Parker Palmer - Reflections from Getting Older - podcast episode cover

Parker Palmer - Reflections from Getting Older

Feb 13, 201952 minEp. 266
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Episode description

Parker Palmer is a writer, teacher, and activist whose work speaks deeply to many people in many different walks of life. He’s the founder and senior partner in The Center for Courage and Renewal. He’s the author of many books, including his newest one which we talk about on this episode: On The Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity and Getting Old. Parker is one of our favorite guests of the show and after you listen to this episode, you’ll know why he’s back for a second conversation.

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In This Interview, Parker Palmer and I Discuss…

  • His book, On The Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity and Getting Old
  • His reflections looking back on his life
  • The resilient fabric of his life
  • How perfection is an illusion
  • The role mistakes can play in one’s life
  • The gift of age: Looking back on one’s life and saying “It all belongs”
  • Another gift of age: Deep appreciation and gratitude for the present moment
  • Feeling like you’re one of the lucky ones that you’re “old”
  • Asking “What’s there for me to learn?” when facing problematic moments in life (like feeling down, or feeling self-pity)
  • Moments of life that are burdened with ego
  • The correlation between ego concerns and anxiety
  • The importance and role of perspective
  • The what and why of the things we’re doing
  • The question (and trap!): Does my life have meaning?
  • My legacy vs Our legacy
  • How we’re all embedded in community
  • “I planted some seeds and found some people I wanted to garden with…”
  • How life and work are profoundly communal
  • Reflecting on the question, “Have I been sufficiently open to and aware of the significant contributions others have made in my life – and in such a way to do a deep bow to them in the work that I do?”
  • Turning attention outward vs inward
  • Being one among many vs trying to be something or someone special
  • The healing impact of getting out into the natural world
  • His poem “Harrowing”
  • To know when to say, “enough” because the rest of the world and the rest of my life is waiting

Parker Palmer Links

Homepage

Facebook

Twitter

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Transcript

Speaker 1

I told my wife because she's like, listen, there's a roadblock. There's something going on with you. I know it. And so when I saw his email, the light bulb just came on. I said, this is what I need to do, at least try to get past this roadblock. And that's what happened. I saw his email, I signed up, and the rest is history. I could never complete a project, and I've completed a project faster than I thought and I didn't throw in the towel. We talked about this

today when I was talking with Eric. You know, I want to keep giving up, and he's like, don't walk away from what you've already created. If you want to help getting past your roadblocks, Like Andy and hundreds of other clients have, go to one you feed dot net slash transform. The mistakes one makes, if one owns up to them, if one embraces them, tries to learn from them, can be just as important as the successes. Welcome to

the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is part kerk Palmer, a writer, teacher, and activist whose work speaks deeply to people in many walks of life. Is founder and senior partner of the

Center for Courage and Renewal. Parker is also the author of many books, including the one we discuss on this episode, On the Brink of Everything, Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old. Hi Parker, Welcome to the show. Hi Eric, Good to be back with you, sir, Yeah, pleasure to have you on for a second time. We will jump into your new book called On the Brink of Everything in a moment, but let's start like we normally do with the parable.

There's a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter, and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at her grandfather, and she says, well, Grandfather, which one wins? And the

grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well. I think it's a very relevant parable to anyone I know who's still alive and will on the face of the earth. Seems to me we faced daily questions about which of our impulses we're going to feed or encourage, or manifest or express, and those choices make a big difference in our lives and in the life of the world.

I'm a profound believer in the whole idea of that we create reality from the inside out, and that whatever is churning and working inside of us, for better or for worse, comes into the outer world and helps to co create a reality that I have to live in, and to some extent you have to live in, and other people in my orbit and in the larger society

around me have to live in. So any way we have of coming at this question of how do I exercise deep thoughtfulness about what it is in myself that I feed and what it is in myself that I that I don't feed. I think is worth reflecting on it, And for me, that parable has always been a very simple path into that really complicated question question, and I think arises big time these days. It always has in

human history. But these days when there's so much free floating anger, free floating anxiety, free floating contempt, free floating hatred really in our political system, and when we put more of that into the world, not reflecting on the choices we're making, it can't possibly be a good thing. So I sitting here today on what January third, nineteen, I hear that parable through those years that are tuned into our current political situation. That's great. Yeah, I agree

with you. One of the things that often people say about the parable is that, you know, people often think the parable is you can't starve your bad wolf. You can't you know, can't shun your bad wolf. You can't you know, you can't push off these bad sides of yourself, which I agree with in the parable actually doesn't say anything about doing anything detrimental to the bad wolf, but

it points me towards something that you say. And I'm just going to read a line of years back and we can kind of head into it from there, and you say, looking back, I'm awed by the way that embracing everything, from what I got right to what I got wrong, invites the grace of wholeness. Yeah. When I wrote On the Brink of Everything, which was a wonderful

exercise in reflecting on my own aging. Um, I'll turn eighty in another month here, and I think I probably started writing the pieces that constitute book about five years ago, and so I was very conscious of the fact that I was moving into my late seventies, and then eventually I hoped to cross that threshold with the big zero at the end of it. It became a way of helping me look back on my life, look around, and

look ahead. And as I looked back, I thought I'd let a complicated life of zigzag life and up and down life and in and out life as many of us have, and yet from this vantage point of age, I can see how every bit of it has woven together into what I currently experience as pretty resilient fabric of life, and that all the threads that went into that fabric are somehow necessary, somehow required, not only the bright and light threads, but the dark and difficult threads,

maybe threads that I at once put into the fabric years ago and instantly or eventually wished I could pull out because they somehow marred the perfection that I was looking for. But I think, you know, one of the things I've learned over the years is that perfection as

an illusion. I think most of us learned that is as we go along, if we're if we're honest about coming to terms with ourselves, and the mistakes one makes, if one owns up to them, if one embraces them, if one tries to learn from them, can be just as important as the successes that one may achieve in a lifetime, those bright and shining moments that we mostly like to talk about and that we put on our

resumes and you know us in job interviews and so forth. Um, Yeah, I just I feel like one of the gifts of age is the opper trinity to look back and say it all belongs, it all as a place. And I guess I could spend time regretting certain parts of my life, certain decisions I made, certain mistakes I made, certain ways I've fell on my face, and I certainly had my share of all of that. But another gift of ages deep appreciation for the present moment, deep appreciation, deep gratitude

for the fact that I'm alive and well. And to waste energy in regret it seems pretty nonsensical to me, And at the same time, as you're suggesting, I don't want to ignore the facts of my life, and so to reframe them as again threads that helped make the fabric of my life more resilient has been very helpful to me, and I don't know that I would have come as far with that job of reframing if I had not written this book, which required me to be

very actively and intentionally reflective about my journey over what's now nearly eighty years. You describe this process and looking at both are are good and are bad. You say, your descents into darkness and rising again into light, your betrayals and fidelities, failures and successes. You talk about embracing all of that is being fierce with reality. Yeah. I

love that phrase. As you know, Eric, I stole that phrase from a wonderful writer, Florida Scott Maxwell, who wrote a book that I don't think is widely enough known called The Measure of Our Days. When she was, as I recall, in her late eighties or early nineties, she was, uh, I believe, a young in psychotherapist, and it's a deeply

insightful book, The Measure of Our Days. In that book, she has this very arresting phrase about I can't quote it directly, but the notion is that if you're willing to embrace everything you you are and have been everything you've said and done, for better or for worse, you become fierce with reality. And I like the notion of fierce with reality. I mean, I think you know, fierce rightly understood is a word about that has to do

with being fully alive. And if there's if there's anything I want to be an old age, it's fully alive, because again with old age comes this this profound gratitude for the fact that I'm still here to walk the walk and talk to talk, and tell the story and and let the story keep evolving. Um. As I say early on in the book, I know people who feel badly about the fact that they're old. I feel like

I'm one of the lucky ones. Um. It doesn't take thirty seconds of reflection to recall that lots and lots of people have never made it this far. And I

feel very lucky about that. And so out of appreciation for life and the gift of another day of life that I give thanks for every morning that I get up, I treasure this notion of fierceness, that I can respond to things with fierce love, with fierce commitment, with with fierce passion and concern, you know, tempered by what I hope is the wisdom of yours, tempered by knowledge, for example, of the fact that not all of the problems I see around me are problems that I can solve or

help sell, but some of them I can make a contribution to. And if if my desire to do that is fierce, and if I do it out of a fierce love for people who are afflicted and affected by those problems, then maybe maybe I make some kind of marginal contribution to the to the world, and I'd much rather do that than lose myself in regretting or handwringing

or or self pity. I can be very contemporary about this, because I woke up this morning realizing I'd got to get in and see my doctor about a certain thing that um that had had troubled me yesterday, and I was able. I was luckily able to get in and see her, and you know, came away with a reasonably good It wasn't the catastrophic possibility that I thought it was,

but something it looks like it's much more manageable than that. Well, I feel very lucky to be sitting here talking with you now without also carrying the burden of a really challenging diagnosis. I feel very lucky that I had a doctor within reach who had a cancelation this morning and was able to see me. I feel very lucky that I'm among the fortunate ones who has the kind of health insurance that allows me to seek good medical care.

So it comes very naturally to me in in age to focus not on the problematic side of things, or to focus on the problematic side of things in a way that says what's there for me to learn. You know, when I'm when I feel down, when I feel self pity, when when I feel to use the ultimate insult in the in the Midwest grumpy. Uh, someone says you're grumpy

in the Midwest. That's a really bad thing. You don't want to hear that about yourself to be able to take moments like that, moods like that and say where is this coming from? But what what is there here for me to learn? And I think this this has to do with not ignoring, um, you know, the devouring wolf, the bad wolf, but to ask that wolf, what do you want? Um, Okay, you're hungry, but I'm not going to let you gnaw on my leg or on someone else's leg. What can I feed you that will satisfy

that that that hunger. It's not going to be me in my heart and my fate in my future. But there must be something. And I sometimes think that these shadow forces in our lives are simply asking us to pay attention to something about ourselves and about our world that isn't working for us, and to learn. I don't negotiate that that interface between self and world in a more creative life giving way very well. Said very well, said, it's interesting your book, and then I read another book recently.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with this gentleman's work. His name is Jonathan Rouch and he's a Brookings Fellow guy, but he wrote a book called The Happiness Curve and we I did an interview with him recently and will air it some time here. But it's fascinating because he's showing that for a lot of people, happiness sort of drops as you go into your twenties, your thirties, your forties, into your late forties, and then it starts the happiness curve.

It starts its way back up in aging. And your book and reading that it more and more is for me is helping to really work with a notion that I think is somewhat in bedded in our culture, which is that you hit your peak whenever that might be called mid thirties, mid forties, whenever you hit your peak, and then it's just all downhill from there. I loved his book. I love the work you're doing because it really points to that the aging process and getting older

really wherever we are. But you know, you can you know, some people think I'm old, right, and to you, I look young. So um, it's all perspective. We're all we're all older. But I love this idea that reframes that aging is not this one way decline into misery, that there's lots of benefits and wonderments and and grace, as you say in the title of your book, to Getting Older. Yeah, absolutely, I mean, I'm glad you brought that up. I've read

a little about Mr. Rouch's book. I haven't read the book itself, but I I like very much this message that you just articulated from that book. When I think back on my thirties and forties and you use this word hit our peak, and that's what's expected of us at that time. That's a lot of pressure, you know. And those are years in which you are keeping your altimeter close at and and you're seeing you know, have I hit my peak yet? You know? I don't think so.

I'm only at ten thousand feet. I know some people who are at fifteen thousand feet. I better get up there, even though I'm already having a hard time breathing. And then there's always somebody at twenty feet, so I better get up there too. That's a miserable way to live, even even though most of us would look back and say, or many of us, I mean, I would say this

about myself. I'm sure that I worried about the wrong things during those years, but they were years of energetic work in which I was trying, in my case, to carve out a career as a writer and a traveling teacher and an activist related to causes that I cared a lot about. And it was hard work, and it was stressful work because you know, I had I had way too much ego pinned on its on its outcomes. UM. I think. I think one of the things that allows

happiness to go up is when the ego falls away. Uh. And for me, you know, having experienced, as you know from my writing, three deep dives into clinical depression, UM, I have the experience of the ego disappearing entirely pretty miserable while you're there, very miserable and even deadly while you're there, when the sense of self disappears. It's a terrible place to be. But you come out of that with some new ways of inhabiting your own life that

are less burdened by ego. Then you know, then before you had that, that ego free experience, you know, you shift in some ways from the performance mode of midlife, like the question is always um, and I can be very concrete about this. In my life as a speaker in front of some very large audiences like five thousand physicians in Orlando, Florida, is one memory I carry with me. It's easy to get very nervous about um. Are they going to respect me? Are they going to like me?

Am I looking good while I do the job. The more you hold those ego written questions, the deeper your anxiety goes, and the less possible it becomes to do a good job. So when I started working on that somewhere in midlife, when I began to recognize what was going on, I had the realization, that's really not why I'm up there, or if it is, I should stop doing this, because those are not good reasons to be up there to perform, warm and look good. I'm up

there if I understand myself in the world properly. I'm up there to serve a bunch of people who are rendering an important service in the world, and I'm up there to serve them with ideas that I believe will help them render that service in the world even better

than they are already doing. So. I was talking with them about patient centered medicine, for example, And as soon as I began to get up in front of audiences with some real clarity around the fact I'm not there to perform, I'm there to serve, that kind of debilitating anxiety went away, and I was able to focus more on questions of am I doing the work necessary to

serve them and these ideas and ultimately their patients. Well, um, that's that's a much more life giving and creative question then the ego questions about you know, do they like me? And do I look good while I'm while I'm doing this? Um, And I think they come again. I think that that falling away of ego, which comes easier with age, is accompanied by a rise in happiness. I mean, there can be no happiness when one lives in an egocentric world,

when everything revolves around one's self. Perspective is huge, and perspective I think comes more easily with age when we're not constantly measuring ourselves against the guy or the gal who's at fifteen thousand or twenties thousand feet, when we're only at at ten tho. I mean you look back and you say, how silly can a person be? You know? And the answer is, well as silly as I was at that time. That's how silly a person could be.

First off, you're still looking good doing what you're doing, because I can see you here, and so I want to. I want to. I want to affirm that I agree completely ego. It can work its way into everything, and we all wrestle with it. I wrestle with it with the show all the time. I try and stay focused on what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, because because I love to talk to people like you, and and because I think that there's a lot of people out there who tell me that it really helps them, you know.

So that's when I'm on target and doing well. When I start doing less well as when I start comparing myself to how many downloads we've got, how many you know, start comparing myself to place you spent a lot of time. You know, I'm not getting as many downloads as christa tip it is right, you know. So I it's so good to come back to why and what we're doing. Um that leads me into a section in the book

I wanted to talk about. It's a question that's asked by adults of all ages, but perhaps most urgently by elders, who wonder if all these years add up to anything worthwhile? Does my life have meaning? Talk to me about that? Yeah, Well, as you know, I think that's the second essay in the book, m in the first chapter, and that was a very important piece for me to write, because I came to realize as I was writing it, the question of does my life have meaning? Does my life have meaning?

There's another one of those egocentric questions that seems perfectly reasonable but ends up being a trap. Um. I came to the place to be very concrete about this. I came to the place ten fifteen years ago where people would would start asking me, now, you know you're sixty or seventy years old, what do you want your legacy to be? And my instinctive answer then and now, whatever it is, it's not my legacy. It's our legacy, because there is nothing in the world that any of us

can create that isn't a communal creation. If I've written some good books, they're good only because I've had wonderful readers who have given me both affirmation and critique in in feedback whom I have come to know, and in the mysterious way writers get to know readers that they've never met and and who I have wanted to serve. It's been a very two way street. It's been a very relational thing. Even though I'm rarely face to face with with my readers, but I'm They're on my mind

as I write. And every conversation I have ever had in my life, whether it's in the privacy of my own home or when I'm out on the road giving talks and workshops, is somehow a place where I'm collecting insight and information and facts and feelings and coming to understand the commonality of the human struggle and the human possibility more deeply. And all of that gets fed into the book that I write. It's true that I sit at the keyboard and write the book, but what's on

the pages is an awful lot about us. It's a collective, communal phenomenon. If somebody's gonna in my obituary, somebody's going to write a line and about his legacy, I want that line to read our legacy, the legacy that was co created with with many many people over over many, many years, that that's just a gut conviction of mine that has nothing to do with false modesty. Somebody accused me the other day of false modesty, and I said, look, I'm not modest at all, let alone false. I'm not

going to buy that. It's just the simple truth. And it's you know, sadly, it's the truth that is often ignored or trampled on in our individualistic culture, where there is this is this great pressure to imagine that I'm doing all of this myself. You know, this is this is all about my prowess, my gifts, my my my strength.

The truth of the matter is that we're all embedded in community whatever we do, and different people bring different strengths and different gifts to that community and what comes out comes out in the mix, and it comes out

as a as a communal creation. I mean, I founded a nonprofit called the Center for Courage and Renewal that has three hundreds plus facilitators who are have worked with hundreds of thousands of people around the world, people in the helping professions, teaching, the law, ministry, philanthropy, etcetera, helping them rejoin soul and roll. But that's not my legacy. There is no way in the world that I could have created that by myself. I planted some seeds, I've

found some people that I wanted to garden with. Um. They taught me a lot about how to be good gardeners, and eventually we started growing a crop that other people found nourished, and so they wanted to help us grow that crowd. And on and on it went profoundly. Communal enterprise is what what life and work are all about. And so asking the question does my life have meaning,

it's started to get off on the wrong foot. UM, I think the real question is have I been over the course of time and I'm I'm thinking out loud now I'm realizing I'm about I think I'm about to say something that I haven't said before that isn't in the book, You know, Have I been sufficiently open to and aware of the incredible contributions that other people have made to my life over all these years, aware of them in a way that has allowed me to at

least somehow make a deep bow in their direction, honor them in the work that I do, and acknowledge that at every step on the way that is such an important thing to do, and as you were saying it, it just hit me like this show. And I don't know why I haven't thought of this more overtly before, but I certainly think about the listeners a lot, and it occurs to me. I've had two fifty guests. They've been co creators every bit or more than you know. And so that gave me a sense of gratitude. We

just passed our five year mark. January one marked five years doing this. Yeah and uh and so yeah that that gave me a moment of gratitude. I'll say one more thing about this there. So I have people come up to me and say thank you so much for writing about your experience with clinical depression, and they'll often say it with tears in their eyes because what you said about that and let your life speak. For example,

another one of my books saved my life. And for me, there's only one genuine response that I can make to that. I'm grateful that the words I put on paper were helpful to you. But I didn't save your life. You saved your life because the life saving work was your inner work. How you internalize those words, how you put wheels on them in your own life, how you use them as a lens to see your way through a very dark place. I didn't I didn't do that for you.

You did that for yourself. I'm very grateful that we met in the middle between my words and your own inner processing. But I really am not going to take credit for saving your life because I didn't do it. You need to take credit for that yourself. And I think that also allows me to say one more quick thing, Eric before we move on. That loops back to our

discussion of ego. I think it's always worth saying there is a kind of ego strength that is a loutable thing that a person needs to make his or her way through the world. You know, I've talked with many many women who will say, well, I understand what you're talking about in terms of wrestling with the male ego. But for me and a lot of my female friends, they will say to me, the question of having egos strength is the first question that we have to that

we have to deal with. And I think they're I think they're exactly right. Um, I think there is a gender difference here and that for at least some men, it's the overweening ego the ego that wants to take charge and control everything, And for some women it's the weak ego that is the problem, the ego that is always wants to be self effacing, that always wants to be helping but not helped, that doesn't feel worthy of

asking for hell word of asking for recognition. So there's something to be said for the healthy ego as um as a gift. Well, well, the overweening ego has to be kept under control. Indeed, I agree. I often think about that stuff from the sense of whether I think too much of myself or too little of myself or you know, the problem is usually in in my experience, because I've been on both sides of that. You know, I'm amazing, I'm a piece of crap right both cases.

My problem in those moments is that I am so focused on me, that's you know, that's for me. Where more that I can do a lot of what you recommend in this book and not recommend, but that you write about in the book and in our discussion about recognizing our place among others, and the more I can turn that attention outward and have it be less about me, what I've accomplished, what I've done, et cetera. I'm always

in a better place. I got this line from a prayer in a But you know what I've just prayed for for years and years is to be released from the burden of self. Yes, absolutely, And I you know, I think it's gonna boil down to some very simple acts. I mean, one of the things that I found this morning when I was quite concerned about my health and lucked out and was able to get a doctor's appointment on the very morning that I felt I needed it.

I got up early, I always do, and I couldn't call the doctor yet to see if I could get

an appointment. But here was an email waiting for me from a reader who was suffering from X, and I just I thought, I'm going to feel better if I answer her email in a way that attempts to speak to her condition and just to acknowledge her as a human being, and to express compassion for her suffering and say what little I might be able to say that could be useful and offer a conversation, you know, down the road in a in a month or so, when my schedule loosens up a bit. So I did that,

and I felt better. It was a very conscious effort to get outside of my own my own worries, I really outside of my own self pity and my own and my fear for my own fate um and touch the life of another, of another person. It seems to work every time I want to just read a couple of things you wrote about this does my life have meaning? Before we kind of wrapped this part of the conversation up, because these are really great for me. I am not

the son at the center of anyone solar system. If I keep trying to put myself there, insisting that I am special and my life must have some sort of special meaning, I'll die in despair or delusion. Peace comes when I understand that I am only one thing among many, no more or less important. I love that because that's another one for me is just to be one among many. I feel like I spent so much of my life trying to be something special, trying to be better or

different or unique. And the more that I can, as you said, just recognize I am one among many really always helps with that. Because in this essay you say, I'm able to affirm that I've made meaningful contributions in at least parts of my private and public life. In other times, everything I've done seems as flimsy and as flammable as straw. And I think it's again that looking at it just from my orientation, If I'm in a good mood, I think I've done good. If I'm in

a bad mood, I think I've done terrible. But that recognition of my place in the greater hole always seems to have a healing effect for me. Yeah, I think

that's absolutely critical. And you know, that's one of the reasons if you take this a step beyond the human world where we've mainly been focusing on our conversation, it's one of the reasons why for me, getting out into the natural world, especially into a wilderness area or a semi wilderness area, always makes me happier, always as a healing impact, because out in the natural world there's this theory interesting mix of sort of the way I speak

about it is indifference and acceptance of me um. You know, when I'm in the middle of the boundary waters of northern Minnesota, million acres of pristine wilderness where no motors are allowed, and I'm back on a trail where if I don't watch myself carefully, I could get lost. I look up at the sky where maybe a big thunderhead is rolling towards me, and I realized this place is utterly indifferent to me. It doesn't even know I'm here. A couple of missteps and I could be done for it.

But at the same time, there is this profound sense of acceptance. You know, those those trees, those rocks which have seen at all, those ancient rocks that have seen at all, They're really not a concern about my latest screw up, and they're not impressed by my it a success. I'm just out there is one among many, and that it's that interesting combination of indifference and accepted that you get in the natural world that I get in the

natural world that somehow adds to my happiness. It's like the place just right, you know, where you're holding this paradox that that has talked about in an old Hasidic Jewish tale where the where the Rabbi teaches that everyone should have a code with two pockets in one pocket is gold to remind us that we are precious, and the other pocket is is dust, to remind us that we're nothing. I love holding that paradox, and the natural

world helps me hold it. I agree. That's something I have grown to appreciate more and more, particularly over the last few years, how important the natural world is. And lately I've done sometimes when I'm sitting out in nature, I I sit there and I go for a second, I'm like, all right, they say the Earth's been around for like four point five billion years, Like this place

that I'm standing is part of that. Like I tend to think of that as an abstract concept, but I'm like, no, this very place has been here, you know, not in its exact same shape. I recognize that that has changed. You know, there might have been a sea here or mountains, but this place has existed that long and it profoundly humbling in a good way. Experience. Yeah, it really is.

And this house that I've built in this place is just a blip on the radar her of time, you know, And I can get into a space with this house where everything that's important to me is right here. You know, these papers, these books, Well, it really isn't everything that's important to me that's right here, and all of this shall pass. So you know, it's another way of asking, So what what is really eternal about our bet our lives, about the human experience. Um. I think probably what I'm

clearest about is that these questions are eternal. Amen to that, you have a line that says, perhaps the most important sentence I've ever written is that one word enough. Yeah. So this is in a reflection on actually on a

clinical depression and on a poem I wrote about being depressed. Um, let me attempt to quote the poem from memory because if I can do it, because it puts that word enough in context and maybe helps explain well, I think that's the most important sentence or word I've ever written. So the poem is called Harrowing, and there's a double meaning to that title. I was walking. I was out

in the country suffering from depression. I was walking past a recently harrowed field, um, which has been dug up by a big piece of farm machinery with disc carrow prior to planting. And harrowing was the nature of the experience that I was going through with clinical depression. So harrowing is the name of the poem, and it goes like this, the plow has savaged this sweet field, misshapen clods of earth kicked up rocks and twisted roots, exposed

to view last year's growth, demolished by the blade. I have plowed my life this way, uprooted a whole history, looking for the roots of what went wrong. Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred enough, the job is done. Whatever has been uprooted, let it be seedbed for the growing that's to come. I plowed under last year's reasons. The farmer plows to plant a greening season. So it's in that context. I didn't get the poem quite right,

but it's in the book. The fact that at your age you can remember that poem is a I am blown away because I don't think I can remember something my red I blew a few words. Beautiful poem, thank you, thank you. Yeah, it was very meaningful for me to write that at the time. It's sort of helped me hold and carry that experience of depression, which is otherwise just kind of amorphous and all over the there I was.

I had gone on retreat, hoping to you know, reflect, meditate, journal, get some counseling around what went on in my life that led me to this place. And the inside of the poem obviously is enough already with that looking back, with that digging up, with that rooting. Um, look at this field. It's it's been dug up, it's been uprooted, just like your ravaged, furrowed, scarred face indicates you've been But why is the farmer doing that? The farmers doing that to plant a new crop, um, you know, to

grow a new harvest. So enough, the job is done. Whatever has been uprooted, Let it be seed bid for the growing that's to come. I plowed unearthed last year's reasons. The farmer plows to plant a greening season. So I think we just come to those moments in life when of necessity, we've we've pushed hard on some boundary or some question um or some issue that that we're finding ultimately inexplicable. In a lot of ways, what happens to us in life can never be fully plane by background factors.

It just happens. M Depression is to some extent bad luck and recovery full full recovery, thriving, surviving and thriving on the other side of depression is good luck. Um. Nobody really knows, you know, why some people decide to end their lives and other people come through into richer and fuller lives. So there's bad luck and there's good luck. But the point is to know when to lay something down,

to know when to say enough. I've whether it's depression, or a relationship that isn't working, or a job that's not fulfilling um or a way of being in the world that is not bringing you happiness in any shaped form or fashion. There comes a point when you've slammed your head against that wall often enough and all you're getting is a headache. The wall isn't yielding. That you just need to be able to say enough, That job

is done. I've pushed that one as far as I can, and and now I just I have to ask myself what's next for me? What? What risk am I called to take? How am I called to reach out? What left to turn or right turn or reversal do I need to make to get away from this impenetrable wall Because the rest of the world is waiting and the rest of my life is waiting. I just I find that an enormously helpful insight. You know, again, we talked early in our conversation here Eric about no regrets about

the past. Um I don't regret the time I spent slamming my head up against walls that nothing but give me a headache, because I can look back and say I did my best to take that wall down, but it was it was not going to come down. It isn't like I cut that job short. It isn't like I stopped trying to redeem that relationship, or stop trying to make that job work prematurely, right too soon, out of laziness or flows or avoidance. I really gave it

my best shot, but it didn't work. And I'm glad now, fifteen years later, that I'm not still slamming my head against that against that same wall, that I'm not still digging up the past to try to figure out what went wrong. You know, what I've been doing is to let go of that old story and start writing a new story. There's a wonderful poem I think I may cite it in the book. I can't quite remember. It's

a poem called thank You Robert frost Um. I can't remember the poet's name at the moment, but the poem starts out by citing an incident that apparently actually happened in real life Robert Frost was asked, do you have hope for the future, and he said yes, and I even have hope for the past. And he goes on to talk about how, um, we can refigure the past.

We can reframe the past. We can retell the story of the past in a way that makes it a better story, and that in which we exercise self forgiveness and forgiveness for others. Um, you know, without without twist, singing the facts by taking a new look at them from a different angle. And I find this, this notion

of writing a different story very, very liberating. I'm just put in a little plug here, but I know that you live in Columbus, Ohio, and my dear friend and colleague, Carrie Newcomer, the singer songwriter, and I are coming to Columbus. I think it's in April at the Burkhart Center. I believe, wonderful place, wonderful organization put on our stage show, which is called what we Need is Here Whole Hard Times in the Human Possibility. It's a show we love doing

a night, a minute show. It's interspersed with songs and spoken word. And I can I can reassure everybody that carried as the singing, and I do the spoken word cases. So that's that that will be a relief to all all who are listening. But SUREY is just in the process of coming out with a new album called The Point of Arrival, and one of the songs on that album that I really really love is called telling a Different Story. It's a great theme for redeeming one's past,

um reframing the narrative. Yes, that is such a fundamental skill to be able to do, to make meaning out of what has happened to us. And I asked people a lot on the show, what do you think is the difference between people who you know bad experience breaks them or bad experience turns them into a stronger, more fuller purpose. And one of the things that I hear most often is exactly what you said, the ability to

reframe the events in a meaningful way. Yeah, it doesn't have to be exercise and self deception, as I think some people hear it to be um, it often involves something as simple was saying being able to genuinely say to yourself, even though I can look back and say what I did was a mistake or inadequate, I did what I had to do, and I did what I knew how to do, and I did the best I

could at the time. It's unfair to ask of my twenty year old self or my thirty year old self that I should have known back then what I know at almost eighty. That's just an unreasonable demand to make on myself, the self I was fifty or sixty years ago. Totally well, I think this is time for us to

end this part of the conversation. You and I will continue in the post show conversation and listeners if you're interested in getting the post show conversations, we have lots of them with lots of guests, and this one is going to be great. Parker and I are going to talk a little bit about the hope of results, you know, how how we can do work and let go of the outcome, and how critical that is to being able to do good work. So we're going to talk about

that if you're interested. When you feed dot net slash support, Parker, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a I think this is even better than the first time. Well, thank you, Eric, it's always a delight to talk with you. I've really enjoyed this time together. Thanks so much. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support.

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