Frame - This Changes Everything
“If I put a frame around these bread crumbs, is that art?” - one of the painter friends asked this question to John. John Cage a pioneer and maverick musician interested in Zen philosophy had a simple answer for this: ” The frame meant everything.”
If you take a violin maestro and make him play in the street corner, people will simply ignore him and move away. But put him in a concert hall and charge an entrance fee of $199, people rave about it. The concert hall is the frame.
Frame instructs people to look at or experience things in a specific manner. It tells us to pay more attention to things that we do not usually observe. In a way what we do with our writing in LifeLog or any other place is having a better “frame”.
Sometimes the frame is us. When a recommendation is coming from a specific person, we know the context and we will give more attention because of that person.
A specific example, I may not read about CGM (continuous glucose monitoring) from any medical journal or blog. But if Brandon Wilson writes about it, I will read it intently because, for me, Brandon’s recommendation changes everything. Because of Brandon’s interest in health, wellness and his experiments, the quality of my attention to a CGM will be different. Brandon is my frame or a lens that makes me look at things in a different way.
Curation is a frame. Writing is a frame. Maybe being mindful and more present will make us look at everything inside a frame. Maybe it is the quality of the attention, that is being referred to as “frame”.
Thoughts on LifeLog vs 750words.com
I want to think aloud on having a public LifeLog and private 750words.com. I see these two platforms serving two different purposes. Morning pages are a nice habit to purge out all the thoughts from one’s head and move ahead in the day. It is a good habit similar to brushing your teeth. Morning Pages can be a palate cleanser for our mind.
But I am sceptical of opening up or publishing morning pages for everyone to view and read. I am vulnerable and I am just dumping my thoughts and I may not even be right. May be, I want a select few people in my life to read all my morning pages. Those few people are someone I really trust and know them well. But I am not comfortable sharing it with the public.
LifeLog is more like a gym. It strengthens your publishing muscle. I am not saying writing muscle consciously. I want LifeLog to be the place where I shed my inhibitions of sharing my thoughts openly and be myself. I know, we have Twitter and newsletter to do the same. Honestly, I dont have a smart answer for it. May be LifeLog is longer than Twitter and I should push things from LifeLog in much more tweetable content.
Another thought is, Twitter and newsletter are our arena. It is the place where we perform and want people to know few facets of my life. LifeLog can be a rehearsal theatre. I publish it to a group of like minded people. Based on their reactions, I perform in social media and newsletter. Very similar to the standup comics, who go to those underground clubs to test their new material, LifeLog is that place.
In that lens, may be streak is not my goal in LifeLog. I want to know what people feel. I want to know how people really read it. That will give me the fodder to tweak the title of post or the tone of the post. Then I can use the content and feedback to write in other platforms for a wider audience.
In short, 750words.com is like a habit to flush my thoughts out however awesome or awful it may be. LifeLog can be the dojo or the dress-rehearsal for social media and wider audience.
Fear Triangle - Hero, Villain or Victim
I am thankful to know the fear triangle and its manifestation. I understand that fear is a good thing that is meant to help us. It is an evolutionary instinct from nature. It morphs shape as victim, villain and hero. I used to fall into the victim trap frequently because I was fearful of my future and my career or whatever unknown problem I had at that time.
Sometimes I used to be a hard critic or an asshole to someone who makes mistakes. I know I could be much kinder and much more forgiving, but something inside triggers me to try to be the harshest critic. Sometimes it happens to me. I am my own harsh critic. The voice in my head beats the shit out of me and I feel ashamed.
Sometimes the same fear comes out as a hero. That I am a vanquished or valorous person trying to save the world and others. It happens because I am fearful or dreading losing some relationship or losing something from others. I become a protector or a hero to not lose that.
Ironically, I can feel like a victim and a hero and a villain in a span of a few minutes. Like the Vikram character in Anniyan, switching between the characters seamlessly, I too have the capability to switch between the roles seamlessly. I feel there is nothing wrong with it. Fear and anger are our primal emotions. Millions of years of evolution have given these emotions to protect us and increase our progeny.
Anger means that there is a threat. Fear means the same in a different manner. Fear is a breach of territory and I need to save myself or my tribe. Fear was needed to protect me from predators or other tribes.
All I need to know and do is something simple. Recognise that you are in mode and be aware of it. Am I a hero or a villain or a victim in this situation? That awareness slowly brings clarity and helps one to move forward.
Ted Lasso on Apple TV+
I started to watch an Apple TV+ Original series called Ted Lasso and fully completed it in a day. It was a TV series of 10 episodes with 30 mins episode. I really like the TV show for the overall concept.
Ted is a nice guy and a good coach of American football. He moves from the US to Britain to coach a soccer club. All the things that he goes through and the people go through with him arex the story. More importantly, it is the story of how being nice to others can be important and it can be a cool thing.
Something in Ted connected and resonated with me. He is an outsider but has his heart in the right place. He is distant from his close family member (his wife) to gain perspective on their relationship and asses it. He doesn’t know a thing about soccer but he doesn’t worry because he knows about coaching very well. He is scorned and abused by the common people but he roots for the better angels in them. He wins over people with his niceness and good intentions.
That is something that struck a chord with me and made me watch the show. I could draw parallels to some qualities of Ted and console and grieve myself. It was quite cathartic. I find that we live in a golden age of television, where the writers can tug at your heart and also make blockbuster hits with the same content.
How to Overcome Your Childhood
The School of Life Institute has been a great influence on me in the past two years. The works of Alain de Botton and his colleagues are amazing. The YouTube channel and their books are simply a pleasure to read and connect with.
One of the interesting books is, “How to Overcome Your Childhood”. It is a call for understanding the impact of childhood, our parents and the deep impact it leaves on our psyche. The indelible effects of our childhood on our adult life, thoughts and habits are truly amazing to me. I never thought that my current problem stems from the experiences of my past.
But for a psychotherapist, this is just another pattern. I think a therapist will be able to understand our current self and connect it with the deeper impact of our past and let us overcome it. I got some great insights on parenting from this book. This book is also a good introduction to the British therapist Donald Winnicott. I have been intrigued by his work and writings.
This book gave a good idea of his philosophy behind therapy. What particularly stood out for me was the child’s “true self” and “false self” and why “good enough” is the best parenting technique. We don’t have to be great parents. We just need to be good enough. More than controlling the tantrums of the kids, we need to know as a parent how to react to it. It is much more important on how we handle the tantrums rather than managing the kid. Because the kid just observes and learns from us.
Another insight from this book was: the positive reinforcement or the golden child syndrome. How big a mistake it is to shove our expectations and dreams on the kids. A kid needs to enjoy life because she/he is a card-carrying member of the human race. Period.
A kid need not be a wizard, need not become a startup founder at the age of 17 or have a YouTube channel with 5M views to feel special. The kid deserves to be praised and loved because they are a kid. It is the same case with us too. We don’t have to feel worthy because of the promotion we got for all our hard work or the stock that we predicted became a super multi-bagger or we published a book or edited a video or we reduced 50 pounds in lockdown. We should be happy because we are human and we are alive. We deserve the love of people and we don’t have to devalue ourselves when things go bad.
Scarcity Mindset vs. Abundance Mindset
This is a framework that I got introduced in the last year after reading the works of Joe Hudson and Brene Brown.
The scarcity mindset evokes the worst instinct in ourselves. Things are scarce and I need to win my share of the pie. My share can be anything. If it is work, it might be a promotion or a salary rise. If it is family, I need my external validation, I need approval or acknowledgement from others.
In general, a scarcity mindset puts me on the treadmill to run a race. Similar to the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, I need to run faster to be in the same place. I need to prove myself, my worth, and my value to others. I find it exhausting. Trying to impress others or chase a goal set by others, is futile. Sometimes the goalposts change due to various influences and factors, that are beyond my control.
Abundance mindset is a liberating one. It truly acknowledges the privileges we are bestowed upon. It makes me count my blessings and truly be grateful for them. If you are reading this article online at this moment, I can assure you that you are in a place where probably 50% of the world’s population wants to be. The privilege of writing one’s thoughts on a paid platform to clarify my thinking and publish it to a group of like-minded people is a blessing. I am just grateful for that. I found one simple hack to unlock the abundance mindset: it is the gratitude exercise.
I have blocked 10 minutes of my time and my wife’s, two times a week, to run this gratitude exercise. We sit together in a room with no distractions. We spend the next 10 mins in saying what we are “thankful” or “grateful” for. It sounded odd and cheesy at first. We ploughed through the first two sessions. We covered topics that seemed very minor, very trivial to thank but it helped.
I still remember it was me who was mildly arm-twisting my wife for the first three sessions to take part in it. But after the three sessions, my wife felt so good, that she started to nudge and remind me to continue this. We take turns in saying what we are thankful for. I will go by saying I am thankful for “a good night sleep I had” and my wife goes next and thank “for the apartment community we live in” and then I go. This happens for 10 mins. We thank about very trivial things to too big things as well. It is one of the best activities we have found in the recent times.
The feeling of connectedness with oneself and your partner after the gratitude exercise is enormous. I never knew such a simple act could have profound impact on my psyche. I started to look at things at home and work in a different manner. There are moments in my day (non-gratitude exercise days), where I try to take 10 or 20 seconds to soak up on the environment and take a snapshot into my memory and be grateful for that.
I had the snapshot-like epiphany in a moment I was talking with my Dad. He is 65 years old and he was passionately talking about some topic. I just got reminded of how many people have had the lucky moment to live with their father in his 60s, who is healthy, active and happy. I found that 10 seconds of realisation to be priceless and I was brimming with joy and gratitude to be in that moment.
Another snapshot moment was with my 8-yo son. He was happily talking about something before falling asleep and making some pranks with my wife. In just a few years, he will grow up to be an adult and may live far away from me, pursuing his dreams. I may be not able to kiss him or smell his hair or get kicked by him because of some wild dreams. It is a very short window of time, where he is an 8-year-old kid with ebullience and wonder. I again found that 10 seconds of realisation that this moment is a priceless and rare one. My body and heart were filled with that cosy feeling of happiness and gratitude.
I didn’t have an app or a phone reminder to be grateful in these two moments. But I believe it happened because of the gratitude practice that I have been doing for the past four weeks. That, in turn, unlocks this abundance mindset. We as an individual have so much to offer and so much in ourselves.