A Humble Inquiry into the Dynamics of "Sharing" Ideas
Reflections on the process and power of sharing ideas, and the potential impact this could have on the ideas themselves, as well as on those who share them!
Hello Dear,
Welcome back, as we explore and journey into some aspects of our shared existence, our individual and collective being and becoming. Speaking of exploration, I am reminded of one question which our plus-two school principal and English teacher asked us during one of his classes, when I was in Std. XI. His question was simple and difficult. [I am thinking, aren’t the most difficult and most important things simple and the simplest and most important things difficult? Please note the distinction between simple and easy: the two are not the same. We will have more to say and reflect on simplicity, in a later post].
What is Life?
So, our principal’s question was short and sweet, and as I said, simple and difficult: What is Life? Maybe, you find this question to be easy as well, in addition to being difficult? That - simple, difficult and easy! - is a great combination, right?😊
Now, tell you what, it seems to me now that the only answer I remember precisely and accurately is the one I myself gave, not which any of my friends gave! Maybe it is because of the high ego I had during that phase of my life, or maybe it is because our teacher, after listening to everyone’s answers, made a special mention and endorsement of my answer. Either way, the answer I gave is this:
Life is an adventure.
Wow, absolutely irrespective of the merit or quality of this answer, it feels great to just remember something which happened 25 years ago. It gives one the feeling of being both young and old at the same time: as if one has grown old yet managed to stay young. 😊
Fine then, let us come to the topic for today (which itself is fluid as I write), with this spirit of exploration and adventure, with the liberty which the freedom to be wrong and not to be always right gives us, with the joy and realization that life is an infiinte storehouse of beauty and inspiration, if only we would open our mind, body, heart and soul to what it has to offer us, with childlike abandon, curiosity, drive and persistence.
Now, we all go through difficuties, right? We cannot stay motivated - equally highly motivated, inspired and positive - every second of our life, can we? [Or is it that we can? Of course, we do have many indefatigable optimists in our midst, I suppose…maybe you yourself are one such perennial wellspring of energy, and / or you may know others who are.]
Either way. having spoken above, about life being an infinite source of beauty and inspiration, it occurred to me how someone who is in a midst of great or even small difficulty and suffering will feel about this statement. Would it just strike them as mere gaseous words, distanced from reality, woven together for literary effect, to fill space and catch people’s attention?
Well, let me clarify my position here. I am reminded of a conversation I had with a close friend and relative just two days ago. She has been in a lot of consistent pain for quite a long time now!, and to her great credit, she has been putting up a brave fight. In fact, I already feel my heart becoming heavy as I write this, while also admiring her for her fortitude. During a conversation, she was telling me: “As my mother says, I should stop complaining and fretting about everything and look at the blessings.”
This is what I replied to her:
The cross is the way to salvation, right? I believe life is difficult, the only way, I think, is to see our difficulties as blessings.
I also sent her a snapshot of the first page of a 45-year-old book The Road Less Travelled, by M. Scott Peck [I am happy to have read this book in 2013].
"Life is a series of problems, do we want to moan about them or solve them?"
So, let this also be the book recommendation for today.
I hope my friend and relative found some value in my message; the part which especially resonated with her is the need for discipline, as the basic tool to solve life’s problems.
The Effects of Sharing Our Ideas
Come to think of it, the above questions regarding embracing difficulties as blessings, and the need for discipline, are of special relevance to me at this moment right now, as I write these lines. Why? Because I wake up today morning, with a slight pang of disturbance within me. Funnily enough, it became all the more disturbing, and at the same time not as disturbing as it would have been otherwise, since I could not quite name or identify or track down what the disturbance was; I could not label what precisely it was which was making me not as enthusiastic as I would have loved to be, and that was both mildly assuaging and lightly pricking at the same time. Life, right? So interesting. 😊
However, despite these minor mental disturbances, I decided to start writing and sharing my ideas with you as I am now doing. And voila! I soon realized that the reason for my discombobulation (I just had to use this difficult word here, I love it here #NotJust since this is what naturally occurred to me, and just in case you are not familiar, it means “the fact of being made to feel confused or uncomfortable by something”) was my concern about the effects of sharing my ideas! [They are in fact #NotJust My Ideas, since hey, the ideas I share are not mine only, are they?]
So, what concern are we talking about here? I think I was concerned whether I was getting concerned about people’s reception of my ideas. See, the problem is partly this. I believe I am good at writing; and I enjoy it too. Very much. As I have said before as well in this #NotJust newsletter, I think I would be most happy to be able to just sit, think, read, write, question and share ideas with everyone! But this so-called “sharing” is not without its share of problems.
For one, if my writing is in fact good, others might appreciate it, and it could hence make me vie for your / their appreciation. I might become a slave of my ego, my vain desire for recognition. True, all of us need each other, we need each other’s acceptance and love; but this innocent feeling of community, of shared being and becoming, can very well and without our knowledge metamorphose or slide into a desire for my / our own vain glory. So that is one problem: a problem of no small magnitude, if we think about it.
The second problem is of lesser concern to me, I should say. That my writings are not read, or do not get attention. Of course, if I believe them to be of some value, I think I would like them to be read and reflected on by more and more people, I guess (which takes us back to the first problem above)…but at the same time, I seem to be quite ok even if they are not read or read by only a few. [After all, the purpose of writing is #NotJust of being read, right? More on this later.]
To round this up, there is a third problem as well. That I end up writing something which is against basic human values, against the principles of the good life, which I might have occasion to regret later. I hope this problem does not rear its ugly head often, and my hope is that being open to correction will let me cope with this.
So there goes, these are three problems which I think my disturbance was trying to articulate to me. No worries, I believe every problem to also be an opportunity, by definition. Here is something I shared with my juniors in Indian Information Service, the civil service to which I happen to belong, in a social media training session I took for them, around six years ago.
A problem is an opportunity for improvement, by definition, not by attitude.
The Dynamics of “Sharing” Our Ideas
Fine then, to look into the problems of sharing ideas in a little more detail, let me share two pieces of reflection which I had written and shared with a handful of colleagues two months ago, in July 2023.
[Beginning of the first piece of reflection I had written, in July 2023]
Ideas are Powerful. Infinitely so. Power corrupts. In the same way, sharing Ideas too corrupts them, since there is the danger that they become powerful; of course, the bigger danger could be that those who share the ideas too (sharing being a so-called "two-way" process - two-way itself is actually Not Just two-way) become powerful and hence corrupted as well.
I will have much more to say on this, or maybe I should not have... remember that You Yourself Are An Infinitely Powerful Idea! Every One of Us. Not Just Good day.
- Not Just Dheep. 😊💐 (this became longer than I had planned it to be, but that is precisely the idea, Life is Not Just Plans)
[End of the first piece of reflection I had written, in July 2023]
[Beginning of the second piece of reflection I had written, in July 2023]
1) I think it might be judicious to clarify what I meant by the above message, especially since it is quite possible that you have misunderstood what I meant above.
2) I said that sharing ideas has the inherent danger of corrupting the ideas themselves as well as those who share them. Well, how come? And more importantly, in short order, am I thereby suggesting that we better don't share ideas? How much more wrong and regressive can I be, one might very well ask.
3) Before I explain the sense in which I meant what I think I said, let me endeavour to explain what I did not mean to say. Come to think of it, I am thinking that most of communication and governance can perhaps be performed merely by subtraction, by not doing or saying or being or becoming wrong, rather than by aspiring to be right? This is indeed what Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, with respect to knowledge, I suppose. And yes, I recall that this is one idea I have been coming back to often - of the role of ignorance as well as knowledge, and of the role of unknowing, ununderstanding and more generally unbeing, unsaying, undoing and unbecoming as opposed to a relentless preoccupation with being, saying, doing and becoming.
4) So, for instance, children are often asked, what do you want to be when you grow up? Just imagine in how many ways this question might be a detraction from the ideal. Here are other questions which we must explore and must consider asking and maybe answering as well.
Who (not what) do you want to be when you grow up? Who are you now? Who precisely? Who do you want to want to be? (note that what we want and what we want to want and what we need to want can all be totally different.) Who do you want to unbe and unbecome? And of course, who do you want to want to unbe and unbecome, and who do you need to want to unbe and unbecome?
Many more variations can be asked of course...
5) Speaking of 4 itself, a related fundamental question is why we call it "growing up". Maybe the phrase has its origins from the increase in height which accompanies what is said to be growth, but even then, it would be growing up only in an environment where there is gravity, right? Had we been in outer space, of zero gravity, would we have still called this process growing up?
6) Secondly, what is interesting is that we tend to associate going up with progress, and going down with regress. Quite interestingly, in many contexts, even humbling oneself and embracing humility is regarded as though we have lost something. I think this flows from a flawed conception of power, in our life and society.
I think real power is the abilty, freedom and wisdom to not exercise it despite having it or maybe even becase we have it.
Alas, what is regarded as and extolled as power is often nothing but weakness in disguise.
7) Ok, so back to "growing up", I think the challenge of growing up is to stay childlike while simultaneously shedding our childishness. I am wondering whether it would be better to view the process as growing into childlikeness and growing out of childishness. And yes, to never cease to wonder, to find infinity in the moment, to marvel at the immaculate beauty of a simple loving gesture, a pure heart that is free of ego and does not seek itself. The ability to cry and yet be a cause for infinite joy for oneself and others, like every child is, at the time of his or her entry out of the mother's womb.
8) Well, if you have been following me (this train of thought I mean), I realize that we reached here from 3, where I said let me first explain what I did not mean to say before I say what I did mean to say. I did not mean to say that we should all keep our ideas to ourselves and not share them with others; you would know that I have always strongly believed in and vouched for the free flow of ideas amongst people and peoples, of course, this is foundational to our democracy as well, and the inability to do this is both a cause and effect of many of the problems we face.
9) I also did not mean to say that sharing our ideas tends to reduce their quality and degrade them. Indeed, we think, learn and grow together, and not alone, and exchange of ideas is foundational to our growth as well.
10) Ok, so then, what did I did mean, you might ask. Before we come to that, let me share another thought which occurred to me recently.
We are in a sharing society, #NotJust a sharing economy.
Thanks to the intrusion of social technologies into every sphere of our life and almost every waking moment, and even sleep, and due rather to the socialization or rather communalization of life itself in its microscopic and macroscopic manifestations, the simple act of sharing has been at once both elevated to a pedestal and relegated to the carpet.
On the one hand, sharing what might be regarded by many as but trivial details of one's private life has come to be idealized as an ideal every one must aspire to imbibe and practise incessantly. On the other hand, the act has been trivialized to such an extent so as to drown out meaning out of what must otherwise be deeply meaningful human experiences and relationships. In fact, I wonder whether the term sharing itself is the right word to characterize the phenomenon. What higher values are we losing sight of and are we crowding out of our individual and collective consciousness and identity, by adopting the vocabulary of sharing, to describe our collective life? I wonder. Or maybe all that is required is a realization that what we need really is not sharing, but #NotJust Sharing?
11) So, let me now come to what I meant by the above message (though there are other multiple directions in which I would very well like to travel before coming to it, let me resist that urge to wander and wonder). See, ideas are powerful, much more powerful than we think, and infinitely powerful in fact. And we don't understand anything infinite, at the very least, we are highly prone to misunderstand rather than understand it, and hence misappreciate rather than appreciate it. Well, just like communication, governance, IIS, those we love, and much else of life. They are infinite, and we fall short in understanding them. And all of these are ideas as well, so back to ideas.
Since ideas are powerful, sharing them is a big source of power and influence. But and herein lies the danger in my opinion.
If we tend to think of the power ideas can and does have, it can interfere with, stand in the way of and wreak havoc with the very process of the birth of ideas, of the process of sharing, diffusing and multiplying them, and with the ideas themselves.
This comes back to the point raised in point 6, regarding the self-abnegatory nature of power.
To allow ideas to retain their power and to thus bring their positive power as a force of change in the worlds within and without, I am thinking that we must be able to not recognize their power, or be able to forget the extent and nature of that power, despite or rather precisely because we realize how infinite it is. For if we realize how infinite it is, we will just not be able to exercise it, our strength will become our weakness.
I think this is why we speak of fearing God - if we do not fear God based on the realization that He is infinite, we will allow Him to become too familiar to us - or too obvious, to put it in more blunt terms - thus making Him invisible to us. He will become blindingly invisible, in other words, too visible to be visible, like a bright beam of light held right in front of your eye, leaving you with no option but to shut your eyes and turn your head and heart away from it. In the same vein:
If you have an idea, you should first recognize its power, and then must be able to forget that power, in order for you to be able to function, even to exist. For if you truly realize its power, it is just not possible for you to stay sane by any stretch of imagination.
In fact, this concept of distance between the object and the subject is closely related with #NotJust communication, but also with the much more "practical" question of “embedding” PIB officers in Ministries, or more fundamentally with the question of the process of integration between governance, development and communication.
12) So, what I was saying is that if we come to be not only cognizant and appreciative of but also those who remember the infinite power of ideas, then it works like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
The very act of sharing ideas tends to alter their form, substance and even moral and ethical composition.
Conscious of our audience and the power and influence our ideas can exert on them - even if that influence be absolutely pristine and pure - we get distracted from the ideas themselves.
13) Time and again, time and again, I am being told by my wife, dear friends such as you, and including quite a few of you, to consider the audience before communicating. I do accept your wise counsel, there is no doubt about it. At the same time, I do not find inconsistent to simultaneously think that being concerned about the audience is in fact a big handicap as well, which is part of what I was trying to say when I said that sharing ideas lead to corruption.
14) All this relates further back to my reflections earlier, on how not being listened to is a great privilege.
If we are stranded in the expanse of the Sahara desert or the Amazon Forest or the ruddy surface of Mars, we could probably laugh and cry our heart out, confident in the blissful knowledge that no one is ever going to countenance us or peek into what we had to say?
(Remember that we can be lonely in a crowd, and be belonging in a community. In fact, I am wondering that nowadays, loneliness is perhaps found more in a crowd rather than in solitude, and belongingness more in solitude rather than in communities, maybe because our communities have become much more technologically mediated, making them more imagined rather than real communities, and thus decommunalizing them in a sense?)
15) Well, come to think of it, one can very well come to occupy this stage, even amidst society, even amidst one's own, one can become an outsider among insiders. Wow, I think that is part of what we IIS are called upon to be - an outsider among insiders, in the scheme of governance. In other words, that is #NotJust what we are called upon to be.
16) Now, would I want you or not want you to read this? Should I want you to read? Should I want to want you to read? Or do I need to want you to read, or do I want to need you to read?
#NotJust Good #NotJust Day - #NotJust Dheep. 😊🙏💐
[End of the second piece of reflection I had written, in July 2023]
Well, there we go. I confess that I would not be surprised if you find this to be a rather difficult read! And of course, I would be delighted to know if you find it otherwise.
Either way, since you are reading this line, I hold the hope that you found some value in this post. So, what are your thoughts on the question of sharing ideas, and other questions and reflections raised in the post? It would be great if you could let me know your valuable thoughts, either in the comments section, or at my email newdheep@gmail.com.
On another note, I am happy, grateful and humbled to note that I have been getting some very kind and encouraging responses from some readers. For instance, a friend and fellow IIS officer contacted me today, informing me that she enjoyed reading the previous post on how groups can better encourage ideas. I hope to tap into this motivation positively, and keep writing regularly, also keeping a constant check that the appreciation makes me humbler and does not inflate my ego! But how can I know that? Let us leave that discussion (on humility and pride) for another post. Thank you! Thank you once again! - Dheep.