wisdom from Krista Tippett
from an interview with The Great Discontent.
“That in itself is a fascinating thing to have lived through—to understand how, at any given moment, there is more change possible than we can begin to imagine. That forms the way I move through the world.”
“We are not defined by the material circumstances of our lives. We have great power to craft that. ”
“When you do something that nobody has ever quite done before, you think people will be excited and curious about it, but that’s not the way the world works. When you do something that no one has done, it’s unfamiliar. There are a lot of people who react negatively to the unfamiliar because that’s not the way it’s done. You just have to persevere.”
“ First of all, I think we need to have awareness and even some forgiveness for ourselves and others because we’ve been trained to shout, right? We learn how to assert ourselves, raise our voices, have an argument, and stand up for what we believe in. Those all have their place and we need to be able to do them, but they aren’t all we need to be able to do.
One thing I think we have to do to reactivate listening as part of our life together, and even part of our political life together, is get less comfortable with the things that feel instinctive. If we take on a hard issue, we’re used to debating or taking a stand. If that’s the only thing we know how to do, then we’re not creating spaces where we’re just getting curious about people who make us uncomfortable and things that scare us.
I’m not saying we have to put ourselves in harm’s way. There are scary people and scary things, especially right now in our society, but we pay all of the attention to that end of the spectrum. Across that spectrum, there are those who are very different from us, who say things we don’t get and believe things we don’t understand, but who would be available to be in relationship with us if we could create trustworthy spaces for them to know that and for us to get curious in an attempt to understand.
We have so many divisions now and it feels like they keep sprouting, so understanding is a skill we need to figure out how to do. And it’s very practical. Brain science shows that even in very charged circumstances, people who feel like they’ve been heard are more likely to accept an outcome they don’t agree with. So this is very pragmatic. But I think on a human level, we will love ourselves more if we can learn to listen and understand.”
“…if I could go back and do one thing differently, it would be knowing how to take pleasure. I would try not to be so restless or so hard on myself and I’d take pleasure in what I did and let that be good enough.”
“The other thing I believe is that some of us right now, whoever we are, wherever we are, need to take on the vocation of just being calmers of fear. What does that mean? I don’t know what your job title is, but if you calm the fear of one person or create spaces in your community for something to be diffused, for some kind of encounter to be possible, that’s the most important work any of us can be doing right now.”
“I’m fascinated by how I hear people use the word love, and not in a romantic way. There are people we know we need to love who we can’t get close enough to in order to feel anything. This love is an action, a way of doing. It’s a commitment to honor the stranger and take them seriously as a human being and insist that we share this world."
I love words. They’re a huge piece of who I am. I think we can excavate the word love. In other languages, there are words to describe the full array of what we do when we love. There’s the love of friendship and the fierce love a parent has for a child and the practical love of service, which is not about what you feel, but the kindness you extend. It can be very simple and practical. I think that in precisely the same moment we are rediscovering our destructive human capacities, the sense of our highest human calling as the only thing that’s big enough to meet that is also rising in us. I hope so much that this is an opening and that we walk through it.”