Apr 13, 2020
Pressing Pause.
The last few weeks has been interesting and challenging. I have written about adapting to change in the past and used some of those lessons to help me through these most recent speed humps in life’s journey. I have also been fortunate enough to lean on those around me for advice and it has reminded me about the energy humans draw from social interactions, even introverts.
Life is changing rapidly around us. Uncertainty is daunting and we all have different mechanism for dealing with it.
When everything is moving so quickly around you, you can easily drift into a state of overwhelm. A constant state of doing, where you are not asking enough questions to justify your actions and not thinking through things at a deeper level. It’s a tricky space to be in and an even trickier one to navigate out of, because the default is do try to do more as one ‘attempts’ to keep up.
The best analogy that I can think of to describe this state of mind is the practice of trying to run up a sand dune. The sand around you is dislodged and is pushing you down the dune, while you are trying to climb it. The faster you move the move the more sand is dislodged and it becomes increasingly challenging to move up the dune.
So many things in life come down to timing and it’s hard to know when to hit the pause button, because if like me, you worry that by stopping or coming up for air you may miss something.
Acknowledging that you needed to hit pause is a lot easier in hindsight than it is in the present moment. Pausing seems counter intuitive, because how can you do something better if you step away for a moment or stop to take a breath? The answer is quite simple really and there are examples of the benefit of pausing all around us in our everyday lives.
My mind has been running lately around how to demarcate things in a clearer way. Acknowledging the transition between tasks, moments, and periods of thinking. Technology is great and I love to geek out regularly — exploring a data rabbit hole or looking at a new product release. The reality is though that in this always on and ever connected world we need to be vigilant and consciously transition between things.
Pressing pause can do wonders and it allows you to take a step back. To come up for air, to view things from a different perspective and to reassess if you actually should be heading down that rabbit hole.
Here are a few podcasts that I found insightful over the last week:
Nora Bateson, Joe Brewer & Jim Rutt: Complexity & the Pandemic
Tom Rath — How You Contribute to the World
Adam Grant: How quarantine will transform the way we work
Charles Eisenstein On The Coronation
#195 — Social Cohesion is Everything
A few interesting articles:
On Confinement — Chapter three from The Book of Life
“If only we could apply a travelling mindset to our own rooms and immediate neighbourhoods, we might find these places becoming no less interesting than foreign lands. What then is a travelling mindset? Receptivity, appreciation and gratitude might be its chief characteristics. And, crucially, this mindset doesn’t need to wait for a faraway journey to be deployed.”
Data privacy during a time of crisis.
Apple and Google are launching a joint COVID-19 tracing tool for IOS and Android
Augmented retail: The new consumer reality
Something that I have been thinking quite deeply about recently:
Are we going through a period that will redefine both the value of things we interact with and how we quantify value?
