In the Workplace

On November 2, 1994, I got themost important email of my life. Its author was a young scientist who had read something on the internet about an article I’d written for Wired magazine. He wanted to know if I was also the guy who reviewed Grateful Dead shows for an online community called the Well.

I was. A few more emails and phone calls later, I met my correspondent in person at a brewpub in Berkeley. He turned out to be a shy, bright, handsome grad student at the University of California named Keith. Neither of us drink much, so we headed out to an old-fashioned soda fountain called Edy’s to share a banana split. Fifteen years later, Edy’s is gone, but Keith and I are still together, having taken a vow to love, honor, and cherish one another till death do us part.

Several of my closest friendships began with an email. My role model in science media, Robert Krulwich of National Public Radio’s “Radiolab,” introduced himself one day by forwarding a message from Jonah Lehrer, another gifted science writer. Last summer, a young poet from Ontario, Eric Cunliffe, stayed at our house on his first visit to San Francisco after befriending me on Facebook. Each of these relationships began with a fragile seed of connection—a shared interest, auspicious coincidence, or click on a link—that found purchase in our hearts and grew.

The web has become nearly inextricable from the fabric of our lives in a relatively short time. We work and play online, stay in touch with our loved ones, follow the news, track our investments, and plan our journeys in the offline world using Google Maps. As more people use wireless devices like iPhones to tap into the global network, it’s getting hard to tell where the virtual world ends and the actual world begins.

I saw a preview of the way we live now on the streets of Helsinki in 1999. Cellphones had not yet become ubiquitous in the U.S., but because Finland is the home country of Nokia, nearly everyone I met had a “kanny” in his pocket. It was strange to see Finns ignoring the person beside them in cafés while busily chatting and texting to friends who were someplace else. It was as if everyone lived in two places at once: wherever their bodies happened to be, and where they really were in their minds, which could change at the chirp of a ring tone.

We are all Finns now. The channel of distraction that used to be confined to the boxes on our desk is suddenly all around us, always on, teasing and tempting us with perishable tidbits of information. New-media experts call applications like Twitter, Facebook, and Google Wave the “real-time web.” The social currency of the real-time web is awareness of news breaking right at this instant. Have you seen that new viral video everyone’s talking about? The latest smackdown of you-know-who? Do you realize how much has happened in the past ten minutes?

The backlog of bleeping alerts starts accumulating the moment you glance away from the screen. We’ve been trying to reach you. She tweeted more than an hour ago. I just called and left a message on your phone. Where are you?

We have banished the specter of boredom for the burden of always having something to do. Insomniacs can now find plenty of ways to occupy their buzzing minds at 3 a.m. The whole networked world has become the City That Never Sleeps.

This constant stream of titillating ephemera can pose challenges for people who are trying to live in a more conscious way. The effort of settling the mind in the here and now often requires reducing the amount of input and taking a friendly attitude toward boredom. “The practice of meditation can be described as relating with cool boredom, refreshing boredom, boredom like a mountain stream,” wrote Chögyam Trungpa in The Myth of Freedom.

Nowadays, we rarely allow ourselves to be refreshed by boredom. Restorative intervals of silence and solitude have become an endangered species of experience. As thankful as I am for the invaluable gifts that the internet has brought into my life, I also miss the slower pace of the pre-web era, the spacious, uninterrupted hours spent turning the pages of a novel with snow sifting outside the window. You could lose yourself in a book and come back to Earth feeling like you had a chance to make things right.

It’s hard not to wonder if all this connection and convenience is driving us crazy.

Henry David Thoreau, who praised the virtues of contemplative life off the grid in Walden, would not be surprised that our craving for constant communion has brought us to this point. “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things,” the sage of Concord wrote in 1849. “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate… We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”

Thoreau referred to much-touted technological marvels like the Transatlantic cable as “improved means to an unimproved end.” Some days it feels like he was right. The internet, once hailed as a wellspring of information that would reinvigorate public participation in democracy, has turned out to be a font of disinformation and spin. In the din of the 24/7 news cycle, every uninformed opinion and knee-jerk reaction—particularly outrage—gets turned up to “11.” Family members on opposite sides of issues like climate change and vaccine safety feel like they’re drifting farther and farther apart, into different countries with alternate versions of history.

At the same time, interactions on the internet can be surprisingly deep and healing. When I first joined the Well in the early ’90s, I got to know a young artist and father named Damian who lived a few blocks away. Sadly, shortly after I met him he was diagnosed with cancer. I encouraged Damian to keep an online journal to record his experiences in treatment. This journal became a sanctuary for those who cared about him and his family, like a little holy place made of text.

“A few years ago, I was reading a book about Suzuki Roshi,” Damian wrote one day, referring to the late founder of the San Francisco Zen Center. “The author said that Suzuki referred to his cancer as ‘his little friend.’ I thought that was just a little tooZen for me. Let’s just say I’ve changed my mind. This internal nemesis has become an ally. Every day I feel healthy is a gift. If I can’t get to sleep at night, I read a book, and am grateful for this new little pocket of time for reading. I see love with all of its flaws heading at me from all directions like a herd of runaway locomotives. I never had a feel for it before. I’ve had to rebuild my life in a very short time and find it to be an exhilarating experience (most of the time). Meanwhile, I try to kill this nemesis, thanking it all the while.”

The internet has also supported my efforts to become more mindful in ways I couldn’t have foreseen. When Eric visited from Ontario, we meditated by the ocean, timed by a handy iPhone app called Meditator. A few years ago, the loss of a treasured friendship after a hurtful exchange was a warning of how ravaging online words can be when used carelessly.

Whatever your interest in meditation, we’re living in a golden age one author called “the Digital Silk Road.” In past centuries, students had to travel long distances and endure hardships to hear great teachers. Now thousands of guided meditations and talks are freely downloadable from sites like dharmaseed.org. Every day, people all over the world learn how to listen more closely to the state of their health by Googling their way to a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction class or performing a “body scan” at home.

One of the first outposts of mindful living on the web—a collection of texts and essays called “What do you think, my friend?”—was built in 1995 by a twenty-five-year-old software engineer from Singapore named Chade-Meng Tan. These days, Meng works for Google as the company’s “Jolly Good Fellow,” leading a program called Search Inside Yourself that offers courses in attention training and emotional intelligence (see “Google Searches,” Shambhala Sun, September 2009). Lately, Meng has been cooking up a project that will harness the technical and scientific expertise of his resourceful personal network—which includes neuroscientists, fellow programmers, and the Dalai Lama—to discover the areas of the brain activated by meditation practice.

The problem with traditional mindfulness training, Meng says (sounding very much like a Google engineer), is that it’s a blind search that takes too long. By mapping the neurological markers of mindfulness practice, he hopes to provide practical milestones for meditators and accelerate the process of achieving deep awareness. “What if, instead of taking forty years to become like the Dalai Lama, it only took four years to become a person of compassion, kindness, and wisdom? That would change the world,” he says. “I don’t know yet if the technology is possible, but I’m trying to figure it out.”

I ask Meng how he manages to stay grounded while working in a high-pressure corporate environment like Google. “Think of the mind as an ocean—very choppy on the surface, but calm and happy just below that,” he says. “I call that clarity my ‘default mind.’ I try to get back to my default mind a couple times a day.” He supplements this practice with another time-tested method for maintaining perspective: “I remind myself that I’m going to die. Given that, how important is this thing bothering me right now?”

Another friend who has embraced technology as a way of exploring the nature of mind is John Tarrant, author of Bring Me the Rhinocerosand other Zen books. For years, John has been evaluating various ways of including online life in his students’ field of practice. I recently shared with him a concern that the web could act as a jungle gym for “monkey mind,” the restless part of our ego that hops from one potential source of gratification to the next, chattering internally all the while. How is it possible to stay grounded in the face of perpetual distraction?

It may just be a matter of acquiring new skills, John observed. People first learn to meditate while sitting, then while walking. Eventually they learn to cultivate the mind of awareness while talking or preparing a meal. Why should websurfing be any different?

At the same time, he said, “The Zen take would be that there isn’t a ‘right way’ to be online. There’s a kind of freedom deeperthan the right way—an awareness that’s always happening while all this other stuff is going on. I woke up with a splitting headache the other night, but this awareness knows it wasn’t really a problem. It’s calm and having a good time, noticing, ‘He’s got a headache,’ or, ‘He’s online now and he thinks his attention is scattered.’ The relationship between this foreground creature that you think you are and this vast background is the question. When there’s a relationship, most people feel their experience is more nourishing.”

In the 1980s, when few people outside the Pentagon and university computer science departments were even aware of the internet, Gary Snyder wrote a poem called “Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh Computer.” The choice of subject may have startled some of Snyder’s fans, who think of him primarily as a spokesperson for the timeless values of wilderness and tribe—one of Thoreau’s heirs, perhaps even a bit of a Luddite.

But Snyder has no inherent distrust of technology. Like any skilled craftsman, he’s eager to praise his tools. His books contain odes to axe handles, pickup trucks, and hydraulic backhoes as well as mountains, rivers, and coyotes. After paying tribute to his Mac as if it were a totemic animal (“it broods under its hood like a perched falcon”), Gary offers gratitude to his elegant machine for reminding him of important truths:

Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly laid out and then highlighted, & vanished in a flash at “delete” so it teaches of impermanence and pain

The poet’s job, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1844, is to reclaim scattered pieces of the sacred whole by re-attaching “even artificial things and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight.” This “deeper insight” could be described as simply paying attention to elements of experience that non-poets usually find unworthy of notice. “Readers of poetry see the factory-village, and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these, for these works of art are not yet consecrated in their readings,” he explained. “But the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the beehive, or the spider’s geometrical web.”

Our job as mindful citizens of this planet is not so different. By paying attention, we rescue orphaned elements of human experience and discover richness in them. The “vast background” described by John Tarrant is equally at work in a spider web and the worldwide web. As members of social networks, our friends’ status updates are constantly bringing us news of the universe: births, deaths, celebrations, sorrows, and transitions, as well as signs of the inevitable approach of old age and death.

Being open to this news without feeling overwhelmed and anxious takes practice, and can also require making choices. Psychologist and Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein enjoys email and the web, but she declines invitations to high-traffic networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. “I know they’re valuable for many people,” she says. “I’m just certain I would not thrive with more contacts than I already have.”

Mindfulness of speech also applies to words online. It’s so easy to fire off a testy reply or detonate a self-righteous blast in the comments section of a blog. After exchanging more than 300,000 emails, I’ve learned to be thankful for the petulant messages I never sent, the bristling reactions I zapped into the void. When I feel hot anger quickening my fingers at the keys, I try to take a mindful breath (or ten), or even a walk around the block. If my response is so important, it will still seem so when I sit back down at my computer. Not every reactive blip needs to be broadcast to the world.

Strategic use of inspirational reminders can help. Some people install software that chimes at random intervals in the course of a day, prompting them to take a conscious breath. Thich Nhat Hanh wrote a poem to recite silently before logging on. When I visited the Boorsteins at home in Sonoma County two years ago, I noticed a square of paper taped to the edge of Sylvia’s monitor with a quote from Cala, one of the first women to take vows in Buddha’s order: I, a nun, trained and self-composed, established mindfulness and entered peace like an arrow.I recently asked Sylvia if she still relies on these dharmic Post-Its. “I have a laptop now, so there’s no space for them,” she replied. “But if there was, I would use a phrase that my friend Susan puts at the end of all her emails: Stay amazed.”

Staying amazed and compassionate, even in the face of imminent death, is a worthy goal in any tradition. As the pain and therapeutic demands of Damian’s illness increased, he still found time to comfort another member of our online tribe whose father had been diagnosed with cancer. Overjoyed at being the father of a four-year-old girl, Damian wrote not long before he died, “I’m renewed every time I come home and see her running down the hallway shouting out ‘DAAADDY!’ I’m reborn every time I think of her. I am the luckiest guy in the world.”