More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 26 - April 3, 2023
Life is so much more enjoyable when we feel connected and move with purpose.
In America and elsewhere, hate violence was not a new experience for me, for my family, or for other Sikhs. It wasn’t a new experience for others targeted in the post-9/11 backlash either, including Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians. Yet, as in previous moments, there are times when bigotry intensifies, revealing more about what’s underneath the surface and how far we still have to go.
This question nagged at me for years, until I learned in college to ask myself a different order of question: Where does this focus on afterlife come from? And why do I care so much? It was through taking this new question seriously that I was able to uncover my bias. I wasn’t asking this question out of curiosity or because I saw an inconsistency within Sikh philosophy. I was asking because it was a central question in other people’s worldviews. They expected my worldview to mirror theirs because it’s what they knew—and I had unknowingly come to internalize their expectations, too.
This was the first time I had to contend with being misperceived as anti-gay, and the experience opened my eyes to a different kind of assumption that people have about me. While many see my outward display of faith as a mark of conservatism, they often overlook the real me: an open-minded person of faith who aims to be affirming, doesn’t judge others, and doesn’t impose his views on anyone.
Whether people attack us or any other community, hate is never justified. No one should be attacked for how they look or what they believe.
My lived experience of being perceived as foreign—even as an American-born, Texas-raised, sports-loving, marathon-running straight man—is a consequence of our collective cultural ignorance. The racist attacks are painful enough as they are. It’s salt in our wounds that people continually misunderstand us. The problem is not that people don’t see us. It’s that, too often, when people see us, they are unable to see our shared humanity.
Having lived on the outside for so much of my life, I had a sense of what it would take to make ourselves part of the archive. We have to disrupt our cultural norms. We have to help center people who have been pushed to the sidelines, waiting for a chance to play. We have to interrupt our typical ways of operating, so that we can bring awareness and empathy to the experiences of those rendered invisible. This commitment—of bringing light to places of darkness—is the work of love and justice.
Living with calm and compassion can be learned and earned.
In the face of adversity and dehumanization, Sikh teachings have given me the tools to do the right thing unconditionally. This is not to say that I always make the right call at every decision point (just check my nutrition log). Yet I do believe that, through daily practice, I am better equipped to end the cycle of hate rather than perpetuate it or let it go unchecked. If my Sikh appearance has opened me up to the world and made me vulnerable to judgment and violence, Sikh wisdom has guarded my spirit and nourished my heart, planting roots so firmly that they are not shaken by the daily
...more
Just as physical exercise strengthens our bodies, practicing equanimity strengthens our inner balance.
Racism always discriminates but rarely discerns.
I hear a version of this question from people all over the world: Why try to effect change without a guarantee of success? Why continue to engage when justice seems impossible and equity feels unreachable? Here is the best answer I know. We may not be able to fix all the problems or make our world perfect, but we can help the people around us who are suffering. And through our efforts, we can change ourselves. Striving every day to live a life of love and service will ultimately make us kinder, calmer, and happier.
At the same time, my personal experience has shown me an additional possibility: Embracing difficult moments as opportunities for personal growth can be both empowering and liberating.
This approach has been empowering because it helps provide a level of control in moments when I have otherwise felt powerless. That inner confidence may not seem like much from the outside, but it has helped preserve my own humanity in the face of dehumanization. It has also been liberating because it is a reminder that the hate directed toward me is fueled by people’s fear and ignorance. I can help resolve some of their inner confusion, but, ultimately, carrying their anger is neither my burden nor my responsibility.
What would bother you more: a loved one being upset with you or a stranger saying something hateful to you? For many, the hate is more bothersome. It’s more inflammatory, especially in a society rife with injustice. I see that, but my perspective has changed over time. Now I’m far more concerned when my wife is upset with me than I am with what someone on the street thinks about me. The reason for this is simple (and no, it’s not because I’m scared of her). My wife cares for me and cares about me. I care for her and about her. Why should we concern ourselves with other people’s bitterness?
Not to forgive him for what he did, and not to forget what he did, but to see his humanity in spite of what he did.
To express anger is to come off as untamed and to feed into the stereotype of darker-skinned people being predisposed to violence. We have been taught, by our elders and through our experiences, not to show these characteristics to the world if we value our well-being.
I had also been an activist long enough to know that cultural change doesn’t happen overnight and that we will never convince everyone to carry all the same beliefs that we do.
I was also struck by a growing trend. On the one hand, many Americans called on Sikhs to abandon their turbans. They suggested that doing so would help them blend into mainstream society, and therefore guarantee their safety. This fits into a larger pattern of Americans asking the marginalized to change themselves rather than demanding change from those who enact the violence. Rather than giving in to these recommendations, some young Sikh women across the country did the opposite: They decided to start wearing a turban daily as an act of defiance and resistance, and as a way of asserting
...more
Gratitude, I learned, is not about changing the world around us, although it absolutely carries that potential when enacted collectively. Instead, it is about helping us find happiness and connection, and about helping us feel ik oankar and chardi kala.
If we embrace the notion that we all share the same light, then we can also see that the various forms of social oppression and hierarchy—racism, sexism, homophobia, to name just a few—are not inherent in us as human beings. We are not born with these ideas. We learn them. This can be empowering to realize, because when we accept that these behaviors are learned, we also accept that they can be unlearned. This outlook comes with the promise of possibility.
We don’t have to look through diversity to find our oneness; rather, we can see oneness through our diversity. The difference is subtle, but it’s critical. We don’t appreciate one another despite our differences. We appreciate one another because of them.
They were all different forms of love, experienced and expressed in different ways. That one felt more powerful did not invalidate the love in my other relationships. They could all coexist. They could all grow. Love, like any human emotion, is not all-or-nothing. We experience it to different degrees.
The first step is perhaps the easiest. It entails nothing more than accepting that this potential resides within you. It’s placing that flower atop the full cup of milk. It’s breathing in as deeply as you can, and then taking in one more breath. It’s opening yourself up to the possibility that we all have the capacity for more.
What I have learned through my friendship with Dave is that happiness is not something to be saved for later, nor is it something to achieve through prestige or fame. Choosing happiness is a decision we make every single day. When faced with the choice between chasing ambition and cultivating love, he has consistently chosen love—love for his family, love for children, love for the most vulnerable and least resourced.
Send to Jacob
My big takeaway from her conclusions is this: Feeling connected brings meaning and joy to our lives, and achieving that is the difference between life and death. Connection is life. Disconnection is death. Connection is joy. Disconnection is pain.
I know now that our love doesn’t just grow by accident; it’s actually something we can work on and grow actively. The more we practice remembrance and grow our capacity to remember, the more connected and loving and satisfied we feel.
Meditation and prayer are not about changing God or directing certain outcomes; they are channels for transforming ourselves. The true force of prayer and meditation is its potential to shape us as people.
While Lorde’s vision of self-care is beautiful and powerful, our current distortion of it shoulders a serious risk. If seeking love for ourselves through gratification becomes the only form of love we engage in, then we will quickly lose all perspective and fall into the trap of superficiality and self-centeredness—just as I did with soccer. This is not to say that we don’t indulge in things that make us happy. Of course we do, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I love an evening of binge-watching TV and eating popcorn as much as anyone else. But when gratifying ourselves becomes our only
...more
True love is not conditional, nor can it be quantified or measured.
It’s time for us to ask ourselves a fresh question, one that will make us uncomfortable but also will help us grow: What are you willing to give up today to help produce loving justice in your own community?
Honoring the idea of ik oankar is not just about seeing everyone around us as equal—we must also be kinder to ourselves and recognize that we are equally deserving. Humility is not about disparaging ourselves. Humility is about decentering ourselves. The difference between the two is critical.
James Baldwin: “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
Thinking and talking about our values can be deceptive. Both are important steps in the journey, but efforts limited to reflection and discussion are incomplete—they make us feel like we’re transforming, but nothing ultimately changes. The path toward growth is not only an intellectual one, but one of practice, too. One gives us an idea of where we want to go. The other takes us there.
It’s also a humbling reminder of how little we ultimately control. We spend so much of our lives trying to control and plan every detail that we sometimes forget how much we actually can control. That’s a frightening idea to wrestle with, and another lesson I took away from the pandemic: There’s something liberating about letting go and accepting what is. In Sikhi, we refer to this acceptance as “hukam.”
It is only when we know our values and practice them daily—so that they are ingrained in our hearts and minds—that we will be prepared to respond with them even in the toughest of situations.
If you feel like you could be doing more to find coherence and direction within yourself, try this simple exercise. Create a list of twenty or so qualities you wish to embody. From that list, identify five that feel central to who you are and who you aspire to be. For instance, your list might include honesty, generosity, courage, service, and humility. Once you have identified your top five values, try to come up with one action you will take each day to practice each of them. For example, if you chose generosity, you might commit to giving three compliments a day to people in your life. Now
...more
Authenticity, on the other hand, is when we bring together our thoughts, words, and actions. When we align what we say, think, and do, we can unleash the true power of any ideal into our being and into the world.
We can summarize the difference between them like this: Values can be learned. Qualities have to be earned.
When we embody our values, we no longer feel insecure about ourselves and how people perceive us. It rids us of our self-doubts and transforms our feelings of guilt and disappointment into lasting happiness. This is why authenticity is the ultimate form of self-love.
!!!
Perfection is unrealistic, and if we make it our goal, we will spend our entire lives chasing the unattainable with perpetual disappointment. On the other hand, if we practice to make ourselves better and stronger and closer to meeting our full potential, then we can find joy all through the process.
Some may say that this is faking it until you make it, but the truth is that there’s nothing fake when your practice is sincere. If you really believe in what you’re doing, then it’s just practice.
There’s one aspect of childhood that I didn’t like: We didn’t get to keep the birthday presents that people gave us. We’d unwrap all the gifts, note who gave us what, and stack them up in our closets. We could select two gifts to keep. The rest were for giving away, donations to children in need through San Antonio’s Elf Louise program. My parents probably thought it was a brilliant way to instill a spirit of generosity. To my ten-year-old self, it instilled resentment. I wanted four different Nerf guns, damn it!
Our worth is not determined by what we do. Our worth is inherent and priceless and cannot be diminished.
The truest measure of our humanity is the sincerity in our hearts.
While our current model of activism measures results and outcomes, it neglects to account for our intentions and our processes. Without rightful intention, our efforts can make us more self-centered rather than less. Without valuing the ends and means equally, we set ourselves up to cut corners and compromise our ethics along the way.
Intention is not the same as impact. We can mean well, but in acting without open ears and open hearts, we may very well cause harm.
He shares that if we recognize all of humanity as extensions of our own being, we will experience their suffering as our own and their joy as our own—just as the branches of a tree are all affected when a single branch is afflicted. Sa’adi’s point here is that deep connection means experiencing our pain and our liberation as being bound up with one another’s. This is what it means to love and serve our neighbors.
Yet what we are seeing is also problematic. So much of our activism is rooted in anger, a reactive emotion that can itself be harmful, to ourselves and to others. When we limit ourselves to viewing anger as a foundation for our activism, or vengeance as the only fuel for our passion, we may find ourselves more interested in destroying the people who hurt us than in creating a new environment that would engender more justice.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying that there’s no place for rage in activism, or even that those who have been wronged by injustice aren’t justified to be angry. Of course there is, and of course we’re justified. But there’s a difference between our raw human emotions and how we choose to channel them. When we fail to process them through our values—like love, service, and creativity—won’t we end up reproducing the very inequitable structures we seek to abolish?
