The One You Feed - Parker Palmer - Reflections from Getting Older

Episode Date: February 13, 2019

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.Need help with completing your goals in 2019? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Parker Palmer and I Discuss…His book, On The Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity and Getting OldHis reflections looking back on his lifeThe resilient fabric of his lifeHow perfection is an illusionThe role mistakes can play in one’s lifeThe 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 momentFeeling 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 egoThe correlation between ego concerns and anxietyThe importance and role of perspectiveThe what and why of the things we’re doingThe question (and trap!): Does my life have meaning?My legacy vs Our legacyHow 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 communalReflecting 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 inwardBeing one among many vs trying to be something or someone specialThe healing impact of getting out into the natural worldHis poem “Harrowing”To know when to say, “enough” because the rest of the world and the rest of my life is waitingParker Palmer LinksHomepageFacebookTwitterThe Great Courses Plus – Thousands of courses in virtually any topic and you can listen on demand anywhere. Get a full month for FREE! thegreatcoursesplus.com/wolfThirdlove – they have 70 sizes including their signature 1/2 cup sizes! Find your perfect fit online in 60 seconds with their no tape measure needed fit finder. Get 15% off our first order at www.thirdlove.com/wolfRobinhood is an investing app that allows you to buy and sell stocks, EFTs, Options, and Cryptos all commission free at any level. All it takes to do so is 4 taps in the app on your smartphone so it makes investing easy for beginners and experienced people alike. For The One You Feed listeners, get a free stock like Apple, Ford, or Sprint to help you build your portfolio by going to  youfeed.robinhood.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 oneufeed.net slash transform. The mistakes one makes, if one owns up to them, 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 Parker Palmer, a writer, teacher, and activist whose work speaks deeply to people in many walks of life. He is founder and senior partner of the Center for Courage and Renewal. Parker's 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 and looks up at her grandfather. 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 well on the face of the earth. It seems to me we face 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 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 don't feed, I think is worth reflecting on. And for me, that parable has always been a very simple path

into that really complicated question, a question that 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 3rd, 2019, I hear that parable through those ears that are tuned into our current political situation. ears that are tuned into our current political situation.

That's great. Yeah, I agree with you 100%. 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. and 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 yours back, and we can kind of head into it from there. 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. got right to what I got wrong invites the grace of wholeness. Yeah. When I wrote On the Break of Everything, which was a wonderful exercise in reflecting on my own aging, I'll turn 80 in

another month here. And I think I probably started writing the pieces that constitute the book about five years ago. And so I was very conscious of the fact that I was moving into my late 70s. 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've led a complicated life, a zigzag life, an up and down life, an 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 had 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 is an illusion. I think most of us learn that as we go along, 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, you know, use in job interviews and so forth. Yeah, I just, I feel like one of the gifts of age is the opportunity to look back and say it all belongs. It all has 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 fell on my face. And I've certainly had my share of all of that. certainly had my share of all of that. But another gift of age is 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 seems pretty nonsensical to me. And at the same time, as you were suggesting, to me. And at the same time, as you were suggesting, I don't want to ignore the facts of my life. And so to reframe them as, again, threads that help 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

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 80 years. You describe this process and looking at both our good and our 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 as 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 80s or early 90s, she was, I believe, a Jungian 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 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 that has to do with being fully alive. And if there's anything I want to be in old age, it's fully alive. Because again, with old age comes this profound gratitude for the fact that I'm still here to walk the walk and talk the talk

and tell the story and let the story keep evolving. 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. It doesn't take 30 seconds of reflection to recall that lots and lots of people have never made it this far. And I feel very lucky about that. 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 fierce passion and concern, with fierce passion and concern, you know, tempered by what I hope is the wisdom of years,

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 solve, but some of them I can make a contribution to. But some of them I can make a contribution to. And if my desire to do that is fierce, and ifting or hand-wringing 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 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 that 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 cancellation 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 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 feel down, when I feel self-pity, when I feel, to use the ultimate insult in the Midwest, grumpy. 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's this coming from? What is there here for me to learn? And I think this has to do with not ignoring the devouring wolf, the bad wolf, but to ask that wolf, what do you want? 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 hunger? It's not going to be me and my heart and my fate and 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 how to negotiate 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 Rauch, and he's a Brookings fellow guy, but he wrote a book called The Happiness Curve. And I did an interview with him recently, and we'll air it sometime here. But it's fascinating because he's showing that for a lot of people, happiness sort of drops as you go into your 20s, your 30s, your 40s, into your late 40s. 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 embedded in our culture, which is that you hit your peak, whenever that might be, call it mid 30s, mid 40s, 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 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. Rauch's book. I haven't read the book itself, but I like very much this message that you just articulated from that book. When I think back on my 30s and 40s, and you used 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 hand, and you're saying, you know, have I hit my peak yet? I don't think so. I'm only at 10,000 feet. I know some people who are at 15,000 feet. I better get up there, even though I'm already having a hard time breathing. And then there's always somebody at 20,000 feet, so I better get up there, even though I'm already having a hard time breathing. And then there's always somebody at 20,000 feet. So I better get up there too. That's a miserable way to live. 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, And it was hard work and it was stressful work because I had way too much ego pinned on its outcomes. I think one of the things that allows happiness to go up is when the ego falls away. And for me, having experienced, as you know from my writing, three deep dives into clinical depression, 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 than before you had that ego-free experience. You shift in some ways from the performance mode of midlife. The question is always, and I can be very concrete about this in my life as a speaker in front of some very large audiences, like 5,000

physicians in Orlando, Florida is one memory I carry with me. It's easy to get very nervous about, 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-ridden 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 and look good. I'm up there, if I understand myself and 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? That's a much more life-giving and creative question than the ego questions about, you know, do they like me and do I look good while I'm doing this? 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 15,000 or 20,000 feet when we're only at 10,000. I mean, you look back and you say, how silly can a person be? And the answer is, well, as silly as I was at that time, that's how silly a person can be. Thank you. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag,

it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. So a little bit of past, present, and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really.

Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. First off, you're still looking good doing what you're doing, because I can see you here. And so I want to affirm that. I agree completely. Ego 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 I love to talk to people like you. 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 is when I start comparing myself to how many downloads we've got, how many, you know, start comparing myself to a place you spent a lot of time, you know, I'm not getting as many downloads as Krista Tippett is, right, you know, so it's so good to come back to why and what we're doing. 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, 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 that 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.

I came to the place, to be very concrete about this, I came to the place 10, 15 years ago, 10, 15 years ago, where people would start asking me now, you know, you're 65 or 70 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 feedback, whom I have come to know in the mysterious way writers get to know readers that they've never met, 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 my readers. But 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 going to, in my obituary, somebody's going to write a line about his legacy, I want that line to read our legacy, the legacy that was co-created with many, many people over many, many years. people over many, many years. 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 a truth that is often ignored or trampled on in our individualistic culture, where there is this great pressure to imagine that I'm doing all of this myself. You know, this is all about my prowess, my gifts, my strength. The truth of the matter is that we're all embedded in community,

whatever the work 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 communal creation. I mean, I founded a nonprofit called the Center for Courage and Renewal that has 300 plus facilitators who have worked with hundreds of thousands of people around the world, people in the helping professions, teaching the law, ministry, philanthropy, etc., helping them rejoin soul and role. 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 found some people that I wanted to garden with. They taught me a lot about how to be good gardeners. And eventually, we started growing a crop that other people found nourishing.

And so they wanted to help us grow that crop. And on and on it went. Profoundly communal enterprise is what life and work are all about. And so asking the question, does my life have meaning, is sort of to get off on the wrong foot. I think the real question is, have I been, over the course of time, and 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 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 250 guests. They've been co-creators every bit or more than me, you know? And so that gave me a sense of gratitude. We just passed our five-year mark. January 1st marked five years of doing this. Yeah. And so, yeah, that gave me a moment of gratitude. I'll say one more thing about this, Eric. 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 in 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 internalized 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 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 laudable 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 ego strength is the first question that we have to deal with. And I think they're exactly right. 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 always wants to be self-effacing, that always wants to be helping but not helped, that doesn't feel worthy of asking for help or of asking for recognition. So there's something to be said for the healthy ego as a gift, while 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 my experience, because I've been on both sides of that, you know,

I'm amazing, I'm a piece of crap, right? Right. Both cases, my problem in those moments is that I'm 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 is 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 AA, but what I've just prayed for for years and years is to be released from the burden of self. Yes, absolutely. And I think this can 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 month or so when my schedule down the road 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 worries, really outside of my own self-pity and my fear for my own fate and touch the life of another person. It seems to work every time. I want to just read a couple things you wrote about this. Does my life have meaning before we kind of wrap this part of the conversation up? Because these are really great for me. I am not the sun at the center of anyone's 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 whole 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 in 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 has a healing impact. Because out in the natural world, there's this very interesting mix of sort of, the way I speak about it is indifference and acceptance of me. You know, when I'm in the middle of the boundary waters of northern Minnesota, a 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 toward me, and I realize 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. But at the same time, there is this profound sense of acceptance. Those trees, those rocks, which have seen it all, those ancient rocks that have seen it all,

they're really not concerned about my latest screw up and they're not impressed by my latest success. I'm just out there as one of my... Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls, and I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go

back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present, and future all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Many, and it's that interesting combination of indifference and acceptance 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 is talked about in an old Hasidic Jewish tale where the where the rabbi teaches that everyone should have a coat with two pockets. In one pocket is gold to remind us that we are precious, and in the other pocket

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 sit there and I go, I think for a second, I'm like, all right, they say the earth's been around for like 4.5 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 it has changed. You know, there might've 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 of time, you know? Yep.

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. Right. That's right here. And all of this shall pass. So, you know, it's another way of asking, so what is really eternal about our lives, about the human experience?

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 clinical depression, and on a poem I wrote about being depressed. 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 why 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 which has been dug up by a big piece of farm machinery with a disc harrow 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 to unearth 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 I read 10 minutes ago. I blew a few words. It's a beautiful poem. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it was very meaningful for me to write that at the time. It sort of helped me hold and carry that experience of depression, which is otherwise just kind of amorphous and all over the place. 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.

around what went on in my life that led me to this place. And the insight of the poem obviously is enough already with that looking back, with that digging up, with that uprooting. Look at this field. 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 farmer's doing that to plant a new crop, you know, to grow a new harvest.

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

Depression is to some extent bad luck and recovery, full recovery, thriving, surviving and thriving on the other side of depression is good luck. Nobody really knows 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. Whether it's depression or a relationship that isn't working or a job that's not fulfilling, or a way of being in the world that is not bringing you happiness in any shape, 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. But you just need to be able to say, enough. That job is done. I've pushed that one as far as I can. And now I have to ask myself, what's next for me? What

risk am I called to take? How am I called to reach out? What left 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 find that an enormously helpful insight. Again, we talked early in our conversation here, Eric, about no regrets about the past. I don't regret the time I spent slamming my head up against walls that, you know, 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 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 stopped trying to make that job work prematurely, right? Too soon out of laziness or sloth or avoidance.

I really gave it my best shot, but it didn't work. And I'm glad now, 5, 10, 15 years later, that I'm not still slamming my head 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. 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 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. in a way that makes it a better story and in which we exercise self-forgiveness and forgiveness for others without twisting the facts by taking a new look at them from a different angle.

And I find this notion of writing a different story very, very liberating. I'm just going to put in a little plug here. 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 Burkhardt Center, I believe. Wonderful place, wonderful organization. Just put on our stage show, which is called What We Need Is Here, Hope Hard Times and the Human Possibility. It's a show we love doing, a 90-minute show that's interspersed with songs and spoken word. And I can reassure everybody that Carrie does the singing

and I do the spoken word pieces. So that'll be a relief to all who are listening. But Carrie 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 by 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 ask 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 an exercise in self-deception, as I think some people hear it to be. It often involves something as simple as being able to genuinely say to yourself, even though I can look back and say what I did was a mistake or inadequate, 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 20-year-old

self or my 30-year-old self that I should have known back then what I know at almost 80. That's just an unreasonable demand to make on myself the self I was 50 or 60 years ago. Yep, 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 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, oneufeed.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. Oh, thank you, Eric.

It's always a delight to talk with you. I've really enjoyed this time together. Thanks so much. Bye. Bye-bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.