Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Growing Hope: What Depression-Era Gardens and Rainn Wilson Teach Us About Hard Times

Episode Date: March 30, 2026

During the Great Depression, Detroit officials carved up vacant lots and handed exhausted families seeds and tools. It wasn't a hobby — it was survival. And a lesson for today: hope isn't just a feeling, it's a habit you practice. Then Rainn Wilson — yes, Dwight Schrute — joins Sharon to talk about the loneliness epidemic, the rise of cynicism, and why posting about something isn't the same as changing it.  Be sure to read our newsletter at ThePreamble.com – it’s free! Join hundreds of thousands of readers who still believe understanding is an act of hope. Credits: Host and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Craig Thompson (00:00:00) A story on how to practice hope (00:07:50) The loneliness epidemic (00:22:41) Rainn Wilson’s on his faith To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When WestJet first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything.

Like packing a spare stick. I like to be prepared. That's why I remember 988, Canada's suicide crisis helpline. It's good to know just in case. Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a train responder anytime. 988 suicide crisis helpline is funded by the government in Canada. Welcome to the preamble podcast. Today's episode will feature one of my favorite guests of all time as a huge fan of the office.

Talking at Rain Wilson, Dwight, Shrewt, if you didn't know, was so much fun. that's ahead. But first, a message from me that I hope will lift you up and inspire you to continue to do the next needed thing. I'm Sharon McBan. And this is the preamble podcast. You don't always need a barometer to know when the wind turns. Bert, the lovable chimney sweep, chalk artist,

one-man band in Mary Poppins, simply senses that something is changing. Winds in the east. Mist coming in, he sings, looking across the roof lines of turn of the century London. Like something is brewing and about to begin. The camera pushes in tight on his face. Can't put me finger on what lies in store. The small crowd of onlookers exchange puzzled glances.

But I fear what's to happen. All happen before. And while I hesitate to point out the nearly prophetic foreshadow. brought to us by a beloved fictional character. The winds in the east have been up for a while now. When I don't know what to make of that, I go rummaging in older weather. On a scrubby municipal field in 1931, someone nailed two signs to a wooden shed. Detroit Thrift Gardens, one read, and beneath it, no work after 8 p.m.

Women in threadbare coats and boys with school-issued hose assembled along the rows of cabbages. The committee came in hats and with clipboards, crouching to inspect what pushed from the earth, murmuring about beetles and moving on. The Great Depression isn't just a handy name to refer to a time of economic unrest. It was also the national mood.

With paychecks evaporating and pantries dangerously thin, officials in Detroit did something stubborn and simple. They created thrift gardens. Plots carved out of vacant tracts of land, ringed by houses and utility poles where families could plant vegetables with city issued seeds and tools. By the 1932 growing season,

the Thrift Garden Project stretched like a patchwork across the city. 6,600 plots on 400 acres. gardeners pin numbered badges to their coats, signed pledges not to sell anything they grew, and to keep track of their bounty. They took turns on the night watch. The city provided families with fertilizer, seeds for plants that could handle the Michigan cold, and workshops on how to can what they grew. The Detroit News noted that in one sample of gardeners, Germans, Hungarians, and Austrians, worked alongside Mexicans, Ukrainians, Ukrainians, Serbian, Russians, and Black Americans. This was no time to worry about whether your neighboring grower spoke perfect English.

The mist was coming in, remember? The newspaper described it as a babble of tongues. People of all types were welcomed as equals into the program. Buried in a city memo is a line that reads like a benediction. Fresh air, sunlight, and the visible. visible results of their own work have altered the morale of many gardeners. The badges, the ledgers, the inspections, the manure, and the hose, they weren't bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake. They were the scaffolding for endurance. A row of radishes couldn't fix

the economy, but it could fix dinner. The sunshine couldn't put dollars into the bank, but it could stave off a depression that ventured into the territory of Great. New York City gritted out the same logic. By 1935, there were 5,000 gardens stitched across the boroughs. A promise ran in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The person who wishes to raise his own vegetables will be furnished to the land, tools, seeds, and instruction in the art of agriculture. The city was telling its tired residents.

We can't stop the wind, but we can stand in it with you. Detroit and New York were building repeatable, recognizable shapes, neighbors over isolation, organizational systems that kept them moving, logging their harvest made progress measurable when little else was. Stories like these get flattened by time. It's too easy to make gardening adorable. But the no-work-after-eight-p.m. requirement wasn't a quaint, be sure to kick your feet up, edict. It was an acknowledgement that exhausted people,

needed to line up the next day for relief checks or to search for non-existent jobs. When I read through the files now, I can see the days in Detroit or New York. A shed door sticks in the humidity. A mother's tears slip silently down her cheeks. A child's crooked planting row is corrected by a neighbor. It's not cute. It's the work of people who were experiencing a great depression. There is a temptation in times like these to believe that our exhaustion disqualifies us from usefulness. We imagine people who did harder things and endured more for longer, and we imagined they were made of tougher stuff. But they weren't. They were as weary and as ordinary

as we are. The difference is that they built structures outside of themselves to carry them forward. The garden plots didn't demand heroism, only habit, and that is still available to each one of us today. They offer us a reminder. Not everything. Something. Not someday. Dinner tonight. If you are hunting for hope this week and struggling to make it appear on command, you're not alone. But hope is not a feeling we conjure. It is a habit we can practice. The thrift gardens were not done. designed to produce inspiration. They produce food. The inspiration followed because people were doing shared, regular, visible things outside in the fresh air and the sunlight. We can smirk at that, or we can admit it might be exactly what we need. Gardens are not a universal solvent,

but what I am offering is the pattern beneath them. Choose a piece, however small, of the burden you can carry and then structure your persistence so it does not depend on the adrenaline of headlines. If gun violence in schools is what you cannot ignore, set a reminder on your phone to make phone calls every month. If immigration courts are the thing you cannot look away from, show up with bottled water on hearing days. Maybe Bert was right. What's to happen has happened before. And if we cannot still the wind, we can decide what to plant in it and with whom. Next, my interview with Rain Wilson. We talk about his shift from atheism to spirituality

and how he fights cynicism and despair. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. This month, as we celebrate women, I'm reflecting on the women who've shaped me. One friend in particular inspires me with how she balances motherhood, partnership, and career goals, while still being the emotional anchor for so many people. But being strong doesn't mean carrying everything alone. Therapy can be a place

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It's so dangerous to live that more dangerous than a B. minus or a C plus life because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves.

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You'll find the same regular prices online as in-store. Many promotions are available both in-store and online, though some may vary. Here's my interview with actor and activist, Rayne Wilson. Thank you for being here. It's a treat. Sharon McMahon. You pronounced my name more correct. than President George W. Bush did.

What did he say? Mirkmern? McMahehan. Something along those lines. It has a silent hoe in the middle, right? There's a silent hoe in the middle of McMahon. And so it kind of throws you for a loop a little bit when you realize the hoe is silent. Is it appropriate for me to say we all kind of have a silent ho in us?

I mean, some of us more than others. Yes. What a pleasure. I'm such a big fan and happy to be on your show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Oh, truly, the pleasure is mine. You are best known for playing Dwight on the office, of course. Are you tired of talking about Dwight yet? Or is he still very beloved in your heart? It's a mixed bag. I'll be really honest. I'm not tired of talking about Dwight yet because when I interact with people, I see how much the show means to them. Totally. So it's a heart and a gut thing. People that are office fans, they'd say how much it impacted their lives, how much it brought. their family together, how much it soothed their anxiety. And so I'm just so grateful to be, how many television shows are a balm to people's lives? Yes, that's absolutely correct. I would

say the same thing. To me, the office is like macaroni and cheese in your comfortable pajamas at the end of a really long day. That's how it feels to me. I've watched every episode, probably a minimum of five to ten times, except for Scott's Tots. That episode's unacceptable. Is it too hard to stomach? Is it just too awkward? Those poor children being denied in education. I just, as a teacher, I can't handle it. It's too much.

I'll watch all the other episodes. Yeah. But, of course, the office would be nothing without Dwight. And it really does mean so much to people, and it means so much to a variety of generations. You know, like the people like me who watched it when it was first airing, there's my generation. And then there's like all of the Janzears that have just discovered. and are watching it in streaming and are like spending eight hours a day binging it. Right.

There's not many shows that are like that. It is intergenerational in a sense. Occasionally you meet people such as yourselves that was watching it on appointment television on the NBC network. The NBC network. Thursdays at 8 or 9 o'clock or whenever the hell it aired. Yep. I do have to ask one quick question.

And I want to talk about something that you've been working on lately. But I do have to ask which bear is best? Fact, black bear is best. How is that? I did that for the fans. But really, in all honesty, have you ever seen a sun bear? Yes, sun bears are super cool. They're so cool.

It's hardly even a bear. It hardly qualifies as a bear, although there is a certain ursignness. But they are delightful little creatures, and they don't get enough attention. I mean, it's koala bears and grizzly bears. What about the sun bear? Or the spirit bear. Have you seen the spirit bears of British Columbia? Okay.

That's not a thing. That is a thing. I'm not making up. You're going to have to Google it. Spirit bears live only in British Columbia. And they are this community bears that has like just existed in its own little community, like getting real fat on the salmon that runs through the rivers, etc. And they are white black bears.

Genetically, they are black bears, but their fur is white. I googled it. It is a black bear. bear that is white. There are about 500 fully white individual ones and they live on the islands up there. Wow. I am a bear authority and I learned something new. I feel like this is my reason and my purpose for being on your podcast. Thank you for teaching me about bears. Sharon, is there nothing that you do not know? I do not know how to speak old German. I don't know about belshnichel. I'm not an authority odd. No.

Amish holidays. That's not my, that's not my thing. There's still time. You're young. You're young, Sharon. You know, when I saw that you were doing a TV show called The Geography of Bliss, I was like, is that based on the 2008, Eric Weiner book that I read in 2008? And now you need to answer the question for everybody else. No, it's not a total coincidence. Completely coincidental. I'm so impressed that you read. read that book when it came out, although it was considered a bestseller. And Eric Weiner is an executive producer on the show. And it is the spirit and curiosity and DNA of his book that runs throughout our show, The Geography of Bliss, and an awesome title as well. It totally is. I loved the premise of the book. So I was like, if we take the general concept of this book, which I really enjoyed, and then we

just add in rain, this is going to be something that I will create. greatly enjoy. And I did. It's a delightful show. Thank you, Sharon. Thank you so much. It was a joy to do as well. It really was. When you were conceptualizing this show with the producers and everybody who worked on this show, how did you decide where to go and what the activities that you were going to engage in? Because I'm wondering, like, how do you get to Bulgaria, find this woman and make like the elderberry syrup? Like, how does that come to be? First of all, what we originally planned and what ended up on the screen are completely different. So we were going to go to Finland and Moldova. And then a pesky and horrendous and tragic thing happened, which is the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And all of a sudden, Finland was on a front line and Moldova was on a different kind of a front line. and we were like, uh-oh, we can't really tell a story over by a war zone about happiness, because that's just not right. Totally. So we shifted from Finland to Iceland, which has similar stories and has beautiful visuals and to Bulgaria from Moldova, because Iceland is among the most happy of the countries and Bulgaria is among the most unhappy. And we wanted to learn from going to both.

What is it that we can glean from both of those? So you find storylines that suit the overall story that you want to tell. And you know, you want to create a package of like five wonderful acts that take you on a journey. You know, one of the reasons that you talk about, you wanted to do this project, you wanted to go on these journeys, is for your own personal spiritual journey or your own personal exploration of like what makes somebody happy. and this notion of where you are or where you live can impact your sense of happiness. I would love to hear some of your personal takeaways. One of the most powerful experiences I had was in Iceland with these incredible Viking vulgari women that gather several times a week to do cold plunges in the Arctic Ocean, which is about 57 degrees.

And they gather and they dance and they sing and they. They breathe and they meditate and they hold hands and dozens of them then walk into the water up to their necks. And they're breathing and singing and then they come out and they dance with a big boom box. And it was one of the most exciting, revitalizing and inspiring hours of my life. And when you do the research, you look at like Andrew Huberman or whatever about cold immersion therapy, it's really astonishing the positive impact that it has on slow dopamine release. But then doing it communally and creating this tribe of women doing it with such abandon and with the arts and with meditation and breathing and holding hands camaraderie,

that was really powerful. And I kind of feel like we could heal the entire world if we just did that every morning. We'd gathered, held hands, sang, revealed our bodies in our swimsuits, even though we're all pudgy and weird looking and went into the cold water. So that was one incredibly powerful experience. But the takeaway from all of it was really pretty basic,

which is that happiness, bliss, joy, well-being comes from community and connection. That's it. That's it. You know, you can do meditation, you can do cold plunges, You can exercise. You can connect with nature.

Those are all crucial and lovely. But really where you saw the most vital and exciting and inspiring connections where people gathered in community. And that's what oftentimes we're missing in contemporary America. Or we're fooled into thinking that we have a community on social media because we have a lot of friends and likes and thumbs ups and hearts on our posts. but that's not real community. We need to be in rooms with each other.

And that's another reason why COVID was so devastating to us culturally. You know, I recently spoke to this doctor who said that community and relationships are as important to anybody's health as anything else you do. He believes that it is just as much a marker of health as how often you're eating broccoli or how often you're playing tennis. that how often are you socializing predicts longevity better than anything else? I just had a conversation with Dr. Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general. Yeah. And he's recently announced that we're in the middle of a loneliness epidemic and that the health impacts of loneliness. Being lonely is the equivalent of smoking like 15 cigarettes a day. That's what they say. And it just takes years off your life. I also was listening to a podcast

about Alzheimer's, and they were talking about how loneliness increases the risk of Alzheimer's greatly. Yes. In the future, when we look back on this time, we'll really be uncovering the mental health epidemic, the loneliness epidemic, and the diseases of despair that I describe in my book and really unearth some very sobering realities. Yeah, totally. I was just going to mention this thing from your book, which you refer to as sort of these deaths of despair, these ideas that there are unique things that plague modern society. And I

wondered if you could expand on that a little bit. So I have a chapter early on in the book called a plethora of pandemics. And I talk about the COVID pandemic. And then I reference the fact that there are a dozen other pandemics that we don't think of as a pandemic, but that's how they should be viewed. The mental health epidemic is one of them. Climate change, I view as a kind of pandemic, with the roots of its disease being spiritual, not political. Because we're so disconnected from planet Earth, that humanity uses planet Earth like a giant ATM machine, where we just withdraw, you know, oil, gold, copper, we're almost out of copper, and we just suck these out in the most destructive ways.

And then with our waste, we just dump our waste right back into planet Earth. And all of these pandemics, including diseases of despair, racism, sexism, income inequality, these are not some kind of lefty,

woke jargon. Like, they're very real, but their roots are, again, and this is a part of the thesis of my book, there's more to it than that. But part of the thesis of my book is that the roots of these issues are spiritual and need to be addressed as such,

and need to be healed with love and compassion and forgiveness and with building of community and turning from being self-centered to being other-centered. You can pass legislation all you want. That's just putting Band-Aid on a cancer, and that's kind of what we're doing in Western civilization right now. And you argue in your book, too, that that's one of the reasons we need a spiritual revolution,

in whatever form that would take for you, that these pandemics can only be addressed via some of these spiritual avenues, that we can be like, stop being racist, period, sign it into law. And yes, we should have laws that make it so that you can't discriminate. And, you know, things of that nature, of course, but it doesn't mean we should abandon legislation. But we can't address the pandemic of racism

or sexism, for example, without addressing the spiritual component. It's exactly like what you were saying. And I think racism is a great example. Like the voting rights law was passed in 1965, making sure that black people were always eligible to vote and that there weren't any restrictions on race. It's such an important law. And all the laws that we've passed to end Jim Crow have been crucial in our country's development, but they're not enough.

And we see that today with an increase in kind of polarization. that to work on racism, we need to go back to the roots of some of the deepest religious and spiritual teachings that have been around since the dawn of time. We need to go back to the life of Jesus Christ. We need to go to the root of what the Buddha taught, or what's in the Bhagavad Gita, or the Vedas, or Apanishads. And another one of my theses, that sounds kind of dirty, but theses of my book is that there is a wealth of spiritual information and tools that is there from, you know, 5,000 BC onwards that we can harness and put into practice on both a personal level, which is how most people consider the spiritual journeys on a personal level, and that's

important. But we can also utilize these tools on a collective level, on a social level, for social transformation. More with Rain Wilson when we come back. In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees earn an average of over $24.50 an hour. Employees also have the opportunity to grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields like software development and information technology. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. More now of my interview with Rain Wilson. One of the things that I really related to in your book was about the death of your dad.

And my dad has passed away as well. And you talked about how it seems impossible to you that life could come to an end because brain activity ceased. That it simply doesn't compute. That it all adds up to nothing. It's my favorite topic in the world. It really is. I have a chapter on God in the book called The Notorious GOD, where I try and kind of explode and re-inspire and reinvigorate conversations about the divine. And death and how to live it is the chapter you're referring to, which I frame with talking about the passing of my father, which was incredibly heartbreaking. And there's

a big cultural conversation between, you know, the atheist elements. and the theist ones. And I tried being an atheist for several years. When I was younger, I had rejected the faith of my youth, which was the Baha'i faith, and I had kind of turned my back on it and, you know, entered kind of secular New York City in the 90s and going to acting school and being a bohemian. And most of my friends were atheists. And I tried it on.

And then as I was on kind of a spiritual journey and learning about faith and the soul and spirituality and whatnot, I realize that, you know, there's two options. There's getting into God. I'm not sure if this is what you do on your podcast, but why not? Why not?

What do we have to lose? Yeah. Well, thousands of listeners. They'll love hearing from you. They'll love hearing your thoughts about this. Yeah. So either everything is a random assemblage of molecules

and atoms and energy that was kind of sparked seven billion years ago, but may have preexisted that. And it's all random and it's bouncing around. And we happened to have formed out of the animal soup and the animal zoo on planet Earth and have advanced consciousness. And that's just a trick and a miracle of evolution.

And then when we die, it's lights out and the consciousness goes out like a light bulb. That's one option. And the other option is that we have some kind of eternal element to us, a soul, that there's some aspect of our consciousness, of our essential beingness, our love. light that is simply residing in these human meat suits for 80 or 90 years, if we're lucky, and then continues on its divine journey, whatever that may be. And different religious mythologies, as it were, point to different possibilities of this kind of a journey.

But all religious faiths talk about how the material is kind of illusory and temporary, and not something to attach oneself to, but to. to continue on the journey, wherever that goes into eternity, beyond time and space. So as I pondered these questions, life's biggest possible questions, about God and the soul and the meaning of life and death, to me it was incomprehensible that life was meaningless and then it was over, but that there had to be something more. And as I've dug deeper and deeper into that realm, I have come away firmly believing that to be true. You know, I loved the chat. that you call the seven pillars of a spiritual revolution because a number of the seven pillars

of a spiritual revolution, I was like, those are the exact principles that I think we need to harness for government, that we need to harness for activism, that we need to harness for sort of systemic societal change. And I love the phrase, celebrate joy and fight cynicism. because cynicism is the opposite of hope in many ways. Cynicism is what makes it impossible for us to have positive change in society, to have a fair justice system, or to have a system that provides equal opportunity for everybody. If we embrace cynicism, then we can never become sort of our best selves as an individual, but also our best country.

We can't be the best country if we are spending all of our time. embracing cynicism. And I wonder what that means to you personally, because I'm viewing this as a big, like, systemic issue of how we can't afford the luxury of hopelessness in the United States. We must maintain that sense of hope and joy if we want to progress as a country. But I wonder what that means to you personally? So I finished the book and I take the reader on a, you know, I say I'm throwing a lot of spiritual spaghetti at the wall and we'll see what sticks. And I take folks on a journey through a lot of big ideas about God and death and the soul and religion and the meaning of life and all of that nonsense. And then I kind of finished it and I'd finished my outline that I had

given my publisher. And then I realized like, wow, this is just too depressing. So I need to leave people with some takeaways. And the seven pillars of a spiritual revolution is just that. Takeaways that people can put into practice that are tangible and relatable and that anyone can do. You don't need to be a fancy celebrity like myself in order to engage. And one of them that you point out is foster joy and squash cynicism. And I tell the story in there of this acting teacher that I had named Andre Gregory. And he's the subject of the famous film My Dinner with Andre and a very famous director and teacher and actor in his own right. And he would meet with his students and have tea. And I had tea with him one day. And he's like, so, Rain, how are you doing? And I was like,

well, Andre, I'm just feeling kind of depressed these days. I'm feeling hopeless. And I just, I don't know. I'm just overwhelmed and washed up. And I don't know what to even think anymore. And he reached out and grabbed my arm hard and he looked into my eyes and he said, don't do it. You can't be cynical. You can't be pessimistic. If you're cynical, they win. If you're pessimistic, they win. They want you to be cynical. They want you to be pessimistic. I don't know exactly who the they was he was talking about.

But the forces of not change, the forces of corruption, of greed that want things to stay the same, that profit by things staying the same, want everyone to be pessimistic and eye rolling. But I remember the 70s when people talked about world peace. Beauty contestants would say, I want world peace and government of affairs. officials would talk about world peace and scientists like Carl Sagan would talk about world peace. We believed it was possible. And nowadays, if you talk about world peace, people are like, oh my God, they just roll their eyes. Sure. And I stumbled out of his apartment and that really changed my life. And every time I roll into pessimism and cynicism, I remember his words. And I'm like, if I stay pessimistic and cynical, then I'm not going to write this book, number one. I'm not going to do a travel show about

happiness because what's the point? And we have to be realistic. We have to live in the real world, but we also have to believe in the power of the human spirit and how indomitable people are and determined. And we can overcome tremendous adversity and rise to our better angels and transform things. And we have to keep that hope alive. And we have to do it, especially those who work with young people in this mental health crisis and in this divided and terrible and anxious and fraught modern world, we need to keep that spark of hope alive. I totally agree with you. Somebody once told me, and I've never forgotten this, that speaking of the proverbial they, that if they can't stop you from doing it, they will try to keep you from enjoying it. That's great. That really hit me like a ton of

bricks. And so the trick is to not let them. That's great. I also loved one of the other pillars of this spiritual revolution, which is don't just protest, build something new. That it is not enough to be like, well, I hate it. Yep. It's not enough to just be like, well, that's dumb. It has to be replaced with something else. Right. Just railing against the machine doesn't actually improve anything.

You actually have to do something about it. And I would add my own caveat, which is posting about it on social, media is not activism. That's not. That's not changing anything. Keyboard activists, slacktivists, as they call them. I have this quote right here. I keep on my desk and it's in my book by Buckminster Fuller. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. And that goes hand in hand with what we're talking about. We live in a culture of protest. Protest is very important. There wouldn't be a civil rights movement without protest. But it only takes you so far. If you simply protest with some angry tweets and a march or two

and a coffee house argument or two and then you're done, you're exactly right that it's much harder to build something. It's very hard to do. It's really hard to go and try and create a grassroots movement or to get together with people and just even like clean up a local park. It's challenging, but it's so, so rewarding and it's so necessary. And we have to, especially young folk, need to get out of that culture of protest and go do something. It's very hard. Good luck. It is. But if you look at people who have been changemakers throughout history, they didn't just tell us what was wrong with something. They passed up. vision for the future that we wanted to believe in. Yeah. That people wanted to follow, that they said,

I believe in what you believe in. Let's build that thing together. Those are the successful change makers. All right, final takeaway. If you could impart one message to a college student who is struggling, perhaps as you did when you were a young man who went to New York, what advice would you give them? That's a tough one. But I'm going to go with something that gives me great solace and meaning in my life. When I do my morning meditation and prayer, and I sit on a little bench outside of my yard and I watch the hummingbirds and the beautiful flowers, and I take some deep breaths and try and quiet my mind and center myself. I remember this, my favorite quote of all time from Father Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest, who said,

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. And when I witness myself in that regard as a spiritual being, having a human experience, I'm a little shard of the divine in the body of this Rain Wilson weirdo. And I've got 80 or 90 years in my meat suit before that falls away and I continue my journey. and if I am a spiritual being, which I am, what do I get to explore in that regard?

How can I develop the qualities of my soul, of my spirit? How can I further develop my compassion, kindness, humility, honesty, openness, creativity, joy, these qualities of the divine that I can exercise, like working out in a gym, and put my focus on them and on gratitude, this shift in perspective away from kind of the discomfort of being a human being, like, oh, I'm hungry or I need to poop, or I've got a Zoom meeting in half an hour and my knee hurts and all of that stuff, I can shift away from that into a more spiritually connected place.

My day is infinitely better. And it helps with my mental health and my anxiety. and it also helps make the world a better place. Beautifully said, and I really enjoyed reading Soul Boom. And thank you for Dwight. Everybody wants me to tell you that the office is so meaningful to them, and I know you know that, but we also need to thank you for Dwight. Oh, well, on behalf of Dwight, you're welcome, idiots.

I really appreciate it. You bring such wonderful light and knowledge to the world. I'm grateful to be a part of the Sharon. McMahon universe. Thank you. That was one of my favorites. Thanks to Rain Wilson for joining us. And thank you so much for listening.

It has truly been my pleasure. Be sure to read our newsletter at the preamble.com. It's free. Join hundreds of thousands of readers who still believe understanding is an act of hope and follow me on social media at Sharon Says So. I've been your host and executive producer, Sharon McMahon. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck Parks, and our audio producer is Craig Thompson.

Thank you for listening.