The One You Feed - The Balance of Adventure and Spiritual Growth with Douglas Westerbeke

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

In this episode, Douglas Westerbeke, explores how to find the balance of adventure and spiritual growth in his writing and life. With a focus on resilience and a balanced approach to life transitions, he offers a valuable perspective for those seeking to understand and adapt to the inevitable changes in life. Through his compelling narratives, he brings a wealth of knowledge to the complexities of personal growth and change. Key Takeaways: Mastering techniques to manage anger and its impact for a balanced life Unveiling the profound concept of enlightenment for personal growth and fulfillment Discovering the pivotal role of libraries in expanding knowledge and fostering personal development Understanding the profound effects of travel for adapting for resilience and growth Navigating life changes through powerful storytelling for inspiration and empowerment For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The other theme of the book is that our happiness, our sense of wonder, whatever it is that makes us happy, depends on the stories we write for ourselves. Because we're always writing a story. You have this internal monologue in your head all the time, right? You're talking to yourself constantly. 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.

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Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is author Douglas Westerbeek. He worked at one of the largest libraries in the U.S. and has spent the last decade on the local panel of the International Dublin Literary Award, reading current literary novels and nominating the best for selection. Although he has a background in screenwriting, the Dublin experience inspired him to write his own novel, discussed here. It's called A Short Walk Through a Wide World. Hi, Doug. Welcome to the show. Hi, how are you? It's good to be here.

I am very happy to have you on. We are sitting together in a studio in Columbus, Ohio. It's very rare that I get to do interviews in person in Columbus. So this is a real treat. You live in Cleveland. For people who don't know, that's about two hours away from here. So thank you for coming down. We're going to be discussing your novel, which is a great adventure story called A Short Walk Through a Wide World. But before we get into that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild, and they say,

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 grandchild stops, think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent 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. So my first thought goes to Carl Jung. Because he always used to talk about.

He had these 12 archetypes. And one of them was the shadow. And this is the first thing I thought. When I hear this. So the shadow. Is this part of you. That you bury. You just bury it your whole life.

Like way down there. Because it's really the darkest side of you. And a lot of people just don't even realize it's there and live in denial of it, so on and so forth. Everybody ignores this. And most people aren't even aware of it. Although every once in a while, you know, you catch yourself thinking something or you lose your temper or whatever, and it's there. And we all kind of know it's there, but you bury it. So you never know. But what Jung used to say was that you really want to know it. You really want to be familiar with it. You really want to make friends with it. So like the impulses say, yeah, you want to feed the good wolf and you

should. Cause I remember, you know, for a long time, my writing wasn't getting me anywhere. And I was just on the sidelines and I was living, you know, whatever my domesticated life. And I was just on the sidelines and I was living, you know, whatever my domesticated life. And I would see even friends of mine who had all the success and could have been really embittered. And I remember making the conscious choice. I'm not going to be that person. I don't want, I'm going to be very happy when someone else like gets wherever they get to because they're living the life they want to live. And that's great for them. And I want them success. But on the other hand, the other wolf,

the one that, you know, you impulsively don't want to feed might not be the best idea because, you know, I mean, you think about even the best people out there, like you can imagine, like, like mother Teresa, right? She goes down to Calcutta and she wants to feed the poor. And I think a lot of people picture this, like, you know, this kind old lady handing out treats the kids and it's not the way it was. This is a huge undertaking, right? It's like running a corporation or something. It's huge.

And from what I understand, Mother Teresa was tough. She was not easy to work for. She was really demanding. She did not put up with fools, all that kind of stuff because she had to do this incredible job. So it takes a certain amount of ruthlessness and relentlessness to get that done. And if she hadn't tapped into that, maybe she would not have been able to do the incredible miraculous things that she did. She was an inveterate gambler too, I heard.

I did not know that. No, no, I'm making that up. I was like, what? I was trying to think of what insult I could lob at Mother Teresa that wouldn't get me like permanent, wouldn't infuriate the entire audience. And not the gambling's not serious, but no, that's not true. Go on. Sorry. I couldn't resist.

That's a good one. But yeah, I think that was my whole point. This darkness in you kind of helps propel you forward, kind of helps you get your tasks done. It kind of makes you focus, kind of like cuts out the distractions around you. It can do a lot of good for you. So you don't want to starve it to death, but you want to be aware of it and you want to use it where it's applicable, I suppose is how I guess you'd say it. That's the first thing I thought of anyway. Interestingly enough, I was having a conversation just, was it yesterday?

No, day before with another novelist. I don't talk to novelists often, but a friend of mine, Matthew Quick, and we were talking about this very idea, the Jungian idea of the shadow. that as particular type of men in the eras in which we've been raised, and by type I mean maybe more liberal and recognizing the overreaches that men often have had, that there was a certain amount of trying to be the good boy. And that what that did for both of us was the thing that we couldn't face in ourselves was anger. It was the thing that got shoved way down. My father was a very angry man all the time. And so I spent my whole early, like adolescence through early adult years going, I'm not going to be like that. I'm not going to be like that. Shove it down, shove it down. Right. And I think there's been a cost to me for that. And it's not that I'm even conscious of it anymore because I think I've shoved it down for so long that it really is deep down there. But you see occasional flashes of it.

tempered yeah and it made it really tense to be around him it was like it's like living next to a volcano because you never know when he's going to go explode and all that kind of stuff and so i mean i was kind of raised to be angry and i feel i'm like yeah sometimes i'm an angry driver and sometimes you know i get i remember every time i've been angry though it has never helped me and so i learned really quickly not to be so angry. I'm trying to think, actually, is there ever a time where it's helped me? And I'm trying to think of one, and I really can't. But I remember really well the times where it just totally undermined what I was trying to do. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this gets back to talking about the two wolves, which is making a distinction between an emotion and the behavior that that emotion causes or pushes you to. So to try not to be angry, like the emotion of anger, I think is probably destructive.

Do not recognize like I'm angry, like shove that down. Don't you can't feel that you can't feel that. Right. However, it does seem perfectly reasonable to me. And part of being a good person in the world of then not letting that emotion go to whatever it wants to do. Right. Right. And I think that's an interesting thing. When we think about emotions, there's almost always an urge with them. Like the emotion is causing us to want to do something. And that's often the place for me where I've tried to learn to separate, don't repress the emotion,

but don't indulge the action either. That's sort of the ideal. Now, it's not the actual emotion of anger. I mean, you should be angry about certain things. You should be angry about whatever slavery, the Holocaust, whatever it is. How you manifest that anger, though, is something you can control. And you've got to do it wisely. You've got to do it so it's actually a productive thing as opposed to something that undermines you. Right. Yeah, it's the whole respond rather than react idea.

Yeah. So let's turn to your book. I'm going to let you maybe tell us for a minute or two your description of what the book is about, just to give listeners a sense of the type of book we're discussing. in 1880s Paris and she gets really sick at the dinner table one night so all her parents are all freaked out her whole family's freaked out they rush her to the doctor and the doctor tries to fix her but gets the doctor and she's totally fine and the doctor's like I don't see anything wrong there and so she goes back home and she can't even get inside the house she's so sick this time and they take her back to the doctor and now she's even sicker and the doctor has no idea what's wrong with her and he's poking and prodding her, trying to figure it out. And she gets so frustrated.

She just runs off into the streets of Paris at night. And she feels fine. And she realizes that it's this active exploration of being somewhere she's never been before that cures her. And so she spends the rest of her life wandering around and around the world, constantly on the run from this disease. And so it's an epic adventure. She's going to climb the Himalayas and cross the Sahara and raft down the Amazon, all these amazing things. And so that's the exciting part.

It's a huge epic adventure. That's the fun part to read. But on the flip side, I mean, this is a girl who has lost her family, has nowhere to call home. She can't fall in love because they're all doomed. She just lives this life that seems to have no meaning. So how do you find a meaning in a life that feels like an eternal punishment? And that's the dilemma that she's facing here. It seems like it would be a great adventure, terrific excuse to get out of there. A lot of

people admire her and are envious of her because they see this woman who's having this grand adventure, perfect excuse to do it, can't hold it against her. But really, it's not so easy if you're there. And I love to travel. Most people do love to travel. But I remember I was traveling. My wife is from China. We were traveling through China. I think we spent like three weeks there, maybe four. And we started in the south, moved our way north. By the time we got to Beijing, me and my kids were four. And we started in the South, moved our way North. By the time we got to Beijing, me and my kids were exhausted and we didn't, you know, there was no forbidden city, no great wall. We just slept for three days, you know? So, I mean, that was only four weeks. Imagine doing this for a lifetime. So, it can be brutal. My dad used to travel all

the time for his work, you know, so he hates to travel. Now, my wife is kind of similar. She's a musician with the Cleveland Orchestra, and they're very much traveling or touring orchestra. You get tired of it. You just want to stay home with your kids and enjoy your life and stuff like that. So there's a flip side. There's the adventure of travel, which is why we go on vacations. But I mean, most people don't take a vacation that's more than a week, 10 days, something like that. Then they come back home. And if it goes on forever, it's a whole different story. Yeah. It's ironic that we're having this conversation because in about 10 days,

I'm about to embark on a three-month trip. Oh my God. To Europe. Now it's not a vacation. I didn't mean to spoil. I don't mean to wreck your vacation. No, no, no, no. It's not a vacate. I mean, parts of it will be vacation, but I will be working while in there. I'm working on a book myself, so I'll be writing. I'll be doing interviews. So it's not a vacation, but it is three months of us moving our way, covering a fair amount of ground over that time. your book a little bit, not in preparation for the trip, but just they sort of aligned. But certainly thinking about that, like how long do we want to stay in one place versus how many different places do we want to see? And what's the pace that you're on,

right? Because to your point, like when you're always moving, that gets to be exhausting. Yeah. I've planned some vacations where I was like, okay, we'll spend one or two days there, one or two days there. And that's never the best way. Really the best way to do it is to pick a spot, stay for a while. So at least you feel like you've gotten the feel of the place and so on. Because otherwise it's hectic. It's constant moving. You never get a break and you need a break. And just to enjoy the place really. I mean, it's not enough to just stop and see. Yeah. We've interspersed a week here, a couple of weeks there, but then there's a couple of weeks where we're seeing multiple places where there's a lot more movement. So I'm so fortunate that my work allows me to work from anywhere and get a chance to go do this. But it's ironic that we're talking

about an epic journey when I feel like I'm going on, for me, what is an epic journey? That is an epic journey. Right? So you've referred to the book as an adventure story. You've also referred to it as a spiritual journey. That's a term that means all sorts of things to all sorts of people. When you use it, what are you referring to? What do you mean? I think I mean it actually pretty literary. So this has a backstory to it.

So when I was a kid, tell you the whole story, it doesn't make me look good. But when I was like, I don't even remember how old I was, like seven, eight years old, maybe, maybe not even. And I remember getting to a big fight with my little brother. I had four brothers. I had one little one and it was over something stupid too. It was like, what are we going to watch on TV? Or, and I wanted to watch a Godzilla movie and he wanted to watch, you know, knowing him, it was like 60 minutes or something. And I'm like, no, I want to watch Godzilla. And he got his way. And I went out into the backyard and I sulked. And I remember sitting under the tree in the backyard thinking, God, if you're out there, just wreak total

unabashed revenge on my little brother. And weeks went by and nothing happened. And I was like, and because of that, I became an avowed atheist from like the age of like seven. I was like, you know, you really let me down. I'm not believing in you anymore. That's my revenge, you know, my petty revenge. As I got older and I stuck to this, you know, my arguments got a lot more sophisticated than that. But as I got older, I started noticing that all the stories I was writing, not all of them, but a lot of the stories I was writing were about these characters who were either very atheistic or they didn't like God, but God loved them anyway. And I was like, why am I

writing these stories? I'm not that person. And then of course, cursed me. Well, geez, maybe I'm not nearly as atheistic as I thought I was. And maybe there's a lot more going. So these are the types of characters I write now. And because of that, I started studying the religions. I started studying all of them. But the Old Testament had these great stories that I loved. A great one would be Jonah, because Jonah's given this task. He has to go down and convert Nineveh, right? Which is an insane thing for, you know, this guy who's just minding his own business.

And God comes down and says, go to Nineveh and convert him. And he's like, I don't want to go to Nineveh. I want to stay home. I was enjoying myself. I was perfectly happy before you came along. And he does everything he can to get out of that situation. And I'm thinking, well, you know, if you just do it, he says your life's going to be a lot easier, but he refuses. And in retrospect, because we all know how the story ends, he would have just been smarter just going along and doing as he was told. ends, he would have just been smarter just going along and doing as he was told. But you got to admire the guy who like butts head with God and says, no, not going to do it. Like you're going

to lose this battle. You have no chance of winning this one, but he fights it anyway. And there's something kind of admirable about that, even if he's wrong. And I know like the bigger moral of the story is that it's trying to show that if you turn your head away when evils are happening in the world you're not helping the world so i get that but at the same time there's something really admirable about a guy who's fighting a completely futile war against something bigger impossibly bigger than he'll ever be he cannot comprehend how big this thing he's up against is and he fights it anyway. And I always thought that was admirable. And I think Aubrey Torval is going through the exact same adventure because she's stuck with this disease. She's traveling around the world. She has no idea why

she's been singled out for this. She's the only one in the world that has this thing and never, maybe the only one ever will. And she doesn't know why. And it makes her miserable where if she kind of embraced her fate, she would have been a lot happier. But people come up to me all the time. I love that character of Aubrey Toravell. She's a great character. It's because she's making this futile fight. She's very feisty.

She's very single-minded. And there's something about that that people admire, I think. I think that's what it is. i'm off on a tangent there but that was my idea is that you know she's up against this it's not until she kind of learns to look back on her life and say you know what that wasn't so bad and i saw things no one else gets to see and there is something to that she kind of comes around this idea kind of manifests to a story. I don't kind of say it outrightly, but there's a voice in her head. There's all kinds of other things happening going on. And what does that mean? I don't spell it out, but in my mind, I knew what it was.

And I hope the readers get that. This is also a story about enlightenment. There's a lot of discussion between her and the prince in the middle of the story. And they're talking about what it means to be enlightened and how do you know? And it's, you know, the idea is it's kind of like waking up from a dream, from a dream life to your waking life. And enlightenment is when you're waking up in your waking life into something even higher than that. And you see her go through that process. By the end, you're there. So it's a story of enlightenment as well. And to me, that's all the way through the book. And that's where the spiritual element comes in. Because it's not a book about God in a direct way.

Exactly. There's no divine being. There's no her taking on. But what you're saying is this person fighting their fate being sort of one of the core themes there. And I always think it's so interesting. And I think it's one of the fundamental dilemmas that we face, particularly in today's day and age where choices are unlimited and every view of the world and every way to live is shown to you, you can actually see it all. Is this question of what do I accept about my life being the way that it

is? And what do I change? Because that's the first question. Like if you're going to fight your fate, on one hand, you look at that and go, well, it's admirable. And on the other hand, you go, well, it's a completely losing battle. Like why? It's obvious that if there's something we can't change, then accepting it is the reasonable course of action. And I think most people are wise enough to know that. chance of fixing it, in many ways, their life is easier because they don't have to try and figure out whether to fix it, how much time and energy to put into fixing it. They just accept. They get on with the business of like, all right, how do we build a life with this thing that we've been given that we can't do anything about? Andrew Solomon, who's a great writer, wrote The Noonday Demon, which is called The Atlas of Depression. He also wrote a book called Far From the Tree. And it's about children who are different than their

parents. Maybe they're blind, they're autistic, but they're different. And it was one of the main points I really took away from that book was this idea of these parents whose children, there might be a way to make them better. And they are caught in this pull. Like part of them is going just, all right, this is what we have. Let's deal with it caught in this pull. Like part of them is going just, all right, this is what we have. Let's deal with it. But then there's another part of them that's going, it could be different. It could be different. If you just did this, what if you tried this? So I think most of us in the modern world are closer to that latter thing I was describing, which is we look at our lives and if we just knew there were things that

couldn't change, like I know my height isn't going to change. Right. I mean, I could do some crazy surgery that breaks all my bones. And but all intents and purposes, I'm the height I am. And so you go about accepting that. I go, well, I'm not going to dunk a basketball. I just kind of move on. Right.

If you're raising kids, you're dealing with this dilemma daily. Yes. Because you want your kids to be as perfect as in ready for the world when it comes to them and all that. So you want them to be perfect at everything. And, and there's just certain things they're going to be good at and certain things they're not going to be good at. And it takes time to like figure, maybe not time, patience and understanding to realize this is what they're like. And the more you try to push them into being this ideal the less of a credit they're going to be to you if you want your kids to turn out well let them be them yeah and and they'll figure out their

own way and they'll figure out their pluses and minuses yeah it's a lot like that there's a line in the book where you're talking about aubrey once believed it was possible to control the world to make it bend to her personal sense of justice. What a child she was, how foolish she'd been, how haughty. And then it goes on to say, without a doubt, she knew she did not command the world, but was at the mercy of it. It's a lesson most people learn at some point in their lives that the world is a bigger and more powerful thing than you. Yeah, that was a lesson I learned. It's a lesson I see a lot of people learn. You start off young, you're idealistic. And then you realize, I remember my

dad telling me when I was a kid, you know what, you're young, you're full of energy, you're idealistic. This is the time to try to do the things you want to do. Because when you're older, you're going to be crushed. Wise. Wise. Right. True. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think that is wise and generous, right? Instead of telling you not to be idealistic and not try that stuff. It's like, go, that's, that's appropriate for this phase in your life of where you're at. I remember thinking of me when I was a kid, because I was very idealistic. I have lots of other friends who are like that. And eventually life gets to you, you know, because I had already been

planning to, you know, write books and make movies and do all this stuff by like time I was like 20, you know, didn't work out that way. And yet here you are, I don't know how old you are with enough. I ain't 20. You're not 20. You're not 60 either. No, no. But this is my next stop though. It's your next stop. Really? Yeah. So you're older than 55. I don't know, actually. I'm 54. You must know how old you are. I think I might be 54. No, I don't. I forget these things. All right. All right. I genuinely forget. I forget too, but my birth year was 1970. So it's always easy to figure out because I can just go, oh, well, what year is it? 2024, add 30 to it. Okay. I'm there. Oh, crap. So then I'm no, no, I'm older than you then. I didn't even realize. See, I really genuinely forgot. Well, you look very young, by the way,

you look very young. But my point with that was not to compliment you on your age. My point was to say, you had this idealism of all these things you were going to do when you were young and they didn't happen. Right. Right. Right. And yet here you are with a novel that has done. I mean, I don't, I don't know how you gauge how well a book does, but I mean, it's been in windows of Barnes and Noble. That's good enough. Right. I mean, that's something. So tie together this early disillusionment with creating art and lack of success with where you are today. How did that happen? How did you stay with it to get to the point where you were able to do it? How did you keep creating art in that period?

Well, so I've been doing it since I was little. I started writing stories when I was in third grade, maybe even before that. I remember me and my friends in third grade would get together and we would all write stories together and we had all these imaginary characters and stuff like that. And mine was a blue raccoon. I think my friend had these family of pickles that went around talking and stuff like that. Did the raccoons and the pickles get together ever? They did. So, we have all these joint stories. It was like Marvel's universe and they would all like intersect and stuff like that. And they would rob banks and stuff like that together.

They're always getting into these, well, it doesn't matter. Point is I kept writing these stories after they had stopped and I couldn't stop. So I was totally writing for pleasure, but I think around sixth grade, I was like, okay, this is what I want to do. And so I just started writing stories and more and more and see, I went to school for it. Afterwards, I would submit screenplays to competitions and they did really well. And it would just always be enough to keep me going, like enough, like encouragement, but it never happened. So I was optioned like, you know, four times, I think in Hollywood, but none of them ever got produced. And, you know, it was just crushing after a while.

Then I had kids and you take a break. But even when I had kids, I was like, oh my God, I have to find time to write. You get the shakes when you don't write. It's, I mean, it's like a physical reaction to not writing. And I've always had that. And so, I mean, I just constantly wrote. I probably have like 50 screenplays and five or six novels already. Just because just yesterday I'm working on a novel that I know is unpublishable.

It'll never be published. It's insane. It's a total vanity project is what they call it. But in between books, I'll take off a novel that I know is unpublishable. It'll never be published. It's insane. It's a total vanity project is what they call it. But in between books, I'll take off a month and I'll work on this thing just for fun. And all that time, I wasn't doing it because I thought it would have like this tremendous, incredible payoff or anything. I'm doing it because I can't stop. I don't know any other way to live, right?

It's just an obsession. You're like Aubrey. Am I? Well, in the sense of she can't stop moving or she gets worse than the shakes. You just described your inability to stop writing without getting some sort of. I never made that analogy. This is going in my next story. Well, there's another Aubrey connection that I picked up, which I don't know if you may or may not know. But one of the things that appears to potentially be an inciting incident for her is when she's young, she fails to take a certain act towards God.

Right. A selfless act. Right. It was sort of a battle with God. And you described being a young child, having a revenge fantasy and swearing off God because he didn't take out your little brother. That's another sim. I don't know if you've connected that dot either. To an extent. Okay. Okay. Maybe not quite so consciously, but I mean, that one, I totally feel. Yeah. Yeah. Like I can get that one right away so

it's also a setup like you get from you know the garden of eden set up right don't eat that apple yeah of course they're gonna eat it yeah yeah so yeah throw out the puzzle ball of course she's not gonna throw it out at that point oh no i gotta see what's inside it so she doesn't yeah and that's what sets her off in her journey. And it's like she was set up. 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.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. So, listener, consider this your halfway through the episode integration reminder. Remember, knowledge is power, but only if combined with action and integration. It can be transformative to take a minute to synthesize information rather than just ingesting it in a detached way. So let's collectively take a moment to pause and reflect. What's your one big insight so far and how can you put it into practice in your life? Seriously, just take a second, pause the audio and reflect. It can be so powerful to have these reminders to stop and be present, can't it? If you want to keep this momentum going that you built with this little exercise,

I'd encourage you to get on our Good Wolf Reminders SMS list. I'll shoot you two texts a week with insightful little prompts and wisdom from podcast guests. They're a nice little nudge to stop and be present in your life. And they're a helpful way to not get lost in the busyness and forget what is important. You can join at oneyoufeed.net slash SMS. And if you don't like them, you can get off the list really easily. So far, there are over 1,172 others from the OneYouFeed community on the list, and we'd love to welcome you as well. So head on over to OneYouFeed.net slash SMS, and let's feed our good wolves together. together. So there's another line in the book that says the best way to survive some things,

thought Aubrey, was not to understand them. Do you believe that? So I read this great book called Deep Survival. Lawrence Gonzalez, I think, wrote it because I love to write survival stories. So he was writing all about how people survive, what they survive. There are some situations people just can't survive, but in certain situations, it is a kind of a personality that gets you through it. And I remember so many aspects of it. One was to just act. And the other one was people who tend to survive, tend to admire their situation. Like there was a story about a plane crash and the plane just broke open in midair. And this girl strapped to her seat was literally tumbling through the air into the jungle and you know because there was a jungle she landed in the trees and actually survived this fall from an airplane a bunch of them did airplane was low i

guess but she describes it as oh look at these trees they look like broccoli she remembers this incident and when she's on the ground she's like this is a beautiful jungle and she's admiring this like everyone else is a lot of other people are looking at this, like this is their grave. You know, this is, this is the worst thing that can happen to me. This is miserable. She's actually admiring the place she's in. She's the only one that survived because everyone just froze, sat still. And she's like, you know what? I'm just going to follow this river. I'm going to walk. Cause if I stay here, they're not going to find us with all that. And so she just did something. Whereas everyone else said, no, no, wait, they'll find us here.

She's like, I don't know. She took off. No one else will go with her. And she is the only one that lived. She eventually was picked up. And there's a, I don't remember where I heard this, a soldier saying it was a combat soldier. And he says, look, if you're ever lost in the woods, just walk because it'll take you somewhere.

I mean, you can stand there and freeze out of fear and you can just sit there and not do anything, or you can take some steps and maybe it won't help. Maybe it will, but at least you'll know more than you did before because you're starting to see the place you're at. And maybe you'll come across something. Maybe you get a little lucky. Maybe you'll find some food. Maybe you'll find a river you can follow, so on and so forth. But if you just stay in one place, you're not improving your situation. So when Aubrey is saying that, I mean, Aubrey is not necessarily a great intellect. She's an action-oriented person.

For her, you've got to keep moving. First of all, she has to keep moving anyway. If she thinks about her plight too much, it's going to make her miserable. And that's what one of her flaws is, right? So, I mean, I hate to advocate mindlessness because I don't think it's quite there. But sometimes if you just do something, it's the best antidote there is. And so, instead of just sitting there feeling sorry for yourself, just get out there and walk. And maybe things, maybe they won't improve, but maybe they will. And it's certainly going to improve a lot more than just sitting there, you know, doing nothing.

Yeah. I feel obligated to tell listeners we do not offer survival advice on this show. So the other amazing thing about that book. Just if you're in the woods, the show has no opinion on whether you should stay put or walk. But the other thing was like, he actually broke it down by demographics. Kids under the age of six were more likely to survive than kids between the age of 17 and like 13. Because the kids between 17 and 13,

you know, teenagers, these young teenagers who don't know how to control their emotions yet tend to get really panicky or they tend to get really depressed. Their emotions get ahead of them and take them over and they tend to get really panicky or they tend to get really depressed. Their emotions get ahead of them and take them over and they tend to curl up and die. Whereas under six, they're like, oh, I'll just look for food. And they go off and just do the things they have to do. They're very practical. They don't get hung up on emotions at all because they just don't have that life

experience and it doesn't mean much to them yet. They just do what they have to do. That's why you hear like little kids being raised by wolves and monkeys and things like that, because they just let it happen. Whereas, you know, these older group of kids, you know, they'll be freaked out. They'll have like, you know, they'll self-doubt, all these kinds of things just undermine them. And then as you get older, the chances get better. Then you get to a certain age and your chances drop off and it's all in the mind. And it's because of where your mind is at that age. It was really fascinating, though. Yeah, that's wild. It is.

Adventure novels or survival novels, I may not get this right. The author Lauren Groff, is that her? Lauren Groff, yeah. She has a new book. Her latest book is sort of a survival story about a woman who wanders off from, I'm going to say, a medieval village where it's just a bad place to be. And so anyway, she's an amazing writer. Her prose is incredible. It is.

And so you might really enjoy that. I'm going to look for that now, yeah. Back to this idea of Aubrey's life as being both a blessing and a curse in that she has to keep moving. And we talked about how sometimes that may not be ideal. You make an analogy in the book between imprisonment and exile, right? Somebody is making the point that like punishment is to be imprisoned. Right. You can't move. And she makes the point, well, people are often exiled also another type of Right. really difficult, right? Like if you're imprisoned in a prison cell, that's awful, horrible, right? You can't go anywhere. You can't, I mean, like nothing. And to be forced to move to a new place you've never been every three days as Aubrey is, is also a form of

torture in its own way. So it seems like there's this, and I don't know if you think about this, but there's a case being made for sort of a middle way here, that the middle way is ideal. Yeah. I love Taoism and that's the philosophy there. Yep. For sure. But I have to admit, and this isn't true for everybody, but I know for me, I would prefer exile because at least you're out there and you're moving. Agreed. And then there are, but there are people I know and I've met them who would prefer to be in the prison because they can relax.

They can just, you know, people are taking care of them, feeding them, and they just have to sit there. Yeah. To make it a little bit more realistic. Because I think almost anybody would choose exile over prison cell because that's so extreme. But we might. One guy who didn't. Yeah. Okay.

Well, and it's interesting. Some people who are out of prison or I have a friend who was in prison. He just got out in the last six months. He was in prison for 20 years. Yeah. That's a tough adjustment. Yeah. I mean, all of a sudden your life is completely structured in to a degree you would never want your life to be structured. And then suddenly there is nothing as far as structure goes. Anyway, I was sort of making the middle way point there a little bit. For most of us, somewhere in between those two things is going to be the ideal. Yeah. Well, that's how most of us live our lives, right? Because we're not sitting at home all day doing nothing. We're out and about. We go on vacations once in a while and so on and so forth.

And most of us don't cloister ourselves inside a room all the rest of our lives. And most of us aren't wandering the world forever and ever either. There are people now, you know, hearing about these, what, digital nomads. And they do it for like a couple of years. And then you go on YouTube and you read, well, what are they up to? And I was like, I broke down. I couldn't do it anymore. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, I've known a couple of people who've tried the digital nomad lifestyle. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I've known a couple of people who've tried the digital nomad lifestyle and it seems to, like you're saying, to be great for a while until all of a sudden it's not. One guy said something really interesting to me, which because he was going around the world seeing all these beautiful things, they stopped becoming beautiful to him. Yeah. And he missed that. He missed the idea of going somewhere and being stunned by the landscape or the culture, whatever it is he was after. He missed being stunned and not bowled over by that because it was becoming routine for him. Yeah. And that's something that didn't actually occur to me.

Yeah, we habituate to almost anything. Yeah. We habituate to almost anything. Imagine habituating. Good and bad. Yeah, imagine habituating to like natural beauty. I can't even imagine that, but I guess it would happen. Yeah.

Well, I think that raises a question that I think is at the heart of a lot of spiritual journeys or spiritual work, which is how do you continue to see the extraordinary in what has become very ordinary? How do you continue to enliven your life, even though it's not changing much? Yeah. Oh my God. It's like you want an answer from me. No, no, no. I'm not looking for an answer so much as that. Yes, I've been hoping. How do you do that? 600 episodes in, I figured you were the guy who was going to solve this problem. The other theme of the book is that our happiness, our sense of wonder, whatever it is that makes us happy, depends on the stories we write for ourselves. Because we're always writing a story. You have this internal monologue in your head all the time, right? You're talking to yourself constantly.

Although I've heard there are people who don't have this internal monologue. And I never knew that was even possible. I've heard that also. And don't have this internal monologue. And I never knew that was even possible. I've heard that also. And I remain skeptical. I can't. How do you even think and be creative? Exactly. Anyway, I've heard the same thing.

And I'm like, obviously, that's self-reported because we can't hear inside anyone else's head. Yeah. I mean, do they just walk in this kind of like vacant void? I don't get it. Yeah. A little thought experiment I like to do sometimes, though, to this end, and it's pretty much impossible to do, but it's a little bit like a Zen koan, is to try and process the world without language. Like, just imagine you don't have language. Yeah.

I mean, I can't turn language off. Because, again, I think in language, in words. Right, right. But it is an interesting sort of way of trying to put your brain on tilt, so to speak, right? I've wondered the same thing. I know like our way, way early ancestors, you know, the Cro-Magnon. And how do they do it? How do they put everything together?

I mean, they were slowly getting there. Yeah. I mean, is it visual? Is it? I have no idea how they do it, frankly. It's hard to imagine. It's like trying to get inside the head of your cat. A hundred percent. If there was any one thing that I, like if there was a God and I could get

to ask God a question, I think my question would be something like, can you put me inside the head of a dog for a few days or an octopus or pick your creature. What is consciousness like for a creature that doesn't have language in the way that we do? I look at my dog all the time and just what must that experience be like? Yeah. I do the same thing. It's just mind-blowing. But it would be great to know. Yeah.

But what I was saying before I got on to that was so everybody tells them their own stories and they're constantly building this in their head. They talk to themselves. They imagine their futures. They rewrite their past. I mean, you can do all kinds of stuff to yourself in the book. There are these libraries that Aubrey comes upon and they're scattered all

throughout the book. And it's a recurring place that she visits these books. They're not in a language, so she can read them anywhere in the world. They're all in pictures and they're people's stories. So she's reading all these people's stories. It becomes a major theme in that. Well,

what's her story and what story is she telling herself? Because like we were saying, she comes off that she's miserable in the beginning and what she's got to do, she's got to learn to change her story or she's going to be miserable until the day she dies. And so people can find their happiness by finding the right story. And a lot of people can get that story wrong. They will tell themselves the wrong story. I'm thinking of, what's that movie? Zone of Interest, where they run Auschwitz, but to them it's just a day job, right? And a way to promote themselves and further their career.

And they are totally telling themselves the wrong story. I don't want to give away the ending, but the end, that staircase scene, it manifests itself. This is not a guy who's well, right? And that's because they've completely told themselves the wrong story, as wrong as you can make it. And this isn't my idea, by the way. I'm not an intellect by any stretch of the imagination, but Viktor Frankl came up with this because he survived Auschwitz and he saw it happening firsthand. He would see people sitting there saying, you know what? I have a feeling we're going to be liberated by the end of March, you know, and then it wouldn't happen. And that person would die.

They would just curl up and give up hope and just die. And he saw this again and again, people telling themselves the wrong story. And sometimes it costs them their life. His, I shouldn't say philosophy, he was a psychologist. His theory was that, look, you've got to tell yourself the right story. That story can change. It can adjust over time. If you get it wrong, it can have disastrous results. If you get it right, you can really make a meaningful life for yourself. Fascinating. I have a bunch of responses to that.

I mean, one is, I mean, there's a type of therapy called narrative therapy. And the whole point of it is to do exactly what you're saying. You rewrite your life experiences to tell a different story, right? Because we're making up the story. Right. We're making up the meaning. Right. Right. In most story, right? Because we're making up the story, right? We're making up the meaning, right? Right. In most cases, right? There's a fact and then there's interpretation. We're making it up. And if you're going to make it up, why not make it up in a way that leads to you being happier, healthier, and of more service to other people in the world, right? Like, I mean, I think about this all the time. Like I'm telling myself stories all the time. Most of them are about how something is

going to turn out. And I don't know how something's going to turn out. If I did, I would be an inveterate gambler, right? Like, I mean, I would, I would take after mother Teresa and I would be gambling all the time because I would know what was going to happen, but I don't. And yet, predominantly, my stories, when I'm not careful, are ones of impending failure. Yeah. And so I just try and remind myself, you don't know the future. So if you're going to make up a story, why not make up one that is a little bit more useful? So I was almost the opposite. I mean, you have the, you know, everything can end

in failure kind of thing going on. And I had like, everything is going to be great. I can't wait. You know, that's a bad story to tell yourself too, because you're divorcing yourself from reality. Yeah. I guess I have my versions of those too, where everything's going to be fine. Everything's going to be fine, which I think is like a cognitive bias where you just believe what you want to believe. Right. And you're right. That is an equally damaging story. If you have an infection and you just say to yourself, well, sure, it's going to be fine. It's going to be fine. Right, right.

And next thing you know, you have sepsis, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I know people have gone through like terrible divorces and then that reshapes their narrative. And now they're like depressed all the time. Yeah. Because, you know, because that's the ultimate betrayal right there. And how do you survive something like that? Absolutely. I mean, Rewrite your whole world right there and then, and you could either like say,

okay, I'm going to survive this or this is going to kill me. And you choose it. Yeah. I mean, as a recovering addict and alcoholic, that's a pivotal point for people who I think get better, like much, much better. There's a rewriting of that story that happens very often with people when they're able to help someone else with the thing they've gone through. Because all of a sudden it goes from this thing I endured to now this gift that I can give to others. The story becomes the gift? No. Well, in a way, in a sense. So my alcoholism or my addiction went from being this terrible thing to when I realized that now I had that power to

help other alcoholics and addicts. Now this thing that was a curse or a burden, this addiction is now, I mean, a gift is a strong word for it, but is now it has a purpose and a use. No, I don't think that's too strong a word. I think that's exactly right. Oh, I know where I wanted to go with this. I kind of just ended up there in a roundabout way, but we're talking about this idea of rewriting your own story and how Aubrey has to do that. And what's interesting is that the way that she's able to do that is very often by other people helping her see her story differently, right? Yeah. Well, we get an example of someone who tells the wrong story to himself and who's there.

One of the setups of the book is that I was thinking, okay, well, here's a woman who can't actually settle down and marry anybody. She's going to go through a series of lovers just because that's the situation she's in. Nobody can hold it against her. So I just went for it. So she's going to have, you know, she's going to fall in love with a very possessive man. And then she's going to have a very romantic affair. And then she's going to have a very platonic relationship. One relationship without words. One's just unreciprocated. All kinds. One in old age. But one of them is the guy who's telling himself, and they actually say this, he's telling himself the wrong story. He thinks he can cure Aubrey.

He can't. He's telling himself the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, too, because he's very possessive and wants to hold on to her. And later on, we get people who are telling themselves various versions of themselves, and they have it in their head. And so we see that manifest through a lot of other characters. Yeah, I think the prince really helps her along because he kind of like opens her up to other possibilities. Vicente at the end, very patient. He's very much a curmudgeon, but he's actually a very patient and very really good-hearted guy. And he helps.

Good listener, too. He helps get her through. You were saying the gift. You're describing it as you've rewritten your story and that you can help others. And that's exactly what ends up with Aubrey at the end. Because I was thinking at the end, because she goes through this whole enlightenment thing, she sees the world in a whole different way. But how do you explain that to other people? And how do you make them see it too?

And towards the end, it's very much intimated that she's going to help these kids that she's taking care of. She's going to lead them through life and she's going to help them try to get there as well. So she's kind of the same way. She's been there. She's seen enlightenment. She's going to help others try to get there too. And that, like you were saying, it's kind of like her gift to them too. She has rewritten her story now and that's what she's going to, I just gave away the ending of the book, but that's what's going to happen. Well, not exactly. Not exactly. There's a whole lot to get there. I'm Jason Alexander.

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So you've alluded to Aubrey finding enlightenment or experiencing enlightenment a couple times. Describe that a little bit more in whatever way you want. What is it that she sees? So it's hard to articulate because I've never been enlightened and I don't know anybody who has. I'm using a lot of creative license here. I'm using it in a way that I don't think is actually representative of what is typically what people will call enlightenment. I don't think enlightenment is a state of being for starters. I think it's just like you have a moment of clarity and then it passes and you have to go back to washing the dishes and raising your kids and everything else. It's kind of like an epiphany. You have an epiphany and that's your moment. I've done it differently in the book. It's a fictional book. It's magical

realism or speculative fiction, whatever you want to call it. So what I did in the book is that she actually has a moment. It's in one of the libraries and she has decided she's not reading anymore. And there's one last book sitting there. She has this moment where that book has been left out for her and she knows it. So she looks at it. And I wanted to get that feeling of the Prince described it as enlightenment, as waking up from your dream world into your actual world.

And then enlightenment will be a wake up further than. So she reads a story about a blind kid. It's all black and white, just pencil drawings. And then he goes blind in his page after page of just blank pages. And then all of a sudden she flips to one. It's all in color. And that's what I was getting at there.

And then she has a moment where the prose itself becomes scattered across the page because it's really hard to articulate. You don't articulate enlightenment, right? You just kind of like create this impression. After that, she's a different woman. She's terrified because I'm thinking if you have a moment where it's so clear and so precise that you think you see the whole universe in a nutshell type of thing or the face of God or whatever it is, that must be terrifying. So she is terrified and she can't look people in the face. And she's this terrified little old lady walking through the woods and scared of everything. And she has to

get over this and she gets over this because she has to take care of these children at the end. So she has no choice. She gets over it, but it lingers there. She knows she has seen something that no one else ever gets to see. And it's a worldview that no one else ever has because she was one-on-one with whatever it was, whatever you want to call it, that's been pushing her through the world and showing her all these wonderful things. Things that she doesn't necessarily think are all that wonderful. But now in retrospect, now that she's older, she can look back on it and say, you know what? That was pretty freaking amazing. And she's been rewarded by it with this book or this moment, this beyond articulation.

So to her, she's gone through all that and she doesn't know what to do with it at first until she realizes, well, here I am. I've gotten what I always wanted. I have kind of a bit of a home here in the jungle and I've got all these children to take care of and I've got to somehow figure out a way to pass this on. And it's a bit like there's a branch of Buddhism.

There are several. One is, you know, you try to reach nirvana and then nirvana is a kind of heaven. And then the other one is, you know, you reach nirvana, you see it, it's beautiful. Now you go back to earth, try to help others get there. And that's Aubrey's approach at that point. Sort of like a Bodhisattva.

Yeah. So yeah, that's where I was going with that. very arcane thing the other day about what the different schools of buddhism believe about omniscience and enlightenment is enlightenment a type of omniscience where you know everything you see everything or is that not what was meant in the book i think i was hinting at that i don't think that's actually how it works. So I was taking a lot of dramatic license. For me, enlightenment is a moment of epiphany about anything. It doesn't have to be like world shattering or anything like that. You have an epiphany about your kids or your marriage or, oh, that's what a cat thinks like,

something like that. All of a sudden you figure it out oh or something occurs to you and you have that moment and you can glide off that moment for a while because you know but then there's reality and you have to deal with reality and you have to cook dinner and you have to do this and that and it's gone but you can remember it you remember what you thought but you don't necessarily have the same feeling and it's not necessarily this gigantic world view or anything it's not like you have stepped outside the universe and can see it all. Maybe if you've taken certain mushrooms, you can do that. I don't know. Yeah.

Well, as someone who studied and practiced really diligently in Zen Buddhism, which is very focused on enlightenment. I mean, Zen is sort of considered like the direct train. And so I've had a couple of those experiences. And I would say that I agree in that they were like waking up, and yet they were very ordinary in another way. Like, oh, of course. They were what would be described as sort of oneness or unitive experiences, right? Where like, I truly felt like I was connected to everything else. And my personal sense of me as this limited individual was just kind of gone. I ran my life into the ground chasing heroin. And, you know, it was it was better than that. And I do think there's a lot of debate in spiritual communities about does somebody become permanently awakened? What does that even mean? You know, let me be clear, I'm making no claim to that, in my case at all.

traumatic experience that really shook up my psychic landscape. I've had a few of them, but really shook it up in ways that never went back to the way it was before. But then ordinary life and ordinary consciousness does very much reassert itself. It's like an infusion of love for everyone, I would suppose. Is that? Yeah. Yeah. That's what it feels like. Yeah. As you've read enough about them to know and what you did in your book with the way I love the way you had the word scatter across the page, because that is the nature of these experiences.

They call them ineffable, right? Meaning you can't anything you say about them is trivial compared to the experience. Right. So it was a oneness experience. The great Zen teacher Suzuki said, and I love this. He said, not two, but not one describing this experience. So like, it's not like I thought I was you exactly. I could tell the difference between you and me, but on some deeper level, there was no difference. sort of think about like interdependence and interconnection and know to like the experience of it but yeah it was one of amazing amount of love and freedom and just oh shit like all that stuff i've been worried about really makes no difference i think a lot about these things

having had a couple of them and study them it's interesting in the zen tradition they describe this as they call it kensho which means a moment or satori a moment of awakening boom this flash like you're describing there's one zen teacher makes this description of it's like you're in a you're in a room that's all enclosed and you have this moment and it's like boom somebody punches a hole in the wall and now there's light coming through there. And over time, and this is what koan practice in Zen is intended to do, is that it keeps punching more holes in that wall until eventually the holes, finally one day the whole structure completely crumbles. Does that happen for people? I think to the degree that it is ongoing is hard to know. to the degree that it is ongoing is hard to know. But I do think people can have pretty radical fundamental changes in the way they experience the world. But again,

I also do believe we habituate to anything. I don't think that you get out of that. I often think of enlightenment as a sudden jump in consciousness, meaning you're here and then all of a sudden you're way up here and it happens like that. And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, because it's so different versus a gradual thing where you change a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. I've joked before that if you put the 23-year-old homeless heroin addict version of me in my brain today, he might think he was enlightened. And again, I'm not saying I'm enlightened. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the difference between the level of psychic torment of where I was then and now would have seemed completely revolutionary to that poor kid. But it's totally normal to me, right? Because I've gotten here little steps that I's, I mean, with a couple what felt like sort of big jumps, but it's been much more incremental.

So the wall coming down, would that be because you're punching holes in it a few at a time until the whole thing comes down? Would that be the same as kind of like habituating to this sense of oneness? That's a good question. sense of oneness? That's a good question. I think what they're trying to get to there is that you have these flashes where you see the world in a certain way, and then ordinary consciousness reasserts itself. And then you have another flash, and then ordinary consciousness reasserts itself. And then eventually, the thing crumbles and ordinary consciousness isn't there. But I think there's an element of consciousness that things become ordinary. But I do think there is a degree of psychic freedom

that is available that some people achieve in a pretty ongoing way. But what the experience is like for them ongoing, I don't know. Meaning if you or I were to suddenly drop into that head we would be like holy shit but i don't know what it's like to them right and then you get into the whole question of people who are in the business of selling you could become enlightened and so thus they have a snake oil and i don't even necessarily mean snake oil but i do mean i don't know

enlightenment seems like it sometimes can turn into a contest with people. Like, I am and you're not. I don't just mean straight out charlatans either. I mean, people who've had some degree of insight. Right, right. I was thinking that if you ever do habituate to that, like, this is your normal state of being now, then does it become really difficult to fit in society? And are you in danger because you're kind of disconnected?

I don't know. I'm just wondering. That's the nature of that phrase, chop wood, carry water. I've never heard this. Oh, really? Really? Chop wood, carry water, what? It's funny because you alluded to like going back to just doing the laundry and doing things like that, right?

Oh, okay, right, right, right. The Zen phrase, you know, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Meaning you just do the basic same things. Right, okay. Right. Right. Right. The Zen phrase, you know, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water, meaning you just do the basic same things. Right. Right. I don't think so. Because again, to me, it wasn't, I mean, I've done hallucinogens, right? I know what it's like to be in an altered state where you're like, Whoa, I can't function. Right. This was not that at all. It was, it felt, no, I wouldn't think it would be quite that bad, but I'm thinking... I'm at danger here of pretending that I know what enlightenment

is about. So that's, I want to just caveat that. No, I was just throwing out the question just because it occurred to me as well. I want to be really careful. But I've talked to a lot of spiritual teachers who seem to have some degree of that. But you wonder what any of that is worth or mean when you find these so you know, so-called enlightened teachers that are sexually abusing their students. Right. Anyway, let's change directions and end this. Libraries. You're a librarian

or were a librarian. I don't know. I was, yeah. Okay. I love libraries. It was awesome being at one. Nicole, who works with the one you feed, who's a producer of the show and helps us do some other things, was a librarian. She actually left a job at the library to come work for us. So libraries are near and dear to our hearts.

In the book, libraries play a big role. And they seem to be the one place that Aubrey can stay in. Right, right. So they seem like a sanctuary to her. Was that the intention of her being able to stay without having to move? Yeah. It's the only place where she can go where she doesn't have to worry about rushing off to the next place. Although she actually travels to the libraries too, so she doesn't actually notice this for a while.

But if the idea is that, look, you're set off on this journey, you're wandering around and around the world. you're set off on this journey, you're wandering around and around the world. If the idea is that something out there wants to show you the world and particularly these libraries, because the whole history of everything is in these libraries and he's showing off, he wants somebody to know, right? This is a very old Testament idea of a divine being where he's kind of proud of what he's done. He's got his own mood swings and so on and so forth. And he wants to show off his creation is the idea or not his, but whatever it is, I never specify. I'm very open about it. So there are these libraries and the idea is, well, look, this is what the end goal is to get into these places and see what's in there. Why would he

chase her out or whatever it is, why would the world chase her? If the world wants you to see what's in these libraries, why would the world chase you out again? So the idea is to take that away. It made no sense to have her finally find these places and then get sick and have to leave them because this was the whole endpoint of her journey really. And really that kind of is where the whole journey kind of ends. And then there's an epilogue in the Amazon. Just one hand, I'm going to force you to keep going around the world to see places, right? Like I'm not going to let you stop. You're going to just have to keep going. And at the same time, also then saying, but you can also get everything that you need to see from a book is an interesting juxtaposition there, right?

It is. And I bring that up. She has a near-death experience where she's thinking this stuff through while she's dying and she's realizing, you know, I've spent all this time. I spent like the past, you know, so many years of my life just reading books when, you know, there's a whole library out here in the actual world. I think about this often because, you know, I love to read books and stuff like that, but it's a very solitary existence. It's not like going to the, you can go to the movies with your friends or the theater or concert, but a book, reading a book is something you just do by yourself. You can't share it. It's an antisocial behavior, actually. I hate to say it about the thing I'm in, but it's true is there's no way around it. And so I often think about that because there's

a kind of a, not a disconnect, a kind of conflict there yeah i'm a bit both i can be very introverted i can be very extroverted um and i suppose a lot of us can which is why we do these things we can be very sociable but then take time out for ourselves to read these books so i'm not knocking it but i am saying it is inherently an anti-social behavior and so she does the deep dive and she doesn't see anybody for years and she's just doing this and she learns a lot and she sees everything else, but she misses a lot at the same time. There's this, you got to have a foot in both places and she doesn't for the longest time. And then when she's out in the world, she has to readjust to it and she has to learn how to talk to people again. She's, she's coming out like a hermit and she has to totally get used to the world all over again. Those are the thoughts that she's

having. And she realizes, you know what, you know, I'm reading the stories of all these individuals around the world, but I'm a story too. And, you know, I think I make a pretty good book, she says at the end. That's where that was going. Wonderful. Well, Doug, thank you so much for coming down. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I really enjoyed the book. We'll have links in the show notes to where people can get the book. And it's a real treat. I hope listeners will talk.

Thank you very much. You know, you do these interviews all the time. So you're used to it, but I never get to talk like this to anybody. So I enjoy this was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support.

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