The One You Feed - Dani Shapiro

Episode Date: May 24, 2017

Credit Kwaku Alston     Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Dani Shapiro Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of three memoirs and 5 novels.  Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House. The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, and has been broadcast on NPR's “This American Life”.  Her newest book is Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage   In This Interview, Dani Shapiro and I Discuss... Her newest book, Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage Her book, Devotion: A Memoir How we are all connected Her history with Orthodox Judaism This sense that she had to pray though she didn't know who or what she was praying to Her process of figuring out what she believes in a spiritual realm Living inside the questions, exploring spiritual wisdom How she moved away from an all or nothing mentality That if her only two choices are "all or nothing", she's going with nothing With her book Devotion: A Memoir, she wrote the book so that she could go on the journey, not the other way around "If you want to do something, begin it, because action has magic, grace and power in it." - Goethe The "third thing" that's essential in relationships What it means to walk through life with another person What it is like to be comfortable not knowing things in life The saying "we can make the best out of everything that happens" vs "everything happens for a reason" Her parents terrible accident The death of her father and it's effect on her life     Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Happily Ever After is about as real as faith without doubt. 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. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

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Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dani Shapiro, best-selling author of three memoirs and five novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, and has been broadcast on NPR's This American Life. Her newest book is Hourglass, Time, Memory, Marriage. If you value the content we put out each week, then we need your help. As the show has grown, Thank you in advance for your help. And here's the interview with Danny Shapiro. Hi, Danny, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Eric. Great to be with you. I'm excited to have you on a couple different reasons. One is Jonathan Fields, who's a friend of both of ours, recommended you. And you mentioned that you're also a listener of the show, so that's always wonderful to have somebody on. And now after reading a couple of your books, I'm even more excited to have you on. So I'm glad you're here. Me too. Thanks. So let's start off like we normally do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. And he says in life, there are two wolves that are 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 grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather and he 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. Yeah, I love that parable so much. You know, when I think of, you know, feeding the inner wolf, part of where I go with it is the way that in my life in the past, when I was, you know,

quite a bit younger, I think I fed the bad wolf a whole lot more than I fed the good wolf. And very particularly in terms of the fear part, so much of the choices that I made were based on fear or anxiety, fear-based decisions and fear-based choices. All the while, I had very, very good and strong instincts that I wasn't really listening to. Or I listened to them in some ways in my life and not others. In terms of my writing life, I tended to listen to my instincts. But in terms of other aspects of my life, not so much. And one of the things that really changed enormously for me was probably about a dozen years ago when I was writing my memoir, Devotion, I began to really feel in a very powerful way, the way that we

human beings are all internally very much the same in terms of really what drives us. And that sense of apartness and aloneness and danger and fear really just kind of practically disappeared. And in its place were all the gifts of the good wolf. Yeah, I think fear is a big one. all the gifts of the good will. Yeah, I think fear is a big one. And reading your books, I can definitely see a strain of fear, or, you know, you could call it Jewish worrying, right? You know, that sort of threads itself through your books. And I was kind of curious, since devotion was written, you know, it's been a while, how you were, you know, with the devotions, really your exploration for a spiritual life, I guess I'll call it, and trying to reconcile

your modern life with your Judaic history and trying to reconcile your modern life with your Judaic history and trying to find a modern approach to spirituality. So I was just kind of curious, what does that look like for you a decade later? One of the things I think that happened with devotion is that the publication of devotion fundamentally changed me. I mean, usually, and always, the writing of a book changes me in some way. But in the case of devotion, the writing of it deepened me and was a tremendous learning experience. But the publication of it also was because while I was writing devotion, as you said, it's a book about trying to reconcile the extremely religious upbringing that I had,

trying to reconcile the extremely religious upbringing that I had coming from an Orthodox Jewish family and having fled that and finding yoga and finding Buddhism and honestly, a creative life that was and is very much a spiritual practice for me. I was worried when I was writing the book that I was writing a book that no one would read, because it felt so idiosyncratically me. And it felt like you'd have to be, you know, a little bit Jewish and a little bit Buddhist and, you know, daughter of a difficult mother and a mother of a baby who had been sick and a wife and mother who moved from New York City to rural Connecticut, you'd have to be all those things to identify with devotion. And I really thought now I've really gone and done it. I've told such a personal story that no one will relate.

And instead, what happened was pretty much from the day devotion came out and people started reading it, I started receiving letters and emails and invitations from people of every walk of life, of, you know, every religion, every creed, every color, every age, both genders, all genders, you know, just everybody seemed to be connecting to it. And what they all were saying to me was, you've told my story. And I thought, well, how have I, by telling my story in the deepest possible way that I know how, how is it that I've also told yours? And that was a profound shift for me. I stopped being afraid of public speaking. Truly, I was cured of it, which is a good thing because I do it all the time. And it used to feel like a heart attack every time I did it,

or I would have to medicate myself, or I would have to, you know, just do so many things in order to feel okay, getting up in front of an audience. And since 2010, when devotion came out, I can get up in front of an audience of any size, thousands of people and feel really truly at, and feel really truly at ease. And it came from that sense of, oh, we are connected. What I'm saying, if I am really true to my own authentic experience in all of its complexity, if I'm really true to it, it is going to tug on your heartstrings as well. And that was huge. Yeah, it's an incredibly powerful book. And I do think it does touch on a particularly modern malady, I guess I would say, which is, as we go on in life, and we start to look for meaning, for a lot of us, if we look back to the way we were

raised, that it brings up a lot of questions that aren't easily answerable, right? If just with what we know with science these days, and with what we were told as children, it immediately creates some sort of conflict. So we look there, and we're a little bit drawn that direction. And then there's all this other spiritual stuff. I think spiritual but not religious might be one of the largest, you know, identifications of people these days. So you tapped in perfectly into a very modern malady that I think more and more people and I, you know, that's what I'm doing with this show. I think more and more people, and I, you know, that's what I'm doing with this show, and I think more and more people are kind of going through that.

Yeah, no, for sure. I think I had spent years of my life, from the time that I really fled Orthodox Judaism, it felt to me that if I was fleeing that, if I was fleeing the music I know, you know, and the rituals I know, and that were, you know, ingrained in me, you know, that were almost part of my DNA, that if I did that, then I wasn't entitled to have anything. And I spent a lot of years, all of my 20s into my 30s, with that sense of all or nothing, I have to be in the world that I came from and was brought up in, or I don't have a right to anything else. And that was, you know, it was okay for a while. I mean, I think there are phases in life where a spiritual life doesn't necessarily feel front and center or

the most essential. But then reaching my mid-irties and getting married and having a baby. And I, you know, when my son was born about six months after he was born, uh, he became very, very ill, uh, in a, in a very terrifying way. And we, we were not at all sure that he was going to recover from this rare disease that he had. And I found myself constantly praying, constantly. You know, every moment when I was rocking him to sleep at night, I would be praying and these Hebrew words would fly into my head. And it didn't even have anything to do with believing them or even understanding them, but it had to do with the sense that I had to pray, but I didn't know who or what I was praying

to, and there was no form for it anymore. And I think that that was really the beginning for me. My son did recover. I don't think it was because my prayers were answered. I think we were just staggeringly fortunate. But it left me with that feeling of anxiety, terror, having a window into what can happen that is so scary. I think if you're a parent, probably the sense of potentially losing your child or losing your child is the worst thing that can happen to any human being. It's like one of the only things I feel like I know for sure is that that's the worst thing. Any other loss is not that loss. And so having been faced with that, then this sense of what do I believe? And then when my son started reaching an age where he could ask those kinds of questions, he started asking them, do you believe in God? What do you think happens when we die? Those kinds of questions. And I felt like I had to address them. I grew up with answers, right? The people surrounding me had answers for how to live. the questions and really explore spiritual wisdom and open myself up for the first time to other wisdom.

And not only to the language of my childhood or the religion that I was born into and, you know, that I am. I mean, I am Jewish, but does that mean that I can't read Thomas Merton or Thich Nhat Hanh or Pema Chodron or, you know, the list goes on, and absorb the magnificence of their wisdom? Are they off limits to me because they're not part of the religious canon? You know, I think no. So that was all very, very present for me. Yeah, I think oftentimes the religion of our childhood is often the hardest to hear for us. Sometimes it's the hardest to turn back to when things are difficult. And conversely, sometimes it's the easiest. I like what you said about all or nothing. I actually pulled that out of the book as something that you had mentioned. You were talking about buying, and I don't know

how to say the word. So I'll ask you to help me with the word, but mezuzahs? Mezuzah. Mezuzahs. You were buying mezuzahs, and you couldn't just buy one. You suddenly felt like if you were going to get one, then you had to follow all the rules and get one on every single door in the house. And I really relate with that all or nothing thinking. And I think moving away from that has been probably one of the most healing things I've done in my life is to start to recognize that tendency and move to the middle for myself on things. Yeah, that was such a revelation for me. That moment where I was with my family, we were in Italy, we went to the Jewish ghetto

in Venice, beautiful place. And there is this store that was selling, you know, beautiful Judaica, beautiful artifacts and religious symbols. And yet a mezuzah for people who don't know what it is, is it's considered like a protective object that is placed on the doorpost of your home to protect the people inside the home from harm. And it's a lovely idea. But the way that I grew up, there were mezuzahs on every single door, not just the outside doors, but all of the inside doors as well. And then, so there I was in this store, and I was about to do this lovely thing of buying this one mezuzah for my home and, one small piece of the traditions that I was raised in. And then what stopped me was, oh, I can't do that. Wait, what's the blessing? I don't know

the blessing. Do I need a rabbi to come to bless the mezuzah? Do I need to buy them for all of the doors of my house? And the feeling that I had at that moment was all or nothing has always led to nothing for me. If my only two choices are all or nothing, I'm going with nothing. And then so where does that leave me? So, so much of the exploration, not just in writing devotion, but in the years following devotion have had to do with what the Buddhists would call the middle way. Or you asked me before what the years after devotion and spiritual practice have been like. And one of the things that happened when I finished that book was, I really just wanted to continue writing that book for the rest of my life, because I got to do nothing but stare out the window and think about spiritual matters and practice yoga and meditate and get paid for it. I was

just living and read great spiritual texts. I was living just an absolutely magically powerful spiritual life during the years that I was writing Devotion. And then I finished it. And there was kind of a now what, how do I continue now that I'm not writing this book? Because I didn't, I didn't go on the journey to write the book. I wrote the book so I could go on the journey. And, you know, that's a, that's a real distinction between certain kinds of books. The way that I do, the way that I find a way to do the things I most need to do is I write about them. And so after devotion came out, my son was reaching an age where if he was going to be bar mitzvahed, we were going to have to get on that. And I had been trying and I write about that in the book. I had been trying to find a synagogue where we would feel comfortable and it was like a comedy of errors. There just wasn't one. I could not find my home. I could not find a home for our family. Nothing worked. It was either too religious or too ecstatically weird or boring or just nothing felt right. And finally, one day, when he was about 11 and a half, so children are

bar mitzvahed at the age of 13. So time was really, you know, ticking. And I had this thought. And the thought was, I have been complaining about how this doesn't exist. And I can't find a synagogue anywhere within an hour and a half of our home. I've tried, it just doesn't exist. And the thought that I had was, how about stopping complaining about this and feeling victimized and bad about this? And how about building it yourself? If it doesn't exist, you know, why not make it happen? And as soon as I thought that, I had become friendly with a lot of rabbis and a lot of spiritual leaders of different faiths while I was writing devotion. And I sent an email to one of my rabbi friends, one of my new rabbi friends, and I said, how would I go about finding a rabbi

who maybe would come to my home once a month or so, and I would gather whatever kids around that I could find, you know, just shake the bushes and find whatever Jewish kids or half Jewish kids or kids who were interested in Judaism or whatever, and just have a really smart and fun rabbi come to my house and do something with the kids. And this was my friend, Rachel, who's a rabbi. And Rachel said to me, well, what about Suri? Suri is Rachel's wife. And Suri is also a rabbi, and I hardly knew her at all. And it turns out that Suri was a middle school teacher and had raised a number of kids and bar mitzvahed them herself, of her own kids. And she was like, if you had looked in the dictionary for perfect person for this job, there she was, and all it took was one email. It's that beautiful quote from Goethe.

I don't know if you know it, but Goethe once, he said or wrote, if you want to do something, begin it because action has magic, grace, and power in it. And it's all I had to do was begin. And it all unfolded. And within a year and a half, I had created this thing that was really meaningful to a whole bunch of families. And for my family, when my son Jacob was bar mitzvahed seen a bar mitzvah inside of it. It was two lesbian rabbis performing the service. And the reason why that's important is because when I grew up, women were not allowed to touch the Torah, certainly not to become rabbis,

never to read from the sacred text, all of that. There was music. My son's a musician and so am I. We sang Leonard Cohen's Broken Hallelujah. And I played the piano and he played the ukulele. And there were readings that friends gave from Coleridge and Hannah Arendt. And it was the most beautiful day of my entire life. I felt that day like I had somehow broken something open for myself, where I had found a way to do something that felt genuinely meaningful, religiously rigorous in terms of my son actually learned the Hebrew and he read from the Torah, but it was also spiritually inclusive and rich. And I had people coming up to me after his

bar mitzvah saying, with tears rolling down their faces saying, I've never been to a bar mitzvah like this. But it was the permission that I gave myself finally after a huge struggle, but that I gave myself to open it up and allow for that all or nothing thinking to just go away. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go

all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?

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And if you are getting some value, then go to oneufeed.net slash support to make a contribution. So go to oneufeed.net slash support now. Thank you. And now back to the episode with Danny Shapiro. I want to change direction because I could talk about devotion for the next four hours. But you have a new book called hourglass time, memory and marriage. And it's really a memoir about your marriage to your husband, which is a beautiful marriage from the sounds of it. And I want to ask you some questions from that book that I think are related to some of the things

we've been talking about. One of the things you mentioned, I thought this was a concept that is useful for marriages in particular, but I thought in relationships in general, and you talk about this idea of a third thing. You say third things are essential to marriages. What is a third thing? Oh, you honed in on one of the most important aspects of Hourglass for me, I think. When I came across this idea, it originated in an essay by the great poet Donald Hall, who had had a really magnificent marriage to another great poet, Jane Kenyon, who passed away tragically quite young. Don was much older than Jane, and he's been left widowed and elderly. He's in his late 80s now, and he's been alone for almost as long as they were together now.

80s now, and he's been alone for almost as long as they were together now. And he wrote this essay that I stumbled across, in which he described the third thing being something that needs to be central to all marriages, all long partnerships. And the idea is that there's something outside of the two of you, something that both of your gazes can look upon and share, you know, a passion, a shared interest. And Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon did not have children. He had children from a previous marriage, but they didn't have their own children. And, um, he, he allows as to how children can be a third thing. Um, but I've, I've, I have some thoughts about that, that I would share, but he, what he, what he's talking about is he says, Keats, uh, um, Dutch interiors, um, you know, uh, Dutch interiors, you know, Bach, you know, he talks about the idea of training your gaze at something that is beyond you that's in the world. And I found that to just be immeasurably beautiful. And I started thinking about couples that are in my life who have been

together a very long time, happily. And they all have third things. I was thinking about my friend, actually, I mentioned her in the book, not by name as my 80-year-old Buddhist friend, but it's actually Sylvia Borstein, the great Buddhist teacher. And the only reason I didn't mention her in Hourglass is because I didn't use any names in Hourglass. It was such a delicate little book. But Sylvia, I sent an early copy of Hourglass to, because she's been married 60 years, and she completely resonated with this idea of the third thing. She and her husband have traveled the world listening to performances of Wagner's Ring Cycle. That's a thing of theirs. Another thing of theirs are bicycle trips that they've taken for years and years and years and also bicycle together,

even into their 80s when they're home in Northern California. And I was thinking about other couples, my in-laws who had a beautiful marriage of 60 years, I believe so 60 years, who owned a real estate company together. And so in many ways, work was their third thing, but they loved it. And it was both of them and sort of outside of them, you know, talking about houses, talking about the people who were they were selling houses to talking about developments, all of that. And, terms of children, this is something I was really thinking about because I see it around me all the time because our son now is a year away from going to college, and so we're surrounded by our peers of people who are getting ready to send their kids to school.

And the thing about your kids being your only third thing is they're going to graduate and they're going to move away. And way too often I see people then in that situation kind of looking at each other going, well, now what? We've raised this family. We've lost ourselves and our own passions in the process. How do we... And then some people come together at that point and some people fall apart at that point. But that sense of the other, of the beauty of that. And in terms of my husband and myself, I think in many, many ways, it's been writing. We're both writers.

in many, many ways, it's been writing. We're both writers. And so we talk about writing and reading and what we read, and we share our work with each other. And so even though it's of us, it's also outside of us and something that we're sharing and we're looking at together. Yeah, I think it's a wonderful thing. And the other challenge with children, at least can be, sometimes there's differences in thoughts on exactly how to parent. And so the children become a source of stress in certain cases, not a true third thing. There's not a lot of stress about how you appreciate John Keats together in the same way. Right. But it can also be an enormously bonding thing. In Hourglass, one of the things that I thought a lot about was, because I was really thinking in writing the book about what it means to walk alongside another person over time.

Like, how do we do that? How do we, you know, we grow at different rates. We don't always see eye to eye, you know. So forming ourselves sort of towards and against and alongside and away from this other human being was a completely separate human being. But you know, you're sharing this, this journey. And one of the things for me to go back to that moment when our son was very sick as a baby is I was so aware at that time that it could have meant that we fell apart. We were very newly together. We had a child within a couple of years of being together, and he was critically ill. And I remember at the time thinking in almost a clinical way, like this is a statistic that I once heard somewhere,

thinking marriages often don't survive something like this. And instead, what happened was we really did come together in a very profound way as a team. And we really truly never disagreed about what course of action to take. We never blamed each other. And there was a tremendous amount of kindness toward each other during that time. And that period of time is actually something that I think has sustained us during other more difficult times in our marriage, you know, as the years went on, where that was something that we shared so powerfully that it became like a glue, a really strong bond. You can definitely tell that through the book, the bond that you guys have. And it was really, it's a beautiful thing to read, to see how two people can come together and how a marriage can work.

It's not all roses and wine, but I think what I was struck by most was kind of what you said was the coming together when things were challenging was really true. There's a scene in the book where you are in the car with M, that's your husband in the book, and you guys are driving. And I'm just going to pick up the scene. There's been something going on with you guys. And you say, I don't ask what's wrong or if everything's okay. I don't fill the car with chatter. I know that everything is both okay and not okay. I'm so glad that you brought up that moment because that's another really important moment, that idea. It's actually

to go back to Keats. Keats talks about negative capability, the idea of holding contradictions in your hands. It was so important to me to attempt to tell the truth from inside a, yes, contented, but also real marriage. So the disappointments, the challenges, the losses, the, you know, the sense of, you know, great imperfection, you know, two imperfect people trying to build a life together. That's, that's, I think, a definition of absolutely everyone who ever walks down the aisle. uncomfortable discomfort. Like, yeah, this is where we are right now in this car as we're speeding home in the darkness is complex and that's okay. Yeah, I love that idea of things being okay and not okay. I don't know if I could really explain it, but I do understand that feeling. I think it's not okay as in the thing that's happening right now is I don't like or even worse than that in a lot of cases, the thing that's happening right now is I don't like or even worse than that, in a lot of cases, the thing that's happening now is a awful thing.

And yet underneath it, there's a deeper sense that everything is OK. And I was really struck by that. And I was also struck by the fact that you had the wisdom in that moment to sort of, you know, allow him to be where he was. to sort of, you know, allow him to be where he was. I think that the way you're describing that is exactly my intention and an eloquent expression of that, because that sense of almost, as you were saying that, what I envisioned was, it's like a sea, like a sea of history and a kind of solidity, even though that's not a good metaphor with C, but like a sense of a woven net of a backdrop of okayness that can therefore tolerate the moments, the times, the passages of time, even, of things not being okay, or, you know, the smaller not okay against the larger okay. Yeah. And I often think, to me, that's what the spiritual search and the spiritual life is about,

to a large extent, is finding that broader background okay, while the vicissitudes of the world kind of happen, and they are going to happen. You talk about it in devotion a lot. The, you know, the Buddhist teachers are always talking about gain and loss and sorrow and joy, and we all get all of it. And I think that's, for me, what has always appealed to me, particularly about Buddhism, but a spiritual life in general, is how do I have that background, everything is okay, even though the moment to moment may not feel that way. I love that. And actually, I'm, as you're saying that I'm making a connection between devotion and hourglass that I hadn't really made before, which has to do really with, you know,

in devotion, that sense of that I had had when I began writing that book, that doubt wasn't okay, you know, that doubt meant that I wasn't okay. You know, that doubt meant that I wasn't doing it right somehow, that spiritual journeys or spiritual enlightenment, whatever that is, means that one doesn't experience doubt. And then I started reading all the great thinkers and all the great thinkers wrestle with doubt. And I came to understand that doubt was an element of faith, that faith is a struggle. And then, you know, in thinking about Hourglass, this whole idea that we have of, you know, that's perpetuated by just the culture and the media and all that of like, happily ever after. Happily ever after is about as real as faith without doubt.

A young person who was interviewing me recently said, I feel like Hourglass is a book that every mother or the bride should give her daughter, you know, before she walks down the aisle of like, like almost a window into the realness of what a marriage, a good marriage really is like over time, you know, and yet, you know, we so often sort of waltz into these things with this feeling. And I look, I know that because I did that earlier in my life. I've waltzed, you know, with very little thought of, you know, what it really means to walk down that path. but walking down that path with someone really does mean that you're going to have periods of time of discomfort and and maybe even of doubt right right inside of it but that's okay too brings to mind a line you have and i think it might end hourglass but i could be wrong so i

won't swear to that but it's a beautiful line i thought it summed up so much of the book very well and it was we understand that suffering and happiness are no longer individual matters. Tonight, we will stay at the edge of the dark forest until together, we are brave enough to go back inside. Yeah, that's another really, really powerful moment for me of that awareness that, you know, that sense there's a there's a moment in the book, well, there's multiple moments in the book that really form the shape of hourglass for me, that M says to a moment in the book, well, there's multiple moments in the book that really form the shape of Hourglass for me that M says to me early in the book about something insignificant, like a household thing, I'll take care of it. And it becomes this motif, you know, my loving to hear

M say, I'll take care of it. Like who doesn't want to hear someone else say, I'll take care of it, really. And then way later in the book, there's a moment where he's asleep and I'm looking at him up late at night and it's a rough moment for him. And I'm looking at him sleeping and I think to myself, I'll take care of it. And I felt like I had arrived at something important and true, not just about my marriage, but maybe about marriage in general, in that moment of two people who are passing this sense of, you know, I can carry us for a bit now, like back and forth between them over time, you know, and then those moments where there's someplace deeper to go and they join hands and yeah, walk back into the dark forest because there's more that needs to be uncovered or more that needs to be figured out. So it's

moments of individual bravery and then moments of joined bravery as a couple. Yeah, I think that's beautiful. And I think that speaks to relationships in general. That idea of sometimes it's me being the strong one, sometimes it's you being the strong one, and that over any good relationship over a period of time, friendship, marriage, whatever, you will see that happen. And I often think it's the inability for those roles to change that causes a lot of problems in relationships where one person always has to be the strong one or I'm always the one that's in crisis. Exactly.

And it seems to me that's where things fall apart. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

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app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Another part in Hourglass, you're referencing a children's book that you used to read to your son called Fortunately, Unfortunately. And it is a mirror of one of my favorite parables of all time, besides the wolf parable about a farmer and a horse and his horse runs away and everybody says it's bad news and it comes back it's good news tell me a little bit about that book because it's just another variation on that that's even more fun and playful than a farmer and a horse i loved sort of arriving at that as many of the best parables are and many of the best children's books are uh you the best children's books are, uh, you know, it's about so much more than the,

you know, the simple story that, that it seems to be about. So in fortunately, unfortunately, this little boy sets out to go to his grandmother's house. You know, unfortunately there's a storm,

but fortunately he has an umbrella and he jumps off the cliff and the umbrella saves him. But unfortunately there is, you know, I'm kind of making it up here, but unfortunately there's an alligator. But fortunately, he lands on top of the alligator and the alligator swims. And then he gets to his grandma's house, fortunately, but he's lost whatever he was going to bring to his grandmother, unfortunately, but

they are together. And so there's this sense of, you know, we never know. And, you know, actually, as we're speaking, I'm sitting in my office in my home in Connecticut, and there is this piece of art that I have on my wall by my friend Debbie Millman. I don't know if you know Debbie. Yep, I was on her show once, which was a deep honor to me. So yeah. honor to me. So yeah, design matters is another Yeah, another awesome podcast. And Debbie is also an artist and she has an of all of her work, the one that I have hanging in my office is like a big piece of notepaper. And in her handwriting in the upper right hand corner of the notepaper, it says, this, just this, I am comfortable not knowing. And that's everything to me. Like I, I look at that and I'm comforted by that probably 20 times a day when I forget. And I think I know best, and I think I'm in charge and I think I know what's right and how it's supposed to happen. And, you know, look, there's, there's a moment in, in devotion where, um moment in devotion where I'm asked by a man who I don't know, perfect stranger, a reader of mine, to meet with him because he wants to talk to me.

He very, very urgently wants to talk to me. And it turns out that he was the last person to leave windows on the world on 9-11 before the plane hit. windows on the world on 9-11 before the plane hit. And he literally like got in the elevator and everyone who was in the restaurant obviously perished. And he wanted to talk, I finally understood that he wanted to talk with me about this very idea really of, with me about this very idea really of, you know, of fortunately, unfortunately, of, of this sense of, you know, why was I saved? And now what am I supposed to do? Uh, what am I supposed to do with this, you know, staggering gift that I've been given the idea that there's, you know, that he, what he was putting together very much was the idea that there was causality or, you know, that he was saved for a reason. I mean, I realize I'm kind of going slightly off topic here. It just felt to me like this idea of,

you know, you miss the plane, you know, or you don't go to all those people on 9-11 who didn't go to work that morning because they were taking their kids to school or they had a doctor's appointment. And, you know, they were saved. I quote a passage from a poem by the Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Sierbowska in Hourglass. It's my favorite poem. I teach it all the time. And it begins, it's called Could Have. And it begins, it could have happened.

It might have happened. It happened nearer, farther off. It happened, it could have happened. It might have happened. It happened nearer, farther off. It happened, but not to you. You were saved because you were the first. You were saved because you were the last. It goes on. And I always teach it and have my student, all my students write as a prompt about what could have happened, but didn't. And it's, of course, this incredibly rich assignment. Nobody hesitates to begin to write when the assignment is write about what could have happened but didn't, because we all are always leading these lives where we understand that if we turn left or we turn right, it's going to actually affect the course of our day or our

hour or maybe even our lives. And yet, if we thought about that all the time, we'd be completely paralyzed. So we don't. But, you know, how to live with that sense of it actually underscoring the beauty and the fragility of life, the beauty because it's fragile, and the kind of seizing of the moments precisely because we don't know what's going to happen next. In devotion, you talk about certain, you know, bromides that people say, you know, like, just to be comforting. And one of them is everything happens for a reason, which is one of my least favorite. Also, the other version of that is I've heard, you know, good things come out of everything, or everything happens, you know, for the better. And there's a turn on that that

I like, which is that, you know, we can make the best out of everything that happens. And that works for me a whole lot better than believing there's some grand plan that orchestrates it. But believing that in every moment in everything that happens, kind of like you were just saying is the seeds of the next moment. And what are we going to do with that? Precisely, this idea of making meaning, and we can make meaning out of the most painful and difficult moments. It has shaped my entire adult life. My father died when I was 23. And I was a complete wreck of a, of a young woman at that time I was, you know, I was drinking heavily. I was, um, doing a lot of

drugs. I was in a relationship with an older married man, uh, who, you know, was just, um, it was all like a catastrophe. Um, and, and my parents were in a terrible car accident. My father died and my mother, uh, had a shattered body, um, and was, and was not expected to live. And she did survive and she recovered. But and I'm their only child. and like shocked, you know, like shock to my system, get my life together and take care of my mother and bury my father and mourn him. We were very, very close. And I was a college dropout at that point. I had left Sarah Lawrence and I was just kind of traveling the world as essentially the girlfriend of this married, very powerful guy. It was, you know, I, if, if all that hadn't happened,

if my parents' accident hadn't happened, I'm not sure I would have survived. I don't know. I mean, it's a neat and tidy idea, but I really do wonder, but what I did know instantly from that moment on was that the only way that I was going to survive was going to be making meaning out of the loss of my father, the loss of, you know, so much in terms of my family. And it made me a writer. It sent me back to college. It kept me in college and then in graduate school. It wrote my first novel, you know, and my second novel. It enabled me to, for once and for all, break up a relationship that was, you know, he was also kind of very much a stalker. It was very, very hard to get away from him. It gave me the strength to get away from him, to do everything that I've done in my life, every single thing began with that sense of I'm going to make meaning

out of this, not it happened so that I would become this person. No. But it happened. And I became this person. Yeah, I agree 100%. I mean, I think for me, getting sober, you know, from being a, you know, heroin addict and really close to dying. That was the moment for me. That was sort of the transformative moment that everything has kind of built from there and, and making meaning out of that. Well, I could do this all day and I've got about 40 more questions, but we are at the end of time for this episode. So we will have to agree to do this again because it has been fun. I love it. I really enjoyed it. Well, thank you so much. Your book, Hourglass, Time, Memory, and Marriage is available now,

as well as Devotion. They're both great. We get a lot of people on the show, and most people have written a book, and you can always kind of tell when it's somebody who is a researcher or does something, and then they write a book about it, versus somebody who's a truly gifted author. And you are in that latter category. The books are beautiful to read. Thanks, Eric. Thank you so much. Okay. We'll talk again soon. Okay. All right. Take care. Bye. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast.

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