Get Rooted

E231 Rest & Recap 33 - Rest through Rooting + besting AI one human conversation at a time

Dateline: Goa, India

Happy Valentine’s Day!

• Get rooted: An invitation to take the long view, and create steadiness and community by emulating trees.

• Let’s review the editions published in cycle 33

About the Rest series: Technology has sped up our lives to today’s always-on 24/7/365 pace bringing with it the risk of mental load that leads to burnout. The Rest editions are my antidote. I focus on “Raising Future-Ready Leaders”, choosing to elevate two heirloom skills that are also essential 21st century skills:

1. Intentional/Active Rest and Recovery - a conscious choice to pause

2. Learning through consolidation - taking the time to turn knowledge into wisdom

In Goa, we have a Konkani word “susegaad” (pronounced sue‑seh‑gaad) derived from the Portuguese word sossegado. It depicts a vectored way of conscious living: unhurried rather than frantic, thoughtful rather than impulsive, reflective learning, embracing others and the Earth in the best possible way. I am considering re-branding the Rest & Recovery editions as the Susegaad editions because they speak to the balanced ways of our ancestors - an invitation to stillness and taking the long view.

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Rest element 33: Get rooted

Trees - rest, resilience and recovery. The trees insisted on having their say this week! (My muse, Linart Seprioto !)

This restful retreat is the Orchard in Doha Airport, a haven of calm and green, and was the perfect respite after my first leg, a 13-hour flight from Toronto to Doha. I stretched my legs and sauntered through to catch my next connection. On that 4-hour flight into Goa, I sat mesmerized by BBC’s stunning documentary Secret Life of Trees.¹

I realize we have so much to learn from trees. Trees are rooted in resilience and relationships. Consider the mycelium networks and neighbourhoods of trees signalling each other via their roots—and the cycles of new growth, aging and being of value through and beyond the life journey of one tree. These massive structures - oaks, banyans, baobab - “read” the landscape and survive through drought and flood. Their leaves are like day-traders, reacting to the wind and whims of the day, while the trunk stays steady, connecting everything together. And the roots? They reach deep and wide across the soil, steadying the expanse, keeping the tree grounded through storms.

I walked into my Goan home … the one that smells of my Grandma’s cooking and feels like her hugs … just as the sky was hinting at dawn with that gentle shade of blush. In an echo of my great-grandmother’s daily routine, my sister and I waited for the baker to ride up with his basket of fresh baked poee and pao - IYKYK, particularly if you are Goan! And I studied the giant banyan tree, with the haystack framed in its network of aerial roots. It felt familiar, grounded. Like it had been there forever.

This banyan tree has been studying us for generations. It stood here alone at the edge of the brook that channelled the water coming down off the hill. It was standing before our home was built. It has watched generations come .. and grow .. and go. And I hope that as our little corner of the world gets busier, and mud paths turn to paved roads, it will last a few more generations into the future.

Trees provide for and protect the living creatures around them. As a child, I recall raking the crisp fallen leaves under this tree to warm our bathwater each night. The sweep of its branches houses monkeys and birds of different feathers, each with a distinct morning call. Dogs and cows, pedestrians and mopeds shelter under its giant canopy during a storm or in the heat of the afternoon sun.

Perhaps our work this week is simple:

• Nurture yourself through Nature. Find a tree and give it five minutes: sit under its shade, hug the trunk, study the roots.

• Roots are relationships. Pick a person, practice or place that roots you. Consider: who do you lean on? Who leans on you?

While today’s headlines can drain our spirits, the trees around us can serve to remind us that we are part of a long-standing community. We can provide shade, and we can take shelter. Like these trees, we can be rooted in our friend groups, families and communities, taking support when we need it, offering it others when we have enough to share. Knowing that we are cared for, allows us to rest and recover.

Here is a full directory of the 33 rest ideas we have covered to date. We explore different techniques and discuss rest in each of these issues. They span discussions on the value of sleep to the value of community time as a rest element. It has also been added to the navigation bar for easy access.

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Recap: Digest of issues 225 - 230

These are the topics covered in the past six five weeks. The snow featured in many editions, as did personal conversations as an antidote to AI in this first cycle of 2026.

TL;DR

• 21st-CENTURY AND HEIRLOOM SKILLS: Lean into relationships, and community. Mentor, and be mentored. As the headlines lean AI, make an extra effort to meet your “beautiful people”.

• RAISING FUTURE-READY LEADERS and FUTURE OF WORK: Playing with signals to understand and plan the way ahead.

Another way to engage with the Tilt the Future concept designed by @ozolinsjanis

HIGHLIGHTING WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID ABOUT …

Scenarios are my jam, and it gave me joy to share this near-future imagineering of what life might look like in 2027 (written in 2017). The aspect of scenarios that is absolutely fun is the fact that you can let your imagination run rampant, and traipse through a meadow of hope and possibility, while also holding onto an element of realism. “It is not a forecast.”

I love word-play. A recently published e-book played with our preconceptions—and in the spirit of scenarios—invited me to change the HOW and WHAT of the way I think, so that other possibilities and ideas might reveal themselves.

Ilona Carneiro observed: Interesting that Substack generated an image with a W and V combined. Pushing the idea to combine the role of Adwiser and Adviser into another category, or just recognising that the best advisers are those that are wiser?

The Power of Small drew a lot of comment in this cycle and brought new members to Tribe Tilt (and one welcome return to the comment board from OG David Reynolds !)

Welcome to our conversations, Neural Foundry and thanks for this observation: Brilliant use of that snowflake metaphor to capture something I dunno if enough people recognize about meaningful change. The accumulation idea works on both ends too, like we often feel overwhelmed by compounding problems but somehow forget that solutions can snowball the same way. I've seen this play out building distributed systems where you're temtped to overengineer the big picture, but really its those small, consistent protocol decisions that end up defining system behavior at scale.

From Zaheer Merali who inspired the post: Two things you said that keep reverberating in me:

→ “[by default] We parent as we were parented.” All the more poignant as I spend time with my parents and have my kids here visiting - It’s real-time observation and feedback!!

→ “The words you hear [in your ear] at 15 echo [in your head] at 50.” This speaks volumes.

The poem on recognizing that we can have many “Home”(s) struck a chord with many readers.

Kathy Karn : I like the idea of having multiple "homes" around the planet.

This edition won the popularity contest in this series! And rightly so, as Cindy Villanueva is an amazing person and brilliant word-smith. And one of my “precious”. Read her web page, and her books.

Bill and Don Tomoff : Cindy is indeed a treasure 🙏❤️✍️…

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Do you have a favourite “rest” practice you’d recommend for a future edition.

Travel Alert and MeetUps? Destination: India

I’m visiting family in Goa, India from February 9 - March 18. ASEAN Tribe Tilt members, will we get to meet in person? I’m debating a quick trip to Bangalore or Kerala. Plan our Zoom sessions in a time slot that is more convenient for you:

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Do you like the concept that every 7th edition is a Rest edition? These digests make a great issue to share with others as you invite them to join our Tribe of difference-makers.

Our small and supportive community in Tribe Tilt believes in the best of humanity - connecting people, sharing ideas, and exploring thoughts respectfully. We believe we can make a difference to the people and places that are precious to us. The best idea can come from anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Until then, stay healthy. From there, all else becomes possible.

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See you next week!
Karena

1. https://player.bbc.com/en/brand/the-secret-life-of-trees/the-secret-life-of-trees-s1