner exercise called Curiosity wherein the smaller-eared person says to the larger-eared person, “What I’m curious about you is….” This was followed by a moment of feedback, where Big Ear says to Little Ear, “Hearing that, what I get about you is…” and “When I felt you most was….” To pull this off, the exercise leaders used bells and their voices to “bring attention up here. Notice this like a practice. If you find your mind wandering, notice that and bring it back to your partner.” One of the leaders cheerfully exclaimed, “I like seeing everyone connected!”
Pictured above are Karen, Bill (center), and Meng, behaving mindfully. Within seconds of them taking the stage to each teach a step “to build corporate mindfulness the Google way,” two protesters rushed the stage and unfurled a large banner reading <EVICTION FREE SAN FRANCISCO> and chanting <What do we want? Stop the evictions! When do we want it? Now! San Francisco’s not for sale!>. After being escorted off, Bill “put the script aside,” saying “let’s see what it’s like to deal with conflict. Check in with your body. Take a second to see what it’s like.” During an extended period of mindful silence, Bill said some words to the 2,000 or so people to help them process what had just happened. Karen: “I really appreciate what Bill did, which was bring us through a shared experience.” Applause. Since they wanted to be mindful of how much time they took up in the schedule, Karen asked Meng and Bill to briefly “mention some of the experiments we’ve done” at Google, “remembering the meta-message of the importance of diversity and conflict.”
Meng: Skillfulness is beginning, middle, and end. In the beginning, there is the champion, yourself. You are deepening your own practice, calm in mind, learning kindness and compassion. There is also skillfulness in training in the beginning. In the middle, you extend the benefits that have accrued to the self to other individuals, then to the group. Ask yourself, What does a team need? “In Google, we’re only beginning to figure out the organization. The holy grail is everyone in the organization mindfully aware, a model for global peace.” The end is described as deepening the practice everywhere.
Bill: Mindfulness means learning how to navigate your organization, and (“the protesters bring up a good point”) what that means for your community. It means “supporting the true believers, learning how to spot them.” The benefits of mindfulness include cognitive improvement, stress management, compassion, and ethics. Progress is found in the “work-a-day networks of true believers” who bring worthy ideas to executives.
Finally, Karen talked about a group of executives who meet regularly to discuss business. They open their meetings with a 2-minute guided meditation by Meng. Meng and Bill have created fifteen 2-minute videos for people to use at the start of their own meetings, in case they aren’t part of Karen’s group.
Peter Deng, Director of Product of Instagram, took the stage a bit later that day to give people “three ways to insert mindfulness into your busy life.” First is mindful planning. He agrees that at first this makes no sense, since mindfulness is all about being present in the moment. But if you take out your smartphone, open up your calendar app, and stare at it for ten minutes, you can “mindfully arrange your day based on what you see ‘now’ in front of you.” Just ten minutes every morning, “before or after meditation.” Second is intentional language. The third way began with an example: some guy quits his unfulfilling job to pursue photography, randomly compiles photo albums and then names them based on some underlying pattern. After taking pictures in New York, he decides the theme is ‘people’ and names the album ‘Humans of New York.’ It’s a page on Facebook now, and “posts get tens of thousands of likes. The language is so compassionate, it’s hard to believe it’s the internet.” “Likes on Facebook are acts of compassion that influence others to be compassionate.” Following accounts becomes a “bite-sized way of practicing compassion.”
Last but not least, Ariana Huffington sat down with John Kabat-Zinn to talk about “the rise of mindfulness in society.” Ariana talked about how inane news has gotten in a world that is constantly connected, saying she can get away with not checking the news for weeks at a time and not miss anything.* She asked John if he thought technology was addictive, to which he replied, “Of course!” while taking his out and waving it around. “The designers of these seductive devices are here because they don’t want their kids to get sucked in,” which got applause. According to John, “The digital/analog divide is the yoga of our time.”
*Note that clicking on Healthy Living re-skins the website, allowing one to quickly access content streams labeled Women, Taste, Good News (Ariana: “only good news!”), Parents, Style, Fifty, Religion, and Weddings.
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Tricycle: Buddhist Review, Summer 2013 pdf