March 6, 2024 • 64 mins
In this episode, Parker Palmer explores ways to embrace the mystery of the human spirit as he shares his profound insights on embracing wholeness. He discusses the importance of nurturing positive qualities within ourselves and the responsibility we have in shaping our micro-environments. He also emphasizes the powerful impact of finding genuine connections and supportive people in your life. Parker’s journey to the depths of depression and the valuable role of authentic friendships during those tough times will leave you feeling inspired.
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Embrace personal development and authenticity to unlock your full potential
- Experience the transformative power of meaningful relationships in your life
- Discover the impact of genuine connections and support on your mental well-being
- Learn how to navigate mental health struggles with grace and resilience
- Nurture the positive qualities with ourselves and what we bring to the world
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
We all want to see changes in our lives, in
our minds, and in our hearts, so we read inspirational authors,
we listen to podcasts like this one, and we get
fired up to apply what we've learned. But then inevitably
we fall back into old patterns and it can be
so frustrating and maddening. When we start to build habits
that truly matter, we see real change, but without enough consistency,
(00:22):
we barely scratch the surface. In my building habits that
matter course, I apply behavioral principles to perennial wisdom so
that you can experience the benefits on a deeper level.
This is your chance to get accountability, ongoing support, and
a proven system. As you journey towards a greater understanding
of yourself, you start to bridge the gap between knowing
(00:43):
what to do and actually doing it. And you do
this in our group setting, in which community, connection and
friendships are all created which support you along the way.
This program is open for enrollment until March eleventh. Head
to oneufeed dot net slash wisdom to learn all about
this opportunity for us to connect and dive deeper into
(01:05):
how building habits that matter can transform the way you
experience your day to day life. Go to oneufeed dot
net slash wisdom. I hope to meet you in this
special program that starts very soon.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Where's the creative tension of holding between I want to
show up in the Michigan Legislature and argue my case
in open dialectical manner. And I'm going to show up
at the Michigan Legislature and let my AK forty seven
do my talking for me.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
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. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
(02:04):
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,
(02:24):
how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us,
our guest on this episode is Parker Palmer, the founder
(02:44):
and senior partner of the Center for Courage and Renewal.
He's a world renowned writer, speaker, and activist who focuses
on issues of education, community leadership, spirituality, and social change.
Parker has reached millions of people through his nine books,
which include Let Your Life Speak, The Courage to Teach
a Hidden Wholeness, and Healing the Heart of Democracy, among others. Today,
(03:08):
Eric and Parker riff on whatever topics come up.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Hi Parker, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Hi Harik, It's good to be back with you.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
It is great to have you back. I am just
really happy to talk with you again. I was saying
to you before we started, like, it's not like you
have a new book out where I was like, oh,
we got to talk about this book. I just was like,
I just want to talk to Parker again. So I'm
glad that we were able to make it happen. We'll
be talking about this and that, but we'll start in
the way we always do, with the Parable of the
Wolves and see what you have to say about it
(03:38):
this time. So 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 a 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, look
(03:59):
at their grandparents. 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.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
I love the parable, I have loved it for a
long time, and what it brings quickly to mind is
my long time belief for understanding that so much in
life depends on what it is that we bring from
inside our lives to the outside world. And conversely, when
(04:34):
the world throws stuff back at us, what do we
do internally to process it? How do we receive it?
Do we cling to it? Can we let it go?
Can we turn dirt into gold? Can we receive affirmation
and blessing in an open hearted way? I call it
life on the Mobius strip. It's this constant exchange of
(04:54):
the inner and outer which keep co creating each other.
And in the end there is no inner and out.
It's one continual act of co creation. But when I
think of that, when I think of it that way,
or in terms of the parable of the two wolves,
I'm reminded of how much responsibility we have for creating
(05:15):
and recreating the micro environments around us. You know, as
one person, a friend of mine has said, our reach
may be only three feet or so, but let's make
a positive impact within that three foot reach. And at
the same time, we're co creating ourselves by how we
(05:37):
internalize what the world throws back at us. So it's
a huge parable in terms of life today. I mean,
look at all that's going on, where so much is
being manifested from the shadow side of our lives in
the external world in murderous ways, in hurtful ways, in
(05:59):
ways that threaten democracy itself and certainly injure other people.
So it's a big, big story.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
I'm always interested in. You know, there's a narrative that
things today are worse than they've been before, and I'm
always interested in, you know, talking to people who've been
around a little bit longer, you know, is that your
sense also, And I know as we tend to get older,
we tend to think that the world today is not
(06:30):
as good as the world used to be. I'm just
kind of curious. If you're eighty you were born you know,
really still well, the really horrible time in human history
was happening, right, you know, you were born during a
war that killed what like seventeen million people or something,
you know, So that historical context I find helpful. How
(06:51):
do you think about our current time and placing it
in overall context?
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Well, I think the gist of what you just said,
Eric is correct, which is that in my lifetime, I'm
actually eighty four right now, born in nineteen thirty nine,
So I've seen a lot of human ups and downs.
Can't even begin to tick them off. But certainly World
(07:18):
War Two, the Holocaust which you referenced on, through the sixties,
at the Vietnam War, and our recurring inability to come
to terms with the original sin of race, racial prejudice, injustice,
white supremacy in this society, the McCarthy era of the
(07:40):
fifties right on through today, with incredible numbers of American
citizens sort of joining in on conspiracy theories and the
denial of the obvious, the denial that an election got
won by the person who actually want it, and buying
(08:01):
in on the basis of no evidence to the notion
that somehow that election was massively rigged and massively flawed.
So there's been a lot of that in my lifetime,
and I'm not forgetting what's going on in the Middle
East these days. Add that to the list of very
fundamental human struggles to decide which wolf we feed. I
(08:25):
think what I do find troubling today is the rise
of the far far right, not only here at home
but around the world, and the ease with which so
many citizens seem to buy in to baseless conspiracy theories.
(08:49):
I'll never understand these conversations that I sometimes get into,
where I'm saying, well, here's what the research shows about X,
Y or Z, and the other person basically says, well,
here's what an anonymous person named Q has to say
about that, and so I refute the research. These things
(09:12):
truly baffle me. I may be deluding myself, but I
think I mean. I was in on a lot of
conversations about Vietnam. I was in on a lot of
conversations about McCarthy and that era of threat to democracy,
and my memory is that they were measurably more rational
and more empirical than what it is that we're treated
(09:37):
to today. So in that sense, I'm a yes and
a no. I mean, yes, it keeps happening, and there
are some twists and turns in the current crisis that
I find really hard to wrap my mind during.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Yeah, I mean, you wrote a book I don't know
how many years ago now called Healing the Heart of Democracy,
and I think we've talked about that in one of
our previous interviews, and I think that that book was
written before the rise of as much conspiracy theory as
we're seeing today, as much the word polarization seems overused sometimes.
(10:14):
I mean, I watched the sixties and I'm like, well,
you know, we were killing president, you know, we were
assassinating leaders here in the US. Like that seems pretty polarized.
But I do agree with you about this not even
being able to agree on basic facts. Is there anything
in your thoughts on how we heal that?
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Yeah, it's interesting you should ask, because that book, Healing
the Art of Democracy, which was published in twenty eleven,
will be republished in a new edition next year twenty
twenty four, and I was asked by the publisher to
write a new introduction to it, which is basically around
the question, how have you changed your mind if at all?
(10:57):
I say basically two things in that new interest deduction.
One is that my fundamental thesis in healing the heart
of democracy is that we have got to learn to
talk to each other across lines of difference, and we
have to learn to engage in what I call creative
tension holding. Creative tension holding means the ability which can
(11:21):
be taught in schools and voluntary associations, in religious communities
and families, that can be taught anywhere and everywhere. Creative
tension holding means holding apparently opposite positions in a way
that eventually allows the two parties either to come to
(11:42):
some compromise in the middle of it, or to learn
that there's a kind of transcendent third thing that neither
one of them had considered or thought of, which would
meet the needs on both sides of the equation. That's
why it's creative tension holding toward some place new that
(12:02):
had not yet been imagined. It has everything to do
with focusing on nurturing that relationship between two or more
people where what's important is not to always be insisting
on being right, but to keep your eye on being
in right relationship, because that creates the container that allows
(12:28):
for an ongoing discussion. And a lot of these issues
around which were conflicted are complicated issues, and so they're
not going to be resolved in five minutes. It may
take five months or five years. But we have to
learn to hang in with each other. So as long
as we are a country rooted in we the people,
a government of by and for the people, as long
(12:50):
as we're at least maintaining the premise the principle, however
broken it may be in practice that we the people
have the final say, should have the final say on
all things. I don't see any way to get away
from the proposition that talking to each other is the
way forward, because that's how you build up we the people.
(13:11):
But in this introduction to the new addition of healing
the art of democracy, I also say, what's happening now
poses us with some oppositions, some polarities that are not
open to creative tension holding. I mean, where's the creative
tension of holding between I want to show up in
(13:33):
the Michigan legislature and argue my case in open dialectical manner,
and I'm going to show up at the Michigan Legislature
and let my AK forty seven do my talking for me.
There's no creative tension to be held between those two positions.
There's no creative tension to be held when the gist
(13:54):
of the conversation is around which race, which religion, which ethnicity,
which nationality, which gender or sexual orientation is superior to
the others. Yep, there's no creative tension holding with conspiracy
theories up against research based facts. So I think what
(14:18):
that means is developing a thicker skin around saying this
is not a conversation that's worth pursuing. This is not
a conversation in which we can expect either to meet
in the middle or to generate a transcendent third thing.
And I think a lot of good hearted people, and
(14:39):
I've been one of those people over the years, just
have a hard time with saying this is not a
conversation that's going to go anywhere fruitful. We keep pretending
that if we just change the subject and pass the turkey,
everything is going to be fine, you know.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Yeah, Well, I tend to agree with you, right. I'm
a big proponent in almost all cases like get to
know the other person, understand why they think what they think,
understand where they're coming from, see their humanity, you know.
And I'm a big proponent of that, right, And it
does seem, like you said, there are certain positions and
(15:19):
viewpoints that, like, I don't know how much creative tension
you can get when I'm like that wall is black
and you're like, no, that wall is white. Human perception
things around colors aside. I mean, the basic thing is
that we can't even agree on a base reality to
have a conversation around. And that's where I feel a
(15:41):
little bit despairing, you know, around these things, right, because
I don't even know how to engage in conversation in
a useful way, I end up often not even having
the conversation, which then doesn't feel good either, Like I
don't know what to do.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Yeah, I agree with you. I think you have to try.
I think you have to keep trying until all the
precincts have reported in that it's pretty clear that this
is not a discussable item. Yeah, but there's another point
that I've made in Healing the Heart of Democracy that
I also built into the new introduction, and that is
(16:21):
that there's a long history in America, dating from the
very beginning of this country, in which it doesn't take
one hundred percent of the people to get the people's
business done. I mean, you know, one of the salient
features of democracy is you can do business with fifty
one percent, even if forty nine percent are saying a
(16:44):
pox on all your houses. I was fascinated when I
was researching Healing the Heart of Democracy to learn I
think for the first time that in the Constitutional Convention
of seventeen eighty seven, which basically resulted in the document,
we now any of us at least treasure, even revere
while we acknowledge its brokenness in practice and continue to
(17:07):
work hard to live by its norms. In the Constitutional
Convention of seventeen eighty seven, a third, a full third
of the delegates walked out, refusing to sign a document
that they regarded as an abomination. But the two thirds
one right, Yeah, And a lot of people are saying
(17:28):
these days, well, it's about a third of the people
who continue to believe that the twenty twenty election was stolen. Okay,
the two thirds can still win. I think one of
the things that's come to me. This will seem pretty
simple minded to some people, but those of us who
participated in the civil rights movements of the mid twentieth
(17:50):
century are very well acquainted with its famous anthem, we
shall overcome. About five seconds of thinking about the word,
overcome means we're going to win. We're going to put
that other position down, We're going to squash racism. We're
going to win this struggle. We're going to win it
by nonviolent means, but we are going to win. We
(18:14):
shall overcome. And I think the whole story of democracies slow,
slow progress toward a more perfect union, toward fullness, toward integrity,
and we're not there yet. But the whole story is
time after time after time, the beliefs that we shall overcome,
(18:34):
not long ago. Just one more thing about this. I
was listening to a speech given by a woman who
was the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and
retired from that position after a very distinguished career. She
said something that's really stuck with me. She said, there
is no point of black history where the last words
(18:58):
in the story are and then we gave up. There
is no such story in the history of Black America.
And that's true, and the process of overcoming is going
on to this day.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Thank you for that. My despair just took a step down,
a couple steps down. Maybe I'm actually not like permanently
in despair. I just have moments, you know. I think
anybody looking at the world, almost at any time in
history would look at parts of it and be like, oh,
I can't. To use the modern phrase, let's change direction
(19:33):
a little bit. I want to read something that you wrote,
and I think it can act as framing for the
rest of the conversation. You use a term called being
fierce with reality, and you say, fierce with reality is
how I feel when I'm able to say, I am
that to which I gave short shrift and that to
which I attended. I am my descents into darkness and
(19:55):
my rising again into the light, my betrayals and my fidelities,
my failures and my successes. I am my ignorance and
my insight, my doubts and my convictions, my fears and
my hopes. And that seems to me also a pretty
good way of describing human wholeness.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Very much so, Eric, Yeah, I appreciate you reading that. Quote.
I'd almost forgotten it, but it's nice to have In
this case, at least, it's nice to have my own
words come back to me. So one sort of summary
statement that I made somewhere that I try to live
by is that holdest does not mean perfection. Oldest means
(20:39):
embracing everything, including your imperfections, as part of who you
are and to the best of your ability. To show
up in the world whole is saying, yeah, I'm all
of the above. I am my successes, and I am
my screw ups. I am whatever light I am able
to shed, and I am the darkness that I carry
(21:00):
within me, which can sometimes engulf me. As you know,
we've talked before about my three descents into clinical depression,
which were in my forties and my sixties, I think
at age eighty four. There's another piece to this that
has come to me more recently that is sort of
another way of summing this theme up, which is that
(21:24):
these days, of course, I think about mortality. I think
about my own death more often than I did ten, twenty, thirty,
forty fifty years ago. When you can if you're healthy,
if you're lucky enough to be healthy, privileged enough to
be healthy, you can sort of pretend that that day
will never come. And I cannot imagine a sadder way
(21:46):
to die than to be lying there, drawing your last
breath and am thinking I never, in all my years on
this planet, I never showed up in the full wollness
of myself or anything vaguely approximating the fullness of myself.
(22:06):
I hit out. Whether it was because I was afraid,
or I didn't want to subject myself to the winds
and currents of change, whatever the reason might have been,
I can't imagine a sadder way to die than when
somebody is having to say to him or herself I
never showed up here as who I am, because ultimately
(22:30):
who one is is the gift you were born to
give to the world through your work, yes, through what
you say, how you conduct relationships, yes, but just in
the very quality of your being.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Yeah, I agree with you that that's a sad thing,
and it also to me there's all sorts of downsides
to not being as whole as possible, right, I think
that part of wholeness is recognizing that you're not even
whole a lot of the time, Like that's just how
we often can be but it seems to me that
my experience is if I'm not bringing as much of
(23:06):
myself to the table as often as I can, that
all the relationships in my life are not nearly as
whole and good as they could be. You know, Like,
that's one very direct downside of that, in addition to
the internal cost of it.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah, showing up as yourself to the greatest extent possible,
and of course it's not done perfectly every moment of
every day. But imagine, for example, that you're in one
of those conversations we were talking about a moment ago,
and you find yourself getting highly critical of another person's
(23:44):
delusions as they seem to you. Imagine that you're present
in that conversation, was at least the self knowledge that
you yourself had brought into illusions at various stages in
your life. Doesn't it stand to reason that if you
have that kind of self awareness of your wholeness, not
(24:04):
only the things you got right, but the things you
got wrong. You know, not only the times you had
measured twice and cut once because you cared about the data,
but the times when you just bought in on something
because it was the popular thing to believe. Doesn't it
stand a reason that you would give your conversation partner
(24:24):
some slack for that and perhaps be more compassionate, more tender,
more open, more vulnerable without jumping down their throat about
the nonsense that they're spouting, which is not unlike the
nonsense you once spouted. You know. Yeah, somebody once said
(24:44):
something that I think applies on many, many levels. This
person was talking about interreligious dialogue, and he said, isn't
it interesting how often in these dialogues we take the
best in our own religious tradition and lift up the
worst in the other person's traditions in order to make
an argument. Well, that's a great example of the failure
(25:08):
to embrace wholeness. Wholeness doesn't mean, you know, wearing your
heart on your sleeve about everything that's happening in your
life at any given moment. Carl Young, the great psychologists, said,
the soul needs its secrets, and it does. The soul
needs to work kind of very quietly in the dark
on you know, important matters that we wrestle with, existential
(25:33):
matters that shape our lives. But there's a lot that
we can hold on a more conscious level, a level
of self awareness that could really change our way of
being in the world and our way of dancing with
others in the world.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Two things there you said that I really like. I mean.
The first is that is the best corrective for me
when I start to become judgmental of other people is
to just reflect on my own life. I often joke,
you know, the benefit of screwing up as often as
I have in my life is that I actually tend
to be fairly non judgmental because I don't even have
(26:27):
to be very self aware to be reminded of all
the ways in which I have struggled. And even recently,
I went through a really difficult period and I was
able to see it in the context of wholeness, and
I was able to see not that I liked it,
because I did a difficult period. You can't like, you know,
and that wouldn't be difficult, but it did allow me
(26:49):
to sort of reconnect to what it feels like to
really struggle. And that felt really helpful and really useful
to me because sometimes I can get in well, I
got sober fifteen years ago kind of thing, right, So
for me recently, in addition to remembering the times I
screwed up. It's you know, being face to face again
(27:11):
with suffering for real was a good part of for me,
helping me feel more whole.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's a poet I can't quite remember
his name right now, but he has a great line
in one of his poems. He says, be kind to
people because you never know what's going on where the
spirit meets the bone. Eh, And you don't, you just can't.
Bug Yeah, you can know what that place feels like
(27:38):
in your own life, where the spirit meets the bone,
and you can begin to remember that nobody could grock
you during those times, nobody could get you. You felt
very isolated and very alone. So cut the other person
some slack because we're all in this together and you've
been there too. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Talk at a couple different points. You're talking about wholeness,
and you're saying that you know wholeness can be achieved
if we can use devastation as a seed bed for
a new life. You go on elsewhere to say, but
there's two ways to understand what it means to have
our hearts broken. One is to imagine the heart broken
into shards and scattered about. The Others to imagine the
(28:20):
heartbroken open to new capacity. And I'm always curious. I
think if we look in the world, we can see
people who have seen devastation and heartbreak and it has
diminished them greatly. And we can see people in the
world who have had devastation and heartbreak and you can
see that it has Maybe enhance isn't the right word,
(28:41):
but I'll use it because it's coming to mind. It
has enhanced them. It has made them more whole, it
has made them kinder, better, more compassionate people. And I'm
always curious, what is it that the people who are
enhanced by their suffering do differently?
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Well. I think there's a great mystery there. It's a
question I am people a lot also, and I don't
think anybody has a definitive answer. One thought that I
would contribute to that big conversation is that you know,
if you pay attention to your life, heartbreak of maybe
small size happens on a fairly regular basis. You know,
(29:22):
a friendship that you valued begins to go south, or
there's some kind of blockage there that you can't understand.
A project that you were working on begins to fall
apart while you thought you know you were almost at
the point of being able to bring this to a
successful completion. You have a child, whether still at home
(29:43):
or an adult child, who is suffering and struggling in life,
and you lose sleep over it because you never stop
being a parent, right, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I think the key is to not try to ignore
those little heartbreaks and just push on with your life,
(30:04):
but to let them in, to feel them as deeply
as you can, because in doing that, you're exercising that
muscle called the heart, the spiritual heart, not the physical heart,
although cardiologists will say that this also relates to the
physical heart. You're exercising that heart in a way that
(30:25):
is akin to how a runner exercises muscles so that
when under stress, they won't snap. Then when the big
heart breaks come along, you're more likely to have that
experience of heart opening rather than shattering, because it's never
been exercised. You know, there's so much about our lives.
(30:46):
They move so quickly, We are subject to so many demands,
either real or imagine, that there's something in us that
just wants to rush through the hard times whole it
all off. I mean isn't that what the great American
hobby of anesthetizing ourselves is all about. Whether the anesthetic
(31:09):
is ings or drags, or busyness or overwork or noise
or you know, a focus on a thousand different irrelevancies
in order to distract ourselves, in order to numb ourselves
to these fairly regular experiences of small heartbreak. So I
(31:32):
would say that it is like the runner exercise. Those
small muscles, keep them blimber, keep them fluid, and when
the bigger heartbreak comes, your heart is very likely to
be more supple. I think the cultivation of a supple
heart is something worth reflecting on.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
Yeah, I was reading something. I don't remember who said
it or where it was, but they were talking about
this idea of somebody saying, like, my heart is broken.
I can't or whether it was a quip, but it
was more or less like, no, it's not. It's doing
exactly what it was designed to do, right, it's working
very well, you know, because you're feeling so much of this,
(32:12):
you know your heart is actually working. It was an interesting,
you know, sort of way of reflecting on it very differently,
like oh, yeah, you know, this is what a heart does.
And my most recent brush with you know, particularly difficult
thing was you know, I had moments of like, is
all this practice I've been doing to open my heart
in general?
Speaker 3 (32:31):
Is this really a god?
Speaker 1 (32:32):
Is this a good idea? Because you know, I'm fairly
undefended here, and it is a good idea. It was
a good idea, But there's those moments of like, well,
do I have some way to turn this down a
little bit. It's just such an interesting concept because everybody's
going to deal with lots of really difficult things and
(32:52):
knowing how to do it in a way that we
get to the other side of enhanced I think the
other thing that is often tricky is that we often
hear that like, well, just go ahead and feel it,
like let it in and feel it, and as if
that is going to be an experience that is in
any way shape or form enjoyable, or that it's going
(33:13):
to make it suddenly just go away. It actually doesn't, yeah, exactly,
And I do think it makes it more likely that
we respond in a wise helpful way ultimately for ourselves
and others. But letting it in is not pleasant.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
And as you talked in the last minute or so,
I've been thinking here how important it is to have friends,
at least a friend to whom you can say, when
they ask how are you, you can say, I'm heartbroken. Yeah,
I'm profoundly and deeply, and it sometimes feels terminally heartbroken.
(33:48):
And a friend who will not run screaming from your
house and he or she hears those words, who will
not become afraid of you? Who will not? Is that
they assume, oh my god, I got to fix this person. Yeah,
but can simply receive you Because to be heartbroken, to
acknowledge it to yourself is one thing, but to be
(34:12):
able to have it held by someone who knows you
and cares about you, who will walk with you without
being afraid, is an incredibly important piece of life. I'll
just refer very briefly here to my experiences of clinical depression,
when so many of the people who came hoping to
(34:34):
comfort me basically engage in what I call drive by caring.
It was sort of in and out. You know you're
going to be okay, hang in there, you're a good guy.
So long because they somehow regarded my depression as contagious,
and if they hung around me too long, they would
get depressed too, And of course the only reason one
(34:56):
feels that is because you feel the burden of having
to fix someone when you don't have the foggiest idea
how to fix them. Yeah, and you can't. It's impossible.
It's a false assumption. But the impact of that on me,
of course, is to leave me feeling even more isolated. Yeah.
You know, this person with whom I used to enjoy long,
rambling conversations about all manner of thing is now fleeing
(35:22):
from my presence because they're scared of me. So part
of processing we were talking earlier about processing life experience inwardly,
part of that processing is having someone who can just
hold your true feelings and your expressions of grief, for pain,
(35:43):
or anguish about them without running away in fear.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
I had some insights about all of that as it
was going through this difficult time, and I am very
fortunate that I have a number of good friends that
I can say I am heartbroken to and these people
really stepped up and stepped in, and you know, they
would check in on me, and I realized how oftentimes
not good of a friend I have been to people
(36:11):
where I do the if you need anything, I'm here,
and then I forget all about it because I'm busy.
I've made it clear I'm there for them, and I
am like, if they call, I'll drop everything. But I
wasn't as proactive as I would like to be in
the future. You know, where I go, Oh, they may
not know what they need, and this isn't a short
(36:34):
term thing for them. They're going to be in pain
for a while. I need to keep sort of checking
back in. And I also know that as somebody who's
like a behavior coach and you know, has worked in
the recovery community for a long time, there's this idea
of like fixing things right, and so I, more often
than I want, will drop into fixing mode. And so
(36:55):
it's just been very interesting for me to go, oh,
there's some real things from me to learn about how
I be a better friend. It was humbling in that
regard and very instructional.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Right, right, I totally agree. I learned so much during
my depression about how to be a better presence in
other people's lives.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Yeah, I'm curious. There's sort of two approaches I think
that we often get when we're struggling.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Right.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
One is what we've just described the person who comes
by and immediately starts trying to fix it or you know,
shake it off, no big deal, right, And then there's
the other side of it, which is where somebody just
only ever listens and almost encourages the difficult time. And
I've often thought about like for me throughout time, the
(37:44):
people who've been the most helped to me actually did
some of both. You know, they actually first like I
felt really deeply understood. But then they might say, have
you thought about a different way of looking at that?
Or they'll ask you know, I know you're a big
fan of good questions in your circles of trust, right,
asking non judgmental questions. It's not like you just sit
(38:06):
in what it is. You recognize that people can give
us different ways of looking at things by the questions
they ask. Is that your experience too, that it's kind
of a blend of those things over time that is
really helpful to someone who's struggling.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
Yes, and no, maybe, but not a hard No. Let
me tell a couple of stories. Yeah, So in my
first depression, there was a guy somewhat older than I,
maybe six or eight years older than I, very intuitive
fellow fellow, I trusted who did something for me proactively
that I will never forget and that really helped me
(38:45):
on my road to recovery. He asked permission to do
all this before he started doing it. You'll understand why
in a moment. What he did was to come to
my house every day. We were living at Pndall Hill
Quaker Community, so we were on the same sixteen acres
of land with a community of about eighty people, and
(39:08):
he had easy access to where I lived. You'd come
to my house every afternoon around four o'clock without fail.
He would have me seated in an easy chair in
my living room. He would kneel down in front of
me or sit on the floor and take off my
shoes and socks and massage my feet. He very rarely
(39:31):
said a word, but I knew him to be an
intuitive person, and occasionally he would say I feel your
struggle today. No more than that, because that was really
about all the language I could take at the time.
I was so deep into this hell. Or he would
say I feel you getting a little stronger today. And
(39:53):
these were honest reflections from where he sat, and I
always benefited from them. When he said, you know, I
feel your struggle today, somebody understands me right where I
feel you getting a little better today. Gosh, maybe that's true.
And if I did a little gut check, maybe I
found out that I did, in fact feel a little better.
(40:15):
What he did took me some time to understand. But
in depression, you're you're radically disconnected from everyone that you're
an atom floating free in the void. That's part of
its terror. There's no community, there's no real relationship. He
found the one place in my body, the body which
(40:38):
had largely gone numb, where I could feel connected to
another human being the soles of my feet, I mean,
whose feet don't ache most of the time. And this was,
you know, such an act of kindness and generosity that
he kept me connected to the human race in an
almost wordless way, but not, as you say, not passive,
(41:03):
not just sitting there and listening to what little I
might have to say. And then the next step up
from that was, in fact, the people who, as you said,
had the gift of asking honest, open questions, they also
had the gift of, I think, discerning when I was
(41:23):
ready to deal with a question and when I wasn't.
Because you know, there were moments in my depression when
somebody might ask me a well intentioned question and I
would just want to say leave, please leave. You know,
I just don't have the bandwidth to think about anything.
I'm barely surviving here. I'm, you know, wrestling with the
(41:48):
question of is this the day to kind of bring
things to an end? And so there are these huge
acts of discernment, and you know, people range on their
ability to do that. I think you have to know
yourself pretty well to enter that force field.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
I'm going to rescind all the nice things that I
said about my friends, because not a one of them
rubbed my feet, and so I'm taking it all back.
You all fell short of the mark.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
You might want to check your feet for you critique
your friends.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
You know, I'm curious about your depressions. You've fallen into
them several times. It sounds like the last time was
in your sixties, So you are somewhere from fifteen to
twenty years from the last one. Is that roughly accurate
or was it late sixties?
Speaker 2 (42:55):
Yeah, about twenty two at this point.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
Yeah, you think you learned what you needed to learn.
You outgrew them. Another one could be right around the corner.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
You know.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
I'm just kind of curious, you know, because it sounds like,
you know, if you had them in your forties and
then in your early sixties, they were kind of clumped
up there a little I mean a little bit, you know,
and you've had a pretty good run any sense of
I mean, and I know it's a speculation, but what
has sort of kept you from falling back into you know,
chasms that are that dark?
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Yeah, I could easily say that I've become more aware
of the warning signs of depression. Even that is tricky though,
because we all have melancholy days or just the blooms,
you know, seasonal effective disorder, whatever. And the last thing
(43:45):
I want to do is to is to panic about
symptoms of that sort and say, oh my god, I'm
on the slippery slope again, because that's not going to
help me at all. Yeah, but there are a few
warning signs that I watched for, you know, repetitiveative, negative
patterns of thinking, catastrophic patterns of thinking, etcetera, etcetera. I think,
(44:07):
I mean, maybe in a sense I outgrew them. Although
the big heading for this particular conversation ought to be
depression is a great mystery nobody really fully understands it,
and that includes everything from genetic and biochemical process has
gone awry, to experiential crises that one's psyche doesn't know
(44:33):
how to handle, internal contradictions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
levels of fear in life, and so forth and so on.
In my forties, looking back, it's reasonably clear to me
that I was taking all kinds of risk, vocational risks
that hardly anyone in my life understood, let alone affirmed
(44:57):
or applauded. And I won't bore you with all all
the details, but I got a PhD from Berkeley in
the sixties late sixties, expecting to go into academia, and
indeed got academic job offers, but had been so impacted
by all that went on during the sixties, the crises
we mentioned earlier, assassinations, the racial crisis, Vietnam, that I
(45:21):
decided to become a community organizer in Washington, d c.
Working with a couple of other people on issues of
racial justice, in redlining and blockbusting. That was my first
five years out of grad school. And all of my
mentors and all my friends are saying, why are you
doing this in saying you're disappearing from the professional radar
(45:44):
for which you prepared. Why did you get a PhD? Well,
it turned out there's a good answer to that. I
ended up working independently most of my life the PhD.
While the content of my PhD is largely irrelevant to
what I've done professionally, just having that union ticket has
opened some doors that wouldn't have been opened otherwise when
(46:06):
you're trying to make an independent career. So I was
taking vocational risks, substantial vocational risks. I was married, I
had two three kids as the years went on, and
I was taking financial risks as well. I had grown
up in the family where my parents were able to
help me go to college, but I was making very
(46:29):
marginal money at this work I was doing, which was
service work in a lot of ways. Was looking at
the prospect of not being able to give my kids
a leg up on getting a good higher education if
that's what they wanted when they got there. So I
(46:49):
was living with a lot of doubts. I was living
with anxieties. It still kind of baffles me how I
hung in there. But I do have an answer that question,
because I should leap ahead and say, in the long run,
I'm really really grateful for the circuitous path that I followed,
(47:11):
because a lot of the writing and teaching I've done
involves things that I could not have learned about any
other way. If I had become an assistant professor or
associate professor, etc. Etc. My bank of experience, my view
of the world would necessarily have been, I think, more
(47:33):
constricted than it is, at least for me. But back
in the day when people would say why are you doings?
I had an answer to me, an interesting answer. I said,
you know, I can barely explain it to myself, so
I'm sure I can't explain it to you, But I
(47:57):
can say this what I'm doing I can't not do.
I had to use that double negative. There was something
in me that knew that if I didn't pursue what
I now think of as the soul's imperative, I would
pay a very large price down the road, a larger
(48:19):
price than the one I was paying by living with
vocational anxiety. I think I would have paid a soul
price of having ignored my own existential imperatives. I've come
to trust that very very much. When young people come
to me because of one or two of the books
(48:41):
I've written about vocational issues. The first thing I'll often
say to them after listening for a long time and
hearing very similar stories really about the struggles that they're
having their generations having and that I had my generation had,
I'll say, well, how old are you again? I'll say
(49:01):
twenty four, and I'll say, well, my vocation didn't come
together until I was fifty, so you've got a lot
of time. But do not panic. But I'll then say,
is there anything that you can't not do? If you've
got an answer that that rings true for you. I'm
not saying you can make a living that way. Maybe
you can, maybe you can't. But I am saying, find
(49:24):
a way in your life to do that thing alongside
whatever else you have to do to keep yourself afloat
so that you don't end up paying the price of
your soul. When all it's said and done.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
So you feel like some of those depressions had their
route a little bit in all of the uncertainty that
you were taking on in life and people not understanding you.
And yet, even in spite of the depressions that may
have had their genesis in that it was still the
right thing for you to do.
Speaker 2 (49:58):
Precisely, that doesn't mean it was the struggle. It doesn't
mean that I didn't, you know, suffer as a dark
knight of the soul around all of those questions. I did,
But somehow I knew I had to persist, And as
I said, I'm glad I did, because what has resulted
has been a vocation that really didn't cohere for me
(50:19):
until I was fifty, when all of these disparate pieces
started coming together, including the writing and the teaching, and
you know, a way of working independently. Once I walked
away not only from large institutions but from small institutions
and kind of got out in the field by myself
and said, okay, let's see what might happen here if
(50:43):
I continue to follow this parative. One of the things
I said in a book called Let Your Life Speak,
where I wrote about depression in an essay that actually
has probably attracted more attention as a single piece than
anything else among the ten books I've written. Because so
many people suffer from depression or live with someone who
(51:05):
suffers from it. I said, you know, people walk around
saying I do not understand why so and so committed suicide,
And I said, you know, to me, that's not a mystery.
They committed suicide because they needed the rest. Depression is
absolutely exhausting, and to be down there for months at
(51:27):
a time, trying every day to catch your breath and
wondering whether it's worth carrying on, just wears you down
to the bone. And people take their own lives because
they come to believe that that's a preferable option to
living in hell. They can find no way out. They
(51:50):
are just lost in the dark. They have become the dark.
You know, if you're just lost in the dark, there's
a difference between you and the darkness. You can negotiate it.
You can look for a door handle, window, a shade
to pull up whatever. If you've become the dark, there's
no negotiating it. You're it, and it's you. You can't
(52:11):
begin to fumble around to try to find a way out.
You just have to wait it out, which is a
very hard thing to do. So the question of why
people take their own lives is not a mystery to me.
What's a mystery to me is why it is that
some people not only survive, but thrive on the other
(52:31):
side of depression. I feel like I'm one of those people,
and you know, slap all kinds of adjectives onto it.
Privileged to be able to have the resources, to be
able to find the support that I needed, et cetera,
et cetera. But even that doesn't explain it to me.
So you want a question that's baffling, Why do some
(52:54):
people not only survive but thrive on the other side
of depression?
Speaker 1 (52:59):
Yeah, I have that one, and then my other one
is addiction. You know, why do some people I mean,
we know what some of the societal correlates are of
people being more likely to recover, more likely to come
through depression. To your point, right, there are privileges that
some of us have in the access to help that
we can get and many different things. But it's still
(53:20):
a mystery because we know people who have none of
those things and come through, and we know people who
have had all of those things and don't. It is
kind of a mystery. And even back to why do
some people with a broken heart become better and why
do some people end up bitter? There's a mystery to
it to a certain degree that you know, if I
(53:40):
ever get to sit down with assuming there is a
creator who had a plan with all this, which is
quite a big assumption. But should we say that be
the case and I could sit down and have a
conversation once I got some of the really big things
out of the way, Those would be some of my
very first questions, right, because I don't understand it. You know,
you said a couple things in there about depression that
I thought were interesting. First was better understanding the warning
(54:04):
signs and yet wanting to be careful with that because
I seem to have this dual approach and I use
one of them sometimes and sometimes I use the other,
and I don't even necessarily know how I know when
to use what. And one of them is I just
simply ignore the symptoms and just go like, yep, well,
you know that's the way it is today, Like you know,
(54:26):
I think of it as like the emotional flu like
it's going to come and it's going to go away,
and there's no sense making a big fuss out of
all this, right, And sometimes that is absolutely the right approach,
And then there are other times where it is like, Okay,
I need to investigate more deeply here what's happening, And
I may need to dive a little deeper and try
(54:46):
and understand, and I may need to say, oh, this
is maybe a little bit more serious. And you know,
I think for me, the one thing that I have
learned to do pretty consistently, regardless of which of those
approaches I'm and as I know, the physical things that
I do that give me as much immunity as I'm
likely to get, and I try and do those as
(55:09):
often as I can, regardless, because for me, it's a
very physical thing, and taking care of myself physically seems
to be the best immunity I know to give myself.
Speaker 2 (55:20):
Yeah, I totally agree with that. You know, for me,
daily walk best of all, walk in the woods, Yeah,
which I have fairly easy access to, is hugely therapeutic.
Reading poetry is hugely therapeutic. There's a lot of poetry
that kind of walks around and inside of these issues
that for me gets at the human condition better than
(55:45):
a nonfiction book about the nature of depression. That the
medicine is interesting, the science is interesting. The poetry connects
with me somehow, It speaks to me. You know, it's
like massaging my psyche instead of my feet.
Speaker 1 (56:00):
The job yep, we're nearly at the end of our
time here, and I just want to read something else
that you wrote and allow you to sort of comment
on it for a second. You're talking about community, and
you lead into what I'm about to write by talking
about like, there's a lot of quick fixed solutions in
the wellness world, right, or the spirituality world, or however
(56:22):
we want to label that world, And you say, solutions
of that sort are snake oil. Of course, the quick
fix mentality that dominates our impatient world serves only to
distract us from the lifelong journey towards wholeness, and the
self help methods so popular in our time, the best
of which offers support for that journey sometimes reinforce the
(56:43):
great American illusion that we can forever go it alone.
And I would just love to hear you say anything
you would like to about that about community as sort
of a wrapping up point here.
Speaker 2 (56:56):
Yeah, well, thank you for lifting that up too, because
that's a big scene for me. First of all, I'm
a great fan of solitude. There's a richness in solitude
and in silence that I really value, and I think
in my younger ears, my sort of inability to turn
in that direction my need to either make noise or
(57:17):
pea surrounded by noise in order to what I don't know,
prove I'm alive, or something that can't quite figured out.
But my aversion to silence and solitude was a hindrance
in my own movement towards hold us in my own
psychological well being. So I spend time in solitude. I've
never found tips, tricks and techniques as in meditation, for example,
(57:41):
that really work for me. But I just love staring
out the window, appreciating the leafless branches on a tree
in my backyard at this time of year, the way
the sun plays on the bark of this triflora maple.
It's in my backyard even when it's leafless and just absorbing,
(58:03):
especially nature, but any kind of beauty I can find,
or just sitting wordless and I don't know, taking it in,
you know, watching the sunset, etcetera, etcetera. So and reading
poetry is joined for me with solitude and with sort
(58:24):
of an interior journey in which you're paying attention to
how those words and images resonate with something in you
that here most of the time barely in touch with
big on solitude, but equally big. And this is a
great paradox in life. I think on community, on relationships
(58:47):
that can rightly be understood as creative, whether those are
the kinds of relationships I had with the friend who
came and massage my feet, or the kinds of relationships
I have with people to whom I can say I'm
profoundly heartbroken, the kinds of relationships I have with people
who know how to ask honest, open questions, never burdening
(59:08):
themselves with a sense that they have to fix me,
and knowing that I would fight like hell against anybody
trying to fix me. The most fundamental need I think
any of us has is to be heard, to be understood,
to be received as we are when we show up
as fully as we know how, with our broken wholeness.
(59:31):
I used to read a lot of a theology and
a remarkable man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany who ended
up being murdered by the Nazis because of his resistance
to Hitler. He wrote a book called Life Together, and
in it he has this little formula. He says, let
the person who cannot be alone be aware of being
in community, and let the person who cannot be in community,
(59:55):
beware of being alone. I think there's immense wisdom in
that that these are the poles of the battery, and
if you connect these two ends a paradox, then life flows,
energy flows and in some pretty remarkable ways. I think
what we have to understand is that community doesn't mean
(01:00:17):
a whole lot of people making a whole lot of noise.
Some people say I can't find community. I mean, there's
where do I join one? Well, you often don't join one,
you co create one with a few other people. Community
can be two, three, four people gathered in some form
of mutual understanding which everyone finds deeply supportive and nourishing.
(01:00:42):
But it must alternate. And I believe, at least in
my cycle of life, with the richness of solitude, which
is very different from loneliness, I feel more alone, often
in a crowd of people who are making noise than
I do. I'm sitting alone looking at that tri floral
(01:01:04):
maple out of my back window. In solitude, there's a
sense of presence, and I think that the presence, especially
of the natural world, which is also part of the
community in which were embedded. That has been a late
realization in my life probably only began twenty five or
(01:01:26):
thirty years ago. I didn't grow up in a family
that went to wilderness or recreation, but I married a
woman who did that, and she introduced me to wilderness,
and I'll always be grateful for that. So, that sense
of belonging to the natural world, which is in no
(01:01:48):
matter how you slice it, whatever you may think about
the big question of is there anything after we die?
We're going back to nature, that's for certain. The atoms
that make us up, which actually came from stars we
can see in the sky at night, or maybe they're
a little out of our vision, but they're still up there.
(01:02:08):
They're going to return to the Earth's return to the cosmos,
and remanifest themselves in all kinds of interesting ways. Since
I've gone to a lot of time and trouble to
get myself to wilderness, to get myself into primal nature
every year for three or four weeks, for twenty five
thirty years, why wouldn't I be perfectly happy to return
(01:02:32):
there for eternity. To me, that's a good deal. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:02:36):
Well, Parker, thank you so much for coming on the show.
It is always such a pleasure to talk with you.
I feel like we often cover the same themes, but
they are themes that we all need to hear about
and be reminded about and lean into more. So, thank
you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom
with us.
Speaker 2 (01:02:53):
Again. Well, thank you Eric once again. I've just delighted
in your questions. And if I haven't told you before,
your questions always leave me thinking for months afterwards, so
I think that's a big thank you. Also, sometimes why
did you have to ask that?
Speaker 1 (01:03:10):
Yeah? Yep, well I appreciate that. It is very kind.
That makes me happy.
Speaker 3 (01:03:30):
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Speaker 2 (01:18):
Where's the creative tension of holding between I want to
show up in the Michigan Legislature and argue my case
in open dialectical manner. And I'm going to show up
at the Michigan Legislature and let my AK forty seven
do my talking for me.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
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. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
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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,
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how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us,
our guest on this episode is Parker Palmer, the founder
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and senior partner of the Center for Courage and Renewal.
He's a world renowned writer, speaker, and activist who focuses
on issues of education, community leadership, spirituality, and social change.
Parker has reached millions of people through his nine books,
which include Let Your Life Speak, The Courage to Teach
a Hidden Wholeness, and Healing the Heart of Democracy, among others. Today,
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Eric and Parker riff on whatever topics come up.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Hi Parker, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Hi Harik, It's good to be back with you.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
It is great to have you back. I am just
really happy to talk with you again. I was saying
to you before we started, like, it's not like you
have a new book out where I was like, oh,
we got to talk about this book. I just was like,
I just want to talk to Parker again. So I'm
glad that we were able to make it happen. We'll
be talking about this and that, but we'll start in
the way we always do, with the Parable of the
Wolves and see what you have to say about it
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this time. So 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 a 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, look
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at their grandparents. 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.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
I love the parable, I have loved it for a
long time, and what it brings quickly to mind is
my long time belief for understanding that so much in
life depends on what it is that we bring from
inside our lives to the outside world. And conversely, when
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the world throws stuff back at us, what do we
do internally to process it? How do we receive it?
Do we cling to it? Can we let it go?
Can we turn dirt into gold? Can we receive affirmation
and blessing in an open hearted way? I call it
life on the Mobius strip. It's this constant exchange of
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the inner and outer which keep co creating each other.
And in the end there is no inner and out.
It's one continual act of co creation. But when I
think of that, when I think of it that way,
or in terms of the parable of the two wolves,
I'm reminded of how much responsibility we have for creating
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and recreating the micro environments around us. You know, as
one person, a friend of mine has said, our reach
may be only three feet or so, but let's make
a positive impact within that three foot reach. And at
the same time, we're co creating ourselves by how we
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internalize what the world throws back at us. So it's
a huge parable in terms of life today. I mean,
look at all that's going on, where so much is
being manifested from the shadow side of our lives in
the external world in murderous ways, in hurtful ways, in
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ways that threaten democracy itself and certainly injure other people.
So it's a big, big story.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
I'm always interested in. You know, there's a narrative that
things today are worse than they've been before, and I'm
always interested in, you know, talking to people who've been
around a little bit longer, you know, is that your
sense also, And I know as we tend to get older,
we tend to think that the world today is not
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as good as the world used to be. I'm just
kind of curious. If you're eighty you were born you know,
really still well, the really horrible time in human history
was happening, right, you know, you were born during a
war that killed what like seventeen million people or something,
you know, So that historical context I find helpful. How
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do you think about our current time and placing it
in overall context?
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Well, I think the gist of what you just said,
Eric is correct, which is that in my lifetime, I'm
actually eighty four right now, born in nineteen thirty nine,
So I've seen a lot of human ups and downs.
Can't even begin to tick them off. But certainly World
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War Two, the Holocaust which you referenced on, through the sixties,
at the Vietnam War, and our recurring inability to come
to terms with the original sin of race, racial prejudice, injustice,
white supremacy in this society, the McCarthy era of the
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fifties right on through today, with incredible numbers of American
citizens sort of joining in on conspiracy theories and the
denial of the obvious, the denial that an election got
won by the person who actually want it, and buying
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in on the basis of no evidence to the notion
that somehow that election was massively rigged and massively flawed.
So there's been a lot of that in my lifetime,
and I'm not forgetting what's going on in the Middle
East these days. Add that to the list of very
fundamental human struggles to decide which wolf we feed. I
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think what I do find troubling today is the rise
of the far far right, not only here at home
but around the world, and the ease with which so
many citizens seem to buy in to baseless conspiracy theories.
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I'll never understand these conversations that I sometimes get into,
where I'm saying, well, here's what the research shows about X,
Y or Z, and the other person basically says, well,
here's what an anonymous person named Q has to say
about that, and so I refute the research. These things
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truly baffle me. I may be deluding myself, but I
think I mean. I was in on a lot of
conversations about Vietnam. I was in on a lot of
conversations about McCarthy and that era of threat to democracy,
and my memory is that they were measurably more rational
and more empirical than what it is that we're treated
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to today. So in that sense, I'm a yes and
a no. I mean, yes, it keeps happening, and there
are some twists and turns in the current crisis that
I find really hard to wrap my mind during.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Yeah, I mean, you wrote a book I don't know
how many years ago now called Healing the Heart of Democracy,
and I think we've talked about that in one of
our previous interviews, and I think that that book was
written before the rise of as much conspiracy theory as
we're seeing today, as much the word polarization seems overused sometimes.
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I mean, I watched the sixties and I'm like, well,
you know, we were killing president, you know, we were
assassinating leaders here in the US. Like that seems pretty polarized.
But I do agree with you about this not even
being able to agree on basic facts. Is there anything
in your thoughts on how we heal that?
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Yeah, it's interesting you should ask, because that book, Healing
the Art of Democracy, which was published in twenty eleven,
will be republished in a new edition next year twenty
twenty four, and I was asked by the publisher to
write a new introduction to it, which is basically around
the question, how have you changed your mind if at all?
(10:57):
I say basically two things in that new interest deduction.
One is that my fundamental thesis in healing the heart
of democracy is that we have got to learn to
talk to each other across lines of difference, and we
have to learn to engage in what I call creative
tension holding. Creative tension holding means the ability which can
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be taught in schools and voluntary associations, in religious communities
and families, that can be taught anywhere and everywhere. Creative
tension holding means holding apparently opposite positions in a way
that eventually allows the two parties either to come to
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some compromise in the middle of it, or to learn
that there's a kind of transcendent third thing that neither
one of them had considered or thought of, which would
meet the needs on both sides of the equation. That's
why it's creative tension holding toward some place new that
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had not yet been imagined. It has everything to do
with focusing on nurturing that relationship between two or more
people where what's important is not to always be insisting
on being right, but to keep your eye on being
in right relationship, because that creates the container that allows
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for an ongoing discussion. And a lot of these issues
around which were conflicted are complicated issues, and so they're
not going to be resolved in five minutes. It may
take five months or five years. But we have to
learn to hang in with each other. So as long
as we are a country rooted in we the people,
a government of by and for the people, as long
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as we're at least maintaining the premise the principle, however
broken it may be in practice that we the people
have the final say, should have the final say on
all things. I don't see any way to get away
from the proposition that talking to each other is the
way forward, because that's how you build up we the people.
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But in this introduction to the new addition of healing
the art of democracy, I also say, what's happening now
poses us with some oppositions, some polarities that are not
open to creative tension holding. I mean, where's the creative
tension of holding between I want to show up in
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the Michigan legislature and argue my case in open dialectical manner,
and I'm going to show up at the Michigan Legislature
and let my AK forty seven do my talking for me.
There's no creative tension to be held between those two positions.
There's no creative tension to be held when the gist
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of the conversation is around which race, which religion, which ethnicity,
which nationality, which gender or sexual orientation is superior to
the others. Yep, there's no creative tension holding with conspiracy
theories up against research based facts. So I think what
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that means is developing a thicker skin around saying this
is not a conversation that's worth pursuing. This is not
a conversation in which we can expect either to meet
in the middle or to generate a transcendent third thing.
And I think a lot of good hearted people, and
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I've been one of those people over the years, just
have a hard time with saying this is not a
conversation that's going to go anywhere fruitful. We keep pretending
that if we just change the subject and pass the turkey,
everything is going to be fine, you know.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Yeah, Well, I tend to agree with you, right. I'm
a big proponent in almost all cases like get to
know the other person, understand why they think what they think,
understand where they're coming from, see their humanity, you know.
And I'm a big proponent of that, right, And it
does seem, like you said, there are certain positions and
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viewpoints that, like, I don't know how much creative tension
you can get when I'm like that wall is black
and you're like, no, that wall is white. Human perception
things around colors aside. I mean, the basic thing is
that we can't even agree on a base reality to
have a conversation around. And that's where I feel a
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little bit despairing, you know, around these things, right, because
I don't even know how to engage in conversation in
a useful way, I end up often not even having
the conversation, which then doesn't feel good either, Like I
don't know what to do.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Yeah, I agree with you. I think you have to try.
I think you have to keep trying until all the
precincts have reported in that it's pretty clear that this
is not a discussable item. Yeah, but there's another point
that I've made in Healing the Heart of Democracy that
I also built into the new introduction, and that is
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that there's a long history in America, dating from the
very beginning of this country, in which it doesn't take
one hundred percent of the people to get the people's
business done. I mean, you know, one of the salient
features of democracy is you can do business with fifty
one percent, even if forty nine percent are saying a
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pox on all your houses. I was fascinated when I
was researching Healing the Heart of Democracy to learn I
think for the first time that in the Constitutional Convention
of seventeen eighty seven, which basically resulted in the document,
we now any of us at least treasure, even revere
while we acknowledge its brokenness in practice and continue to
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work hard to live by its norms. In the Constitutional
Convention of seventeen eighty seven, a third, a full third
of the delegates walked out, refusing to sign a document
that they regarded as an abomination. But the two thirds
one right, Yeah, And a lot of people are saying
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these days, well, it's about a third of the people
who continue to believe that the twenty twenty election was stolen. Okay,
the two thirds can still win. I think one of
the things that's come to me. This will seem pretty
simple minded to some people, but those of us who
participated in the civil rights movements of the mid twentieth
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century are very well acquainted with its famous anthem, we
shall overcome. About five seconds of thinking about the word,
overcome means we're going to win. We're going to put
that other position down, We're going to squash racism. We're
going to win this struggle. We're going to win it
by nonviolent means, but we are going to win. We
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shall overcome. And I think the whole story of democracies slow,
slow progress toward a more perfect union, toward fullness, toward integrity,
and we're not there yet. But the whole story is
time after time after time, the beliefs that we shall overcome,
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not long ago. Just one more thing about this. I
was listening to a speech given by a woman who
was the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and
retired from that position after a very distinguished career. She
said something that's really stuck with me. She said, there
is no point of black history where the last words
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in the story are and then we gave up. There
is no such story in the history of Black America.
And that's true, and the process of overcoming is going
on to this day.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Thank you for that. My despair just took a step down,
a couple steps down. Maybe I'm actually not like permanently
in despair. I just have moments, you know. I think
anybody looking at the world, almost at any time in
history would look at parts of it and be like, oh,
I can't. To use the modern phrase, let's change direction
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a little bit. I want to read something that you wrote,
and I think it can act as framing for the
rest of the conversation. You use a term called being
fierce with reality, and you say, fierce with reality is
how I feel when I'm able to say, I am
that to which I gave short shrift and that to
which I attended. I am my descents into darkness and
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my rising again into the light, my betrayals and my fidelities,
my failures and my successes. I am my ignorance and
my insight, my doubts and my convictions, my fears and
my hopes. And that seems to me also a pretty
good way of describing human wholeness.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Very much so, Eric, Yeah, I appreciate you reading that. Quote.
I'd almost forgotten it, but it's nice to have In
this case, at least, it's nice to have my own
words come back to me. So one sort of summary
statement that I made somewhere that I try to live
by is that holdest does not mean perfection. Oldest means
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embracing everything, including your imperfections, as part of who you
are and to the best of your ability. To show
up in the world whole is saying, yeah, I'm all
of the above. I am my successes, and I am
my screw ups. I am whatever light I am able
to shed, and I am the darkness that I carry
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within me, which can sometimes engulf me. As you know,
we've talked before about my three descents into clinical depression,
which were in my forties and my sixties, I think
at age eighty four. There's another piece to this that
has come to me more recently that is sort of
another way of summing this theme up, which is that
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these days, of course, I think about mortality. I think
about my own death more often than I did ten, twenty, thirty,
forty fifty years ago. When you can if you're healthy,
if you're lucky enough to be healthy, privileged enough to
be healthy, you can sort of pretend that that day
will never come. And I cannot imagine a sadder way
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to die than to be lying there, drawing your last
breath and am thinking I never, in all my years on
this planet, I never showed up in the full wollness
of myself or anything vaguely approximating the fullness of myself.
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I hit out. Whether it was because I was afraid,
or I didn't want to subject myself to the winds
and currents of change, whatever the reason might have been,
I can't imagine a sadder way to die than when
somebody is having to say to him or herself I
never showed up here as who I am, because ultimately
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who one is is the gift you were born to
give to the world through your work, yes, through what
you say, how you conduct relationships, yes, but just in
the very quality of your being.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Yeah, I agree with you that that's a sad thing,
and it also to me there's all sorts of downsides
to not being as whole as possible, right, I think
that part of wholeness is recognizing that you're not even
whole a lot of the time, Like that's just how
we often can be but it seems to me that
my experience is if I'm not bringing as much of
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myself to the table as often as I can, that
all the relationships in my life are not nearly as
whole and good as they could be. You know, Like,
that's one very direct downside of that, in addition to
the internal cost of it.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah, showing up as yourself to the greatest extent possible,
and of course it's not done perfectly every moment of
every day. But imagine, for example, that you're in one
of those conversations we were talking about a moment ago,
and you find yourself getting highly critical of another person's
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delusions as they seem to you. Imagine that you're present
in that conversation, was at least the self knowledge that
you yourself had brought into illusions at various stages in
your life. Doesn't it stand to reason that if you
have that kind of self awareness of your wholeness, not
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only the things you got right, but the things you
got wrong. You know, not only the times you had
measured twice and cut once because you cared about the data,
but the times when you just bought in on something
because it was the popular thing to believe. Doesn't it
stand a reason that you would give your conversation partner
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some slack for that and perhaps be more compassionate, more tender,
more open, more vulnerable without jumping down their throat about
the nonsense that they're spouting, which is not unlike the
nonsense you once spouted. You know. Yeah, somebody once said
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something that I think applies on many, many levels. This
person was talking about interreligious dialogue, and he said, isn't
it interesting how often in these dialogues we take the
best in our own religious tradition and lift up the
worst in the other person's traditions in order to make
an argument. Well, that's a great example of the failure
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to embrace wholeness. Wholeness doesn't mean, you know, wearing your
heart on your sleeve about everything that's happening in your
life at any given moment. Carl Young, the great psychologists, said,
the soul needs its secrets, and it does. The soul
needs to work kind of very quietly in the dark
on you know, important matters that we wrestle with, existential
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matters that shape our lives. But there's a lot that
we can hold on a more conscious level, a level
of self awareness that could really change our way of
being in the world and our way of dancing with
others in the world.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Two things there you said that I really like. I mean.
The first is that is the best corrective for me
when I start to become judgmental of other people is
to just reflect on my own life. I often joke,
you know, the benefit of screwing up as often as
I have in my life is that I actually tend
to be fairly non judgmental because I don't even have
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to be very self aware to be reminded of all
the ways in which I have struggled. And even recently,
I went through a really difficult period and I was
able to see it in the context of wholeness, and
I was able to see not that I liked it,
because I did a difficult period. You can't like, you know,
and that wouldn't be difficult, but it did allow me
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to sort of reconnect to what it feels like to
really struggle. And that felt really helpful and really useful
to me because sometimes I can get in well, I
got sober fifteen years ago kind of thing, right, So
for me recently, in addition to remembering the times I
screwed up. It's you know, being face to face again
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with suffering for real was a good part of for me,
helping me feel more whole.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's a poet I can't quite remember
his name right now, but he has a great line
in one of his poems. He says, be kind to
people because you never know what's going on where the
spirit meets the bone. Eh, And you don't, you just can't.
Bug Yeah, you can know what that place feels like
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in your own life, where the spirit meets the bone,
and you can begin to remember that nobody could grock
you during those times, nobody could get you. You felt
very isolated and very alone. So cut the other person
some slack because we're all in this together and you've
been there too. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Talk at a couple different points. You're talking about wholeness,
and you're saying that you know wholeness can be achieved
if we can use devastation as a seed bed for
a new life. You go on elsewhere to say, but
there's two ways to understand what it means to have
our hearts broken. One is to imagine the heart broken
into shards and scattered about. The Others to imagine the
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heartbroken open to new capacity. And I'm always curious. I
think if we look in the world, we can see
people who have seen devastation and heartbreak and it has
diminished them greatly. And we can see people in the
world who have had devastation and heartbreak and you can
see that it has Maybe enhance isn't the right word,
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but I'll use it because it's coming to mind. It
has enhanced them. It has made them more whole, it
has made them kinder, better, more compassionate people. And I'm
always curious, what is it that the people who are
enhanced by their suffering do differently?
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Well. I think there's a great mystery there. It's a
question I am people a lot also, and I don't
think anybody has a definitive answer. One thought that I
would contribute to that big conversation is that you know,
if you pay attention to your life, heartbreak of maybe
small size happens on a fairly regular basis. You know,
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a friendship that you valued begins to go south, or
there's some kind of blockage there that you can't understand.
A project that you were working on begins to fall
apart while you thought you know you were almost at
the point of being able to bring this to a
successful completion. You have a child, whether still at home
(29:43):
or an adult child, who is suffering and struggling in life,
and you lose sleep over it because you never stop
being a parent, right, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I think the key is to not try to ignore
those little heartbreaks and just push on with your life,
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but to let them in, to feel them as deeply
as you can, because in doing that, you're exercising that
muscle called the heart, the spiritual heart, not the physical heart,
although cardiologists will say that this also relates to the
physical heart. You're exercising that heart in a way that
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is akin to how a runner exercises muscles so that
when under stress, they won't snap. Then when the big
heart breaks come along, you're more likely to have that
experience of heart opening rather than shattering, because it's never
been exercised. You know, there's so much about our lives.
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They move so quickly, We are subject to so many demands,
either real or imagine, that there's something in us that
just wants to rush through the hard times whole it
all off. I mean isn't that what the great American
hobby of anesthetizing ourselves is all about. Whether the anesthetic
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is ings or drags, or busyness or overwork or noise
or you know, a focus on a thousand different irrelevancies
in order to distract ourselves, in order to numb ourselves
to these fairly regular experiences of small heartbreak. So I
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would say that it is like the runner exercise. Those
small muscles, keep them blimber, keep them fluid, and when
the bigger heartbreak comes, your heart is very likely to
be more supple. I think the cultivation of a supple
heart is something worth reflecting on.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
Yeah, I was reading something. I don't remember who said
it or where it was, but they were talking about
this idea of somebody saying, like, my heart is broken.
I can't or whether it was a quip, but it
was more or less like, no, it's not. It's doing
exactly what it was designed to do, right, it's working
very well, you know, because you're feeling so much of this,
(32:12):
you know your heart is actually working. It was an interesting,
you know, sort of way of reflecting on it very differently,
like oh, yeah, you know, this is what a heart does.
And my most recent brush with you know, particularly difficult
thing was you know, I had moments of like, is
all this practice I've been doing to open my heart
in general?
Speaker 3 (32:31):
Is this really a god?
Speaker 1 (32:32):
Is this a good idea? Because you know, I'm fairly
undefended here, and it is a good idea. It was
a good idea, But there's those moments of like, well,
do I have some way to turn this down a
little bit. It's just such an interesting concept because everybody's
going to deal with lots of really difficult things and
(32:52):
knowing how to do it in a way that we
get to the other side of enhanced I think the
other thing that is often tricky is that we often
hear that like, well, just go ahead and feel it,
like let it in and feel it, and as if
that is going to be an experience that is in
any way shape or form enjoyable, or that it's going
(33:13):
to make it suddenly just go away. It actually doesn't, yeah, exactly,
And I do think it makes it more likely that
we respond in a wise helpful way ultimately for ourselves
and others. But letting it in is not pleasant.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
And as you talked in the last minute or so,
I've been thinking here how important it is to have friends,
at least a friend to whom you can say, when
they ask how are you, you can say, I'm heartbroken. Yeah,
I'm profoundly and deeply, and it sometimes feels terminally heartbroken.
(33:48):
And a friend who will not run screaming from your
house and he or she hears those words, who will
not become afraid of you? Who will not? Is that
they assume, oh my god, I got to fix this person. Yeah,
but can simply receive you Because to be heartbroken, to
acknowledge it to yourself is one thing, but to be
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able to have it held by someone who knows you
and cares about you, who will walk with you without
being afraid, is an incredibly important piece of life. I'll
just refer very briefly here to my experiences of clinical depression,
when so many of the people who came hoping to
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comfort me basically engage in what I call drive by caring.
It was sort of in and out. You know you're
going to be okay, hang in there, you're a good guy.
So long because they somehow regarded my depression as contagious,
and if they hung around me too long, they would
get depressed too, And of course the only reason one
(34:56):
feels that is because you feel the burden of having
to fix someone when you don't have the foggiest idea
how to fix them. Yeah, and you can't. It's impossible.
It's a false assumption. But the impact of that on me,
of course, is to leave me feeling even more isolated. Yeah.
You know, this person with whom I used to enjoy long,
rambling conversations about all manner of thing is now fleeing
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from my presence because they're scared of me. So part
of processing we were talking earlier about processing life experience inwardly,
part of that processing is having someone who can just
hold your true feelings and your expressions of grief, for pain,
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or anguish about them without running away in fear.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
I had some insights about all of that as it
was going through this difficult time, and I am very
fortunate that I have a number of good friends that
I can say I am heartbroken to and these people
really stepped up and stepped in, and you know, they
would check in on me, and I realized how oftentimes
not good of a friend I have been to people
(36:11):
where I do the if you need anything, I'm here,
and then I forget all about it because I'm busy.
I've made it clear I'm there for them, and I
am like, if they call, I'll drop everything. But I
wasn't as proactive as I would like to be in
the future. You know, where I go, Oh, they may
not know what they need, and this isn't a short
(36:34):
term thing for them. They're going to be in pain
for a while. I need to keep sort of checking
back in. And I also know that as somebody who's
like a behavior coach and you know, has worked in
the recovery community for a long time, there's this idea
of like fixing things right, and so I, more often
than I want, will drop into fixing mode. And so
(36:55):
it's just been very interesting for me to go, oh,
there's some real things from me to learn about how
I be a better friend. It was humbling in that
regard and very instructional.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Right, right, I totally agree. I learned so much during
my depression about how to be a better presence in
other people's lives.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Yeah, I'm curious. There's sort of two approaches I think
that we often get when we're struggling.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Right.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
One is what we've just described the person who comes
by and immediately starts trying to fix it or you know,
shake it off, no big deal, right, And then there's
the other side of it, which is where somebody just
only ever listens and almost encourages the difficult time. And
I've often thought about like for me throughout time, the
(37:44):
people who've been the most helped to me actually did
some of both. You know, they actually first like I
felt really deeply understood. But then they might say, have
you thought about a different way of looking at that?
Or they'll ask you know, I know you're a big
fan of good questions in your circles of trust, right,
asking non judgmental questions. It's not like you just sit
(38:06):
in what it is. You recognize that people can give
us different ways of looking at things by the questions
they ask. Is that your experience too, that it's kind
of a blend of those things over time that is
really helpful to someone who's struggling.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
Yes, and no, maybe, but not a hard No. Let
me tell a couple of stories. Yeah, So in my
first depression, there was a guy somewhat older than I,
maybe six or eight years older than I, very intuitive
fellow fellow, I trusted who did something for me proactively
that I will never forget and that really helped me
(38:45):
on my road to recovery. He asked permission to do
all this before he started doing it. You'll understand why
in a moment. What he did was to come to
my house every day. We were living at Pndall Hill
Quaker Community, so we were on the same sixteen acres
of land with a community of about eighty people, and
(39:08):
he had easy access to where I lived. You'd come
to my house every afternoon around four o'clock without fail.
He would have me seated in an easy chair in
my living room. He would kneel down in front of
me or sit on the floor and take off my
shoes and socks and massage my feet. He very rarely
(39:31):
said a word, but I knew him to be an
intuitive person, and occasionally he would say I feel your
struggle today. No more than that, because that was really
about all the language I could take at the time.
I was so deep into this hell. Or he would
say I feel you getting a little stronger today. And
(39:53):
these were honest reflections from where he sat, and I
always benefited from them. When he said, you know, I
feel your struggle today, somebody understands me right where I
feel you getting a little better today. Gosh, maybe that's true.
And if I did a little gut check, maybe I
found out that I did, in fact feel a little better.
(40:15):
What he did took me some time to understand. But
in depression, you're you're radically disconnected from everyone that you're
an atom floating free in the void. That's part of
its terror. There's no community, there's no real relationship. He
found the one place in my body, the body which
(40:38):
had largely gone numb, where I could feel connected to
another human being the soles of my feet, I mean,
whose feet don't ache most of the time. And this was,
you know, such an act of kindness and generosity that
he kept me connected to the human race in an
almost wordless way, but not, as you say, not passive,
(41:03):
not just sitting there and listening to what little I
might have to say. And then the next step up
from that was, in fact, the people who, as you said,
had the gift of asking honest, open questions, they also
had the gift of, I think, discerning when I was
(41:23):
ready to deal with a question and when I wasn't.
Because you know, there were moments in my depression when
somebody might ask me a well intentioned question and I
would just want to say leave, please leave. You know,
I just don't have the bandwidth to think about anything.
I'm barely surviving here. I'm, you know, wrestling with the
(41:48):
question of is this the day to kind of bring
things to an end? And so there are these huge
acts of discernment, and you know, people range on their
ability to do that. I think you have to know
yourself pretty well to enter that force field.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
I'm going to rescind all the nice things that I
said about my friends, because not a one of them
rubbed my feet, and so I'm taking it all back.
You all fell short of the mark.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
You might want to check your feet for you critique
your friends.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
You know, I'm curious about your depressions. You've fallen into
them several times. It sounds like the last time was
in your sixties, So you are somewhere from fifteen to
twenty years from the last one. Is that roughly accurate
or was it late sixties?
Speaker 2 (42:55):
Yeah, about twenty two at this point.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
Yeah, you think you learned what you needed to learn.
You outgrew them. Another one could be right around the corner.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
You know.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
I'm just kind of curious, you know, because it sounds like,
you know, if you had them in your forties and
then in your early sixties, they were kind of clumped
up there a little I mean a little bit, you know,
and you've had a pretty good run any sense of
I mean, and I know it's a speculation, but what
has sort of kept you from falling back into you know,
chasms that are that dark?
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Yeah, I could easily say that I've become more aware
of the warning signs of depression. Even that is tricky though,
because we all have melancholy days or just the blooms,
you know, seasonal effective disorder, whatever. And the last thing
(43:45):
I want to do is to is to panic about
symptoms of that sort and say, oh my god, I'm
on the slippery slope again, because that's not going to
help me at all. Yeah, but there are a few
warning signs that I watched for, you know, repetitiveative, negative
patterns of thinking, catastrophic patterns of thinking, etcetera, etcetera. I think,
(44:07):
I mean, maybe in a sense I outgrew them. Although
the big heading for this particular conversation ought to be
depression is a great mystery nobody really fully understands it,
and that includes everything from genetic and biochemical process has
gone awry, to experiential crises that one's psyche doesn't know
(44:33):
how to handle, internal contradictions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
levels of fear in life, and so forth and so on.
In my forties, looking back, it's reasonably clear to me
that I was taking all kinds of risk, vocational risks
that hardly anyone in my life understood, let alone affirmed
(44:57):
or applauded. And I won't bore you with all all
the details, but I got a PhD from Berkeley in
the sixties late sixties, expecting to go into academia, and
indeed got academic job offers, but had been so impacted
by all that went on during the sixties, the crises
we mentioned earlier, assassinations, the racial crisis, Vietnam, that I
(45:21):
decided to become a community organizer in Washington, d c.
Working with a couple of other people on issues of
racial justice, in redlining and blockbusting. That was my first
five years out of grad school. And all of my
mentors and all my friends are saying, why are you
doing this in saying you're disappearing from the professional radar
(45:44):
for which you prepared. Why did you get a PhD? Well,
it turned out there's a good answer to that. I
ended up working independently most of my life the PhD.
While the content of my PhD is largely irrelevant to
what I've done professionally, just having that union ticket has
opened some doors that wouldn't have been opened otherwise when
(46:06):
you're trying to make an independent career. So I was
taking vocational risks, substantial vocational risks. I was married, I
had two three kids as the years went on, and
I was taking financial risks as well. I had grown
up in the family where my parents were able to
help me go to college, but I was making very
(46:29):
marginal money at this work I was doing, which was
service work in a lot of ways. Was looking at
the prospect of not being able to give my kids
a leg up on getting a good higher education if
that's what they wanted when they got there. So I
(46:49):
was living with a lot of doubts. I was living
with anxieties. It still kind of baffles me how I
hung in there. But I do have an answer that question,
because I should leap ahead and say, in the long run,
I'm really really grateful for the circuitous path that I followed,
(47:11):
because a lot of the writing and teaching I've done
involves things that I could not have learned about any
other way. If I had become an assistant professor or
associate professor, etc. Etc. My bank of experience, my view
of the world would necessarily have been, I think, more
(47:33):
constricted than it is, at least for me. But back
in the day when people would say why are you doings?
I had an answer to me, an interesting answer. I said,
you know, I can barely explain it to myself, so
I'm sure I can't explain it to you, But I
(47:57):
can say this what I'm doing I can't not do.
I had to use that double negative. There was something
in me that knew that if I didn't pursue what
I now think of as the soul's imperative, I would
pay a very large price down the road, a larger
(48:19):
price than the one I was paying by living with
vocational anxiety. I think I would have paid a soul
price of having ignored my own existential imperatives. I've come
to trust that very very much. When young people come
to me because of one or two of the books
(48:41):
I've written about vocational issues. The first thing I'll often
say to them after listening for a long time and
hearing very similar stories really about the struggles that they're
having their generations having and that I had my generation had,
I'll say, well, how old are you again? I'll say
(49:01):
twenty four, and I'll say, well, my vocation didn't come
together until I was fifty, so you've got a lot
of time. But do not panic. But I'll then say,
is there anything that you can't not do? If you've
got an answer that that rings true for you. I'm
not saying you can make a living that way. Maybe
you can, maybe you can't. But I am saying, find
(49:24):
a way in your life to do that thing alongside
whatever else you have to do to keep yourself afloat
so that you don't end up paying the price of
your soul. When all it's said and done.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
So you feel like some of those depressions had their
route a little bit in all of the uncertainty that
you were taking on in life and people not understanding you.
And yet, even in spite of the depressions that may
have had their genesis in that it was still the
right thing for you to do.
Speaker 2 (49:58):
Precisely, that doesn't mean it was the struggle. It doesn't
mean that I didn't, you know, suffer as a dark
knight of the soul around all of those questions. I did,
But somehow I knew I had to persist, And as
I said, I'm glad I did, because what has resulted
has been a vocation that really didn't cohere for me
(50:19):
until I was fifty, when all of these disparate pieces
started coming together, including the writing and the teaching, and
you know, a way of working independently. Once I walked
away not only from large institutions but from small institutions
and kind of got out in the field by myself
and said, okay, let's see what might happen here if
(50:43):
I continue to follow this parative. One of the things
I said in a book called Let Your Life Speak,
where I wrote about depression in an essay that actually
has probably attracted more attention as a single piece than
anything else among the ten books I've written. Because so
many people suffer from depression or live with someone who
(51:05):
suffers from it. I said, you know, people walk around
saying I do not understand why so and so committed suicide,
And I said, you know, to me, that's not a mystery.
They committed suicide because they needed the rest. Depression is
absolutely exhausting, and to be down there for months at
(51:27):
a time, trying every day to catch your breath and
wondering whether it's worth carrying on, just wears you down
to the bone. And people take their own lives because
they come to believe that that's a preferable option to
living in hell. They can find no way out. They
(51:50):
are just lost in the dark. They have become the dark.
You know, if you're just lost in the dark, there's
a difference between you and the darkness. You can negotiate it.
You can look for a door handle, window, a shade
to pull up whatever. If you've become the dark, there's
no negotiating it. You're it, and it's you. You can't
(52:11):
begin to fumble around to try to find a way out.
You just have to wait it out, which is a
very hard thing to do. So the question of why
people take their own lives is not a mystery to me.
What's a mystery to me is why it is that
some people not only survive, but thrive on the other
(52:31):
side of depression. I feel like I'm one of those people,
and you know, slap all kinds of adjectives onto it.
Privileged to be able to have the resources, to be
able to find the support that I needed, et cetera,
et cetera. But even that doesn't explain it to me.
So you want a question that's baffling, Why do some
(52:54):
people not only survive but thrive on the other side
of depression?
Speaker 1 (52:59):
Yeah, I have that one, and then my other one
is addiction. You know, why do some people I mean,
we know what some of the societal correlates are of
people being more likely to recover, more likely to come
through depression. To your point, right, there are privileges that
some of us have in the access to help that
we can get and many different things. But it's still
(53:20):
a mystery because we know people who have none of
those things and come through, and we know people who
have had all of those things and don't. It is
kind of a mystery. And even back to why do
some people with a broken heart become better and why
do some people end up bitter? There's a mystery to
it to a certain degree that you know, if I
(53:40):
ever get to sit down with assuming there is a
creator who had a plan with all this, which is
quite a big assumption. But should we say that be
the case and I could sit down and have a
conversation once I got some of the really big things
out of the way, Those would be some of my
very first questions, right, because I don't understand it. You know,
you said a couple things in there about depression that
I thought were interesting. First was better understanding the warning
(54:04):
signs and yet wanting to be careful with that because
I seem to have this dual approach and I use
one of them sometimes and sometimes I use the other,
and I don't even necessarily know how I know when
to use what. And one of them is I just
simply ignore the symptoms and just go like, yep, well,
you know that's the way it is today, Like you know,
(54:26):
I think of it as like the emotional flu like
it's going to come and it's going to go away,
and there's no sense making a big fuss out of
all this, right, And sometimes that is absolutely the right approach,
And then there are other times where it is like, Okay,
I need to investigate more deeply here what's happening, And
I may need to dive a little deeper and try
(54:46):
and understand, and I may need to say, oh, this
is maybe a little bit more serious. And you know,
I think for me, the one thing that I have
learned to do pretty consistently, regardless of which of those
approaches I'm and as I know, the physical things that
I do that give me as much immunity as I'm
likely to get, and I try and do those as
(55:09):
often as I can, regardless, because for me, it's a
very physical thing, and taking care of myself physically seems
to be the best immunity I know to give myself.
Speaker 2 (55:20):
Yeah, I totally agree with that. You know, for me,
daily walk best of all, walk in the woods, Yeah,
which I have fairly easy access to, is hugely therapeutic.
Reading poetry is hugely therapeutic. There's a lot of poetry
that kind of walks around and inside of these issues
that for me gets at the human condition better than
(55:45):
a nonfiction book about the nature of depression. That the
medicine is interesting, the science is interesting. The poetry connects
with me somehow, It speaks to me. You know, it's
like massaging my psyche instead of my feet.
Speaker 1 (56:00):
The job yep, we're nearly at the end of our
time here, and I just want to read something else
that you wrote and allow you to sort of comment
on it for a second. You're talking about community, and
you lead into what I'm about to write by talking
about like, there's a lot of quick fixed solutions in
the wellness world, right, or the spirituality world, or however
(56:22):
we want to label that world, And you say, solutions
of that sort are snake oil. Of course, the quick
fix mentality that dominates our impatient world serves only to
distract us from the lifelong journey towards wholeness, and the
self help methods so popular in our time, the best
of which offers support for that journey sometimes reinforce the
(56:43):
great American illusion that we can forever go it alone.
And I would just love to hear you say anything
you would like to about that about community as sort
of a wrapping up point here.
Speaker 2 (56:56):
Yeah, well, thank you for lifting that up too, because
that's a big scene for me. First of all, I'm
a great fan of solitude. There's a richness in solitude
and in silence that I really value, and I think
in my younger ears, my sort of inability to turn
in that direction my need to either make noise or
(57:17):
pea surrounded by noise in order to what I don't know,
prove I'm alive, or something that can't quite figured out.
But my aversion to silence and solitude was a hindrance
in my own movement towards hold us in my own
psychological well being. So I spend time in solitude. I've
never found tips, tricks and techniques as in meditation, for example,
(57:41):
that really work for me. But I just love staring
out the window, appreciating the leafless branches on a tree
in my backyard at this time of year, the way
the sun plays on the bark of this triflora maple.
It's in my backyard even when it's leafless and just absorbing,
(58:03):
especially nature, but any kind of beauty I can find,
or just sitting wordless and I don't know, taking it in,
you know, watching the sunset, etcetera, etcetera. So and reading
poetry is joined for me with solitude and with sort
(58:24):
of an interior journey in which you're paying attention to
how those words and images resonate with something in you
that here most of the time barely in touch with
big on solitude, but equally big. And this is a
great paradox in life. I think on community, on relationships
(58:47):
that can rightly be understood as creative, whether those are
the kinds of relationships I had with the friend who
came and massage my feet, or the kinds of relationships
I have with people to whom I can say I'm
profoundly heartbroken, the kinds of relationships I have with people
who know how to ask honest, open questions, never burdening
(59:08):
themselves with a sense that they have to fix me,
and knowing that I would fight like hell against anybody
trying to fix me. The most fundamental need I think
any of us has is to be heard, to be understood,
to be received as we are when we show up
as fully as we know how, with our broken wholeness.
(59:31):
I used to read a lot of a theology and
a remarkable man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany who ended
up being murdered by the Nazis because of his resistance
to Hitler. He wrote a book called Life Together, and
in it he has this little formula. He says, let
the person who cannot be alone be aware of being
in community, and let the person who cannot be in community,
(59:55):
beware of being alone. I think there's immense wisdom in
that that these are the poles of the battery, and
if you connect these two ends a paradox, then life flows,
energy flows and in some pretty remarkable ways. I think
what we have to understand is that community doesn't mean
(01:00:17):
a whole lot of people making a whole lot of noise.
Some people say I can't find community. I mean, there's
where do I join one? Well, you often don't join one,
you co create one with a few other people. Community
can be two, three, four people gathered in some form
of mutual understanding which everyone finds deeply supportive and nourishing.
(01:00:42):
But it must alternate. And I believe, at least in
my cycle of life, with the richness of solitude, which
is very different from loneliness, I feel more alone, often
in a crowd of people who are making noise than
I do. I'm sitting alone looking at that tri floral
(01:01:04):
maple out of my back window. In solitude, there's a
sense of presence, and I think that the presence, especially
of the natural world, which is also part of the
community in which were embedded. That has been a late
realization in my life probably only began twenty five or
(01:01:26):
thirty years ago. I didn't grow up in a family
that went to wilderness or recreation, but I married a
woman who did that, and she introduced me to wilderness,
and I'll always be grateful for that. So, that sense
of belonging to the natural world, which is in no
(01:01:48):
matter how you slice it, whatever you may think about
the big question of is there anything after we die?
We're going back to nature, that's for certain. The atoms
that make us up, which actually came from stars we
can see in the sky at night, or maybe they're
a little out of our vision, but they're still up there.
(01:02:08):
They're going to return to the Earth's return to the cosmos,
and remanifest themselves in all kinds of interesting ways. Since
I've gone to a lot of time and trouble to
get myself to wilderness, to get myself into primal nature
every year for three or four weeks, for twenty five
thirty years, why wouldn't I be perfectly happy to return
(01:02:32):
there for eternity. To me, that's a good deal. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:02:36):
Well, Parker, thank you so much for coming on the show.
It is always such a pleasure to talk with you.
I feel like we often cover the same themes, but
they are themes that we all need to hear about
and be reminded about and lean into more. So, thank
you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom
with us.
Speaker 2 (01:02:53):
Again. Well, thank you Eric once again. I've just delighted
in your questions. And if I haven't told you before,
your questions always leave me thinking for months afterwards, so
I think that's a big thank you. Also, sometimes why
did you have to ask that?
Speaker 1 (01:03:10):
Yeah? Yep, well I appreciate that. It is very kind.
That makes me happy.
Speaker 3 (01:03:30):
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