The One You Feed - Sarah Kaufman

Episode Date: April 19, 2017

Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Sarah Kaufman about grace SARAH L. KAUFMAN is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, author, journalist and educator. For more than 30 years, she has focused on the union of art and everyday living. She is the dance critic and senior arts writer of the Washington Post, where she has written about the performing arts, pop culture, sports and body language since 1993. Her book, THE ART OF GRACE: On Moving Well Through Life, won a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, was a Washington Post Notable Book of 2015 and has been featured on NPR’s “On Point with Tom Ashbrook.” Sarah Kaufman recently appeared at the South-by-Southwest Interactive Festival, speaking on a panel inspired by her book, titled, "Can Grace Survive in the Digital Age?" She has taught and lectured at universities and institutes around the country. In 2010 she became the first dance critic in 35 years to win the Pulitzer Prize. In This Interview, Sarah Kaufman and I Discuss... Her book, The Art of Grace on Moving Well Through Life How she defines grace The idea of ease at it relates to grace The three different types of grace that she looks at in her book Physical Grace Social Grace Spiritual Grace That grace exists where we forget ourselves and aim instead to bring pleasure to others The fact that we have a "grace gap" in our current culture The religious take on grace The relationship between overload and grace That grace is a worldview and a philosophy that allows us to take care of ourselves and others Considering the idea of "defying gravity" when considering the idea of grace The paradox of grace That practice makes graceful The graceful balance skill with ease The role of movement in grace Posture - how do you do it and why is it important The grace of a smooth running commercial kitchen How being present is crucial to observing grace That grace doesn't demand perfection, it simply means that we lean into our humanity Tips to practice grace     Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pay attention to all the moments around us where we can find the wonder and the ease of grace. 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. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Sarah Kaufman, a Pulitzer Prize winning critic, author, journalist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, author, journalist, and educator. As the dance critic and senior arts writer of The Washington Post, she has written about the performing arts, pop culture, sports, and personal expression since 1993. Her first book, The Art of Grace, was a Washington Post Notable Book of 2015 and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award winner. If you value the content we put out each week, then we need your help. As the show has grown, so have our expenses and time commitment.

Go to oneufeed.net slash support and make a monthly donation. Our goal is to get to 5% of our listeners supporting the show. Please be part of the 5% that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas. We really need your help to make the show sustainable and long lasting. Again, that's one you feed.net slash support. Thank you in advance for your help. And here's the interview with Sarah Kaufman. Hi, Sarah. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. I'm so glad to be with you. Your book is called The Art of Grace on Moving Well Through Life. And I'm excited to talk about what grace is and all the various ways that it can show up in our lives and how we can get more of it in our lives.

But before we do that, let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves that are always inside of us. 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. Well, I love that the parable draws on the natural world foremost. And it has such powerful images with the two wolves. And so that's a great way to get around the thinking process and just really feel the points

that it's making. But here's my take on it. How about trying to live with both wolves and accepting that we all have these tendencies and emotions, which can give us important information about how we're relating to the world. I mean, for example, fear can be useful. It can let us know we're in a dangerous situation that we need to get out of. And then coming from the arts world, since I cover the arts, a lot of art can arouse anger or anxiety, strong emotions, and that can lead to self-reflection and even understanding. So I think what really matters, as you point out in your introduction, is how we act on these strong feelings. It's our intentions and our actions that matter the most. Excellent. I totally agree.

I think that obviously the idea of getting rid of all negative emotion is not something that we can do, nor should we be trying to. All these emotions exist for a reason. exist for a reason. You know, as one of the neuroscientists I spoke to in the research for my book said, our emotions exist to teach us something about the world, to give us useful information, you know, whether we like something and so we want to experience more of it because it's good for us, or whether we dislike something And so we should move away from it and learn, you know, learn from that experience so that we can go on and survive and be successful. Yep, exactly. So let's now talk about your book.

So the book, as I mentioned earlier, is called The Art of Grace on Moving Well Through Life. Let's start off with the very basics. So what is grace? Yeah, that's a great question. And that's what I spent a lot of time thinking about in researching and preparing to write the book. And what it comes down to, for me, in ways. But it's kind of that idea of ease and effortlessness and naturalness, frictionless, and well-being that I believe connect the three different types of grace that I look at in my book. And those are physical grace, so that of an athlete, Roger Federer on the tennis court, or Muhammad Ali, or Katie Ledecky in the swimming pool, or a dancer.

Or Chris when he's editing. Right. Does that mean we should do this over? No, no, no. He's very graceful. I just want him to know I'm thinking of him. And, you know, I love that you noticed that. That's so perfect. So then social grace, you know, the person who's got a listening ear for your troubles or who welcomes you into his or her home, that ability to make you feel at ease. Or spiritual grace, the sense of divine love or a benevolent universe, that sense of comfort and acceptance that can help us get through difficult times and bring about ease. And so when looking at these three different forms, that idea of just, oh, relief, you know, ease, appreciation, acceptance, those are the ideas that combine into the idea of grace.

Yeah, obviously you spent a book describing it. So me expecting you to answer it in a sentence is challenging. There is one place where you say grace exists where we forget ourselves and aim instead to bring pleasure to others. And I really liked that. Of the many descriptions, that was one that really stuck with me. Great. Yeah. And that is the theme that came up in so many of my interviews with people knowledgeable about grace. And that's really my starting point was I wanted to just know more about it. You know, how could I have some of what they have, you know, this beautiful quality. And what came up over and over again was that idea of turning ourselves outward towards others,

you know, supporting one another, really stepping up for one another. And that is what you see in the people that you find graceful. The examples I bring up in my book, I mean, there's so many characters that I incorporated to kind of give a lot of dimension to that idea. But, you know, look at these examples. I think we can all relate to Nelson Mandela, You know, look at these examples. I think we can all relate to Nelson Mandela, Muhammad Ali, who was physically graceful in the ring for being a heavyweight, being light and buoyant and elegant, but also stood up for human rights and spoke up for religious tolerance and actually traveled to Iraq to help free 15 American hostages in 1990, when he was just weakened by Parkinson's, he was still making those connections and helping people. You describe that in our current culture, we have a grace gap. What is that? I think that we can kind of agree, you know, so many of us may feel that there's just a bit of a dropping away of a concern about other people's

feeling. You know, there's a coarseness that's come into society. Many different examples of that we can point to, but I think it's a combination of forces. Our busy lives, the burdens placed on us in this day and age at work, at home. We're overloaded at work. Everyone's trying to do more with less. We have so many demands on our time. We have a lot of family duties. We have technology that draws us in and takes up our time. And sometimes it can just feel exhausting being online with all of the snark and the comments and so forth that we can encounter. We're rushing around physically, we're in close confines with other people and, you know, there are just a lot of stresses

that are accumulating day to day and that take us away from what's happening right now in this moment. Our thoughts are racing and we're very distracted. And being mindful of grace is really about paying attention. And that's one thing I have heard over and over again. And what I've incorporated into the book is trying to inspire people to pay attention to all the moments around us where we can find the wonder and the ease of grace. One point in the book, you're exploring grace from sort of a religious angle. And you quote someone who says, I think a saint is someone who sees every moment in life as grace-filled.

Every moment is an opportunity to encounter God. That's sort of to that paying attention that you're talking about. Exactly. It's a matter of perspective, really, right? We can look at things in so many different ways, and yet if we slow down and we kind of take a moment to exercise what I call a flexible lens, to zoom in on the moment and then also take a step back and see what's really going on, what matters about it? What else can I discover that maybe I've overlooked? So many times in our life, so many hardships, so many irritations and frustrations can actually

reveal something else. You know, maybe it's really not so bad. Maybe this led me to think about something I hadn't thought about before. Maybe it caused an encounter with a person that actually ended up being rewarding. Or maybe it's in the past and I don't need to think about it anymore and I can just keep going forward. Yeah, when you were describing the things that are causing the grace gap, it brought to mind for me, me trying to get out of the house some mornings and how ungraceful it must be with like a backpack on one shoulder and then this bag of clothes on the other and then coffee in one hand and keys. And I was just kind of made me laugh like, yep, that's not I'm sure that's not a very graceful moment. And to your point, it's how much getting crammed into one day, right, getting crammed into one day

and getting crammed onto our bodies. You know, weed with having to carry our portable offices around with us, laptop, iPhones and notebooks and books and what have you. And the physical experience of all that is exhausting. And the physical is such a big part of this idea of grace and of how we inhabit our bodies. That's something to really pay attention to because, you know, what I came away from after writing this book and or after doing the research on the book, is that grace is really a worldview. It's a philosophy. And it allows us to take care of ourselves as well as taking care of others. And the taking care of ourselves is a really big part of it. At the end of the book, you talk about some different tips for moving through the world with grace. And one of them was, you know,

lightening up your physical load. And my backpack is like, I have everything in the world in it. I travel so much that it's like, that's kind of my, like you said, portable office slash life in there. But boy, it is heavy sometimes. There's no doubt about that. And so if I'm, if I'm traveling, I sometimes, you know, on the weekends, if I got time to go out, you know, how little can I go out with not schlepping that thing around for sure is wonderful. It makes a big difference. We are kind of newly bipedal. I mean, if you look at our evolution in the grand scheme of things, over the millions of years that our primate heritage extends back to, it's a very small sliver of time that we've been fully upright and we're still adapting to that.

You know, so our spine takes such a load and, you know, one image to think about as far as grace goes is defying gravity. You know, that sense of to go back to Roger Federer or a ballet star like Mikhail Baryshnikov, who can just leap across the stage and take your heart with him, that lightness. We can all kind of try to breathe that in and stand upright and open our shoulders and draw in a big breath and, oh, that feels so good. And when we're loaded down with stuff on our shoulders, we are compromising that breathing and that defying gravity sense. You know, we're instead weighing ourselves down. So the more we can do to lighten up, to stand upright, to breathe, to kind of try to almost have your spine be floating upwards, the better we'll feel. 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. Bryan 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. One of the questions that I get asked most often is,

what podcasts do you listen to? And so one of the podcasts that I listen to a lot, and it's a guest we had on the show, is The Art of Charm by Jordan Harbinger. I think they get as interesting to guests as we do, in my own opinion. And so I love checking out what they've got. And I've got Jordan here from The Art of Charm with me. Hi, Jordan. Hey, thanks for having me on. Yeah. I was particularly interested in the Scott Adams episode you had recently. You want to tell

folks a little bit about that one? Yeah, Scott Adams was an interesting guy because he came in and I don't do politics, right? It's not worth it. It's not a good look for the show. And man, I'll tell you, he came in with a thesis that Trump is a master persuader. And I wanted to dissect that a little bit. And he's a trained hypnotist. We talked about hypnosis, persuasion, how hypnosis and persuasion are used by Trump. He gives concrete examples. So this was a little bit controversial, but whether you're pro-Trump or you're anti-Trump or you don't care and you're Trumped out, this was one of the most popular episodes we've done recently because Scott Adams is a creative guy. He created Dilbert and here he is talking about persuasion and influence and how that's being used to shape the world by one of our current times most iconic people, love them or hate them. So that was a really interesting show for us. Excellent. And

tell people where they can find you if they want to listen. Sure. We're at theartofcharm.com slash podcast or just, you know, you're listening to a podcast right now. You might as well search for the Art of Charm podcast in whatever podcast player you've got, Stitcher, Spotify or iTunes. Excellent. Well, thanks for spending a minute with us, Jordan. Thank you. And here's the rest of the interview with Sarah Kaufman. You've listed a bunch of people, Muhammad Ali and Roger Federer and ballet dancers, these people who seem so graceful. It's almost as if it's without effort. And yet at the same

time, there is a tremendous amount of effort behind that. I think you refer to that as the paradox of grace. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Yes, it's that practice makes graceful. So the graceful athlete balances skill and ease. So now it's mysterious, and it's a beautiful mystery, in my opinion, why Roger Federer is so much more graceful than many other tennis players, or why Sandy Koufax, the gorgeous pitcher, looked so delicious and delightful as he was pitching his fastballs, you know, with devastating speed, more so than other pitchers that seem to achieve the same results, but just with so much more effort. So it's balancing the skill and the ease. And really, it's the practice that's put into it,

the more that a person practices something, the more the neurons in the brain are wired together along those pathways. And those connections get stronger and stronger and stronger. So any of us can achieve a level of physical grace, as long as we are aiming for that and trying and getting out there and moving, walking, any kind of physical activity. But that also goes for the social graces. You know, we can practice warmth and compassion and understanding and slowing down. We can practice those things and we'll get better at them. You stress movement a lot in the book. Tell us about the importance of movement in your mind just to our overall well-being and

how it ties into grace. Well, we are more than just a head. And, you know, I live in Washington, D.C. We are very much in our heads here in this city. But we're connected to a body. And the physical experience of living in our bodies is not something that we may all think about all the time. That's how our brain is fed so much information. So what I said about grace being like a philosophy and a worldview that allows us to nurture ourselves and nurture those around us, well, moving our body through the world is how our brain gets information. So the more that we get up out of our chairs, that we try to take walks, that we try to incorporate activity into our lives, that fires up our brain. Even if most of our life is thinking or using our intellect, that is how your brain is fed, is through this physical activity. Now, if we think about grace and wanting

to acquire grace, that goes hand in hand with moving and connecting to people. You know, the way that we connect with people is through this kind of physical warmth, exercising the ability to sense one another's emotions, which we all have. Empathy is deeply tied in with the body. We connect with one another body to body. If you think about if you're listening to someone tell a sad story, you'll probably lean forward a little. Your eyes might tear up. You know, we can't help but be connected to one another in that way. And that's all part of grace, being connected, body and spirit with other people.

You give advice in the book about posture, about how to have better posture. And it's funny, I spent most of the day yesterday in an emergency room, which is actually reading your book and being there, there's a surprising amount of grace there in the kindness of the people around in certain cases. But I spent lots of time kind of walking up and down the halls, practicing your posture. And I've noticed there is something to how I carry my body certainly has to do with how my mood and emotions are. There's lots of studies that kind of show that stuff. There's this back and forth between the mind and brain. But in a relatively short way, what is good posture and why is it important? So I guess,

how do you do it and why is it worth doing? Okay, great. I love those questions. So I'll flip it around and I'll talk about the importance of it. First of all, it's worth doing because good posture allows more air to get into our lungs, you know, more oxygen. So that's a good thing, right? If we're slumped over, if we're hunched, if we are not standing upright, we can't open up our chest. We can't take those deep breaths to get the air in. And when we slump and maybe any kinds of losses of verticality in our spine mean that there's a kink in there, there's a twist in there somehow, which means those cells are not getting oxygen and blood flow. That's also not a good thing. And that's also not a good thing. So posture has been very strongly connected to health,

to oxygen flow, to blood flow, to tissue health, to avoiding all kinds of inflammations and other calamities down the line, which I talk about in my book, the essence of good posture is that it should feel upright, elegant, and light. So if you can think about, you know, standing and lifting up out of your hips, having that firm core, not a clenched core, nothing should be tight or restricted, but just lifting up, lifting up all the way, lifting up in your chest, kind of relaxing the shoulders and let them slide down, feel those shoulder blades sliding down the back, having the head be right up on top of the shoulders, everything in a nice vertical line. And if you stand against a wall, this is an easy way to do it. If you stand with your back against the wall, your heels, your butt, and the back of your head should touch the wall. And then you know that you're upright.

And then you say, just try and move away from the wall and keep that posture, that position. We shouldn't forget the important that I was making sure to practice yesterday in the emergency room of nipples firing. Yes, love that. I know. That's the phrase. Exactly. That's the phrase that was given to me by a dancer who's done choreography. She said this is what she tells her dancers to do when they're strutting out

onto that stage, nipples firing, because that means your chest is up, you've got beautiful posture, and that's what everyone's going to notice. Yep, thought that was kind of funny, and the thought of me practicing that in the emergency room corridors is an image that makes me giggle. Another part of the book that you described that I really related with was you talked about the grace of groups of people moving together. So the obvious one is armies marching together or dancers dancing together. But you also use NASCAR pit crews and how well they work. And you reference the grace of a kitchen. And a long time ago, in what feels like another life at this point, I was a cook and a sous chef. And I don't miss that world very much, except I do miss that. I miss that coordination of a kitchen that's moving

right and everybody's just sort of flowing together. And there's a real grace and a joy to it. And that's the one part of it that I missed. And I really related with that when you were talking about that part. Well, I'm so glad. And that's really exciting to hear about that part of your life. Because, you know, I've talked to other people who were cooks at some point in their life, and they say the same thing. It's that coordination that you get into where everything's working, everyone's firing, and those nights where there's just this smooth cycle, everyone knows what he's doing, and it all flows, that really stand out. And that was such a joy to do in this book, to direct attention at these moments of grace that are happening around us. And like you said, in the emergency room, That's a fantastic place to observe it, you know, where you can see, if it's possible, to see the nurses and the doctors and the way they can move if it's a really great team and there's been some practice. That's a crucial element of delivering care

in an urgent situation. I mean, that's the classic grace under pressure, right? To be able to move with ease. And I think those medical folks will say it's been practiced. And that's another example of the practice makes graceful. These are all practiced maneuvers that then become easy. One of the things that you talk about is you mentioned how as moderns, the concept of self improvement, which is something that's been on everybody's mind from, you know, probably as long as we've had a self, has moved from a more traditional view where, you know, self improvement was about building up our character, something that was slow and took time, and that more and more self-improvement is seen as, you know, by buying things, by acquiring something different.

Can you share a little bit about that? Yes, exactly. You know, we can think of people like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, you know, our founding fathers in the colonial period were really obsessed by this idea of character development. And it was inner qualities that were to be worked on, cultivating patience, generosity, gratitude, sympathy, understanding. gratitude, sympathy, understanding. And going back to when we first have records to show, the very first text that we have that is considered the first book was a set of hieroglyphics from about 5000 BC in ancient Egypt, where the writer was talking about kindness. And at a time when the pyramids were being built, he was writing down maxims to his son, ideas to live by. And one of the most

important ones that he wanted to pass on was kindness. Kindness is a man's memorial, he wrote. on was kindness. Kindness is a man's memorial, he wrote. In the long view of time, the kind have a greater claim than the rude. So all through time, you can find echoes of that. And in the Renaissance era, books were being written about how to perfect human behavior, just in the way that Michelangelo and other painters were perfecting the human form. And then in the colonial era, George Washington considered very graceful, not only for the way he moved and the fact that he was tall and elegant and an athlete, but also for his equanimity and his ability to listen. The fact that he would look people right in the eye and actually listen to what they were saying. And he had that kind of

magical quality of connecting on a deep level. And gradually that slipped away know I think with the rise of commercialization television possibly we are acquisitive people you know we're this is kind of part of our nature to be looking at what everybody else is doing and being interested in what we all have and what other people have. And television stores, advertising, the internet, all reward that behavior that, oh, if only I could buy that, if only I can acquire that, if only I can get that thing, I'll be happy, I'll be good, I'll be, you know, I'll be using it to better my life, rather than that slower process of cultivating inner qualities. And we know that can be a slow process. Indeed.

A lifelong practice. 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. Bryan 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. wherever you get your podcasts. There's a lot of examples of grace in the book, and I love the stuff about Motown and how the Motown stars were really taught grace and polish and how to handle themselves. We're not going to go there, though. This is a little teaser for people for the book

that is really a great story and I found really interesting. The one I want to talk about, though, is the dance class for people with Parkinson's. I love that experience. And it's in a chapter on grace for those with physical difficulties. So I want to underscore that grace is not about perfection. You know, it doesn't demand perfection. It only demands that we lean into our humanity and that we connect with one another through that humanity. And so this dance class arose to work with people who have Parkinson's, which is a neurological disorder that you could say kind of takes away physical grace. It makes balance and even walking and controlling movements, reaching for something, holding a cup without spilling the contents, makes those very difficult.

without spilling the contents makes those very difficult. This is a dance class that gets people together with Parkinson's and teaches movement together that everyone can do, whether the participants are sitting in a wheelchair, sitting in a chair, or able to stand, uses music from Broadway, from all kinds of popular songs, that's very rhythmic, you know, real momentum to pull people along. And these participants have so much fun, and it is such a pleasure to participate and to watch it because it's not therapy. You know, it's not, let's do this set of exercises and improve your balance. No, this is art. It's let's experience this music. It's just about fun and making art and being together, being in a community. being together, being in a community. And the series of classes, Dance for PD, Dance for Parkinson's Disease, you can find it online if you Google Dance for PD. It has spread into really a movement and there are classes all around the country and in fact, all around the world.

The description of it was very touching and I I definitely want to check out that sounds like there's a documentary made about it also. Yes, indeed. It's a wonderful endeavor that can be replicated in so many ways, you know, because if we have ailments, if we have limitations, we may not feel like getting out and being part of the community. You know, there's so many ways when people with these kinds of difficulties can become isolated. And yet there's so many ways when people can be brought together with like interests just for the joy of it. And at whatever level can be embraced and experience the community of people. That's the wonder and that's the grace of it. And it's it's fantastic to be a part of.

I read a lot of things. And so every once in a while, I just feel like every book I read brings up an idea, you know, the same idea and, and your book did the same thing. And it was this idea that it wasn't very long ago, like, like a blink of an eye ago in human history, that all of us were singers and dancers. And we all did that stuff. It wasn't where we are now, where some of us are performers, and some of us are people who watch everybody did these things very recently in human history. And I just think that I'm often struck by that switch and how fundamental that might be that we don't really even understand yet. Exactly. We can feel embarrassed, you know, to get up and sing or to get up and dance.

When really, it's kind of like this is humanity's birthright. We all came along doing that. So that's why every culture everywhere in the world has some kind of dance tradition, has some kind of music tradition, has some kind of art making it. You know, scientists believe that creativity and making art may be absolutely fundamental to human existence, which is why so many scientists are starting to study that right now, which I draw on some of the results of those studies, which are so fascinating. That's one way, you know, to express the idea of the pleasure that we take in watching dance or listening to music is that it's a way in for many of us to these powerful expressions that we may not otherwise have a way into nowadays. Yeah, I mean, I'm loosely considered a musician, right?

And if it was a talent game, I never would have stuck with it, right? If that was the whole point of it. And I'm glad that I just kind of kept going. Like, I've talked about this on the show before, Chris is so gifted as a musician that he's just remarkable. And I do not have that gift in any measure. But I still make music. And I make a lot of it. And it's just been by some of it is just the you know some some degree of stubbornness but a lot of it was that I've spent a lot of the time focusing on the joy it gives me and making it and less on how good it is and and I think we could all put more things into our lives if we approached them that way versus the I can only do it if I'm really good at it exactly and you And we have this editor, most of us have this self-editor up in our head, which is why I like to think about inhabiting the body more.

The body will let us know that it's just fun. It's just fun to jam in your bedroom or to get together with your friends and just have a late night jam session without the mind overthinking it too much. And that's really the grace is in the connection that we make, the connection with other people and the connection with our deepest selves, with this creativity that we are longing to be able to express. You end the book by talking about tips to move more gracefully through life.

So why don't you leave us with a couple of those before we wrap up the show? Great. So the number one tip is slow down. That's difficult in this hurly-burly age that we're in, where, you know, as we've discussed, lots of temptations to rush, lots of needs to rush often. But if we can find moments to slow down, that's when, first of all, we'll be able to pay closer attention to what's happening around us. We may find we don't trip over curbs or, you know, I've certainly made quite a spectacle of myself falling upstairs. But, you know, when we slow down, we've got more control over the

situation and we can tune in more to the people around us, which leads to the second tip, which is to practice tolerance and compassion. And those qualities come first from slowing down and trying to understand where another person is coming from. I guess another one of my favorite tips and the one I end the book with is enjoy. You know, just enjoy, celebrate this life. As you mentioned, one of the priests I spoke to for the book said that his idea of a saint was someone who recognized every moment in every day as grace-filled. there are those moments that we can look around and savor and really hold onto, hold in our hearts and build on. And those are fleeting, but it's the time that we spend savoring them and paying attention

to them, make them real. And that's kind of what matters in life, right? The connections that we make. And I feel that grace is really all about deepening connections with others. Well, I don't think there's any better way to end than what you just said there, which was beautiful. So, Sarah, thank you so much for coming on the show. We will have links in the show notes to your book as well as to your website and all the information about you. We'll have links to some of your stuff on the Washington

Post also. So thanks so much for taking the time to come on today. Thank you so much, Eric. It was just a pleasure and I really love the work you're doing. I've encountered so many interesting ideas and thinkers through your podcast and you're just building a terrific body of knowledge. So thank you for that. Thank you. I appreciate that. Okay, take care. Take care. 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.