June 8, 2020 • 21 mins
A single writer who had just started dating for the first time since her divorce navigates a new, promising relationship.
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is the Way We Live Now.
Today is day ninety since I've started taking naps and
a forty of this podcast. There are people who are
riding out this pandemic with spouses they're not getting along with.
There are those who are at the start of new
relationships who decided to speed things up by sheltering in
(00:27):
place together. And then there are those who were just
at the start of something new, a hard one romance
now put to the test of distance and global anxiety.
My guest today is Maya Shaun bog Lang, a forty
one year old divorced mom, a writer whose memoir What
We Carry is Just Out. Maya waded into the dating
(00:49):
waters just at the start of twenty and lightning struck
and then the pandemic. Maya thank you so much for
joining me to talk about the way we live now. Danny,
thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure
(01:09):
and a privilege. So where are you right now? Describe
what you see your surroundings in as much detail as
you can muster. At the moment, I am sitting in
my kitchen, it is a rainy day outside. The house
feels curiously empty because my daughter is with her father,
(01:35):
with whom my share joint custody. I am feeling the
strangeness of this time. And where do you live. I
live just north of Manhattan in a town called hey
Things on Hudson. I'm about fifteen miles north of the city.
And has your daughter been going back and forth between
(01:57):
you and and her father? She has, So we split
the time pretty evenly. And since this whole period started, um,
you know, the quarantine, he has been working from home.
I've been working from home. We live very close to
one another, just a few miles apart, so we've basically
(02:17):
been treating it as though there's like a tunnel between
our households. Yeah, I wondered about divorced parents with joint
custods during this time and how complicated it can be
of creating that sort of bubble of you're sort of
back in a bubble in a way with the person.
But tell me a little bit about what your life
(02:38):
was like pre pandemic. You're a writer, you had a
memoir coming out in the near future. You teach, you coach,
you editum, and you had just at the age of
forty one, met someone you really, really liked yes. So
you know, cut to you know, the start of the
(03:01):
new year, the start of a new decade. I had
been separated from my ex husband for over a year
at that point, and I had decided in December to
open myself up to the possibility of dating. And I
went into it in a very guarded way, thinking, you know,
I'm finally in a place where I'm happy and independent,
(03:24):
and after doing a lot of emotional work, I feel
good about myself, and do I really want to risk
kind of opening up the can of worms that dating
can be. And so I went into dating just deciding
to be mercilessly picky and to give myself permission to
(03:46):
do that as opposed to kind of making allowances and
excusing certain things. And um, and I met someone wonderful
who you know. We started messaging in December. We had
our first date right um, at the start of the
new year. I think it's January three, and we met
(04:08):
for lunch in the city, and our lunch last day,
I think two and a half hours. You know, it
wasn't your typical date. There wasn't wine, there wasn't the
soft glow of candle light. It was two divorced parents
meeting in the bright light of day, and I think,
(04:28):
really just being ourselves. And I felt so nervous because
he was insanely handsome, you know, just so attractive. He
had been a Division one college athlete. I was a
total nerd in high school and college, and you know,
my kind of adolescent self felt spooked where I partly
(04:52):
thought like he's out of my league, or I thought
this is sort of the breakfast club mentality of like
we fall into different categories. The whole thing felt uh,
nerves racking, but also butterfly and dec thing. I have
a theory about that, which is that those feelings that
kind of harken back to like middle school, high school
(05:15):
feelings of like the first stirrings of having a crush
on somebody kind of almost pull us back to ourselves
or some version of ourselves from that time, you know,
so that like the whole all the high school and
middle school feelings of like they're being categories or groups
kind of come back to us. Yeah. I think that's
(05:37):
exactly right. And I also think part of what happens
when you're getting out of a marriage is you really
start questioning, well, who am I and who was I
before I got married, and who am I kind of
at my core? Um, So it makes sense that when
you start dating or when you start examining yourself. UM,
(05:57):
Like I remember, right when I separated, I started list
stening to music from high school and college that I
hadn't listened to in you forever. Um. But yeah, you're right.
I was sort of sort of brought back to that um,
to those feelings and to that state. And then yeah,
I mean to go back to our you know, this
new blessing relationship. For several weeks, all through January February,
(06:24):
we were seeing each other and it was wonderful, and
for the first time in my life, I thought, Oh,
this is what it's like to be with someone and
not compromise myself. You know, I really kept an eye
on my priorities, you know, namely my daughter and my
(06:45):
career and my time with my girlfriends. It just felt
so new and so different from my relationships in the past,
where I think before I had always kind of sought
safety and I had thought about being with people. I
didn't realize it consciously at the time, but I was
(07:06):
never really seeking out equal partners who would challenge me
or inspire me, and so this was just it was
so exciting and wondrous, and to have butterflies at forty
one a special welcome feeling. I was sort of like
walking around beaming and skipping and feeling all of those
happy oxytocin feelings of joy. And my real epiphany was, Oh,
(07:30):
you can be with someone and still value your time apart,
and you can have multiple parts of your life coexist.
And I felt like I was putting together this puzzle
and figuring it all out and it felt great. And
then the pandemic happened, and it felt like it was
(07:51):
sort of mocking my theory of being together while apart.
It suddenly we were truly apart um and unable to
see each other. Was there a moment when you've realized, oh,
this is really happening. We're not going to see each
other for at least the immediate future, or was there
a moment where you where you realized that, because I
(08:13):
think a lot of the people when the pandemic hit
it was like waiting into water slowly thinking this is
maybe overblown or it's exaggerated, or were overreacting. Um, it
seems so incredibly naive now Um, I mean, I certainly
felt all of those feelings and then there's a moment
(08:33):
where it just hits home. Yeah. Well, so one complicating
factor in our situation is that, um, he is a
caregiver for his mother who has cancer and she lives
with him, and that was actually one of the things
(08:54):
that we really bonded over. The memoir that I just
wrote um came out a few weeks ago, is about
my experience of bringing my mother to live with me
in my house when she had dementia and being her caregiver.
So that was one of the things that really sort
of united us because it's not an experience that people
(09:17):
at forty or forty one often, you know, know all
that intimately. And um, so for us, the kind of
fear level, I think it was immediately very high because
his mother is so immano compromised. She just had a
stem cell transplant. She basically had no immune system whatsoever.
So we couldn't take any risks, you know, from the
(09:40):
get go, And you're right, we didn't know how long
it would last, you know, it was like, oh, maybe
this will be a couple of weeks. Like there was
that kind of who knows and at a certain point. Yes,
we started to process the fact that this was going
to be a while and he said to me, We're
(10:00):
talking one day on the phone and he said to me, Um,
I'm sorry that we got interrupted. And I immediately felt this,
you know, sort of yeah, you know, but we haven't
been interrupted like I had to like, Um, I don't
know if it was denial or I just you know,
(10:22):
it was like, no, we haven't been interrupted. And since then,
you know, it's interesting, We've definitely talked on the phone
a lot. We've had conversations that we wouldn't have had,
and I've seen sides of him that I wouldn't have seen,
right because normally, like our dating would have unfolded in
a certain way, and seeing someone in a crisis, it's
(10:45):
kind of like, oh, you get new data that you
might not have had access to, you know, potentially like
years into a relationship. Absolutely, we don't know who we're
going to be. Um, when the ship really hits the fan,
That's exactly right. We don't know, you know, who we
(11:07):
ourselves are going to be or who are partners are
going to be, and it can be quite surprising to
all people involved. Yeah, I mean I have thought on
some level, I'm really grateful to have this information because
part of how I view jading now is I want
all the goods up front, like I want to know.
I want to know this person, um, And I don't
(11:30):
feel like, oh, I really need to be in a relationship,
you know, I feel like, oh, I want to know
what I'm getting myself into. I've been trying to look
at it through that lens as I'm getting to learn
him and he's getting to learn me, you know. But
it's also interesting because relationship wise, it's sort of like
(11:52):
we've known each other through the honeymoon the first few
weeks stage, and then we've known each other through acis stage,
and we haven't really had like normal days stage. Yeah,
that's interesting, and it's also I think the pandemic is
(12:14):
making so many of us long for what was just
the day to day. You know, it was just the ordinary,
which in so many ways we all take for granted.
You know that we can stop and get a cup
of coffee or that, um, you know that we have
an appointment that we can make in the afternoon or
whatever it is. It's just our daily lives are ordinary blessings,
(12:38):
you know. Of our daily lives and and it sounds
like you've had, you know, both ends of the drama,
the exquisite high of you know, falling for someone and
and then falling for you, and then this, you know,
this strange, dystopian kind of nightmarish time that we're all
living through and living through it with with all the
(13:01):
strangeness and with the newness of a new relationship and
not being together under the same roof. That's right. So
part of how I think about this time, I think
we're all kind of in withdrawal, you know, almost like
drug addicts, because what got taken away from us. It's
not just about like oh, being able to have coffee
(13:23):
or being able to go to a restaurant or go
to the gym. I mean all of that together forms
our daily life. You know. We're homeosthetic creatures where we
want some baseline level of this is how life feels.
And to have that taken away and ripped away, I
think puts us in a state of withdrawal where we're
(13:45):
all sort of anxious and thrown and not ourselves. So
that's what's so fascinating is to be with someone, except
of course we're not actually with each other in proximity,
and to be with someone while we're not really ourselves.
M hmmm in terms of the whole you know, we're together,
(14:08):
we're apart. What's also fascinating to me is that I've
heard similar sentiments, just in different ways through friends of
mine who, you know, like some of my married friends,
we'll talk about their spouses, and you know, I've had
girlfriends say to me like, yeah, we're under the same
roof all the time, and yet I've never felt more apart.
(14:32):
We stuck together, but I feel I feel oceans apart
from my spouse, from my partner. And then I've heard
these stories of people who were in early relationships who
decided to shelter in place together where their romance was
accelerated these circumstances. Yeah, that's so interesting. It's you know,
(14:54):
I think in the future, we're all going to have
so many stories or you they're going to be divorces
over this, They're gonna be babies over this. There's you know,
they're gonna be marriages, you know over this. Um uh.
There there's gonna be a lot of post traumatic stress.
There's there's gonna be so many waves and waves and
waves of experience and and feeling, you know, when we
(15:17):
are through it whenever, whenever that might be. That's exactly right.
Do you feel interrupted now or do you feel like
you're you know, in a relationship that's in this, you know,
just in this kind of strange soup of this time.
I like that phrase, strange soup. Yeah. I think at
(15:38):
a certain point, you know, this becomes the new normal,
you know, whether we like it or not, it's now
we have to accept it. And so I now have
come to a place where I think, you know, this
isn't interrupted time. It's not that this time doesn't count.
It's not that it's a break. It's just time of
(16:01):
a different feel and time of a different texture and
with a different rhythm. My kind of takeaway is to
do my best to just take it one day at
a time, one moment at a time. And one of
the things I've realized is that the heightened uncertainty that
so many of us are feeling right now, truthfully uncertainty
(16:24):
of always with us, you know, whether we're together and
like blissfully going off to have a meal at a
great restaurant, like we never know what our fate is
going to be we never know how a relationship is
going to play out. I certainly never thought I was
going to get divorced, you know, I thought I was
going to be with my ex husband forever, and then
(16:44):
the idea of falling in love again was utterly laughable.
So I've experienced outcomes that I felt certain would never
ever ever come to path, And what I know for
sure is that I'm better for them. So I think
it's easy to look at uncertainty and feel fear and apprehension,
(17:04):
but there can be welcome gifts on the other side
of the fear and of the uncertainty. I love that.
That's I think that's such a great message because really
we all always are living in uncertainty. We just don't
walk around conscious of it, with a name attached to
(17:24):
it and a virus attached to it, and you know,
fantasies attached to that. We we walk around with all
of our plans and all of our certainty is when
in fact we're always My friend Sylvia Borstine, the great
Buddhist teacher, has this great um expression like we're all
just hanging on the vine. We're always hanging on the line,
(17:46):
and this just underscores that, but that doesn't have to
be terrifying it. I mean, it is, it is. I
mean I'm not minimizing it. And certainly many many people
are suffering um tremendously. But there's a way in which
this uncertainty and learning how to live with it in
this time out of time and not wishing the time away,
(18:11):
not wishing for it to be over, because this is
the day we have, This is the day we have,
This is the time we have. And one thing I
thought about I talked about this in my memoir because
that was you know, when I was caring for my mother,
that was a time of excruciating uncertainty. Um. I didn't
know what any given day would look like with her
because of her dementia. I didn't have any sort of
(18:33):
script for how to be with her. And one thing
I really thought about was that, like if you think
about what a diamond is, a diamond is the result
of time and pressure. But no piece of coal would
ever choose those circumstances, Like, no one opts in for that,
because when you hear in it and you're in that process,
(18:56):
it is excruciating. You don't know when it's going to end.
You're submitting to all of the discomfort. But you don't
get to the place of clarity and strength and brilliant
and that next version of yourself without that process. And
(19:18):
I think so often we think of challenges in life.
I think especially in America, you know, we think of
like challenges of the things that we take on. But
I actually think it's the challenges that we don't choose,
you know, the challenges that we have to submit to
that we never would have opted for. Those are the
things I think that really make us shine because they
(19:40):
forced us two tap into different parts of ourselves and
to find resilience. And when we're in the moment and
we think we cannot bear it, we endure and we
persist and you know what choice do we have and
we come out stronger hmm. And even if that means
(20:02):
facing negative outcomes with difficult things, I think that is
not to be shied away from it. I think it's
to be embraced um with the difficulty and with all
of the you know, the recognition of how hard it
is in the moment. Well, that is a beautiful and
(20:22):
hopeful message. Cap off this conversation. I so appreciate everything
that you've said. And I think so many people will
will relate and will be nodding as they listen, and
just wish you the best of luck with your book
and your romance and UH and your next steps. So
(20:43):
thanks Maya, Thank you so much, Danny, and thank you
for making space for the time period with this podcast.
It's my pleasure, all right. Take care of you too.
Thanks for stening to the Way We Live Now. Tell
us the way you're living now. We want to hear
(21:05):
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(21:28):
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at Danny Ryder. The Way We Live Now is a
production of I Heart Radio. It's produced by a Lowe Broulante.
Bethan Macaluso is executive producer. Special thanks to Tristan McNeil
and Tyler Klang. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever
(21:50):
you get your podcasts.
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is the Way We Live Now.
Today is day ninety since I've started taking naps and
a forty of this podcast. There are people who are
riding out this pandemic with spouses they're not getting along with.
There are those who are at the start of new
relationships who decided to speed things up by sheltering in
(00:27):
place together. And then there are those who were just
at the start of something new, a hard one romance
now put to the test of distance and global anxiety.
My guest today is Maya Shaun bog Lang, a forty
one year old divorced mom, a writer whose memoir What
We Carry is Just Out. Maya waded into the dating
(00:49):
waters just at the start of twenty and lightning struck
and then the pandemic. Maya thank you so much for
joining me to talk about the way we live now. Danny,
thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure
(01:09):
and a privilege. So where are you right now? Describe
what you see your surroundings in as much detail as
you can muster. At the moment, I am sitting in
my kitchen, it is a rainy day outside. The house
feels curiously empty because my daughter is with her father,
(01:35):
with whom my share joint custody. I am feeling the
strangeness of this time. And where do you live. I
live just north of Manhattan in a town called hey
Things on Hudson. I'm about fifteen miles north of the city.
And has your daughter been going back and forth between
(01:57):
you and and her father? She has, So we split
the time pretty evenly. And since this whole period started, um,
you know, the quarantine, he has been working from home.
I've been working from home. We live very close to
one another, just a few miles apart, so we've basically
(02:17):
been treating it as though there's like a tunnel between
our households. Yeah, I wondered about divorced parents with joint
custods during this time and how complicated it can be
of creating that sort of bubble of you're sort of
back in a bubble in a way with the person.
But tell me a little bit about what your life
(02:38):
was like pre pandemic. You're a writer, you had a
memoir coming out in the near future. You teach, you coach,
you editum, and you had just at the age of
forty one, met someone you really, really liked yes. So
you know, cut to you know, the start of the
(03:01):
new year, the start of a new decade. I had
been separated from my ex husband for over a year
at that point, and I had decided in December to
open myself up to the possibility of dating. And I
went into it in a very guarded way, thinking, you know,
I'm finally in a place where I'm happy and independent,
(03:24):
and after doing a lot of emotional work, I feel
good about myself, and do I really want to risk
kind of opening up the can of worms that dating
can be. And so I went into dating just deciding
to be mercilessly picky and to give myself permission to
(03:46):
do that as opposed to kind of making allowances and
excusing certain things. And um, and I met someone wonderful
who you know. We started messaging in December. We had
our first date right um, at the start of the
new year. I think it's January three, and we met
(04:08):
for lunch in the city, and our lunch last day,
I think two and a half hours. You know, it
wasn't your typical date. There wasn't wine, there wasn't the
soft glow of candle light. It was two divorced parents
meeting in the bright light of day, and I think,
(04:28):
really just being ourselves. And I felt so nervous because
he was insanely handsome, you know, just so attractive. He
had been a Division one college athlete. I was a
total nerd in high school and college, and you know,
my kind of adolescent self felt spooked where I partly
(04:52):
thought like he's out of my league, or I thought
this is sort of the breakfast club mentality of like
we fall into different categories. The whole thing felt uh,
nerves racking, but also butterfly and dec thing. I have
a theory about that, which is that those feelings that
kind of harken back to like middle school, high school
(05:15):
feelings of like the first stirrings of having a crush
on somebody kind of almost pull us back to ourselves
or some version of ourselves from that time, you know,
so that like the whole all the high school and
middle school feelings of like they're being categories or groups
kind of come back to us. Yeah. I think that's
(05:37):
exactly right. And I also think part of what happens
when you're getting out of a marriage is you really
start questioning, well, who am I and who was I
before I got married, and who am I kind of
at my core? Um, So it makes sense that when
you start dating or when you start examining yourself. UM,
(05:57):
Like I remember, right when I separated, I started list
stening to music from high school and college that I
hadn't listened to in you forever. Um. But yeah, you're right.
I was sort of sort of brought back to that um,
to those feelings and to that state. And then yeah,
I mean to go back to our you know, this
new blessing relationship. For several weeks, all through January February,
(06:24):
we were seeing each other and it was wonderful, and
for the first time in my life, I thought, Oh,
this is what it's like to be with someone and
not compromise myself. You know, I really kept an eye
on my priorities, you know, namely my daughter and my
(06:45):
career and my time with my girlfriends. It just felt
so new and so different from my relationships in the past,
where I think before I had always kind of sought
safety and I had thought about being with people. I
didn't realize it consciously at the time, but I was
(07:06):
never really seeking out equal partners who would challenge me
or inspire me, and so this was just it was
so exciting and wondrous, and to have butterflies at forty
one a special welcome feeling. I was sort of like
walking around beaming and skipping and feeling all of those
happy oxytocin feelings of joy. And my real epiphany was, Oh,
(07:30):
you can be with someone and still value your time apart,
and you can have multiple parts of your life coexist.
And I felt like I was putting together this puzzle
and figuring it all out and it felt great. And
then the pandemic happened, and it felt like it was
(07:51):
sort of mocking my theory of being together while apart.
It suddenly we were truly apart um and unable to
see each other. Was there a moment when you've realized, oh,
this is really happening. We're not going to see each
other for at least the immediate future, or was there
a moment where you where you realized that, because I
(08:13):
think a lot of the people when the pandemic hit
it was like waiting into water slowly thinking this is
maybe overblown or it's exaggerated, or were overreacting. Um, it
seems so incredibly naive now Um, I mean, I certainly
felt all of those feelings and then there's a moment
(08:33):
where it just hits home. Yeah. Well, so one complicating
factor in our situation is that, um, he is a
caregiver for his mother who has cancer and she lives
with him, and that was actually one of the things
(08:54):
that we really bonded over. The memoir that I just
wrote um came out a few weeks ago, is about
my experience of bringing my mother to live with me
in my house when she had dementia and being her caregiver.
So that was one of the things that really sort
of united us because it's not an experience that people
(09:17):
at forty or forty one often, you know, know all
that intimately. And um, so for us, the kind of
fear level, I think it was immediately very high because
his mother is so immano compromised. She just had a
stem cell transplant. She basically had no immune system whatsoever.
So we couldn't take any risks, you know, from the
(09:40):
get go, And you're right, we didn't know how long
it would last, you know, it was like, oh, maybe
this will be a couple of weeks. Like there was
that kind of who knows and at a certain point. Yes,
we started to process the fact that this was going
to be a while and he said to me, We're
(10:00):
talking one day on the phone and he said to me, Um,
I'm sorry that we got interrupted. And I immediately felt this,
you know, sort of yeah, you know, but we haven't
been interrupted like I had to like, Um, I don't
know if it was denial or I just you know,
(10:22):
it was like, no, we haven't been interrupted. And since then,
you know, it's interesting, We've definitely talked on the phone
a lot. We've had conversations that we wouldn't have had,
and I've seen sides of him that I wouldn't have seen,
right because normally, like our dating would have unfolded in
a certain way, and seeing someone in a crisis, it's
(10:45):
kind of like, oh, you get new data that you
might not have had access to, you know, potentially like
years into a relationship. Absolutely, we don't know who we're
going to be. Um, when the ship really hits the fan,
That's exactly right. We don't know, you know, who we
(11:07):
ourselves are going to be or who are partners are
going to be, and it can be quite surprising to
all people involved. Yeah, I mean I have thought on
some level, I'm really grateful to have this information because
part of how I view jading now is I want
all the goods up front, like I want to know.
I want to know this person, um, And I don't
(11:30):
feel like, oh, I really need to be in a relationship,
you know, I feel like, oh, I want to know
what I'm getting myself into. I've been trying to look
at it through that lens as I'm getting to learn
him and he's getting to learn me, you know. But
it's also interesting because relationship wise, it's sort of like
(11:52):
we've known each other through the honeymoon the first few
weeks stage, and then we've known each other through acis stage,
and we haven't really had like normal days stage. Yeah,
that's interesting, and it's also I think the pandemic is
(12:14):
making so many of us long for what was just
the day to day. You know, it was just the ordinary,
which in so many ways we all take for granted.
You know that we can stop and get a cup
of coffee or that, um, you know that we have
an appointment that we can make in the afternoon or
whatever it is. It's just our daily lives are ordinary blessings,
(12:38):
you know. Of our daily lives and and it sounds
like you've had, you know, both ends of the drama,
the exquisite high of you know, falling for someone and
and then falling for you, and then this, you know,
this strange, dystopian kind of nightmarish time that we're all
living through and living through it with with all the
(13:01):
strangeness and with the newness of a new relationship and
not being together under the same roof. That's right. So
part of how I think about this time, I think
we're all kind of in withdrawal, you know, almost like
drug addicts, because what got taken away from us. It's
not just about like oh, being able to have coffee
(13:23):
or being able to go to a restaurant or go
to the gym. I mean all of that together forms
our daily life. You know. We're homeosthetic creatures where we
want some baseline level of this is how life feels.
And to have that taken away and ripped away, I
think puts us in a state of withdrawal where we're
(13:45):
all sort of anxious and thrown and not ourselves. So
that's what's so fascinating is to be with someone, except
of course we're not actually with each other in proximity,
and to be with someone while we're not really ourselves.
M hmmm in terms of the whole you know, we're together,
(14:08):
we're apart. What's also fascinating to me is that I've
heard similar sentiments, just in different ways through friends of
mine who, you know, like some of my married friends,
we'll talk about their spouses, and you know, I've had
girlfriends say to me like, yeah, we're under the same
roof all the time, and yet I've never felt more apart.
(14:32):
We stuck together, but I feel I feel oceans apart
from my spouse, from my partner. And then I've heard
these stories of people who were in early relationships who
decided to shelter in place together where their romance was
accelerated these circumstances. Yeah, that's so interesting. It's you know,
(14:54):
I think in the future, we're all going to have
so many stories or you they're going to be divorces
over this, They're gonna be babies over this. There's you know,
they're gonna be marriages, you know over this. Um uh.
There there's gonna be a lot of post traumatic stress.
There's there's gonna be so many waves and waves and
waves of experience and and feeling, you know, when we
(15:17):
are through it whenever, whenever that might be. That's exactly right.
Do you feel interrupted now or do you feel like
you're you know, in a relationship that's in this, you know,
just in this kind of strange soup of this time.
I like that phrase, strange soup. Yeah. I think at
(15:38):
a certain point, you know, this becomes the new normal,
you know, whether we like it or not, it's now
we have to accept it. And so I now have
come to a place where I think, you know, this
isn't interrupted time. It's not that this time doesn't count.
It's not that it's a break. It's just time of
(16:01):
a different feel and time of a different texture and
with a different rhythm. My kind of takeaway is to
do my best to just take it one day at
a time, one moment at a time. And one of
the things I've realized is that the heightened uncertainty that
so many of us are feeling right now, truthfully uncertainty
(16:24):
of always with us, you know, whether we're together and
like blissfully going off to have a meal at a
great restaurant, like we never know what our fate is
going to be we never know how a relationship is
going to play out. I certainly never thought I was
going to get divorced, you know, I thought I was
going to be with my ex husband forever, and then
(16:44):
the idea of falling in love again was utterly laughable.
So I've experienced outcomes that I felt certain would never
ever ever come to path, And what I know for
sure is that I'm better for them. So I think
it's easy to look at uncertainty and feel fear and apprehension,
(17:04):
but there can be welcome gifts on the other side
of the fear and of the uncertainty. I love that.
That's I think that's such a great message because really
we all always are living in uncertainty. We just don't
walk around conscious of it, with a name attached to
(17:24):
it and a virus attached to it, and you know,
fantasies attached to that. We we walk around with all
of our plans and all of our certainty is when
in fact we're always My friend Sylvia Borstine, the great
Buddhist teacher, has this great um expression like we're all
just hanging on the vine. We're always hanging on the line,
(17:46):
and this just underscores that, but that doesn't have to
be terrifying it. I mean, it is, it is. I
mean I'm not minimizing it. And certainly many many people
are suffering um tremendously. But there's a way in which
this uncertainty and learning how to live with it in
this time out of time and not wishing the time away,
(18:11):
not wishing for it to be over, because this is
the day we have, This is the day we have,
This is the time we have. And one thing I
thought about I talked about this in my memoir because
that was you know, when I was caring for my mother,
that was a time of excruciating uncertainty. Um. I didn't
know what any given day would look like with her
because of her dementia. I didn't have any sort of
(18:33):
script for how to be with her. And one thing
I really thought about was that, like if you think
about what a diamond is, a diamond is the result
of time and pressure. But no piece of coal would
ever choose those circumstances, Like, no one opts in for that,
because when you hear in it and you're in that process,
(18:56):
it is excruciating. You don't know when it's going to end.
You're submitting to all of the discomfort. But you don't
get to the place of clarity and strength and brilliant
and that next version of yourself without that process. And
(19:18):
I think so often we think of challenges in life.
I think especially in America, you know, we think of
like challenges of the things that we take on. But
I actually think it's the challenges that we don't choose,
you know, the challenges that we have to submit to
that we never would have opted for. Those are the
things I think that really make us shine because they
(19:40):
forced us two tap into different parts of ourselves and
to find resilience. And when we're in the moment and
we think we cannot bear it, we endure and we
persist and you know what choice do we have and
we come out stronger hmm. And even if that means
(20:02):
facing negative outcomes with difficult things, I think that is
not to be shied away from it. I think it's
to be embraced um with the difficulty and with all
of the you know, the recognition of how hard it
is in the moment. Well, that is a beautiful and
(20:22):
hopeful message. Cap off this conversation. I so appreciate everything
that you've said. And I think so many people will
will relate and will be nodding as they listen, and
just wish you the best of luck with your book
and your romance and UH and your next steps. So
(20:43):
thanks Maya, Thank you so much, Danny, and thank you
for making space for the time period with this podcast.
It's my pleasure, all right. Take care of you too.
Thanks for stening to the Way We Live Now. Tell
us the way you're living now. We want to hear
(21:05):
call us on. You might want to get a pen
for this nine O nine three eight that's nine O
nine seven three eight nine nine five and record your
story and we might just use it on the pod. Also,
you can join our Facebook group at facebook dot com
slash groups slash the Way We Live Now Pod. We
(21:28):
are creating a community here and we would love for
you to join us. You can find me on Instagram
at Danny Ryder. The Way We Live Now is a
production of I Heart Radio. It's produced by a Lowe Broulante.
Bethan Macaluso is executive producer. Special thanks to Tristan McNeil
and Tyler Klang. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever
(21:50):
you get your podcasts.
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