January 6, 2025 • 50 mins
Happy New Year! While most people seem to be busy making plans for the new year or reacting to others who are making plans for the new year, Ryan & Nicole turn their attention to the certain inevitability that plans or no, life sometimes hands us small and large disruptions. Among the larger types are those which are so large that their inability to have planned or accounted for them is an essential part of their character. When these come, they beget the necessity of a radical reorientation.
Discussed: New Year, New Year's resolutions, planning, futility in planning, man plans and God laughs, when things don't go according to plan, everything happens for a reason, hopeless positivity, depression, anxiety, panic, grief, full-bodied emotional experiences, evangelical Christianity, solidarity, practicing presence, radical reorientation, vulnerability, caring for yourself well, panic, Thich Nhat Hanh, home is the way, the power of now, and more.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
This is Ryan Thomas Neese.
(00:03):
And this is Nicole Neese.
This is the Closer Podcast.
Hello, hello.
Hello, hello.
How are you?
This fine morning.
Good.
This fine Southern California.
It is a fine Southern California morning.
(00:25):
We are sitting on our porch.
You have this beautiful succulent garden that is in like an old Spanish fountain thing.
So pretty.
And the birds, they are a chirpin.
They are a chirpin.
And man, it is supposed to be 76 on January the 2nd.
(00:50):
2025.
2025.
And I can tell you this weekend in St. Louis where I am from, they are calling for 10 inches
of snow.
And I would rather punch myself in the face than be a part of that madness.
Yeah.
Yeah, I do not miss that.
Me either.
(01:10):
So happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
Thanks for sticking with us for What Is Now Today 10 episodes.
If you like this, please share it with the people that you know, anybody you think needs
to hear it, people you think do not need to hear it, or body.
Or body in the club getting tipsy.
(01:32):
No.
No.
Okay.
No, not that song.
Let us have you not do that song.
Let us leave that to the original artist.
So we are looking at the New Year here and thinking about how much planning goes on at
this time of the year.
I think appropriately so.
Yeah.
It is a calendar reset.
(01:53):
It is a good inroad for a life reset.
Of course, there is the thing that everybody knows about called New Year's Resolutions.
And there is also the sort of reaction against New Year's Resolutions where everyone tells
you, I saw a meme on Instagram yesterday that said with soft music and I think two bears
(02:14):
hugging a cartoon, just remember, you do not need to do New Year's Resolutions.
You can just, I do not really know what it was, but I got the idea.
You stopped reading.
Yeah, I did.
If I did read it, it is gone already.
And I understand that as well.
Sometimes everybody is so busy talking about what they are going to do different.
It is like, hey, you can just keep living your life if you want.
(02:36):
And I think all of that is well and good.
When we start thinking about planning and the New Year, we are all for it.
And I think we do a little bit of reorienting ourselves around that concept.
But no sooner do we start talking about it than we just sort of become aware that like,
oh, you know what?
(02:57):
For us, life has been full of a series of, wow, it is really nice that you made that
plan.
That was cute.
There is like an old Yiddish adage.
I will not give it to you in the original Yiddish because I do not actually know what
the heck it is.
(03:17):
I would have been so impressed.
Yeah, no doubt.
I will look to do something for you equally impressive.
Work on that this year.
Yeah, thank you.
That is my plan for the year is I am going to work on my Yiddish.
That man plans and God laughs.
Yes.
And I think that has been the experience we have had across much of our, even our young
(03:41):
time together as we were kind of reflecting on episodes eight and nine where we told our
origin story how much, you know, no sooner do we get married that we lost our jobs and
then we moved and then we got pregnant and we ended up turning down my scholarship offer
for PhD work and what a radical trajectory alteration that was.
(04:06):
And then along, you know, the last 17, 18 years of our relationship, there have been
countless examples of in big and small ways just like things just kind of don't go.
Plans are good.
You need them.
You should be making them.
And often things don't go according to plan.
And we were even kind of thinking there are almost like various levels to this too.
(04:28):
Yeah.
Yeah, I think there, you know, there's the I want to go to the gym and I'm going to
go three days a week.
And by the end of the year, I was going maybe an average of one day a week.
Yeah, right.
If that right, the little things like that, then there's stuff like with Lily, we weren't
(04:49):
planning on being pregnant when we were.
We were going to be pregnant someday.
Right.
It just like advances the timeline.
So it was like a plan that you had in place or we had in place that then like, oh, plan
has been sped up.
So it was like that thinking about moving out to Southern California in part of our
long term plan had always been we wanted to move out here.
(05:12):
Right.
And we were talking about when, when the kids.
Yeah, they were done with school.
Right, done with high school.
Not to move a ton and kind of give them a stable base.
But then, you know, my dad got sick and it moved the timeline up.
We wanted to be out here.
We wanted to be around family for them and for our kids.
Yeah, and those are the types of adjustments that while highly disruptive to one degree
(05:39):
or another, I think most people do have, I mean, you know that theoretically if in no
other way, you know, health concerns of you or your immediate family or your family of
origin, like these are going to be things that you face throughout life.
And you know that there's going to be impasses with like jobs and, you know, I don't know,
(05:59):
for lack of better terms, money and that sort of thing.
And then.
There's a third kind.
There is a third kind.
It's like a larger, more disruptive.
Those are the ones that like you just didn't see coming that like they're not ones that
(06:20):
fall along the lines of, oh, I expect to kind of have difficulty in this area.
Yeah.
And so when it happens, you're kind of partially acclimated already.
You knew this was at least a possibility.
I think particularly for us, the foray into midlife, roughly the last seven, eight years,
you know, I'll be 46 in March.
So I would say since like 38 or so, we've had a bunch of things that we've simply just
(06:46):
like, oh, wow, I did not see that one coming.
No, not even kind of.
Yeah.
Not even sort of.
And the irony of those types of things is that they're the type that you you kind of
in postlude or in the middle of you're like analyzing, like, how did this come to be and
(07:11):
what did I miss and how could I have planned?
And it's like, no, that's it.
You couldn't have planned for this precisely because you didn't know that it was a possibility.
And so there's like varying levels of plan disruption.
(07:33):
So sort of like as we rounded to the new year and everyone's thinking about plans or thinking
about not making plans, the main thing that we started thinking of is, you know, like
whatever you plan here, that's really nice and we hope that's good.
And in fact, for a great many of our plans, they probably will be reasonably able to be
(07:53):
pulled off and then some won't.
And that'll be one kind of adjustment.
And then sometimes meteor falls and crashes into your house.
And really, how could you have planned for that?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, that it's at that level of disruption.
And not only could you not have planned for it, but the plans you did make are now not
(08:18):
even relevant to you.
Right.
And you're sort of trying to figure out what to do from there.
And I think that's the thing that felt interesting to us is like, as we survey the land over
the last, yes, 17, 18 years of our relationship, married family life, and then also more recently
(08:40):
the last seven or eight years of the like presto change-o.
Like you thought one plus one equals two, and not only does it not equal two, it doesn't
even equal a number.
It's like one plus one equals purple.
Right?
It's just something totally ridiculous.
(09:01):
It's ridiculous.
It's a non sequitur.
It doesn't follow.
How did I get here?
Yes.
And you can't take anything that you know and apply it to make it make sense.
Right.
Yes.
And that's probably one of the central themes about this.
Let's ask this question.
What kinds of responses have you seen people have when, you know, things stop going according
(09:29):
to plan across any of these domains?
Those domains, yeah.
I think the most common one, at least from my vantage point and certainly one that I
had for a very long time would be like a glass half full kind of perspective, trying to always
see the positive no matter how dark and dreary it was, which is easier in some of those domains.
(09:57):
The third domain, the one plus one equals purple, that starts getting to be really difficult.
Yeah.
What do you mean glass half full or positive?
How does that look practically?
I think it looks like saying, here's this thing that didn't go according to plan.
(10:17):
I could be really miserable about that and mad and upset.
And because for me, those feelings were often things I tried to avoid.
I would be like, well, but maybe this is what was supposed to happen or this is, you know,
something happens for a reason or...
(10:39):
Not one of my favorite phrases, by the way.
It's like a good way to immediately have maybe like, I start like twitching and I like, all
of a sudden I'm, you know, like, it sounds like a buzzer.
But yes, you're right.
Okay, I see what you mean.
Like you don't want to feel the negativity that's associated with disruption.
(11:05):
And so you start mobilizing a lot of your efforts to try to organize this in a way that...
Firmly plants me in La La Land.
Yeah, right.
This thing which is observably, ostensibly negative and disruptive to your life is somehow
positive.
I mean, okay, like, you know, hear me sort of body slamming that one turn of phrase,
(11:30):
which maybe I can unpack a little bit in a second.
But there probably are, and I think I've seen this with you, like, there are a lot of necessarily
helpful things about that.
So before we like dissect that as being exclusively negative, which by the way, it is not, why
(11:51):
do you suppose that's a decent way to approach things at least some of the time?
Like glass half full, there's got to be a reason for this and it's going to be for my
good kind of thing.
Yeah, well, I would say when I used to say that in my 20s, I don't think I had this perspective.
I think I was on the cusp of trying to understand it.
(12:12):
For me now, what that means, because I still implement it in a lot of areas of my life,
is there are hard things here.
There's land of the icky and I can experience those.
I can look at them.
I can learn from them.
I can be curious about them.
(12:33):
And I can also feel some positivity out of it.
There may be purpose behind this.
I'm growing as a human or this is leading me down an interesting path I didn't think
I would ever go down and gosh, actually, I think I like this one a little bit better
than I thought I would.
I mean, let's just take a really basic one from like my early teens.
I had a list of the kind of guy that I was going to like date slash marry, right?
(12:58):
Had all these attributes.
Yeah, yeah, I think I think I've seen this.
Yes.
And what I have said many a times, not only to our daughter, but to other people when
talking about this time of life was all of those attributes, you actually hold all of
them.
(13:18):
There's only one that you didn't.
And that was that you're going to be six foot tall.
Wow, I wondered if that was coming.
My personality is six feet tall.
It is.
My personality is six, six.
I'm six feet tall.
But there are also so many things about you far superior and more delightful and enjoyable
(13:38):
than the things I could have come up with on that list.
There are things that earlier in life, if I would have just said, well, he doesn't meet,
he's not six foot, so he's out.
I could have been missing something.
I'm five, nine, by the way.
Five, eight, and three quarters.
I know, you're a tall guy.
You're not a shorty.
Let's get it on the record.
I just had this vision of dirty dancing and lifting me above.
(14:02):
You had to be taller to be able to do that.
The physics on that are somewhat dubious at this point.
But this isn't feeling clear for me.
Why is this positive?
What about this positivity is in fact actually helpful and positive and productive?
What is it that makes it helpful rather than just hopeless positivity and la, la, la, la,
(14:25):
la, I swear it's all okay?
I think what it does is that it enables me to say there are good things even when things
don't feel good.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
Right.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, so that your initial orientation is like, hey, okay, this feels bad.
(14:46):
There are things about it that are bad, but let's not plunge off the deep end here.
So it does sort of at worst, when it's not working super amazingly, it potentially closes
you off from the negative things and sort of pretends like they're not there.
But what you're saying is I can experience the bad things and the good things, which
(15:11):
would seemingly be mutually exclusive in fact are not.
These two things can go together.
Yeah.
I think that it's sort of like when you are going through something difficult and someone
says everything happens for a reason, it can feel dismissive.
And maybe you even, if it was not even intended that way, it can be received that way.
(15:37):
Because of this thing that I'm saying about like, somehow it's like, it doesn't matter
that it feels negative.
Just know that good things are coming sort of thing, which sort of invalidates that.
Yeah, but I feel like crap.
Yeah.
But this thing is really hard or no, I didn't plan on it going this way and I don't know
what to sort of do with my disruptive plan.
(15:57):
But if you can present that glass half full or that happens for a reason with maybe more
context of like, yes, this really does suck or no, this wasn't what we planned.
Also, there are good things that we could maybe take from this.
If nothing else, we can be talking about this together and that brings us, knits us closer
(16:24):
together.
I don't know, it's harder to say with each individual thing and I would change it maybe
with each thing that goes on.
But certainly like with Lily, when we got pregnant with her, that was six years ahead
of the plan.
Yeah.
Right?
And I was like, holy crap, uh-oh, what are we gonna do?
But the joy of that is that we have this beautiful human being that would have been potentially
(16:48):
a different version of that beautiful human being because six years later, it would have
been just a different human.
Right.
Literally.
And we would have gone through different things.
We would have lived in different places.
Our experiences would have been different.
I can say so much of that with hindsight.
You can't say it when you're going through it so much.
Right, which is why saying, you know, everything happens for a reason too quickly, with that
(17:15):
little time to pause and feel the impact can really run the risk of feeling, as you worded
it, dismissive because it sort of doesn't allow you the benefit of that full experience.
You are really scared.
I do need to kind of sit and be with that side of things.
(17:35):
I need to care for myself well.
And if you gloss over all of that to get straight to the positivity, it really sort of runs
interference on the larger experience.
So taken in proportion positivity as an orientation can be immensely helpful.
(17:57):
And I think that's right.
I mean, if I look at our relationship, I've wired the other direction some of the time,
which is to say I'm very like, no, this really does suck.
Like you don't get it.
Like take a look at what I'm saying to you.
I like, yeah, no doubt it's gonna, it probably won't kill us.
(18:17):
But look at what this is going to do.
Oh my gosh.
And I really have needed you across time and space to reorient me because I can kind of
lose myself there, like if you lose yourself on the positive side of things and it can
lead to like a loose orientation to the reality of some of the negativity that's at hand.
(18:44):
I can lose myself on the other end.
And across most of my life have been prone to depressive streaks and kind of feeling
listless and lost.
And I have really needed people to go, hey, you know, it's possible that like this could
(19:06):
be really good for you.
And I remember a guy telling me one time, as a matter of fact, it was the last woman
that I dated before you when she broke up with me and I was just really heartbroken.
And I was not, relatively speaking, I was not a spring chicken.
(19:28):
I was 27-ish, something like that.
So I'm approaching 30 and I'm thinking, hey, I'm feeling desirous to have something last
and to be really meaningful for the rest of my life kind of thing, even though we hear
how apparently conflicted I was about that when you examine, you know, your and I's relationship.
(19:50):
But I was just really devastated and deeply depressed and trying to find my way out.
And the guy that used to help me back then said, hey, every time this comes up for you,
I want you to say to yourself, man, I'm so glad this happened.
It's like the best thing that's ever happened to me.
(20:10):
And as we're articulating here, it did kind of feel a little dismissive.
But he was asking me to do it as a thought exercise.
And I remember saying, I can remember there's a couple of buildings in the area that I lived
that I remember walking into these buildings, this thought is occurring to me.
And I remember laughing out loud to myself some of the time being like, this sounds so
(20:34):
dumb what I am doing right now.
Like, I don't believe this at all.
And yet there was something really, it sort of takes your orientation and just turns it
ever so slightly to allow for the possibility that something good, again, that's different
than a sort of hopeless positivity, which in fact is not helpful and just designed to
(20:57):
prevent you from feeling things.
Right.
Yeah, because I can appreciate what he's doing there is trying to help you with your thought
orientation, right?
And for one who is inclined to think more negatively about it, trying to help you think
more positively.
That doesn't mean that we negate the things that are happening.
Yes, it doesn't mean that the thing you're going through doesn't genuinely feel negative.
(21:21):
And from your current vantage point is negative.
Yeah.
And I would say that is something I had to, you know, work on between us two was a lot
of times you'd be like, no, hear my pain.
And I'd be like, yeah, I am.
But this positive thing over here, you'd be like, no, I don't think you're really hearing
it.
And I genuinely thought that I was.
(21:41):
I was hearing it as much as I maybe potentially could at that moment.
But what I didn't realize was by hearing the things that were painful for you, that I felt
pain within myself because I loved you so much and I didn't want you to be in pain,
that my need to keep driving the positive was trying to stomp on your feelings.
(22:08):
Yeah.
Or if not, I don't know if I experienced it as being stomped on, but certainly it short
circuited something that felt necessary for me.
Like when things don't go according to plan in big or small ways, particularly in the
big ones, there's a certain grief associated with that.
Like if I really had my heart set on this thing in a really concrete way, and that could
(22:30):
be something, you know, small or large, something relational, something life ambition, and then
it becomes manifestly clear that it's not going to happen, grief is appropriate.
That's the right response.
It's no fun.
Yeah.
But it's the right response.
And again, there's a difference between getting lost there and not going there at all.
(22:51):
And as it regards relationships between you and me, for example, I think what I was wanting
a lot of times was exactly what you described, which was for you to suffer with me.
And I don't mean like for you to suffer with me.
I mean for you to suffer too, for us to be in solidarity together.
And arguably, the thing that makes the high end of a disappointment transition experience
(23:17):
where something bad happened and then as you are saying, something good comes out of it
potentially, part of what makes that experience a full-bodied experience is that we went through
the whole thing.
We did suffer a loss, even if it's just a loss of something potential, a loss of a dream.
We did grieve that together and then we did come out the other end and look at the new
(23:42):
life that has sprung forth from the wound.
But kind of like not acknowledging that it's a wound, that's a part that I feel really
sensitive to.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think what was new for me was learning, well, maybe partially what we're saying here.
(24:04):
When we were younger, the things that kind of didn't go a certain way, we were a little
more flexible, a little more fluid.
We could kind of move around and we didn't have so many things tying us down.
I decided to move from California to Nashville.
I packed up my Honda Civic and drove my little behind out there.
Now if I need to move, I mean, gosh, our move from Missouri here was months of planning
(24:27):
and it just takes so much more because there's so much more rootedness in where we're at.
Yeah.
Right?
And it's just germane to being at the station of life that we're at.
Right.
And I would suspect for me, at least I'll speak, is that it is some of that that causes
the, like, when the unexpected comes, you're like, oh, I thought that I was...
(24:52):
Because I'm so rooted, that will prevent some of these things from happening, right?
If I'm like really intentional and I'm present and I'm rooted and I have a plan and I've
laid it out and it's really clear, then I'm gonna...
All of which are great things that you should be doing.
Yes.
Like those are...
(25:12):
That's the way to do it.
That's right.
That will prevent any kind of really massive pitfalls from happening.
Right, and that one's not true, right?
It's like, if I do this, if I plan this, if I'm faithful and have high integrity around
I'm willing to put in the hard work, and I'm like...
And again, you have to do all of those things.
(25:34):
That's right.
Yes.
And know...
Well, to the degree that a thing can be prevented, a life disruption, a not going according to
plan, to the degree that it can be prevented, those are the right things to do.
And they're good as an exercise within themselves because they build up tremendous things within
(25:54):
you.
And if you think that that equals bad stuff won't happen to me...
Yeah, no, that's not true.
Which I think most people do.
Yeah.
Certainly, we do when we're younger, but my experience is a lot of older folks still seem
to think that even when you can kind of like look at their lives and be like, you guys
(26:15):
are saying this and I'm looking at your life and I can see like three things that are eating
at you right now.
And you don't seem to be acknowledging that your planning was apparently insufficient
to prevent this from happening.
And really, I think the reason why people don't is because they're desperately fearful
that they've done something wrong.
That like the fact that life did not go according to plan means I made a miscalculation somewhere.
(26:40):
And no doubt, many things that are disruptive are outgrowths of in some big or small way
of some sort of miscalculation.
But part of the deal is that even when that's true, the miscalculation was a calculation
you didn't know.
(27:00):
How could you possibly have accounted for what you did not know?
Right.
So if the positivity thing is one way of responding, another way of responding that I think is
closer to where we live these days.
You sort of just said it a second ago.
It's like, oh, this is, I think this is a part of like what it means to be alive.
(27:25):
I'm just recognizing I'm saying this thing again that I've been saying since the first
couple of episodes, which is I put that in my this is what it means to be human bag.
Right.
So part of the deal is that there really is a reorientation that has to occur, particularly
when you start to lean into the larger disruptions.
(27:45):
The one plus one does not equal to one plus one apparently equals purple.
There's no amount of planning or foreknowledge that I could have had to inorganically advance
my developmental awareness that this was a thing.
At least for myself, I needed to erratically reorient.
(28:10):
I even think I would have told you that I was as aware and oriented to the nature of
bad stuff happens as one could possibly be.
But there were just things that I didn't know.
And I think I would have told you I know there are things that I don't know, but I don't
think I really understood what that meant.
I think I thought like, no, but I probably know because I'm like, I'm pretty I'm pretty
(28:34):
20 steps ahead.
Yeah.
It's sort of like a lifestyle for me of being 20 steps ahead of every thing and everyone
and trying to figure it all out.
But so this is another layer in to developmental humanity.
You know, it was like, stuff's going to happen.
(28:57):
All of your plans were great.
They didn't account for this.
That wasn't really a miscalculation on your part.
Or if it was a miscalculation, it was the type of miscalculation that you could not
not miscalculate.
Yeah.
Like you.
Yeah, there was no avoiding it.
No, there's no avoiding this.
(29:17):
And a lot of what I see around the everything happens for a reason stuff is a primary avoidance
of that right there.
Like, wait a minute.
Are you telling me that I must now turn and face a certain vulnerability across the rest
(29:38):
of my life that no matter my planning, no matter my calculation, no matter my ability
to divine the earth, the sun, the stars and the moon, and to have even like mystical or
special insight, which many of us are open to and aware of and find helpful, that there
are things that are going to come that I didn't like.
(30:00):
And like the oh, God, what do I do now?
I think that's really what that's about.
It's like everything might happen for a reason, but as for your ability to know what the heck
that reason is or what difference that makes in the thing happening.
I mean, a part of the deal here is the acknowledgement that some things that sit down on your life
(30:25):
are so cataclysmically disruptive that whatever their supposed reason that the universe has
allowed this to drop into your lap is doesn't appear to be, I don't care.
I experienced this a lot in evangelical Christianity where they didn't say everything happens for
(30:46):
a reason.
I never, well, occasionally people said that, but that wasn't like preached.
That wasn't a preached message.
It was usually that God has a plan for your life.
And as you are saying about the positivity aspect, I'm like, no doubt that's helpful.
Like let's say that's true.
God has a plan for my life.
It's very helpful for me to know that and it does bring some sense of comfort.
(31:10):
Also dude, I have had some shit go down for me that I'm like, I couldn't possibly give
a rat's ass less what God's plan is.
And some people, you know, they hear you say that in those circles and they're just like,
how could you?
And I'm like, man, I just am so fundamentally connected to my humanity here.
(31:32):
I don't know what that plan is.
I don't give a crap at all.
I'm just over here sweating bullets trying to figure out how I'm going to make my life
keep ticking.
You know, I'm staring down the barrel of something that is terrifying to me and you want me to
farm it out.
I'm like the same God who allowed this to get to me has got a plan.
(31:54):
Oh boy, aren't I excited.
And so something has to happen at this kind of an intersection that I believe can only
go through the doorway of a full on admission that I am vulnerable in the world.
Not just that like I carry myself with a certain vulnerability, which you might find compelling
(32:17):
or not, but that like no, literally the Latin root of that term vulnerable, vulna, means
to wound.
Like I am going to be wounded in life in spite of my best plans.
Something about that for me when I really squared up to it and it did not happen until
(32:37):
37, 38.
It's like there is stuff coming in your life.
It's not about your family of origin.
It's not about the stuff you grew up.
It's not about your childhood wounds.
I mean, it may touch them, but it isn't principally about them.
Something is going to plop down in your life.
And I don't know if we've talked about this yet before, but the way I tend to think of
(32:59):
it is statistical probabilities in your life are going to start to play themselves out.
I think we have talked about this.
You haven't had a problem with your kids yet, here it comes.
You haven't had a problem in your relationships yet, here it comes.
You haven't had a problem with your health yet, here it comes.
FedEx, here it comes.
You haven't had FedEx yet, here it comes.
How's it going, man?
(33:22):
You just leave it stuff right there.
It's great.
Thank you.
You too.
Thank you.
But the idea of that, like, there is no amount of planning.
Even if you think you know, you don't know.
And there's no way to have a new orientation about these things until you go through it,
(33:43):
right?
Until it's happened to you and then you've gone through it.
The more you fight the thing and the opportunity to go through it and learn it, the more it
just persists and continues and you either get stuck on the path that you're on and maybe
that's okay for you.
Yeah, it just keeps, like, it keeps bringing it around to you again and again.
Oh, here's another.
(34:03):
Oh, here it is again.
Here it is again.
Here it is again.
No, you don't want to look at it?
Okay, here it is again.
And inevitably it's somewhere in there, even if the really big thing that lands in your
lap is not that thing that's come around 18 times, that thing that's come around 18 times
will play a part in the thing that lands in your lap in terms of you being able to get
through it.
It's the skill set there that you're working on.
(34:25):
Yeah, so what you're saying is, I like this so much.
This is so spot on.
I'm kind of saying we reach this point where we recognize that to continue living life
from this point, life has now not gone according to plan to the degree that a sort of reorientation
is going to be required.
(34:47):
And the reorientation is somehow about recognizing that no amount of planning, no amount of forethought,
no amount of good insight, no amount of coaching, help, et cetera, is going to insulate me from
the difficult things that are going to come my way.
And there's a certain vulnerability associated with that.
And in avoiding that, things are going to present themselves over and over and over
(35:10):
again, particularly around that lesson.
You're just going to keep telling you, hey, I think you're vulnerable.
Hey, you're vulnerable.
Hey, you're vulnerable.
And even when that isn't the thing being directly presented, it's some other less global, different,
smaller other thing that that thing will be touched by your inability or unwillingness
(35:34):
to see this larger lesson we're pointing to.
Yes.
Yeah, wow.
It feels clear to me when you lay it out like that.
Like how do they not touch each other?
How could they not?
Yeah, sort of like you kind of won't admit your vulnerability in the world.
And even though this thing does not appear to be about that, it is touched by that because
(35:57):
you will respond as though you're not in touch with your vulnerability in the world.
Gosh, that's tough.
And I think a lot of people that we see at Midlife who are really struggling in this
way, there is this kind of traffic jam of developmental stuff that just kind of hasn't
(36:19):
been reconciled.
It's sort of like the folks that I know that are doing well in their 40s and 50s, maybe
late 30s, they're not really dealing with their parents so much anymore and wounds from
childhood and family of origin.
They seem to have squared up to the fact that life hands you stuff that not only is it disruptive,
(36:46):
it is stuff that is disruptive in a way that you could not have planned for.
And they're now trying to learn to hold what it means to exist in a world where you find
that you're kind of vulnerable no matter where you go.
And how do I still be open to the world and at the same time carry my vulnerability well
(37:09):
and care for myself well?
And the folks who aren't doing that, there's like a pile up of all those issues.
So what do you do, practically?
Yes.
Yes.
Right.
(37:30):
That is the correct question.
This happens in therapy a lot.
Like we'll be talking, have you had this happen?
Well, you're talking around some thing that is, it's not exactly pie in the sky, but it
is a high level meta sort of perspective.
And people want this so bad, they want you to give it to them.
(37:51):
And I feel it.
I want it just as bad.
And I do with the people that I ask in my life.
But you're saying like what does it look like practically that I am now reckoning with a
new orientation in the world that suggests this vulnerability?
(38:11):
And my answer is yes, that is the correct question.
Like what I think it is, if you can make it practical, is that you carry that question
with you day to day.
Like okay, today in the things that I go through from the rest of the day between now and the
time that I go to sleep, what does it look like to sort of be in full acknowledgement
(38:33):
of my vulnerability?
Like if it was true that I'm vulnerable, what would I do today to care for myself and others
well?
And so for me, for one thing, it very much equals in a way that I never had this motivation
and it showed in my practical behavior to go to yoga, breath, plunge as committed as
(39:00):
I am.
People will sometimes say to me, oh Ryan, you seem so disciplined.
And I'm like, I see what you are saying.
That is one way to frame it.
It doesn't even feel flattering to me because it feels untrue.
I'm like, no, I don't feel disciplined.
I feel extremely motivated.
Right.
Because I'm vulnerable.
(39:21):
And I am trying to help my nervous system accept that because the difference in the
way that I feel when I wake up at about 4 a.m. every morning and when I am done with yoga,
breath, work, plunge by roughly 7, 8 a.m., it's like two totally different planets.
(39:45):
So the question is, if you want to make this really practical, if you're vulnerable, how
should you care for yourself and others well today?
What would that actually look like?
What do you think?
What do I think?
What does the orientation look like practically?
(40:06):
Do you have something beyond yes?
Mine's always uh-huh.
Yeah.
We have that, yeah.
It's similar, but I think before I can even get there, because sometimes even that execution
is difficult depending on the thing that's landed in my lap.
(40:28):
So sometimes it's practicing just the presence of like the immediate moment.
That sometimes is all I can offer myself is just right now.
Okay, and now just right now and just like right now.
Yeah, and your brain says, and just right now.
And just right now, yeah.
(40:50):
And finding ways for me to stay in my body and present.
They are what you're saying.
They're going to yoga.
They're doing plunge, breath work, all of those, moving my body and dance or whatever
the thing may be.
And sometimes just getting there is so hard practically like depending on the really difficult
(41:10):
thing that's been handed to me.
So the very first step is just right now.
Just right now.
Yeah, and as many times a day as you have to do that.
Yeah, no, I think it is as many times and sometimes that looks like letting myself off
(41:32):
the hook for the other things that I am quote unquote supposed to be doing.
Sometimes I need to be able to be just right now wherever that is.
That could be in my bed.
That could be on my couch.
That could be in my car.
I mean, it's so many different things.
(41:54):
But giving myself permission that just right now doesn't have to bring in all the to do's.
Right?
So if we go back to the New Year's resolution, the idea of like things that I have planned
for myself, things that may or may not go according to that plan.
If I can give myself permission to be just right now, the things that didn't go according
(42:15):
to plan, there's more room for them.
So then it lends itself for me to do whatever the next practical step is, if that makes
sense.
Because I'm just right now and right now doesn't have a plan.
It's just right now.
I'm kind of talking about like I've got to go do the things and you're saying no, you
(42:40):
don't.
I'm saying no, those are things sometimes that if you can get there, depending on the
thing that's been handed to your lap, sometimes those are the things you go do because they're
accessible and you get to them.
Sometimes the thing that lands in your lap is so big that even getting to those right
away feel hard.
And then you start putting this additional pressure on yourself.
(43:02):
Well, I have to go plunge.
I have to go yoga.
I have to go do breath work because it's the thing that whatever.
And sometimes for me, I need to give myself permission to say, no, just be right here
right now.
And if we can get there, great.
And if we can't, we'll try again later.
(43:24):
Just both and because sometimes you can't.
You just can't.
Yeah.
And I think what's interesting is sometimes the things that get in the way are less about
me and more about others.
It doubles back on itself twice.
(43:44):
It's okay.
I need to go to the gym to take care of myself, but I need to be present right now because
I can't get to the gym unless I'm present.
And I can't be present because I have all these things.
It's less about going to the gym or going to yoga.
It's more about I need to care for this person.
I need to care for this person.
I need to make sure.
And I have to be this type of mom and I have to be this type of spouse and I have to be.
(44:07):
And it's like, whoa.
Like if you don't take care of you, no one else, least of all you, no one else wins.
And it is not even possible.
You're making me think of some times in the last even six months where an unexpected thing
(44:32):
happened of the type that we were talking about, pretty stinking disruptive to the degree
that like I was in pretty full on panic mode.
And I'm not a person, I am prone to a great many things.
Panic?
I don't think so.
Anxiety, yes.
(44:52):
Depressive stuff, yes.
But panic, like full on panic, like the world is burning and I don't know what to do.
I don't think that's one of them.
And I was in that place and I was thinking about how there were nights where I could
not settle down and you had to like wrap me up and lay with me and just say, like just
right now, just hear this thing exactly that you're saying.
(45:17):
Where sometimes it was what's needed right now and what's needed right now is for you
to rest.
Right.
Because rest is central to your ability to cope with what's going on for us right now.
And there's something so dialed in and practical about that.
But what's difficult about this and maybe feels at odds with people who consider themselves
(45:39):
to otherwise be functional and healthy or where we think we're supposed to be at this
stage of our life is that it is inconsistent with that.
It's like, I don't want to be me, Ryan.
I don't want to be 45 years old and having to have my wife do that for me.
(45:59):
On the one hand, it's beautiful and I love it and I am extremely glad that I have it.
And maybe my mind, my thinking mind is like, boy, you're blowing it, dude.
Look at you.
You are 45 years old and this is still happening for you.
And so a lot of the reorientation for me also practically has been learning to get some
(46:21):
distance between me and my mind and the stuff that I think as being objectively real.
And a lot of times it's like, this is a phrase I use a lot, it's like, that's just some shit
you're thinking right now.
That's just some shit you think.
Come back to right now.
I mean, sometimes for me, even in yoga, I will be floating away into the problem of
(46:45):
the day, the week, the month or the year.
And I will say to myself, just now, just here.
Sometimes I say, just these four walls right here, you're safe.
Just do this.
But do you feel the energy that I mean when I say like, it's like humbling and it's like,
(47:08):
man, I am so disrupted that I kind of have to just be here.
And then you realize, no, no, this is actually the only way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like this is it.
This is it.
On New Year's Day, I saw a post from Thich Nhat Hanh that said, there is no way home.
Home is the way.
(47:28):
It's like, ironically, sometimes the place that I find myself at, that I find humbling
and like, oh man, look at me and I'm 45 and I really have to just be oriented to the present
moment.
And then I hear myself say it and I'm like, Ryan, this is the way.
(47:48):
This is the way to the life that you've always wanted is to be radically present here and
now.
So maybe that's the thing we could say that's the most practical of all, even though it's
still maybe lacks that like, but what are my six instructions quality is it's just today.
(48:09):
Just the rest of today.
And if that's too much, then just like the next couple of hours.
And if that's too much, then like just the next 60 seconds.
I don't know if I knew that that radical simplicity was sort of like a way of life.
(48:36):
That is the answer to what I do now.
That is the answer to how to make this practical.
It's like, focus on now.
But wouldn't you say you know that now because you went through the really hard things, like
(48:57):
because the things that landed in your lap, it caused you to have a new orientation and
the new orientation led you to this thing that is more fruitful and more successful
and like more life giving through the ebbs and flows of all of it.
I would.
I did have to go through it to get here.
We did.
(49:17):
Yeah.
But it just somehow feels like reaching this point is sort of like rediscovering something
that was always there.
And like we want it to be more complex than that or something.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's a good way of saying it.
(49:39):
It circles back to itself.
Yeah.
It comes full circle.
And it's like, I'm in the nighttime sky.
In the spinner 201s.
This is Ryan Thomas Neese.
(00:03):
And this is Nicole Neese.
This is the Closer Podcast.
Hello, hello.
Hello, hello.
How are you?
This fine morning.
Good.
This fine Southern California.
It is a fine Southern California morning.
(00:25):
We are sitting on our porch.
You have this beautiful succulent garden that is in like an old Spanish fountain thing.
So pretty.
And the birds, they are a chirpin.
They are a chirpin.
And man, it is supposed to be 76 on January the 2nd.
(00:50):
2025.
2025.
And I can tell you this weekend in St. Louis where I am from, they are calling for 10 inches
of snow.
And I would rather punch myself in the face than be a part of that madness.
Yeah.
Yeah, I do not miss that.
Me either.
(01:10):
So happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
Thanks for sticking with us for What Is Now Today 10 episodes.
If you like this, please share it with the people that you know, anybody you think needs
to hear it, people you think do not need to hear it, or body.
Or body in the club getting tipsy.
(01:32):
No.
No.
Okay.
No, not that song.
Let us have you not do that song.
Let us leave that to the original artist.
So we are looking at the New Year here and thinking about how much planning goes on at
this time of the year.
I think appropriately so.
Yeah.
It is a calendar reset.
(01:53):
It is a good inroad for a life reset.
Of course, there is the thing that everybody knows about called New Year's Resolutions.
And there is also the sort of reaction against New Year's Resolutions where everyone tells
you, I saw a meme on Instagram yesterday that said with soft music and I think two bears
(02:14):
hugging a cartoon, just remember, you do not need to do New Year's Resolutions.
You can just, I do not really know what it was, but I got the idea.
You stopped reading.
Yeah, I did.
If I did read it, it is gone already.
And I understand that as well.
Sometimes everybody is so busy talking about what they are going to do different.
It is like, hey, you can just keep living your life if you want.
(02:36):
And I think all of that is well and good.
When we start thinking about planning and the New Year, we are all for it.
And I think we do a little bit of reorienting ourselves around that concept.
But no sooner do we start talking about it than we just sort of become aware that like,
oh, you know what?
(02:57):
For us, life has been full of a series of, wow, it is really nice that you made that
plan.
That was cute.
There is like an old Yiddish adage.
I will not give it to you in the original Yiddish because I do not actually know what
the heck it is.
(03:17):
I would have been so impressed.
Yeah, no doubt.
I will look to do something for you equally impressive.
Work on that this year.
Yeah, thank you.
That is my plan for the year is I am going to work on my Yiddish.
That man plans and God laughs.
Yes.
And I think that has been the experience we have had across much of our, even our young
(03:41):
time together as we were kind of reflecting on episodes eight and nine where we told our
origin story how much, you know, no sooner do we get married that we lost our jobs and
then we moved and then we got pregnant and we ended up turning down my scholarship offer
for PhD work and what a radical trajectory alteration that was.
(04:06):
And then along, you know, the last 17, 18 years of our relationship, there have been
countless examples of in big and small ways just like things just kind of don't go.
Plans are good.
You need them.
You should be making them.
And often things don't go according to plan.
And we were even kind of thinking there are almost like various levels to this too.
(04:28):
Yeah.
Yeah, I think there, you know, there's the I want to go to the gym and I'm going to
go three days a week.
And by the end of the year, I was going maybe an average of one day a week.
Yeah, right.
If that right, the little things like that, then there's stuff like with Lily, we weren't
(04:49):
planning on being pregnant when we were.
We were going to be pregnant someday.
Right.
It just like advances the timeline.
So it was like a plan that you had in place or we had in place that then like, oh, plan
has been sped up.
So it was like that thinking about moving out to Southern California in part of our
long term plan had always been we wanted to move out here.
(05:12):
Right.
And we were talking about when, when the kids.
Yeah, they were done with school.
Right, done with high school.
Not to move a ton and kind of give them a stable base.
But then, you know, my dad got sick and it moved the timeline up.
We wanted to be out here.
We wanted to be around family for them and for our kids.
Yeah, and those are the types of adjustments that while highly disruptive to one degree
(05:39):
or another, I think most people do have, I mean, you know that theoretically if in no
other way, you know, health concerns of you or your immediate family or your family of
origin, like these are going to be things that you face throughout life.
And you know that there's going to be impasses with like jobs and, you know, I don't know,
(05:59):
for lack of better terms, money and that sort of thing.
And then.
There's a third kind.
There is a third kind.
It's like a larger, more disruptive.
Those are the ones that like you just didn't see coming that like they're not ones that
(06:20):
fall along the lines of, oh, I expect to kind of have difficulty in this area.
Yeah.
And so when it happens, you're kind of partially acclimated already.
You knew this was at least a possibility.
I think particularly for us, the foray into midlife, roughly the last seven, eight years,
you know, I'll be 46 in March.
So I would say since like 38 or so, we've had a bunch of things that we've simply just
(06:46):
like, oh, wow, I did not see that one coming.
No, not even kind of.
Yeah.
Not even sort of.
And the irony of those types of things is that they're the type that you you kind of
in postlude or in the middle of you're like analyzing, like, how did this come to be and
(07:11):
what did I miss and how could I have planned?
And it's like, no, that's it.
You couldn't have planned for this precisely because you didn't know that it was a possibility.
And so there's like varying levels of plan disruption.
(07:33):
So sort of like as we rounded to the new year and everyone's thinking about plans or thinking
about not making plans, the main thing that we started thinking of is, you know, like
whatever you plan here, that's really nice and we hope that's good.
And in fact, for a great many of our plans, they probably will be reasonably able to be
(07:53):
pulled off and then some won't.
And that'll be one kind of adjustment.
And then sometimes meteor falls and crashes into your house.
And really, how could you have planned for that?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, that it's at that level of disruption.
And not only could you not have planned for it, but the plans you did make are now not
(08:18):
even relevant to you.
Right.
And you're sort of trying to figure out what to do from there.
And I think that's the thing that felt interesting to us is like, as we survey the land over
the last, yes, 17, 18 years of our relationship, married family life, and then also more recently
(08:40):
the last seven or eight years of the like presto change-o.
Like you thought one plus one equals two, and not only does it not equal two, it doesn't
even equal a number.
It's like one plus one equals purple.
Right?
It's just something totally ridiculous.
(09:01):
It's ridiculous.
It's a non sequitur.
It doesn't follow.
How did I get here?
Yes.
And you can't take anything that you know and apply it to make it make sense.
Right.
Yes.
And that's probably one of the central themes about this.
Let's ask this question.
What kinds of responses have you seen people have when, you know, things stop going according
(09:29):
to plan across any of these domains?
Those domains, yeah.
I think the most common one, at least from my vantage point and certainly one that I
had for a very long time would be like a glass half full kind of perspective, trying to always
see the positive no matter how dark and dreary it was, which is easier in some of those domains.
(09:57):
The third domain, the one plus one equals purple, that starts getting to be really difficult.
Yeah.
What do you mean glass half full or positive?
How does that look practically?
I think it looks like saying, here's this thing that didn't go according to plan.
(10:17):
I could be really miserable about that and mad and upset.
And because for me, those feelings were often things I tried to avoid.
I would be like, well, but maybe this is what was supposed to happen or this is, you know,
something happens for a reason or...
(10:39):
Not one of my favorite phrases, by the way.
It's like a good way to immediately have maybe like, I start like twitching and I like, all
of a sudden I'm, you know, like, it sounds like a buzzer.
But yes, you're right.
Okay, I see what you mean.
Like you don't want to feel the negativity that's associated with disruption.
(11:05):
And so you start mobilizing a lot of your efforts to try to organize this in a way that...
Firmly plants me in La La Land.
Yeah, right.
This thing which is observably, ostensibly negative and disruptive to your life is somehow
positive.
I mean, okay, like, you know, hear me sort of body slamming that one turn of phrase,
(11:30):
which maybe I can unpack a little bit in a second.
But there probably are, and I think I've seen this with you, like, there are a lot of necessarily
helpful things about that.
So before we like dissect that as being exclusively negative, which by the way, it is not, why
(11:51):
do you suppose that's a decent way to approach things at least some of the time?
Like glass half full, there's got to be a reason for this and it's going to be for my
good kind of thing.
Yeah, well, I would say when I used to say that in my 20s, I don't think I had this perspective.
I think I was on the cusp of trying to understand it.
(12:12):
For me now, what that means, because I still implement it in a lot of areas of my life,
is there are hard things here.
There's land of the icky and I can experience those.
I can look at them.
I can learn from them.
I can be curious about them.
(12:33):
And I can also feel some positivity out of it.
There may be purpose behind this.
I'm growing as a human or this is leading me down an interesting path I didn't think
I would ever go down and gosh, actually, I think I like this one a little bit better
than I thought I would.
I mean, let's just take a really basic one from like my early teens.
I had a list of the kind of guy that I was going to like date slash marry, right?
(12:58):
Had all these attributes.
Yeah, yeah, I think I think I've seen this.
Yes.
And what I have said many a times, not only to our daughter, but to other people when
talking about this time of life was all of those attributes, you actually hold all of
them.
(13:18):
There's only one that you didn't.
And that was that you're going to be six foot tall.
Wow, I wondered if that was coming.
My personality is six feet tall.
It is.
My personality is six, six.
I'm six feet tall.
But there are also so many things about you far superior and more delightful and enjoyable
(13:38):
than the things I could have come up with on that list.
There are things that earlier in life, if I would have just said, well, he doesn't meet,
he's not six foot, so he's out.
I could have been missing something.
I'm five, nine, by the way.
Five, eight, and three quarters.
I know, you're a tall guy.
You're not a shorty.
Let's get it on the record.
I just had this vision of dirty dancing and lifting me above.
(14:02):
You had to be taller to be able to do that.
The physics on that are somewhat dubious at this point.
But this isn't feeling clear for me.
Why is this positive?
What about this positivity is in fact actually helpful and positive and productive?
What is it that makes it helpful rather than just hopeless positivity and la, la, la, la,
(14:25):
la, I swear it's all okay?
I think what it does is that it enables me to say there are good things even when things
don't feel good.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
Right.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, so that your initial orientation is like, hey, okay, this feels bad.
(14:46):
There are things about it that are bad, but let's not plunge off the deep end here.
So it does sort of at worst, when it's not working super amazingly, it potentially closes
you off from the negative things and sort of pretends like they're not there.
But what you're saying is I can experience the bad things and the good things, which
(15:11):
would seemingly be mutually exclusive in fact are not.
These two things can go together.
Yeah.
I think that it's sort of like when you are going through something difficult and someone
says everything happens for a reason, it can feel dismissive.
And maybe you even, if it was not even intended that way, it can be received that way.
(15:37):
Because of this thing that I'm saying about like, somehow it's like, it doesn't matter
that it feels negative.
Just know that good things are coming sort of thing, which sort of invalidates that.
Yeah, but I feel like crap.
Yeah.
But this thing is really hard or no, I didn't plan on it going this way and I don't know
what to sort of do with my disruptive plan.
(15:57):
But if you can present that glass half full or that happens for a reason with maybe more
context of like, yes, this really does suck or no, this wasn't what we planned.
Also, there are good things that we could maybe take from this.
If nothing else, we can be talking about this together and that brings us, knits us closer
(16:24):
together.
I don't know, it's harder to say with each individual thing and I would change it maybe
with each thing that goes on.
But certainly like with Lily, when we got pregnant with her, that was six years ahead
of the plan.
Yeah.
Right?
And I was like, holy crap, uh-oh, what are we gonna do?
But the joy of that is that we have this beautiful human being that would have been potentially
(16:48):
a different version of that beautiful human being because six years later, it would have
been just a different human.
Right.
Literally.
And we would have gone through different things.
We would have lived in different places.
Our experiences would have been different.
I can say so much of that with hindsight.
You can't say it when you're going through it so much.
Right, which is why saying, you know, everything happens for a reason too quickly, with that
(17:15):
little time to pause and feel the impact can really run the risk of feeling, as you worded
it, dismissive because it sort of doesn't allow you the benefit of that full experience.
You are really scared.
I do need to kind of sit and be with that side of things.
(17:35):
I need to care for myself well.
And if you gloss over all of that to get straight to the positivity, it really sort of runs
interference on the larger experience.
So taken in proportion positivity as an orientation can be immensely helpful.
(17:57):
And I think that's right.
I mean, if I look at our relationship, I've wired the other direction some of the time,
which is to say I'm very like, no, this really does suck.
Like you don't get it.
Like take a look at what I'm saying to you.
I like, yeah, no doubt it's gonna, it probably won't kill us.
(18:17):
But look at what this is going to do.
Oh my gosh.
And I really have needed you across time and space to reorient me because I can kind of
lose myself there, like if you lose yourself on the positive side of things and it can
lead to like a loose orientation to the reality of some of the negativity that's at hand.
(18:44):
I can lose myself on the other end.
And across most of my life have been prone to depressive streaks and kind of feeling
listless and lost.
And I have really needed people to go, hey, you know, it's possible that like this could
(19:06):
be really good for you.
And I remember a guy telling me one time, as a matter of fact, it was the last woman
that I dated before you when she broke up with me and I was just really heartbroken.
And I was not, relatively speaking, I was not a spring chicken.
(19:28):
I was 27-ish, something like that.
So I'm approaching 30 and I'm thinking, hey, I'm feeling desirous to have something last
and to be really meaningful for the rest of my life kind of thing, even though we hear
how apparently conflicted I was about that when you examine, you know, your and I's relationship.
(19:50):
But I was just really devastated and deeply depressed and trying to find my way out.
And the guy that used to help me back then said, hey, every time this comes up for you,
I want you to say to yourself, man, I'm so glad this happened.
It's like the best thing that's ever happened to me.
(20:10):
And as we're articulating here, it did kind of feel a little dismissive.
But he was asking me to do it as a thought exercise.
And I remember saying, I can remember there's a couple of buildings in the area that I lived
that I remember walking into these buildings, this thought is occurring to me.
And I remember laughing out loud to myself some of the time being like, this sounds so
(20:34):
dumb what I am doing right now.
Like, I don't believe this at all.
And yet there was something really, it sort of takes your orientation and just turns it
ever so slightly to allow for the possibility that something good, again, that's different
than a sort of hopeless positivity, which in fact is not helpful and just designed to
(20:57):
prevent you from feeling things.
Right.
Yeah, because I can appreciate what he's doing there is trying to help you with your thought
orientation, right?
And for one who is inclined to think more negatively about it, trying to help you think
more positively.
That doesn't mean that we negate the things that are happening.
Yes, it doesn't mean that the thing you're going through doesn't genuinely feel negative.
(21:21):
And from your current vantage point is negative.
Yeah.
And I would say that is something I had to, you know, work on between us two was a lot
of times you'd be like, no, hear my pain.
And I'd be like, yeah, I am.
But this positive thing over here, you'd be like, no, I don't think you're really hearing
it.
And I genuinely thought that I was.
(21:41):
I was hearing it as much as I maybe potentially could at that moment.
But what I didn't realize was by hearing the things that were painful for you, that I felt
pain within myself because I loved you so much and I didn't want you to be in pain,
that my need to keep driving the positive was trying to stomp on your feelings.
(22:08):
Yeah.
Or if not, I don't know if I experienced it as being stomped on, but certainly it short
circuited something that felt necessary for me.
Like when things don't go according to plan in big or small ways, particularly in the
big ones, there's a certain grief associated with that.
Like if I really had my heart set on this thing in a really concrete way, and that could
(22:30):
be something, you know, small or large, something relational, something life ambition, and then
it becomes manifestly clear that it's not going to happen, grief is appropriate.
That's the right response.
It's no fun.
Yeah.
But it's the right response.
And again, there's a difference between getting lost there and not going there at all.
(22:51):
And as it regards relationships between you and me, for example, I think what I was wanting
a lot of times was exactly what you described, which was for you to suffer with me.
And I don't mean like for you to suffer with me.
I mean for you to suffer too, for us to be in solidarity together.
And arguably, the thing that makes the high end of a disappointment transition experience
(23:17):
where something bad happened and then as you are saying, something good comes out of it
potentially, part of what makes that experience a full-bodied experience is that we went through
the whole thing.
We did suffer a loss, even if it's just a loss of something potential, a loss of a dream.
We did grieve that together and then we did come out the other end and look at the new
(23:42):
life that has sprung forth from the wound.
But kind of like not acknowledging that it's a wound, that's a part that I feel really
sensitive to.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think what was new for me was learning, well, maybe partially what we're saying here.
(24:04):
When we were younger, the things that kind of didn't go a certain way, we were a little
more flexible, a little more fluid.
We could kind of move around and we didn't have so many things tying us down.
I decided to move from California to Nashville.
I packed up my Honda Civic and drove my little behind out there.
Now if I need to move, I mean, gosh, our move from Missouri here was months of planning
(24:27):
and it just takes so much more because there's so much more rootedness in where we're at.
Yeah.
Right?
And it's just germane to being at the station of life that we're at.
Right.
And I would suspect for me, at least I'll speak, is that it is some of that that causes
the, like, when the unexpected comes, you're like, oh, I thought that I was...
(24:52):
Because I'm so rooted, that will prevent some of these things from happening, right?
If I'm like really intentional and I'm present and I'm rooted and I have a plan and I've
laid it out and it's really clear, then I'm gonna...
All of which are great things that you should be doing.
Yes.
Like those are...
(25:12):
That's the way to do it.
That's right.
That will prevent any kind of really massive pitfalls from happening.
Right, and that one's not true, right?
It's like, if I do this, if I plan this, if I'm faithful and have high integrity around
I'm willing to put in the hard work, and I'm like...
And again, you have to do all of those things.
(25:34):
That's right.
Yes.
And know...
Well, to the degree that a thing can be prevented, a life disruption, a not going according to
plan, to the degree that it can be prevented, those are the right things to do.
And they're good as an exercise within themselves because they build up tremendous things within
(25:54):
you.
And if you think that that equals bad stuff won't happen to me...
Yeah, no, that's not true.
Which I think most people do.
Yeah.
Certainly, we do when we're younger, but my experience is a lot of older folks still seem
to think that even when you can kind of like look at their lives and be like, you guys
(26:15):
are saying this and I'm looking at your life and I can see like three things that are eating
at you right now.
And you don't seem to be acknowledging that your planning was apparently insufficient
to prevent this from happening.
And really, I think the reason why people don't is because they're desperately fearful
that they've done something wrong.
That like the fact that life did not go according to plan means I made a miscalculation somewhere.
(26:40):
And no doubt, many things that are disruptive are outgrowths of in some big or small way
of some sort of miscalculation.
But part of the deal is that even when that's true, the miscalculation was a calculation
you didn't know.
(27:00):
How could you possibly have accounted for what you did not know?
Right.
So if the positivity thing is one way of responding, another way of responding that I think is
closer to where we live these days.
You sort of just said it a second ago.
It's like, oh, this is, I think this is a part of like what it means to be alive.
(27:25):
I'm just recognizing I'm saying this thing again that I've been saying since the first
couple of episodes, which is I put that in my this is what it means to be human bag.
Right.
So part of the deal is that there really is a reorientation that has to occur, particularly
when you start to lean into the larger disruptions.
(27:45):
The one plus one does not equal to one plus one apparently equals purple.
There's no amount of planning or foreknowledge that I could have had to inorganically advance
my developmental awareness that this was a thing.
At least for myself, I needed to erratically reorient.
(28:10):
I even think I would have told you that I was as aware and oriented to the nature of
bad stuff happens as one could possibly be.
But there were just things that I didn't know.
And I think I would have told you I know there are things that I don't know, but I don't
think I really understood what that meant.
I think I thought like, no, but I probably know because I'm like, I'm pretty I'm pretty
(28:34):
20 steps ahead.
Yeah.
It's sort of like a lifestyle for me of being 20 steps ahead of every thing and everyone
and trying to figure it all out.
But so this is another layer in to developmental humanity.
You know, it was like, stuff's going to happen.
(28:57):
All of your plans were great.
They didn't account for this.
That wasn't really a miscalculation on your part.
Or if it was a miscalculation, it was the type of miscalculation that you could not
not miscalculate.
Yeah.
Like you.
Yeah, there was no avoiding it.
No, there's no avoiding this.
(29:17):
And a lot of what I see around the everything happens for a reason stuff is a primary avoidance
of that right there.
Like, wait a minute.
Are you telling me that I must now turn and face a certain vulnerability across the rest
(29:38):
of my life that no matter my planning, no matter my calculation, no matter my ability
to divine the earth, the sun, the stars and the moon, and to have even like mystical or
special insight, which many of us are open to and aware of and find helpful, that there
are things that are going to come that I didn't like.
(30:00):
And like the oh, God, what do I do now?
I think that's really what that's about.
It's like everything might happen for a reason, but as for your ability to know what the heck
that reason is or what difference that makes in the thing happening.
I mean, a part of the deal here is the acknowledgement that some things that sit down on your life
(30:25):
are so cataclysmically disruptive that whatever their supposed reason that the universe has
allowed this to drop into your lap is doesn't appear to be, I don't care.
I experienced this a lot in evangelical Christianity where they didn't say everything happens for
(30:46):
a reason.
I never, well, occasionally people said that, but that wasn't like preached.
That wasn't a preached message.
It was usually that God has a plan for your life.
And as you are saying about the positivity aspect, I'm like, no doubt that's helpful.
Like let's say that's true.
God has a plan for my life.
It's very helpful for me to know that and it does bring some sense of comfort.
(31:10):
Also dude, I have had some shit go down for me that I'm like, I couldn't possibly give
a rat's ass less what God's plan is.
And some people, you know, they hear you say that in those circles and they're just like,
how could you?
And I'm like, man, I just am so fundamentally connected to my humanity here.
(31:32):
I don't know what that plan is.
I don't give a crap at all.
I'm just over here sweating bullets trying to figure out how I'm going to make my life
keep ticking.
You know, I'm staring down the barrel of something that is terrifying to me and you want me to
farm it out.
I'm like the same God who allowed this to get to me has got a plan.
(31:54):
Oh boy, aren't I excited.
And so something has to happen at this kind of an intersection that I believe can only
go through the doorway of a full on admission that I am vulnerable in the world.
Not just that like I carry myself with a certain vulnerability, which you might find compelling
(32:17):
or not, but that like no, literally the Latin root of that term vulnerable, vulna, means
to wound.
Like I am going to be wounded in life in spite of my best plans.
Something about that for me when I really squared up to it and it did not happen until
(32:37):
37, 38.
It's like there is stuff coming in your life.
It's not about your family of origin.
It's not about the stuff you grew up.
It's not about your childhood wounds.
I mean, it may touch them, but it isn't principally about them.
Something is going to plop down in your life.
And I don't know if we've talked about this yet before, but the way I tend to think of
(32:59):
it is statistical probabilities in your life are going to start to play themselves out.
I think we have talked about this.
You haven't had a problem with your kids yet, here it comes.
You haven't had a problem in your relationships yet, here it comes.
You haven't had a problem with your health yet, here it comes.
FedEx, here it comes.
You haven't had FedEx yet, here it comes.
How's it going, man?
(33:22):
You just leave it stuff right there.
It's great.
Thank you.
You too.
Thank you.
But the idea of that, like, there is no amount of planning.
Even if you think you know, you don't know.
And there's no way to have a new orientation about these things until you go through it,
(33:43):
right?
Until it's happened to you and then you've gone through it.
The more you fight the thing and the opportunity to go through it and learn it, the more it
just persists and continues and you either get stuck on the path that you're on and maybe
that's okay for you.
Yeah, it just keeps, like, it keeps bringing it around to you again and again.
Oh, here's another.
(34:03):
Oh, here it is again.
Here it is again.
Here it is again.
No, you don't want to look at it?
Okay, here it is again.
And inevitably it's somewhere in there, even if the really big thing that lands in your
lap is not that thing that's come around 18 times, that thing that's come around 18 times
will play a part in the thing that lands in your lap in terms of you being able to get
through it.
It's the skill set there that you're working on.
(34:25):
Yeah, so what you're saying is, I like this so much.
This is so spot on.
I'm kind of saying we reach this point where we recognize that to continue living life
from this point, life has now not gone according to plan to the degree that a sort of reorientation
is going to be required.
(34:47):
And the reorientation is somehow about recognizing that no amount of planning, no amount of forethought,
no amount of good insight, no amount of coaching, help, et cetera, is going to insulate me from
the difficult things that are going to come my way.
And there's a certain vulnerability associated with that.
And in avoiding that, things are going to present themselves over and over and over
(35:10):
again, particularly around that lesson.
You're just going to keep telling you, hey, I think you're vulnerable.
Hey, you're vulnerable.
Hey, you're vulnerable.
And even when that isn't the thing being directly presented, it's some other less global, different,
smaller other thing that that thing will be touched by your inability or unwillingness
(35:34):
to see this larger lesson we're pointing to.
Yes.
Yeah, wow.
It feels clear to me when you lay it out like that.
Like how do they not touch each other?
How could they not?
Yeah, sort of like you kind of won't admit your vulnerability in the world.
And even though this thing does not appear to be about that, it is touched by that because
(35:57):
you will respond as though you're not in touch with your vulnerability in the world.
Gosh, that's tough.
And I think a lot of people that we see at Midlife who are really struggling in this
way, there is this kind of traffic jam of developmental stuff that just kind of hasn't
(36:19):
been reconciled.
It's sort of like the folks that I know that are doing well in their 40s and 50s, maybe
late 30s, they're not really dealing with their parents so much anymore and wounds from
childhood and family of origin.
They seem to have squared up to the fact that life hands you stuff that not only is it disruptive,
(36:46):
it is stuff that is disruptive in a way that you could not have planned for.
And they're now trying to learn to hold what it means to exist in a world where you find
that you're kind of vulnerable no matter where you go.
And how do I still be open to the world and at the same time carry my vulnerability well
(37:09):
and care for myself well?
And the folks who aren't doing that, there's like a pile up of all those issues.
So what do you do, practically?
Yes.
Yes.
Right.
(37:30):
That is the correct question.
This happens in therapy a lot.
Like we'll be talking, have you had this happen?
Well, you're talking around some thing that is, it's not exactly pie in the sky, but it
is a high level meta sort of perspective.
And people want this so bad, they want you to give it to them.
(37:51):
And I feel it.
I want it just as bad.
And I do with the people that I ask in my life.
But you're saying like what does it look like practically that I am now reckoning with a
new orientation in the world that suggests this vulnerability?
(38:11):
And my answer is yes, that is the correct question.
Like what I think it is, if you can make it practical, is that you carry that question
with you day to day.
Like okay, today in the things that I go through from the rest of the day between now and the
time that I go to sleep, what does it look like to sort of be in full acknowledgement
(38:33):
of my vulnerability?
Like if it was true that I'm vulnerable, what would I do today to care for myself and others
well?
And so for me, for one thing, it very much equals in a way that I never had this motivation
and it showed in my practical behavior to go to yoga, breath, plunge as committed as
(39:00):
I am.
People will sometimes say to me, oh Ryan, you seem so disciplined.
And I'm like, I see what you are saying.
That is one way to frame it.
It doesn't even feel flattering to me because it feels untrue.
I'm like, no, I don't feel disciplined.
I feel extremely motivated.
Right.
Because I'm vulnerable.
(39:21):
And I am trying to help my nervous system accept that because the difference in the
way that I feel when I wake up at about 4 a.m. every morning and when I am done with yoga,
breath, work, plunge by roughly 7, 8 a.m., it's like two totally different planets.
(39:45):
So the question is, if you want to make this really practical, if you're vulnerable, how
should you care for yourself and others well today?
What would that actually look like?
What do you think?
What do I think?
What does the orientation look like practically?
(40:06):
Do you have something beyond yes?
Mine's always uh-huh.
Yeah.
We have that, yeah.
It's similar, but I think before I can even get there, because sometimes even that execution
is difficult depending on the thing that's landed in my lap.
(40:28):
So sometimes it's practicing just the presence of like the immediate moment.
That sometimes is all I can offer myself is just right now.
Okay, and now just right now and just like right now.
Yeah, and your brain says, and just right now.
And just right now, yeah.
(40:50):
And finding ways for me to stay in my body and present.
They are what you're saying.
They're going to yoga.
They're doing plunge, breath work, all of those, moving my body and dance or whatever
the thing may be.
And sometimes just getting there is so hard practically like depending on the really difficult
(41:10):
thing that's been handed to me.
So the very first step is just right now.
Just right now.
Yeah, and as many times a day as you have to do that.
Yeah, no, I think it is as many times and sometimes that looks like letting myself off
(41:32):
the hook for the other things that I am quote unquote supposed to be doing.
Sometimes I need to be able to be just right now wherever that is.
That could be in my bed.
That could be on my couch.
That could be in my car.
I mean, it's so many different things.
(41:54):
But giving myself permission that just right now doesn't have to bring in all the to do's.
Right?
So if we go back to the New Year's resolution, the idea of like things that I have planned
for myself, things that may or may not go according to that plan.
If I can give myself permission to be just right now, the things that didn't go according
(42:15):
to plan, there's more room for them.
So then it lends itself for me to do whatever the next practical step is, if that makes
sense.
Because I'm just right now and right now doesn't have a plan.
It's just right now.
I'm kind of talking about like I've got to go do the things and you're saying no, you
(42:40):
don't.
I'm saying no, those are things sometimes that if you can get there, depending on the
thing that's been handed to your lap, sometimes those are the things you go do because they're
accessible and you get to them.
Sometimes the thing that lands in your lap is so big that even getting to those right
away feel hard.
And then you start putting this additional pressure on yourself.
(43:02):
Well, I have to go plunge.
I have to go yoga.
I have to go do breath work because it's the thing that whatever.
And sometimes for me, I need to give myself permission to say, no, just be right here
right now.
And if we can get there, great.
And if we can't, we'll try again later.
(43:24):
Just both and because sometimes you can't.
You just can't.
Yeah.
And I think what's interesting is sometimes the things that get in the way are less about
me and more about others.
It doubles back on itself twice.
(43:44):
It's okay.
I need to go to the gym to take care of myself, but I need to be present right now because
I can't get to the gym unless I'm present.
And I can't be present because I have all these things.
It's less about going to the gym or going to yoga.
It's more about I need to care for this person.
I need to care for this person.
I need to make sure.
And I have to be this type of mom and I have to be this type of spouse and I have to be.
(44:07):
And it's like, whoa.
Like if you don't take care of you, no one else, least of all you, no one else wins.
And it is not even possible.
You're making me think of some times in the last even six months where an unexpected thing
(44:32):
happened of the type that we were talking about, pretty stinking disruptive to the degree
that like I was in pretty full on panic mode.
And I'm not a person, I am prone to a great many things.
Panic?
I don't think so.
Anxiety, yes.
(44:52):
Depressive stuff, yes.
But panic, like full on panic, like the world is burning and I don't know what to do.
I don't think that's one of them.
And I was in that place and I was thinking about how there were nights where I could
not settle down and you had to like wrap me up and lay with me and just say, like just
right now, just hear this thing exactly that you're saying.
(45:17):
Where sometimes it was what's needed right now and what's needed right now is for you
to rest.
Right.
Because rest is central to your ability to cope with what's going on for us right now.
And there's something so dialed in and practical about that.
But what's difficult about this and maybe feels at odds with people who consider themselves
(45:39):
to otherwise be functional and healthy or where we think we're supposed to be at this
stage of our life is that it is inconsistent with that.
It's like, I don't want to be me, Ryan.
I don't want to be 45 years old and having to have my wife do that for me.
(45:59):
On the one hand, it's beautiful and I love it and I am extremely glad that I have it.
And maybe my mind, my thinking mind is like, boy, you're blowing it, dude.
Look at you.
You are 45 years old and this is still happening for you.
And so a lot of the reorientation for me also practically has been learning to get some
(46:21):
distance between me and my mind and the stuff that I think as being objectively real.
And a lot of times it's like, this is a phrase I use a lot, it's like, that's just some shit
you're thinking right now.
That's just some shit you think.
Come back to right now.
I mean, sometimes for me, even in yoga, I will be floating away into the problem of
(46:45):
the day, the week, the month or the year.
And I will say to myself, just now, just here.
Sometimes I say, just these four walls right here, you're safe.
Just do this.
But do you feel the energy that I mean when I say like, it's like humbling and it's like,
(47:08):
man, I am so disrupted that I kind of have to just be here.
And then you realize, no, no, this is actually the only way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like this is it.
This is it.
On New Year's Day, I saw a post from Thich Nhat Hanh that said, there is no way home.
Home is the way.
(47:28):
It's like, ironically, sometimes the place that I find myself at, that I find humbling
and like, oh man, look at me and I'm 45 and I really have to just be oriented to the present
moment.
And then I hear myself say it and I'm like, Ryan, this is the way.
(47:48):
This is the way to the life that you've always wanted is to be radically present here and
now.
So maybe that's the thing we could say that's the most practical of all, even though it's
still maybe lacks that like, but what are my six instructions quality is it's just today.
(48:09):
Just the rest of today.
And if that's too much, then just like the next couple of hours.
And if that's too much, then like just the next 60 seconds.
I don't know if I knew that that radical simplicity was sort of like a way of life.
(48:36):
That is the answer to what I do now.
That is the answer to how to make this practical.
It's like, focus on now.
But wouldn't you say you know that now because you went through the really hard things, like
(48:57):
because the things that landed in your lap, it caused you to have a new orientation and
the new orientation led you to this thing that is more fruitful and more successful
and like more life giving through the ebbs and flows of all of it.
I would.
I did have to go through it to get here.
We did.
(49:17):
Yeah.
But it just somehow feels like reaching this point is sort of like rediscovering something
that was always there.
And like we want it to be more complex than that or something.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's a good way of saying it.
(49:39):
It circles back to itself.
Yeah.
It comes full circle.
And it's like, I'm in the nighttime sky.
In the spinner 201s.
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com