Today's episode of Ephemeral features the track Deathless by musician Nathaniel Kraus. Here the full piece at Nathaniel Krauss dot band camp, dot com, links and more on our website Ephemeral dot show. Ephemeral is production of my Heart three D audio for fell Exposure. Listen with that phones. This is our second episode based on my conversation with explorer and author Arling Cogan. If you miss it, Part one will give you more backstory about earls life as an explorer.
I've just done a lot of interviews. Are like, I feel like you've done probably a tremendous amount of interviews in your life. I have never counted. Ah, yeah, you know when silence came out, and also walking came out and philosophy for polar explorers. So I did honor something too is probably, but recently not so many. I guess I'm late to the party that that I happened. Congratulations.
Earling spent his young adulthood engaged in record setting expeditions, sailing around the world, climbing on everest, hiking to the North and South Poles on foot the ladder completely alone. Then I kind of changed my life and became a family man. I'm still a family man, but I think it's a season of every thing. And I keep on doing old doors and keep on doing expeditions, but with
a lower profile, and I really enjoy writing books. In After we put out the episode Sounds of Silence, on the work of composer John Cage, a friend gave me a copy of EARLINGOK Silence in the Age of Noise. This is probably the trickiest question I give you all day, But what what is silence? Silence is to me more like an idea in the sense that before I start to write about silence, and also before I walked alone to the self pole, almost in total silence, I thought
about silence as the opposite to sounds. But of course sounds you can measure in decibels, while silence you can't really measure. So to me, silence is kind of the opposite of noise. And then I think about noise. Obviously it sounds, but it's also all kinds of distractions you have through today, that the telephone is beeping, a car is passing, a radio is running, and of course also you're like man made lights. During the nights, you can't see the starry night and all this is noise to me,
and silence is about yourself. It's about your inner core. It's about getting to know yourself. And this silence, inner silence is there all the time waiting for you to explore it. We're living in the age of noise. So much is about noise. So much is about forgetting yourself, and about living through other people, living through your telephone, living through a TV series, living through games, etcetera. You keep on telling yourself all this kind of small day
to day lives and half truths. Silence is about the opposite, is about getting to know of yourself, and of course to get to know yourself. That has been said for thousands of years. That's one of the most important things you can do to live a rich life. And I think every idea that has survived for more than one
thousand years you should take seriously. In the book, Earling sides a lot of great sources on silence, including artists, philosophers, scientists, and poets, but maybe the most important research came from personal experience. You know, my best background is that I walked by myself to the South Pole for fifty days and nights with no radio contact in total silence into this huge last white nothingness which is Antarctica to the
South Pole. As the first doing it Solow. That expedition taught my great lesson of silence, because you know, when they walked down there and you don't talk to anyone, and you kind of stopped thinking. Because as soon as you start to think too much, you think about the past or the future. That's kind of noise too. So it's starting to experiencing the world. Experiencing yourself is getting
to noviorself better. When I started out, I felt that everything was white and everything was flat all the way to the horizon. But as the hours and days and weeks passed by and you kind of start to see that it wasn't totally white after all. It was a little bit bluish, reddish, greenish, even pinkish in the snow and the eyes. And it wasn't flat either. It was kind of different structures on the ice. So then I start to wonder if Antarctic I was changing, But of
course Antarctica remained the same. I was the one who had changed. That experience really taught me a great lesson on silence. And as the pulvert Emi, the Dickinson wrote the brain is wider than the sky, and by that expedition I very well understood what she meant. And then I became a father of three girls, and I had to start to get a proper job, and my life became all about noise afterwards. So this combination about doing outdoors and living a busy life, like most of the
people maybe really feel for writing on silence. And also then I sat on to read great philosophers on silence, and also some you know, some great authors who have already written about silence. But the problem with the philosopher is that you know, hardly any philosophers actually write about silence. One of the first things you read learn at college studying philosophy is that nothing comes from nothing. Ex and he'll he'll fit. You know, it's easy to think about
silence as nothing, and then nothing comes from nothing. I was just surprised to see how few philosophers actually had bordered thinking about silence. Why do human brains up for chaos? Why does it seem like all of us are just our brains are just destined for chaos sometimes, you know, to me, it was a surprise because when I sat down to write about silence. You know, I thought about myself and everybody else that in the mind that you
didn't have too much chaloes. But starting to think further about it, I think we all have these chales in our head almost all the time. The importance of silence is sometimes to get order or all these chaos being present in our own life, to experience not to think too much. Also, in the scilence, you're kind of seeking opportunities, So silence is also kind of opposite all these chaos
that goes on in our minds all the time. Demo technology is certainly a great disturber, but I think it's important to think about in a time before all this technology. Three fifty years ago, seventy years ago, this French philosopher Blessed Pascal wrote this book where he claimed that no man is able to sit by himself for fifteen minutes in silence doing nothing. Of course, when he wrote this in the six and fourties, it was already a big
problem that we have chaos in our minds. Of course, today with the smartphone and all this other technology, the problem has become so much more massive. So back to Pascal again, instead of doing nothing, we start to do something, and I think that's the origin of course not all,
but most other problems. If I managed to kind of sometimes just be quiet, be still listening to ourselves, not exploring yourself in the world while looking into a screen, but kind of look up, I think we can find much more peace, and you can find much more low I think, and you will live a more meaningful life. So it's not about being anti technology. It's more like learning how to relate to technology, because you know, it's almost insane if you think about the way we're living
relating to technology. When they walk the streets and they see grown men grabbing the telephones to the air like there should be teddy bears and totally focused on that telephone. To me, it's absolutely insane. I don't know what kind of vertically I love to use in the program for the kind of you know, you mind get absolutely fucked up. You see home, you're googling something, you find what is searching for Twenty minutes later, half novelater, you're still googling.
Some of the brightest people on Earth, working day and night, extremely well paid to get too addicted to all this absolution. But you know, in many ways it is absolutely terrible. One of the things that I really appreciate about your writing is that you insert yourself so much into it, Like you talk about those things as being problematic, but also like participating yourself in them, like as just like another member of you know, of the human race in
this modern era. And that's how I feel, man. I mean, like, you know, I'm big on the mindfulness and disconnecting and getting out in the silence, but I also am doing this. I do the same thing. I get in on the phone. I feel like I talked on the phone for eight hours yesterday or something. You probably did. You know, I wouldn't like to write a book and give everybody advice about how to live and look at me because I'm such a great person, because you know, I'm also getting
hooked on this technology. And that's also why I thought I had that message to tell, because I lived through it. I always had my phone with me somehow, or I tempted to have my phone with me all the time. Maybe the biggest mistake of doing the world today is to avoid nature, to think that we're kind of above nature, that we don't need nature, that we don't need to
listen to nature. I think that's the main reason for people feeling restless, why they feel insulated, why they feel lonely, quite also why people feel depressed, because we avoid nature almost happens. I've always been a walking species. We have always been exploring the world by walking, by feeling, by touching, by smellling, listening, see in and that has defined us as a species. While today we're the first generation who just sit on over arsis and exploring the world looking
down into a screen. And of course this is doing something to our mental health. I just read in the paper somewhere that people like average spent four hours every day on social media, and other people, of course spent four hours every day on looking at TV on what don't you do both? But let's say you spend four hours every day doing this kind of media, that adds up to a hundred and twenty thousand hours of your life,
about thirteen years day and night plus minus. When you are as well as me, you start to go to six eighty ninety birthdays. In more ways, and Sweden we have this problem which goes all this so comic in the shunty at shall believe it. All these days amounts and years that passed by, came and went I didn't
really understand that was life. Do you know? It's a little bit sad because somehow people start to fair, not on the death, but maybe even more to start to fair late in life that I'll kind of missed alt on this huge opportunity to have a great life. But do not despair. How does one find silence in the noise? Maybe try taking a walk? What does it mean to live in the present moment? I think it's an idea that we're all familiar with, but like, what does that
look like? Like? How how does one achieve such a thing? You can achieve it by almost any means. First of all, I think in general the present hurts, just like Pascal I mentioned earlier on the present hurts, and that's why we try to avoid it. And the opposite to the presence. Of course, it's the future on the past, and every time you think, as I said, you're thinking about the future on the past. The present has to be about experiencing the moment there and then I can do it
in nature. But you know, it's also about shutting out the world and experiencing your own silence or you're inner silence. Whenever you run, could food, have sex, study, chat work, think of the idea, read or dance, and you know, I love it. That's when you can be really in the present moment. And of course if you make low and you're not in the present moment, of course you all experienced that, but it's not so interesting to make
low if you're not in the present moment. I think it's different in early published walking one step at a time. I think walking is quite often about silence. Of course, you can walk with people and talk, or you know, use your phone or listening to music. But sometimes I would try to walk without holding anything in my hands and not having anything in my ears, and then it is very much about silence. You have it in the English language, just like you have it in the Norwegian
language and in sun script. That when you move you're being moved motion, emotion. So this is something you find in almost any language, at least as I know about. So this walking is doing something to your mind. The reason Socrates was walking all the time was not because you wanted to become fit. It was because you want to meet people and they want to think better, like a Steve Jobs. Definitely a huge and very important innovator and businessman, and of course he walked all the time too.
And also, of course I think a great thing with walking is that get all to the house, to get away from a family, get away from your friends. You can have a break and you can decide your own speed and hopefully you can see the starry night or the sunrise, or you can listen to the birds, are listening to a river, or you're just footsteps, and all
this is about getting closer to yourself. I think it's definitely plaform of meditation, and I think meditation in general, and yoga and mindfulness, all these are to me great ideas. But one of the reasons I wrote those two books was because I felt you can definitely experience great meditation and also deeper in a silence without using any techniques, for instance, just by walking. That's cheap and it's always availble bull like I flew from all Slaughter Sri Lanka
to be on this retreat. It was either there that it was a vegan, it was your goa all the time. It was quite silent, peaceful, and it was great. And when I came home after twelve days or something to Norway, I was very happy. But then I started to wonder, did that we all have to travel half the world to experience this kind of emotion. Um uh yeah, I haven't come back to Sri Lanka. I kind of very interesting when you mentioned that you personally maybe use working
as one of your primary modes of meditation. Maybe that's a little culturally determined, right, Like if you had been born somewhere else, grown up somewhere else, that maybe it would be a different approach. Absolutely, it's interesting to see in theres of walking. It's like I grew up in Norway, they close to nature. We didn't have a car. My father insisted that cars and TV and motor boats and a few other things very diseases in the world. So we walked quite a bit, so of course I was
kind of ingrained in my life. One of the most difficult cool questions I had as a father was my daughters, all three daughters. They always asked me, why do you have to walk when it's faster to drive? And I fact, that's a very good question. And that's also another reason I wrote the book, because you know, some of the best and obvious things in life are not that easier
to explain. When I wrote about walking, I just studied walking cultures in different places, and interestingly, like in Bombay in India, you see poor people walking all the time. Rich people they are having cars and even helicopters to get around, And of course in a norn Europe you see that it's the opposite. It's quite often the privilege of walking because they have the time and all. So you can quite often the live in nicer neighborhoods, so closer to the forest, so it's kind of more natural
to walk. But walking is something also deeply democratic because everybody can do it. When you read about the big revolutions in history or the world, at least the ones I've read about, they have usually started by people walking the streets. And of course this is something politicians quite often are kind of worried about, because if sufficient of
people walking the streets, they become very, very powerful. And also walking is a bit an artistic in the sense that as long as you're driving, you will kind of get from a to B in a particular speed and you will follow the rules. Or you take the metro, or you take the channel, you take the bus, and it's all kind of regulated by the government. But then by walking, you can walk very we like you don't have to follow the tracks of the form all the trump and you can have your own speed, you can
do details, and you can stop whenever you please. You mentioned politicians, right, like, certainly here in the US, I think of it at least like a certain national out of politicians, Like they come up in black cars, they're surrounded by people, they're sort of swooping out of place, and then they leave out. You don't really see your representatives walking around with the people, And I guess it's
different in doorway. Yeah, I think that's a very valid point because you know, one problem is, of course that you never see your own politicians. Good afternoon, everybody, quiet weekend. But I think it's a even bigger problem that politicians never see you. I'm not commenting, so they kind of
absolutely separated from their own citizens. And of course, you know this makes sense due to security and blah blah blah, but also think it's kind of lacking willingness to meet people because it's quite comfortable to move around and not having to relate to the people. Today, it has become a democratic problem in many parts of the world that the people who are supposed to help you to sort of two problems and support you and be your best
representative in the government. Then no, the true statistics and by reading and studying and advisors, but they are absolutely no cue who you are as you said in Norway. Fortunately it's better. It's not perfect hair either, but here you can actually see the Prime Minister shopping milk in the evening on the way back home from her office. It's it's quite sweet. And of course with five point
five in the people, it's much much easier. But I think it's very important for everybody to walk the streets and get to know your fellow citizens and see what it looked like. It's important to keep in mind that it was not we who invented the possibility to walk on two legs. It was the possibility to walk onto legs who invented manity. And then eventually, due to evolution, we can walk on two legs. We're able to move much longer distances, able to hunt fish, move around covering
huge distances. Then, all the time that we went off from Eastern Africa, it has always been about walking, about doing something physical to survive and to prosper for over civilization. Of course, the developmental languages has been very important, Farming has been very important, and walking has been very important to make us into who they are today. So many people talk all the time about the search in the hurry. It's there has so much to do, blah blah blah
blah blah. But of course, if you're going to watch a lot of TV and social media, it feels like you have a lot to do, but you know you really have time to spend fire ten minutes extra walking. In general, it's a huge misunderstanding like this that you have to drive all the time to save time. Time is extended when you move slowly, and opposite, if you drive quickly from A to B, you don't hardly experience anything, either in a chunnel or on the surface, but still
have to watch the light. You have to be careful, and although it goes quicker, nothing is happening, and then it feels like time moves really quickly. However, when you move slowly from A to B and suddenly you start to see people, you start to see how people addressed.
If in a city you start to see shops, what the houses are looking like, you start to get the smells, you hear all the sounds, and then because so many small things are happening, time is expanding and you feel that you have experienced something, and life get richer than kind of a ten second can feel like internity, I can have the kind of also the same experience in my own living room if we're reading a great book or thinking of listening to music, and they had this
kind of feeling that like time is just expanding. But then again, if you're kind of doing the same things every day, harder and a variety, you hardly see anything one day that you didn't see the day before or experienced more less exacted same things, then time moves very quickly. Um Like people said to me like, oh, you know, in years ago, time so quickly. And also I'm sixty. You can hard to tell them that, you know, I
feel that life is long. Time moves slowly. I don't want to move in the slower You've got a great quote. I think this is one of yours. You call lots of billion people obviously to this one. Letting your body travel at the same speed as your soul. Yeah, it's a quote from me, but the idea is not original. I think many people have felt the same and talked about the same. If you move too quickly, your spirit,
your soul is just lagging behind you. That's also what I mean, like you're not experiencing so much, you're not diggesting your what you're seeing, what you're kind of going through, because you've gone too fast. Another big misunderstanding today is like things are just going to happen quickly. You're going to have a quick fix, You're going to go from one mood to another fast. While I'll find it when I'm out in a nature that I'm just becoming a
part of everything which is surrounding me. Every now and then when the wind is blowing, you kind of feel is a part of you. You know, if you see a bird which somehow you know has a broken leg going or whatever kind of painful for you too. We need to respect nature, and we need to learn from nature, and we need to listen to nature, because nature has a lot to tell us about where we come from, where we are, and also quite a bit about what's
going to happen next. And of course when you walk in the cities or do an over hike in the force, part of every something fantastic is happening, but like small details are going on all the time. I have kind of fun or found interesting sometimes to look at people how they walk. Quite often by looking how they move forward, you can tell if you're in good mood, bad mood, if they're depressed, if they are optimistic, Like if you're really sad, you kind of crumbling in, almost shrinking, and
you're dragging your feet after you. You kind of lower your head, love your neck even, you know, briefing in a different way, and you're much more tense in your whole body. And opposite, if someone is super happy, just got a great message, they walked offly. Differently, if a couple walk together, if they're in low you know, you can just tell by the baldy language. And opposite, two people walk together and they have fed up at their shold,
you can also tell by your body language. And also if one is fed up and the other one is still in love, we can also tell. You can also quite often tell I couldn't say accurately, but what kind of profession they have. One of my neighbors is former army officer, and it still walks like an armory of officer, although his retired. You can spot a lawyer or an auditor that kind of a little bit similar, and the priests will work differently. Again, how long has it been
since you're last confession. I'm not saying it's kind of one to one. You can just say that's guy is a priest, that guy is a football player. But it's just fun to try to guess. In general life, I think curiosity, curiosity also about people, is super important. I love curiosity, and I think you know it's stop being super curious and you become a very old man. Are
there moments in your day. There's certainly moments in my day where it's like, Okay, I need to just stop what I'm doing, I need to hit pause on the rest of my life and just walk for like twenty minutes. Yeah, in my life too, And I think twenty minutes is a good number because it doesn't have to be long. Twenty minutes is great, I think, but even less can change your dramatically. As you know you asked earlier on
about meditation. We just walk for fifteen twenty minutes and without talking on the phone or checking your phone and maybe not talking to anyone, just kind of having a break to me can re energize me. You still need as much sleep, at least I do, but my whole attitude and also the way I move it totally changes. I think this is something like people have been doing
to every generation for thousands or years. But interestingly, now you can see, like you know, quite often universities are starting to study kind of what everybody knows, and I think it's University's, Stanford, University of Virginia, something together that have kind of proven that just while walking fifteen minutes, your creativity goes dramatically up and your mood goes up,
and you know it makes a wonder for you. Of course, two and a half thousand years ago, hippocratist the father and modern medicine, he said, the best medicine in the world is to do a walk. And if you come back from a walk and you're still in a bad mood, you should go for one more walk. And his third advice was just make sure the doctor is not giving you the wrong medicine. So I think it's three great advices.
Also in one it's wild to me because I feel like we all know that that walking is good for your health, your spirit, your mood, your heart, your soul. Like I think we all intrinsically know that, and yet sometimes it feels, i don't know, like hard advice to take, like to just take a break. Yeah, it's quite often when I read articles is about educating people, like telling
them what's best for them and blah blah blah. And this should be done by you know, of course schools, college, the government, private businesses to should kind of tell you what's good for you, which quite often that's a good reason. But quite often, as you say, we know what's good for us, nobody needs to tell you you should exercise, you should walk, you should move around, you should not sit in a share all day. This almost everybody knows.
Quite often, it's not a lack of knowledge, it's just lack of like, you know, a little bit of guts to get going. Yeah, when you were read in the book, I mean what you might have known someone this already. But like health wise, physical, bodily, health wise, it seems like walking can be incredibly good just for your well being. It is, as a Hypocritus said two and a half thousand years ago, as you know it's quoted, it is the best medicine. You know, It's an open question today.
Should be careful saying it, but you know, it's kind of open question today if doctors throughout history has saved more people than they have killed, at least if you look before you got antibiotics, I think that maybe not killed, but you know, maybe even you know, conditions even worse. But of course the antibiotics, it was radical that help a lot of people. But prior to let's say nothing, fourth to whenever fort five, it's not easy to figure out how much help it was with dr or sexually.
But one thing which is absolutely shortness that people who walks a lot, they're less sick, they are more flexible, they are not on the living longer life than other people. They also live richer, more meaningful lives than other people. But still, you know, even the Norway could just tell in many parts that even an old slowed capital of Norwa, it's six d people still kind of you know, huge neighborhoods where very few people are walking, they spend much
more time smoking, watching TV being inside. Average in those parts of the city lives nine years less than they are. Rich and other parts of the city. This is quite dramatic. That's super sad. No I don't have a follow up on that. I'm just going to change the subject. Do you have any advice, practical advice for somebody that might be listening and like wants to find some silence in their lives and peace and some purpose. But it's maybe struggling.
I think everybody almost is struggling with it. So that's a good start at list if you feel that you are unique because it's struggling with it. It's like, as you quoted Pascal the philosophers said, well this is a universal problem or challenge to get to know of yourself, and silence is you know very much about experiencing yourself. So first of all, it is difficult. As you said, the president is hurting, so I think that's a good
start to accept that. But then again, the silence we're talking about now, this inner silence is within you at all times, just waiting for you to explore it. So it's no focus, focus, and I don't think you need any formula. You need to just past this chresshold that we talked about that for a few seconds of some minutes, it is uncomfortable to sit or walk and doing nothing and try to get into your inner PC in and
experience your own silence. It is uncomfortable sometimes, it takes a lot of energy sometimes, and it can feel to start with as a waste of time sometimes, but of course it's not. It's what you know partly makes life meaningful. The most important question you should ask yourself is how should I live my life? You need silence, and your silence is different from my silence. That's also why in my book I'm not giving that many advices because we
have to accept. Like you know, everybody got their own silence. And the reason is because silence is about who we are, is about over personalities, about all our experiences. That's why your silence will always be different from my silence. That's really lovely. Thank you. Um. I wanted to at least add just if you could tell me a little bit about your your publishing company and why you started in the kind of in the kind of work that you do there. You know, you do whatever you do, you
do it for more than one reason. But a few of the reasons I started publishing was because my girlfriend was pregnant. So I want to have a job. I want to an interesting job. I like publishing because you both have to be commercial but you also have to think about intellectual matters all the time, so kind of you need to think about both, which fitted me and I have always read this since I was ten years old. I learned how to read late. I read lots of books.
I was kind of familiar literature, so I felt I had something to contribute, and I want to earn enough moneys i could buy a house for my family. So that's kind of why I started book publishing. And I did it for a few years and I liked it a lot, so I've done it for twenty five years. It's a it's a great job. I don't know if I'm going to do it the rest of my life, but at least it is a great job to published books.
So today we are Norway's biggest on nonfiction and we also publish children's books, a little bit, philosophy, sound fiction, and I have turned two four colleagues and it's great, it's meaningful. The world is getting a little bit better because you published great books, just like you with your podcast.
The world is getting a little bit better, and I think that's very important because everybody can change the world, but you know, you need to do it in tiny persons at the time, you've written six books eight sorry, you've written April books now. First I wrote about walking North Pole and to the South Call. Then I book on the Three Poles and some old expeditions. And then I wrote a book I call Philosophy for polar Explorers, kind of what I didn't teach me at school kind
of book. And then I wrote a book about crossing New York City. I wrote a book about art collecting, and then I wrote a book on Silence and the Woman Walking. This is also a really cool on the bookshelf, like I want to get more and more of your
of your books that are they are this size. But one of the things I really like about the way that you've structured is it almost reads like a series of Cohens and Mando's, Like do these sort of individuals sometimes like parable kind of stories sometimes sort of always gonna ask you. Did you write the book in no regionally? Did you write it in English? In the first place, I've wrote it in the Norwegian I have to, but
then I worked really hard to get the English. As you say, that is kind of more like a meditation, like I wanted to read or to be almost a little bit apotized while reading. And also, like you know you said, esthetics I think is really important because I think especially book on Silence, but also walking, it has to somehow reflect the content of the book. And I think you know, books should be beautiful and great to
have around you. If not, you know, you could just have e book or listen to no streaming, which is good too, but that's a different story. Yeah, well it's it's uh, both of those things that I mean, specifically on on the On the writing, it's very effective. I mean hypnotizing is a great word for it. Um. The English prose is beautiful and it's so poetic and so excellent job. I mean, I know this is your business,
but from from from my humble opinion, good job. Thank you know it's more than the business, because you know it's I don't think it hardly anyone sits down to write a book because that would like to earn money. I think you know the reason to write a book is uh, and these are no both of us all for us publisher. You know that has to come really from your heart. So I wouldn't spend a year and a half to write you know. That's finn book and Silence.
If I didn't really feel that I had something really important to say, well, Early, thank you so much for the time that you gave me today. My my pleasure, you know, I I feel privileged, would be invited to be able to talk about things that are really close to my heart, so thank you, or us to say Norwegian to some touch. This episode of Ephemeral was written and assembled by Alex Williams, with producers Max Williams and
Trevor Young and editing by rima Il Kali. Special thanks to Nitro Sound in Oslo, Norway, and to Andrew Howard for gifting me a copy of Silence in the Age of Normals, which, along with Walking One Step at a Time, are the books by Arling Cockay on which this conversation was based. Find them wherever books are sold, and find us on the worldwide Web at Ephemeral Show. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite show.
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