Spanda: Building Through the Swings

I distinctly remember a Tuesday last month at the office.

At 10:00 AM, we had a breakthrough. A major architectural hurdle we'd been banging our heads against for weeks suddenly cracked. The latency dropped by half. The product felt like magic. I was convinced we were going to take over the world.

At 2:00 PM, a critical dependency updated, silently broke our core logic, and took the staging environment down. An investor email I'd been banking on came back as a polite, devastating “pass.” By 4:00 PM, I was staring at my terminal, wondering why I didn't just take a high-paying job writing React components at a FAANG company.

The product had changed during those hours. So had my opinion of my entire life. Those are related events, but treating them as the same event makes an ordinary bad afternoon surprisingly powerful.

What I take from Spanda

Spanda is usually translated as pulsation or vibration. In Kashmir Shaivism it describes the dynamic character of consciousness. It is not a claim that everything has a measurable frequency, or a theorem about startup growth. The Lakshmanjoo Academy's introduction is a useful place to begin reading the tradition on its own terms.

What I find useful is its refusal to make stillness depend on the disappearance of activity. I can be interested in awareness while something difficult is happening. I do not have to wait for the company to become orderly before I pay attention to how I am meeting it.

That is my application of the idea to building. It would be too convenient to call every setback a necessary contraction before the next expansion. Some setbacks are avoidable. Some are warnings to stop. A broken dependency needs a fix, and a shrinking runway does not become less urgent because I have found a Sanskrit word for how it feels.

The afternoon is allowed to be an afternoon

At ten, I had taken an improvement in latency as evidence that everything would work. At four, I was tempted to take the day's failures as evidence that none of it would. Both judgments outran the information available.

There are practical questions beneath the feeling: what broke, what can be recovered, what has the rejection told us? They are easier to answer if I do not also require the answers to settle whether I am a worthwhile person.

I still want the good mornings. I still dislike the bad afternoons. The useful shift is smaller than learning to enjoy chaos. It is noticing when a problem in the work has become a verdict on my life, and returning to the problem long enough to do something about it.

Spanda gives me a way to think about that movement. It does not promise that tomorrow will expand. I have to leave tomorrow open.