Speaker 1: And every moment the mind is asking you what you
Speaker 1: wanted to do, and if you say ah, you know,
Speaker 1: let's neurotically obsessed about all the ways in which we've
Speaker 1: been short changed in life. And then the mind is
Speaker 1: happy to do that. Welcome to the one you feed.
Speaker 1: Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the
Speaker 1: thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or
Speaker 1: you are what you think, ring true. And yet for
Speaker 1: many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
Speaker 1: episode is George Saunders, the author of nine books, including
Speaker 1: Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National
Speaker 1: Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize for the
Speaker 1: Best Work of Fiction in English. He was recently elected
Speaker 1: to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and teaches
Speaker 1: in the Creative Writing program at Syracuse University. Today, George
Speaker 1: and Eric discussed his book A Swim in a Pond
Speaker 1: in the Rain, in which four Russians give a master
Speaker 1: class on writing, reading, and life. Hi, George, welcome to
Speaker 1: the show. Nice to be here, Eric, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: It is a real pleasure to have you on. I'm
Speaker 1: such a big fan of your writing, and we'll be
Speaker 1: talking about your latest book, which is called A Swim
Speaker 1: in a Pond in the Rain, in which four Russians
Speaker 1: give a master class on writing, reading, and life. But
Speaker 1: before we do that, we'll start the way we always do,
Speaker 1: with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson.
Speaker 1: He says, in life, there's two wolves inside of us
Speaker 1: that are always at battle. One's a good wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
Speaker 1: other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
Speaker 1: and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks
Speaker 1: about it, and he looks up at his grandfather says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandfather says the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. Yeah, that's a beautiful one.
Speaker 1: You know. I'm just reading this book called Live Wired
Speaker 1: about the brain, and it literally proves the truth of
Speaker 1: that parable. It says that whatever you do with your
Speaker 1: body and your mind during the day, the brain then
Speaker 1: remakes itself to honor those things or to enable those things. So,
Speaker 1: you know, I have some experience with different meditation practice,
Speaker 1: and I think what you're doing there is you're sort
Speaker 1: of artificially summoning up a positive state of mind, and
Speaker 1: then I think the brain takes the cue from that
Speaker 1: and then it reforms itself, and then that state becomes
Speaker 1: more easy for you to attain. And every moment the
Speaker 1: mind is asking you what you want it to do,
Speaker 1: and if you say, ah, you know, let's neurotically obsess
Speaker 1: about all the ways in which we've been short changed
Speaker 1: in life, and then the mind is happy to do that.
Speaker 1: And then I think the idea is it makes a
Speaker 1: kind of rut in which it can do that more easily,
Speaker 1: and pretty soon you're that person. Whereas if you just
Speaker 1: slightly can enforce a change in the habit to where
Speaker 1: in a quiet moment your mind might turn to gratitude.
Speaker 1: Then I think theoretically that rut will be dug and
Speaker 1: you'll be a more grateful person. I think that's what
Speaker 1: that parable means to me. Anyway, We're not powerless to
Speaker 1: decide what kind of person will become. I love that
Speaker 1: we're not powerless to decide what kind of person we
Speaker 1: will become. There's so many different places I could take
Speaker 1: this conversation with all your different writings, with the latest book,
Speaker 1: with your interest in Buddhism, But I want to start
Speaker 1: with the line fairly early in the new book, and
Speaker 1: you're describing what these Russian writers are doing, and you
Speaker 1: say that they have the most radical idea of all,
Speaker 1: that every human being is worthy of attention, and that
Speaker 1: the origins of every good and evil capability of the
Speaker 1: universe may be found by observing a single, even very
Speaker 1: humble person and the turnings of his or her mind.
Speaker 1: Say a little more about that, Yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 1: think that's kind of the basis of fiction, which is
Speaker 1: that if you want to know the great truths of
Speaker 1: the world, you have two choices. One is to try
Speaker 1: to sort of conceptually generalize to them, which I don't
Speaker 1: think is very successful because our mind is actually kind
Speaker 1: of small compared to the universe. The second route is
Speaker 1: a more homely route, which is just say, well, whatever
Speaker 1: is going on in this planet, it's first starts in
Speaker 1: a single mind, any single mind, any mind is as
Speaker 1: good as any other. And then we have this ability
Speaker 1: to imaginatively focus on that person. We're going to try
Speaker 1: to imagine what they're imagining, and in that, you know,
Speaker 1: we're making a little scale model the whole thing. If
Speaker 1: we look at a guy sitting at a diner counter
Speaker 1: looking over at the pie his friend is having with envy,
Speaker 1: that's envy, you know, that's the whole history of human questing,
Speaker 1: you know. Or if we look at someone and we're
Speaker 1: in his mind the first time he sees this person
Speaker 1: he's going to fall in love with, that tells us
Speaker 1: so much about love. So for me, one of the
Speaker 1: reasons I'm attracted to fiction as a vocation is that,
Speaker 1: in this very small way that's accessible to all of us,
Speaker 1: actually we all imagine, we all project, we can work
Speaker 1: through some things in terms of questions like well, why
Speaker 1: is it that we all want to be happy, but
Speaker 1: we tend to make each other miserable sometimes. Or how
Speaker 1: is it that even though in a given moment a
Speaker 1: person would never or almost never choose to be evil,
Speaker 1: we still do things that add up to evil. I
Speaker 1: would say all those answers are just available in the tiny,
Speaker 1: little fluctuations of one's own mind, and those are actually
Speaker 1: what we're using when we make a story. We're just
Speaker 1: pretending that this guy over here is a different person
Speaker 1: from us, But of course we're exporting all of our
Speaker 1: own thoughts and desires and stuff into that imaginary vessel. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's so true. The other thing you say at one
Speaker 1: point in the book, I think you're talking about a
Speaker 1: Chekhov story and you say something that I love. You're
Speaker 1: talking about how the more we get to know this character,
Speaker 1: the less inclined we are to pass judgment on that person.
Speaker 1: You say, some essential mercy in me has been switched on.
Speaker 1: And then I love this line you say, what God
Speaker 1: has going for him that we don't is infinite information.
Speaker 1: That's just so cool. This idea that if we take
Speaker 1: the idea of God, as you know, loving all of us,
Speaker 1: the reason that God is capable of doing that is,
Speaker 1: he can see all of us. Yeah. God is kind
Speaker 1: of a master of cause and effects. So in other words,
Speaker 1: you know, you're walking down the sidewalk and somebody roughly
Speaker 1: bumps into you. Instantly, I know that person's political party,
Speaker 1: I know certain things about his mind. Of course I
Speaker 1: don't really, And I think there's this idea that if
Speaker 1: you could follow that person home, and if you could
Speaker 1: even leap into his mind and see some famous poets
Speaker 1: that his secret fears. I think what happens is as
Speaker 1: you fill up with information like that, the causality that
Speaker 1: led him to be the person he is becomes clear.
Speaker 1: You know. It's kind of like when you have a
Speaker 1: fight with your partner. Before you have a talk about it,
Speaker 1: you have an idea in your mind of what happened.
Speaker 1: Then she explains it to you and suddenly you go, Okay,
Speaker 1: So my initial model wasn't quite right, and actually from
Speaker 1: her point of view, it makes sense. And the more
Speaker 1: information you exchange, the more you see that, of course
Speaker 1: it happened the way it happened. You know, how otherwise
Speaker 1: could it have happened, given the entire history of the
Speaker 1: universe up to that point. So with fiction, we get
Speaker 1: this rare opportunity to sort of slow time down for
Speaker 1: one thing, to sort of play at the skill of omniscians.
Speaker 1: So Chekhov, for example, we'll go into the character's head
Speaker 1: and stay there for nine pages, really beautifully and convincingly,
Speaker 1: with a high degree of specificity. So we get to
Speaker 1: do on the page what we never get to do
Speaker 1: in life, which is fully fully know somebody. I think
Speaker 1: when we fully know somebody, it's not that we don't
Speaker 1: have opinions about them, but the opinions are kind of
Speaker 1: full of this. On the other hand, thinking, you know,
Speaker 1: when we want to make a two facile judgment, some
Speaker 1: fact comes along goes well, you know, you have to
Speaker 1: also consider this. And so from my point of view
Speaker 1: that this makes us wiser, you know, maybe a little
Speaker 1: slower to act, which is probably a good thing in
Speaker 1: most cases. It makes every decision more fraud because we
Speaker 1: know more. So to me, it's it's something we can
Speaker 1: simulate on the page, and I would claim that it's
Speaker 1: just good for us to go through that exercise, almost
Speaker 1: like sacramentally. I've always been really interested in this. There's
Speaker 1: a cognitive bias out there. It goes by a couple
Speaker 1: of different names, but one of the ones that's known
Speaker 1: by is the fundamental attribution error, and it's one of
Speaker 1: my favorite ones because it basically says, when I do
Speaker 1: something bad, I know all the circumstances. Well, I didn't
Speaker 1: get enough sleep and Jenny's mom had a psychotic episode
Speaker 1: this morning with her Alzheimer's. I know all the reasons
Speaker 1: why I acted like a jerk. But when you do it,
Speaker 1: it's because you're a jerk, you know. And I love
Speaker 1: cognitive distortions because and you talk a lot about this,
Speaker 1: and we'll get to it in a minute. We don't
Speaker 1: see the world correctly, but it's really hard to know
Speaker 1: in what ways am I not seeing the world correctly,
Speaker 1: And so I've always found cognitive distortions interesting because they
Speaker 1: allow me to sort of identify some of those ways
Speaker 1: that I don't see the world correctly. And the fundamental
Speaker 1: attribution error is a really common one and one that
Speaker 1: if we can start to not do, is so powerful,
Speaker 1: especially when you see that one's attribution error tends to
Speaker 1: have a pattern, you know. So in other words, when
Speaker 1: someone does something we don't know why, will supply reasons,
Speaker 1: and those reasons surprise surprise will tend to reaffirm our
Speaker 1: existing view of the world. So if I have an
Speaker 1: idea about the way things are, someone offends me, they
Speaker 1: are given reasons by me, which in a sense takes
Speaker 1: you even a step further from whatever the truth is.
Speaker 1: That's one of the things that I wanted to talk about.
Speaker 1: You bring this up in a lot of different places.
Speaker 1: You bring it up in this book, you bring it
Speaker 1: up in your talk on kindness that you did that's
Speaker 1: so lovely, But you basically talk about the sort of
Speaker 1: very built in Darwinian confusions that we have. Can you
Speaker 1: share a little bit more about what those are? What
Speaker 1: that is that you're talking about. Sure, it's basically the
Speaker 1: sense of self that we have from the minute we're born,
Speaker 1: and that I think, in my case anyway, I tend
Speaker 1: to have built it up more and more with every
Speaker 1: passing year. You know, on one level, we know that
Speaker 1: that is an illusion because if nothing else, we see
Speaker 1: that this person doesn't last very long. You know, pretty
Speaker 1: soon they're gone. But I think you know, what neuroscientists
Speaker 1: are working toward is kind of the same thing that
Speaker 1: Buddhists have known for a long time, which is that
Speaker 1: the self doesn't actually physically exist anywhere. It's kind of
Speaker 1: a process. I mean, you know, you could say it's
Speaker 1: an illusion or a delusion that is constructed, and I
Speaker 1: suspect it's done because the species wanted to survive. So
Speaker 1: if I believe that I'm primary in this world and
Speaker 1: I'm so important and I'm George, you know, I'm constantly
Speaker 1: telling myself my own dramatic, lovely victory narrative. You know,
Speaker 1: then when the wolf comes to eat me, I'll resist
Speaker 1: a little harder. You know. That makes sense, and it's beautiful.
Speaker 1: Actually it's no problem. But the problem is it's also
Speaker 1: not true. So we all, you know, at different times
Speaker 1: in our lives, and certainly at the end of our lives,
Speaker 1: we run into the toll taker for this lifetime of
Speaker 1: living within a delusion, which is that you know, Oh,
Speaker 1: by the way, George, it's the day of your death,
Speaker 1: and this guy that you've held dear for so long
Speaker 1: is not going to be with us. And by the way,
Speaker 1: I can't really tell you where he's going. Oh well,
Speaker 1: you know, so I think that's really the essence of it,
Speaker 1: and it's not horrible. I mean, I think in a way,
Speaker 1: these things comprise a kind of owner's manual for the
Speaker 1: mind that we have. But most of us, I think,
Speaker 1: are so thoroughly seduced and charmed by the illusion of
Speaker 1: self that we don't, you know, often step outside of
Speaker 1: It's very hard. I mean, the ego is so bright
Speaker 1: and so adaptable, and it doesn't really, I think, in
Speaker 1: a certain way, doesn't really want us asking those questions.
Speaker 1: So that's what I mean. And again, I don't really
Speaker 1: despair of it, but I think as I get older,
Speaker 1: I'm a little more tired of it. I'm tired of
Speaker 1: being trapped within what I know is kind of an
Speaker 1: elaborate magic trick. Yeah, And I love the way that
Speaker 1: you describe it, because I've talked to fair amount on
Speaker 1: this show about some of these ideas of on self,
Speaker 1: and they're sort of abstract short of experience, they don't
Speaker 1: necessarily make a lot of sense. But you say a
Speaker 1: description here that I really like. You say, the mind
Speaker 1: takes a vast, unitary wholeness. The universe selects one tiny
Speaker 1: segment of it me and starts narrating from that point
Speaker 1: of view, and just like that, that entity, George becomes
Speaker 1: real and he is surprise, surprise, located at the exact
Speaker 1: center of the universe, and everything is happening in his movie.
Speaker 1: And I love that idea that that center of the
Speaker 1: universe piece. I think it is so much because we
Speaker 1: all think we are. It's the point of reference. And
Speaker 1: we'll get to some of these points a little bit later,
Speaker 1: particularly hopefully if we get to the Tolstoy story Master
Speaker 1: and Man. But it's not that that view is necessarily wrong,
Speaker 1: because there's a certain rightness to it. It's just that
Speaker 1: it's a very very limited view. It's a perspective that's
Speaker 1: very small, right, right, I've heard it this right onces
Speaker 1: that a lot of these apparent conundrums can be addressed
Speaker 1: by thinking in terms of the relative and the absolute.
Speaker 1: So in a relative sense, I definitely exist, which I
Speaker 1: know if I stub my toe you know where I
Speaker 1: get a nice review, you know very much exists. But
Speaker 1: rationally we can see that, yeah, you know, you flared
Speaker 1: into existence. You're never the same moment to moment, and
Speaker 1: in time something will take you out, and that consciousness
Speaker 1: will we don't know, but you know, certainly the consciousness
Speaker 1: that we've known all these years will not be there anymore.
Speaker 1: So the thing is both are true. You hear sometimes
Speaker 1: people say, oh, myself doesn't exist, and so therefore it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter if I steal your cookie or you know whatever.
Speaker 1: But that's not really fair. Both things are true. So
Speaker 1: that's the conundrum, is to try to figure out how
Speaker 1: to live and enjoy and you know, be fruitful in
Speaker 1: this life, while at the same time knowing that a
Speaker 1: lot of the motivations that make you want to do
Speaker 1: that are actually just contrivances, Darwinian contrivances really right, right,
Speaker 1: We are driven very much on some level by survival mechanism. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, as a former Catholic, part of me, once
Speaker 1: I've said that, you know, we're a contrivance, I get
Speaker 1: a little dour. But then another part of me says, yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's how we are, you know, but we're we
Speaker 1: were given hunger, we were given lust, we were given
Speaker 1: the desire to go to the carnival. Why would you
Speaker 1: refute those things? They're there for you to enjoy. I
Speaker 1: think the trick is for me at sixty two. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm a writer, so I I could go to spring training,
Speaker 1: you know, with the White Sox and follow those guys
Speaker 1: around and listen to them talk and I could write
Speaker 1: a piece that would really be full of pithy information
Speaker 1: about baseball, but I still couldn't hit the ball, you know,
Speaker 1: no matter how much I can talk about the physics
Speaker 1: stuff and I can talk about how one gets better,
Speaker 1: but I'm still not going to be a very good hitter.
Speaker 1: This is also the case for me with the spiritual stuff,
Speaker 1: is I can lay out a pretty good system intellectually,
Speaker 1: but that's sort of neither here nor there. What's important
Speaker 1: is to get that knowledge into your body somehow, and uh,
Speaker 1: that is I suspect the work of many lifetimes, and
Speaker 1: so at this moment in my life, I'm kind of
Speaker 1: hurched on that, like, well, you know, you're not you
Speaker 1: have some number of years left. You know very well
Speaker 1: what a big job it would be to actually get
Speaker 1: your ego to reduce. But in fact, what you're doing
Speaker 1: is sort of gradually making it bigger, you know, by
Speaker 1: by doing this writing thing and kind of trotting after that.
Speaker 1: So it's, you know, kind of a crossroads moment, but
Speaker 1: it's a moment I've been at for the last twenty years,
Speaker 1: so it's not that urgent or scary. That brings up
Speaker 1: a really interesting point, and I have talked about this
Speaker 1: a little bit. Over the last several years, I had
Speaker 1: several pretty really powerful, mystical type experiences that, you know,
Speaker 1: we would say that is part of what we're aiming
Speaker 1: for in spiritual practice, the actual realization that the self
Speaker 1: that I am spending all this time protecting just isn't
Speaker 1: worth protecting in the way that I'm trying to protect it.
Speaker 1: And these very very powerful moments. I've described it as
Speaker 1: feelings sometimes stuck in the middle. And what I mean
Speaker 1: by that is I've had powerful enough experiences and enough
Speaker 1: time that I go, well, that stuff isn't really that important,
Speaker 1: and my level of ego, if we think of it
Speaker 1: as how am I perceived in the world, diminished greatly,
Speaker 1: but it didn't diminish all the way. And so what
Speaker 1: I find is that a lot of the ambition what
Speaker 1: used to drive a lot of my activity in the world,
Speaker 1: it was reduced, but it wasn't reduced enough that I
Speaker 1: didn't care at all. And so I sometimes describe it
Speaker 1: as stuck in the middle. You know, I don't have
Speaker 1: the previous ambition fuel I once had, but not to
Speaker 1: the point where I don't care at all. I don't
Speaker 1: know if that relates at all to what you were
Speaker 1: just kind of saying. These questions are way above my pagrade.
Speaker 1: But I'll tell you what it's occurred to me is
Speaker 1: just speaking for myself. I don't think I do myself
Speaker 1: any favors by trying to diminish those ambitious energies. For me,
Speaker 1: that's not quite right, because then you can get into
Speaker 1: kind of a new age ascetic thing where you just
Speaker 1: I don't care about anything, but you kind of do,
Speaker 1: and you kind of should. You know, I don't think
Speaker 1: I mean to be weird if someone said I I
Speaker 1: don't do hunger anymore, man, I'm against hunger. Bullshit, You aren't.
Speaker 1: You know, you're pretending. So I think for me that
Speaker 1: the trick is somehow again it's beyond me, but it
Speaker 1: must have something to do with one's relation to those
Speaker 1: ambitious energies. How are you fielding them and how are
Speaker 1: you submitting to them? Like after I write a story
Speaker 1: and it gets accepted, for example, there's a really important
Speaker 1: moment there where I either kind of lean into it
Speaker 1: in this kind of victory dance feeling which realifies the self.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm winning, I'm winning after all. Or there's
Speaker 1: another move, which is to kind of I always think
Speaker 1: of it sort of tossing it in a backpack, like yep, okay,
Speaker 1: that's good, but then re calibrating myself to recognize that
Speaker 1: the real moment of pleasure and power is back when
Speaker 1: I did it. You know, being in the middle of
Speaker 1: the creative process was a more reliable place to be
Speaker 1: as opposed to, you know, standing under the goal post dancing.
Speaker 1: But all of these things, I mean, there's such interesting
Speaker 1: questions and I certainly don't know. But the sense I
Speaker 1: get is that, you know, it would be simple to
Speaker 1: completely lean into being ambitious and be Gordon Gecko. It
Speaker 1: would be simple to completely renounce all worldly ambition. I
Speaker 1: think both of those are autopilot in a way. For me,
Speaker 1: it feels like anyway, there's some middle ground there, as
Speaker 1: you say, where you're celebrating both. You know, you're celebrating
Speaker 1: the whole shebang. I haven't been there, but maybe for
Speaker 1: a couple of minutes a day, I'm in the right place.
Speaker 1: You know. It's a big question to me, there's something
Speaker 1: not quite right about denying one's essential energy, because then
Speaker 1: how are you going to do anything? I talked to
Speaker 1: my students about this. You know that a lot of
Speaker 1: them have a lot of mixed feelings about their very
Speaker 1: palpable desire for fame, And I'm like, well, if it's palpable,
Speaker 1: it's real. So you could certainly do the Catholic thing
Speaker 1: of suppressing it, putting your foot on his throat. But
Speaker 1: I think there's a more mature thing to do, which
Speaker 1: is to sort of affably accept that that's in your
Speaker 1: toolbox and you've got to figure out how to use
Speaker 1: that energy. Yeah, and that's a perfect transition, I think
Speaker 1: into the Tolstoy story that for me was incredible story,
Speaker 1: but the way you broke it own, I was like,
Speaker 1: can I just have George come, like, can we read
Speaker 1: War and Peace together? You and me and you can
Speaker 1: just kind of break down every chapter a little bit,
Speaker 1: because it really brought some things together for me that
Speaker 1: we're really powerful. Can you give a brief summary of
Speaker 1: the story about giving too much away? Yeah? I mean,
Speaker 1: to me, it's a cousin to a Christmas Carol, which
Speaker 1: is a story that you know says, Okay, once upon
Speaker 1: a time there was a really miserable human being that
Speaker 1: we're going to use as a stand in for evil,
Speaker 1: and then we're gonna go on a little adventure with
Speaker 1: this person. And the question hanging over the story is
Speaker 1: can such a person change? You know? And then the
Speaker 1: secondary question is if so, how, And you know, that's
Speaker 1: a story that is fun on two levels. One, it's
Speaker 1: kind of fun to see a jerk in the world's
Speaker 1: it's a fun to see a jerk depicted. But also
Speaker 1: I think the story is at a deeper level speaking
Speaker 1: to everybody because we all, as we just were, should
Speaker 1: be thinking about the question of how can I change?
Speaker 1: You know, how can I who don't consider myself an
Speaker 1: evil person, but I'm a limited person? How can I change?
Speaker 1: And if I did, what would that actually look like?
Speaker 1: So that's kind of the understory. The story itself is
Speaker 1: so beautifully specific and real and this role they go
Speaker 1: on a trip to a blizzard and larity ensues. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so what blows me away about this story? We can
Speaker 1: actually kind of skip by too much of the parts
Speaker 1: of the story. But I want to bring up a
Speaker 1: couple of things that you bring up here because I
Speaker 1: am very, very interested in how people change. That's probably
Speaker 1: the heart of what three episodes of this show is about.
Speaker 1: How do people change. I'm a former heroin addict, so
Speaker 1: I have undergone dramatic change in my life. I do
Speaker 1: a lot of one on one coaching work with people,
Speaker 1: will create workshops. So I'm very interested in how people change.
Speaker 1: And this story is very much about can this person change?
Speaker 1: And if so, how does it happen? And you say
Speaker 1: that what creates the illusion of a changed mind? Here
Speaker 1: is a simple pattern. What once worked for Vassili stops working?
Speaker 1: Did I pronounce his name rights at the correct pronunciation?
Speaker 1: I think there's a I don't know, I've I've pronounced
Speaker 1: it four or five different ways along the pass In class,
Speaker 1: we just call these guys about their first name, just
Speaker 1: for simplicity, V, V and N. Yeah, that would be
Speaker 1: a good way to do it. I'm always mispronouncing things.
Speaker 1: Complete aside here, but a lifetime of reading, particularly when
Speaker 1: I was young, got me to the point where I
Speaker 1: knew all sorts of words, and I knew what they meant,
Speaker 1: but I'd never heard a human being say them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would go to use it for the very first
Speaker 1: time and I'd be like, I don't even know if
Speaker 1: that's right. Yeah, that's a sign of somebody who's read
Speaker 1: ahead of their life, which is really nice. So V
Speaker 1: in this case you describe. The first pattern here is
Speaker 1: that what works for him stops working, And I think
Speaker 1: this is so fundamental to human change. Yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: section where he's sort of trying to wait out this
Speaker 1: freezing cold night, and the person who so far has
Speaker 1: never had any fear or self doubt suddenly gets some
Speaker 1: Actually harder to de pick than you might think, because
Speaker 1: if you've made a person who's convincingly arrogant and confident,
Speaker 1: you know you can't just reform him instantaneously. So here,
Speaker 1: what Tuls he does is just he establishes certain thought
Speaker 1: patterns that Vacility has, which we all do that kind
Speaker 1: of mental recounting of our various victories. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: such a good writer, I won this award, blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: Later he marks the sort of interimment where Vacili falls
Speaker 1: asleep and we all know that feeling of falling asleep
Speaker 1: in the cold, and then you wake up even colder
Speaker 1: and and sort of like, oh god, I'm still here.
Speaker 1: And then vacillly revisits those same exact thought patterns, but
Speaker 1: now suddenly they're not giving him any sustenance. There's just
Speaker 1: something so skillful about that, and it kind of ties
Speaker 1: into what happens at the end, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: change never means that you step entirely out of who
Speaker 1: you are and take on a different mind and body.
Speaker 1: It's something more interesting going on, which is that all
Speaker 1: your previous habits just get slightly re channeled somehow, you know,
Speaker 1: As I say in the essay, it's a very hopeful
Speaker 1: thing because I've never had a moment where I stopped
Speaker 1: being me and it's wearisome, you know. So that might
Speaker 1: make us think, Okay, I'm stuck, I'm stuck forever in
Speaker 1: this guy. But what touls Away saying is no, no, no,
Speaker 1: You're actually an amalgam of different energies and impulses, almost
Speaker 1: like those what Pachinko games or whatever. You know, the
Speaker 1: marble comes down if it goes left instead of right,
Speaker 1: it's still using its same energy. So this is what
Speaker 1: the lesson of this story is is he's not going
Speaker 1: to suddenly become a perfect person who has no resemblance
Speaker 1: to who he was before, but a lot of his
Speaker 1: habits can just move over a half inch, and in
Speaker 1: that way, he's completely transformed by the end. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: makes me think so much of a concept and behavior
Speaker 1: science of the habit loop. I don't know if you're
Speaker 1: familiar with the habit loop, but the habit loop basically says, right,
Speaker 1: you've got a stimulus or a trigger, You've got then
Speaker 1: the thing that you do, and then there's a reward
Speaker 1: on the other end. So if your thing is smoking,
Speaker 1: you know, you get a trigger. I'm stressed, you smoke,
Speaker 1: you feel a little bit better. And the simplest thing
Speaker 1: to do is you just change that middle part. You
Speaker 1: can't change the fact that you're going to get stressed,
Speaker 1: and he also can't change the fact that you're gonna
Speaker 1: want relief from that stress. So recognizing those things are
Speaker 1: going to remain the same, you try and change that
Speaker 1: middle element. And that's kind of what you're pointing to here,
Speaker 1: and that the character in this story doesn't suddenly change
Speaker 1: his essential energy. His essential energy is an energy of doing.
Speaker 1: He is a doer. He also thrives on the feeling
Speaker 1: of self pride, you know, a victory. And the funny
Speaker 1: thing is even and I won't give story way, but
Speaker 1: even at the end, he's doing, he's still doing, taking
Speaker 1: a lot of pleasure in that work energy. And he's
Speaker 1: still congratulating himself. You know, he's congratulating himself though for
Speaker 1: something different. And before when he congratulated himself, he was
Speaker 1: doing it for being a rich guy, a clever guy,
Speaker 1: you know, better than everyone else. Now he still thinks
Speaker 1: he's better than everyone else. He's just really good at
Speaker 1: saving people. You know, he's really good at being selfless.
Speaker 1: You know, that is something very familiar to me, Like,
Speaker 1: you know, I wrote that talk on kindness and I
Speaker 1: went on tour for it, and so everyone is saying, oh,
Speaker 1: you're so kind, and of course I go, yeah, I am.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty cool. There's the ego, you know, so nobody
Speaker 1: you know, can exactly get away from that. But in
Speaker 1: his case, he's still enacting the same patterns of wanting
Speaker 1: to be victorious and wanting to feel good about himself,
Speaker 1: but the objects of those things have just changed slightly.
Speaker 1: And of course in the story, one of the things
Speaker 1: that helps him get there is that, you know, he's
Speaker 1: in extreme fear and he's an extremely dangerous situation. And
Speaker 1: that's like that thing, you know that the knowledge that
Speaker 1: wants to be hung in the morning has the fact
Speaker 1: of clarifying the mind or whatever the universe gives him
Speaker 1: a great gift, which is that he's in terrible peril.
Speaker 1: You know, right as you're sort of walking us through this.
Speaker 1: In the book, you tell a story about you being
Speaker 1: on a plane. Can you share a little bit of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean this is quite a long time ago, but
Speaker 1: I was on a book tour and I was coming
Speaker 1: home on the last leg from Chicago to Syracuse, and
Speaker 1: make a long story short, some geese flew into one
Speaker 1: of the engines and knocked it out kind of catastrophically,
Speaker 1: and it was, I think, really dangerous because the crew
Speaker 1: stopped communicating with us and there was a lot of
Speaker 1: energy and terror in the air. So I just blanked out.
Speaker 1: I mean I literally might not have been able to
Speaker 1: recall my name. You know. You hear people saying I
Speaker 1: was so scared I pissed myself, And I'm like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that could happen. That's not just hyperboly, that actually could
Speaker 1: physically happen. Because suddenly you know you're you're a guy
Speaker 1: going home to see your family, and then you're not.
Speaker 1: Suddenly you know all of that future is going to
Speaker 1: be over, and I remember looking at the seat back
Speaker 1: ahead of me and going, Okay, I'm gonna get out
Speaker 1: of this body now, and that's the thing that's going
Speaker 1: to do it to me and I can't help it,
Speaker 1: you know, I really can't help. But I have no
Speaker 1: power here. So the reason I brought this up in
Speaker 1: this context was that, you know, after a few minutes
Speaker 1: of this, I noticed that there was actually a fourteen
Speaker 1: year old boy sitting next to me, and he looks
Speaker 1: over at me and he goes, uh, sir, is this
Speaker 1: supposed to be happening, And just his vulnerability. You know,
Speaker 1: I had kids about the same age at that time,
Speaker 1: and I just reflectively said, yeah, yeah, no, no no, it's fine,
Speaker 1: it's fine, you know, which is totally not true. But
Speaker 1: I was just being a dad, you know, being a teacher.
Speaker 1: The interesting thing was, as soon as I did that,
Speaker 1: just totally out of habit, I a little bit came
Speaker 1: back to myself, like, Okay, this is not the best,
Speaker 1: but you still have some power, you know, you can
Speaker 1: still act. So I talked to him a little bit,
Speaker 1: and I noticed a woman across the aisle was nervous,
Speaker 1: and I took her hand, and I was still beyond terrified,
Speaker 1: but I had been reminded of the person I was
Speaker 1: before this happened. So I think that's kind of what
Speaker 1: happens to the Silian. The story is through action, his
Speaker 1: habitual kind of manic, nervous, neurotic energy that he has,
Speaker 1: he rouses himself, you know who he is, and suddenly
Speaker 1: that energy is now channeled in a more positive directions.
Speaker 1: He's actually thinking of this peasant that's with him, and
Speaker 1: in the same way that I was thinking of that
Speaker 1: little boy. You know. It's funny. It says that transformation
Speaker 1: is incremental, which in some ways is wonderful because it
Speaker 1: means that it actually does matter what you do. Small
Speaker 1: adjustments in mind and action actually do matter in the
Speaker 1: grandest scale possible. It's the only way that things could change. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's two things in there I want to call in
Speaker 1: the book. You say, now my energy was going out
Speaker 1: towards him instead of inward neurotically, and that is such
Speaker 1: a powerful idea. There's a quote by the writer Richard Roor.
Speaker 1: I love it. I won't get it right, but he says, basically,
Speaker 1: anything that is pulling you up and out of yourself
Speaker 1: is acting it for all intents and purposes as God
Speaker 1: for you in that moment, beautiful. I love that idea,
Speaker 1: anything that's pulling me up and out, And that ties
Speaker 1: in what we said earlier that that you, that self
Speaker 1: is actually a little bit rickety and delusional. So any
Speaker 1: chance we have to recognize that by moving away from
Speaker 1: it as a plus, yep ye. And then that second
Speaker 1: piece that you said about changing incrementally being so important,
Speaker 1: This idea that we can change just a little bit
Speaker 1: at a time. I've reflected before on you know, if
Speaker 1: you're want to film the movie of my life, there
Speaker 1: would be this really dramatic scene at twenty four me
Speaker 1: and arrested for a bunch of felonies. And there's another
Speaker 1: scene where I'm in a detox center and they say
Speaker 1: you need to go into longer term treatment and I say, no,
Speaker 1: I don't want to do that, and I go back
Speaker 1: to my room and I'm sitting there in the room
Speaker 1: and I have this, you know in in recovery called
Speaker 1: a moment of clarity where I'm like, oh God, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna die if I go back out there. And so
Speaker 1: I go back to him and I say, I'll go
Speaker 1: into treatment. Right if we were filming the movie, that
Speaker 1: would be a big pivotal scene, right, But that scene
Speaker 1: is really no more important in my recovery then the
Speaker 1: thousands of other very small actions that I took hour
Speaker 1: after hour, day after day that kept moving me towards recovery.
Speaker 1: It's just that that one makes a great story, but
Speaker 1: they all matter, you know, back to that point of
Speaker 1: incremental change. A word I really love is granular. It
Speaker 1: applies for fiction writing all the time. And in the story,
Speaker 1: you know, you said you you went into your room,
Speaker 1: and then you realize or you change your mind, you know,
Speaker 1: to extend the cinematic metaphor, if we could pan in
Speaker 1: on your mind at that moment, I would guess at
Speaker 1: many thousands of times before your mind had gone left
Speaker 1: in yeah, yeah, no, I don't need it. I don't
Speaker 1: need it. I don't need it. On this occasion it
Speaker 1: went right, Maybe I do need it. That was prepared
Speaker 1: by many thousands of moments, you know, and uh and
Speaker 1: and then you know, even breaking down one level further,
Speaker 1: there's probably moments when your mind went right, okay, we
Speaker 1: better change and then the other part of the mind
Speaker 1: said no, no no, no, no, don't do that. Come back
Speaker 1: over here and it did that, So it really is
Speaker 1: a small, tiny, tiny little thing. And you know, in fiction,
Speaker 1: when you're rewriting a story, those are the kind of
Speaker 1: things you're looking for. You always want to ask, how so,
Speaker 1: tell me more? And you know a moment that might
Speaker 1: have a kind of a big placard on saying transformation.
Speaker 1: If you keep saying, how so, tell me more, that
Speaker 1: the mind will cough up with increasing granularity, explanations and specificity,
Speaker 1: and then we get down to the core of how
Speaker 1: things actually happen. Dis relates to what we said earlier
Speaker 1: about the more you know about something, the less judgmental
Speaker 1: you are. You know, right, somebody in that similar situation
Speaker 1: might feel like, oh, I don't have what it takes
Speaker 1: to make that decision, But your story tells us what
Speaker 1: you could, you know, depending on again, and to go
Speaker 1: back to your parable at the beginning. If enough times
Speaker 1: in your life you fed the right thing, even scraps
Speaker 1: of food, you know you might be preparing yourself for
Speaker 1: the one big decision where all the things are lined
Speaker 1: up in the ball goes into the Potico machine and
Speaker 1: falls into the right direction. Yeah, I love that idea
Speaker 1: that you just brought up, that that decision was prefaced
Speaker 1: on countless previous decisions. I love the idea in Buddhism.
Speaker 1: Of Ian we talk about cause and effect, and we're like, okay,
Speaker 1: cause and effect. But I love that Buddhism essentially talks
Speaker 1: about countless cause and conditions that to me, gives a
Speaker 1: really rich picture of reality. I think it also gives
Speaker 1: us positive intention because if your intention is right, then
Speaker 1: as those thousands of micro decisions come at you, you're
Speaker 1: more likely to feed them. Well, you know, if your
Speaker 1: ambition in the morning is I'm going to kick the
Speaker 1: world's ass, I'm gonna be so successful, then when those
Speaker 1: thousands of decisions come, they're a little confused by you,
Speaker 1: you know. But if your intention is I really want
Speaker 1: to help other people, are want to be present, whatever
Speaker 1: formulation you have, and I think the best one is
Speaker 1: I'm going to try to be here for the benefit
Speaker 1: of other people, then when those decisions come, it's more
Speaker 1: likely that more of them are going to go in
Speaker 1: the positive direction. And then that's I think what they
Speaker 1: would call like you're you're kind of adding up merit.
Speaker 1: You know, over all, those thousands of micro decisions are
Speaker 1: cumulatively changing the whole weather system inside your head. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to switch directions a little bit and talk
Speaker 1: about a method that you describe for how you work
Speaker 1: on a story, But I want to take something that
Speaker 1: you're doing in there and see if I can apply
Speaker 1: it more broadly. So you basically say that the process
Speaker 1: for you of getting through a piece of fiction is
Speaker 1: you essentially write it and then you reread it. We
Speaker 1: won't use the word countless, but a lot of times
Speaker 1: over and over and over, and each time you're sort
Speaker 1: of looking at each sentence and you're sort of going, well, okay,
Speaker 1: did this move me in a positive or negative direction?
Speaker 1: And you would work your way through. My question for
Speaker 1: you is how do you keep as much as possible
Speaker 1: approaching that work in a fresh way, Because I feel
Speaker 1: like if I reread something I've written, you know it's
Speaker 1: an email that's going to go out by about the
Speaker 1: third time, I feel like I'm barely even reading it.
Speaker 1: So I think there's a process of being engaged. But
Speaker 1: the reason I ask taking this more broadly than than
Speaker 1: improving a work of fiction is that I think this
Speaker 1: ability to look get life freshly, to look at each
Speaker 1: moment freshly as much as possible with the beginner's mind
Speaker 1: is so important and so valuable, and so clearly it's
Speaker 1: something you really figured out how to do. So I'm
Speaker 1: kind of curious, how do you do it? Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a beautiful thought, and that connection is exactly right. I
Speaker 1: think the first thing you do is you recognize that
Speaker 1: freshness is hard to keep. You know, in others, you're
Speaker 1: absolutely right. By the third time you read something, the
Speaker 1: brain has done something that distances you from a genuine
Speaker 1: experience of it. So the one thing, in the practical
Speaker 1: sense as a writer, that's the thing that improves over time.
Speaker 1: For some reason, I can generate a simulation of a
Speaker 1: fresh mine much quicker now than I could when I
Speaker 1: was thirty. I used to take me a couple of days.
Speaker 1: Now I can just sort of step away and get
Speaker 1: a couple of coffee and come back. And I wouldn't
Speaker 1: say it's really a fresh mind, but it's a simulation
Speaker 1: of a fresh mind. I can pretty much imagine the
Speaker 1: experience of a first time reader. Second of all, I
Speaker 1: have an ongoing like Q, A guy who's going, how's
Speaker 1: your freshness, you know, And I can say, yeah, today
Speaker 1: it's not so good, and he goes Okay, we'll be
Speaker 1: humble then and don't change anything too much. Or some
Speaker 1: days you're like, wow, I am really seeing this as
Speaker 1: if I've never read before, and he goes, go use that,
Speaker 1: you know. So I think for me, that's most of
Speaker 1: it is just to be aware that there is such
Speaker 1: a thing as freshness and that we're not always in
Speaker 1: relation to and in possession of it. That's a lot
Speaker 1: of the struggle right there, because even in real life
Speaker 1: you can say, Man, I'm projecting like crazy today or
Speaker 1: I'm really grouch. None of this seems fresh to me.
Speaker 1: But I think ultimately there are neurological slash spiritual ways
Speaker 1: to train ourselves to get fresh, you know, to have
Speaker 1: that beginner's mind, and also to be able to in
Speaker 1: real time assess how that's going. You know. I even
Speaker 1: have moments where I'm like, oh, wow, you're really in
Speaker 1: the throes of some pretty negative projections about so and
Speaker 1: so I'm sitting here looking at the person. I'm going, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: look at that. Your mind is making up a backstory
Speaker 1: about this person that isn't helpful. I don't really have
Speaker 1: a tidy answer, but I think that's exactly the right thing,
Speaker 1: and It's what I love about fiction is that it
Speaker 1: gives you a little practice space, you know, to come
Speaker 1: back to something fresh, and you know, there's a beautiful
Speaker 1: moment where you're reading something you've read seven or eight
Speaker 1: or twenty or thirty times, and suddenly you go, oh,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, there's a moment right here I missed.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a little falseness here I didn't notice before,
Speaker 1: or there's a little rhythmic yuckiness that I didn't really
Speaker 1: hear before. And then the beautiful thing is when you
Speaker 1: poke at it, it often will give you something beautiful.
Speaker 1: So even just that as a lesson, you know, if
Speaker 1: if you're dissatisfied with something, if something seems not right,
Speaker 1: and you poke at it with positive intention, sometimes it
Speaker 1: pops out something nice for you. You know. For me,
Speaker 1: it's it's something that you can kind of use in
Speaker 1: life a little bit. You know, if you're having a
Speaker 1: conversation with somebody and it just feels a little stifled,
Speaker 1: even just the admission that it feels stifled is sometimes
Speaker 1: a big step forward, you know, Whereas in my previous life,
Speaker 1: you know, I was a real denier. I somehow had
Speaker 1: learned early on that if I felt uncomfortable, I should
Speaker 1: run away from that. And for me, that was often
Speaker 1: making a joke or doing a you know, kind of
Speaker 1: a bit of stand up or somehow I was uncomfortable
Speaker 1: with anything that was lumpy, and fiction has made me
Speaker 1: more comfortable with it. You know, you don't have to
Speaker 1: be afraid of that. You can sort of just you know,
Speaker 1: turn your attention to it. A couple of things you
Speaker 1: said there, if I were to summarize it for myself,
Speaker 1: would be one is practice, right, you keep doing it,
Speaker 1: whether it's meditation or mindfulness. If we were to extrapolate
Speaker 1: this to a spiritual term, is to continue to practice.
Speaker 1: And then the second is I really like that idea
Speaker 1: of the internal que a guy going hey, am I
Speaker 1: fresh and sort of checking and it's interesting. I heard
Speaker 1: a different conversation between a couple of meditation teachers recently,
Speaker 1: and one of them was talking about he called it
Speaker 1: the internal auditor. Was talking about being mindful looking out
Speaker 1: into the world, noticing something and then having an internal
Speaker 1: auditor sort of looking out into the world and saying
Speaker 1: I'm mindful of that tree, and the internal auditors saying, well,
Speaker 1: tell me a little bit about that tree. Are you
Speaker 1: really mindful? You know? And then the more you describe
Speaker 1: it a little bit, it goes okay, yeah, I guess okay,
Speaker 1: I'm going to give you a check on that one.
Speaker 1: And I've found it to be a really interesting practice
Speaker 1: to sort of look at something and then ask myself,
Speaker 1: am I really seeing this thing? And then looking again.
Speaker 1: I've been exploring a little bit how artists look at
Speaker 1: the world as a way of being able to see
Speaker 1: what's out my window differently, right, because I know that
Speaker 1: at least what neuroscience says is I'm not even really
Speaker 1: seeing what's out there. And Buddhism said the same thing
Speaker 1: a long time ago. You're not seeing what's out your
Speaker 1: window anymore. In the minute you named it all, you
Speaker 1: don't see it anymore. And neuroscience says that my brain
Speaker 1: is essentially predicting what it thinks is going to be
Speaker 1: out that window, and as long as the sense data
Speaker 1: coming back is more or less in accord with that,
Speaker 1: that sense data never even makes it all the way
Speaker 1: up the signal processing chain. And so some of the
Speaker 1: artists questions of where the edges, where the lights, where
Speaker 1: are the shadows? For me caused my brain to have
Speaker 1: to look more freshly. And I think that's probably some
Speaker 1: of what's happening with you in fiction is you probably
Speaker 1: don't even know what they are at this point, but
Speaker 1: you've got ways of looking that allow you to go deeper. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean it's all language. You know. If you say,
Speaker 1: you know Fred the stupid Republican, and then you let
Speaker 1: that sitting and go ah, and you know that your
Speaker 1: specificity seeker says, well, okay, but how so tell me more? Uh,
Speaker 1: And what it's really saying is could you come up
Speaker 1: with a more interesting formulation of that? Because that sentence
Speaker 1: is reductive and it's a little insulting. Then that's the
Speaker 1: equivalent of you looking out at those trees and saying,
Speaker 1: let me try to not think of that as a tree,
Speaker 1: but let me think of it as you know, what
Speaker 1: are the component phenomenon there. So as you try to
Speaker 1: in language rework Fred the Republican, you see that Fred
Speaker 1: has a scale model railroad in his basement. Huh, that's interesting.
Speaker 1: And Fred is a widower, you know, And so suddenly
Speaker 1: the single reductive signifier Fred the Republican or tree can
Speaker 1: be sort of fragmented into smaller and smaller things and
Speaker 1: then you're coming closer to seeing Fred, you know. And
Speaker 1: and for me, it's all about language. It's all about
Speaker 1: just the process of that you described earlier, where you
Speaker 1: read a sentence and you just have to really get
Speaker 1: quiet and say, am I satisfied with that? Does that
Speaker 1: sentence through me? And if not, where, and then just
Speaker 1: be sort of joyfully, kind of playfully making a little
Speaker 1: tweak to it. But you know, something you said made
Speaker 1: me think to one of the things I struggle with
Speaker 1: as a teacher, and I think it's similar in other
Speaker 1: parts of life. If I could generalize the Western mind,
Speaker 1: at least my Western mind thrives on analysis and conceptualization
Speaker 1: and in a sense, reduction. So we have pithy slogans
Speaker 1: about writing. A given writer has a sense of his
Speaker 1: lineage and different maxims and different catch phrases and so on.
Speaker 1: But that's all thinking, you know. And people can spend
Speaker 1: their whole lives refining the way they think about writing.
Speaker 1: But what I try to say in the book is
Speaker 1: that's a very different process from the writing. The writing
Speaker 1: itself is accomplishing us what second from a direction we
Speaker 1: don't even understand, But getting better at that is what
Speaker 1: actually will distinguish one writer from another one. And I
Speaker 1: think same with a lot of spiritual things, you know.
Speaker 1: I think Trunk, Bar Room Pretchet had a whole about
Speaker 1: spiritual materialism and how we can spend a whole life
Speaker 1: accumulating books and visits to different countries and all that,
Speaker 1: and then find that you wake up and you're not
Speaker 1: that much different than you were at the beginning. So
Speaker 1: for me, that's, especially as I get older, that's a
Speaker 1: really urgent thing to remember that the accouterments of writing
Speaker 1: are fun and they very much seem like writing sometimes,
Speaker 1: but in fact they're not. You know, that's another discipline
Speaker 1: I'm trying to enforce it myself. You've talked before about
Speaker 1: the similarities for you between writing and meditation, how they
Speaker 1: come together in certain ways, and listening to you talk now,
Speaker 1: it strikes me that one of them is there's a
Speaker 1: certain amount of patients that perhaps you developed through a
Speaker 1: lot of years of writing that as you entered meditation,
Speaker 1: prepared you to enter it with a certain frame of mind.
Speaker 1: And for me, what I have to do is make
Speaker 1: sure it's an urgent patience. You know, there's that feeling, well,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna hang out today and read my stuff.
Speaker 1: That's not it for me. You know, it's better when
Speaker 1: I've got a real sense of like a fire in
Speaker 1: the belly. And then the patience is, I'm going to
Speaker 1: have the fire in the belly today, I'm gonna make
Speaker 1: these great changes, and then I'm going to stop and
Speaker 1: be patient and come back tomorrow and do exactly the
Speaker 1: same thing again. So it's kind of a long term patience.
Speaker 1: And when you say patients, what comes to my mind
Speaker 1: is a sense of saying, well, the story knows better
Speaker 1: than I do, so let me be an handmade into
Speaker 1: the story service energy which I don't know right now.
Speaker 1: I shouldn't know. I prefer not to know it. It's
Speaker 1: going to tell me what it's energy is, and then
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be there to help it. That's the kind
Speaker 1: of literary patients that I try to get to because
Speaker 1: there is some weird thing where you know, it sounds
Speaker 1: crazy about a story. I would say, even from the
Speaker 1: first couple of sentences, and even if those sentences don't
Speaker 1: wind up in the final draft, a story has a
Speaker 1: kind of DNA, and your job is to try to
Speaker 1: discover that DNA. And the way you discover it is
Speaker 1: by trying to privilege the most high energy moments in
Speaker 1: the story as you stumble on them or as you
Speaker 1: revise them into being. So that's a lot different than
Speaker 1: what I thought when I was young, which is you
Speaker 1: just have to know some ship and force it on
Speaker 1: the reader. It's much more exploratory and that's really exciting,
Speaker 1: you know, but it means that you never get to
Speaker 1: be a master. You get to be a schmuck, you know,
Speaker 1: and you you always have to be the person who
Speaker 1: shows up a little sheepishly going I have no idea
Speaker 1: what's going to happen, you know, Dear God, please help
Speaker 1: me listen well today and be playful. And I don't
Speaker 1: think it is meditation. I think meditation is much more
Speaker 1: profound and can do more for us. But writing is
Speaker 1: sort of a nice cousin to that that maybe, as
Speaker 1: you're suggesting, it preps certain internal moves that will come
Speaker 1: in handy when you do the more eerious activity. Right.
Speaker 1: I'm interested to use the phrase you just use what
Speaker 1: are the cousins of meditation? You know, what are what
Speaker 1: are all the various cousins? Because I do think that
Speaker 1: meditation in the sense it's presented in a Buddhist context.
Speaker 1: It's an incredibly powerful tool. I've done it for a
Speaker 1: long long time, and I think that it is only
Speaker 1: one tool, and for different people at different points in
Speaker 1: their lives, may not even be the best primary tool.
Speaker 1: I'm not certain. So I'm curious, like, what are its cousins?
Speaker 1: And I think writing is a good one. I think
Speaker 1: creativity is in general a good one. But I'm kind
Speaker 1: of curious of off the top of your head, do
Speaker 1: you think of any other close cousins. What this book
Speaker 1: taught me is that everything is a causing nobit if
Speaker 1: you see it right. You know, falling down the stairs
Speaker 1: is a good one, you know, because you know, in
Speaker 1: writing this book, I kind of notice when we're reading
Speaker 1: a work of literature there's something that our mind does
Speaker 1: I think is general and what it is is okay,
Speaker 1: it's in a relatively uninflected state. So it's blank, you know,
Speaker 1: you pick up the nine page store, you start reading. Instantly,
Speaker 1: the mind is being altered, you know, and it's being
Speaker 1: altered in a pattern of roughly speaking, you know, expectations
Speaker 1: are being engendered and then they're being exploited. I guess
Speaker 1: are used, you know, So you expect something. So when
Speaker 1: you're trying to analyze the story, in other words, when
Speaker 1: you're trying to understand what has happened to you, what
Speaker 1: are some gifts. Well, one is that internal auditor we
Speaker 1: talked about. You look back over the story and you
Speaker 1: can remember where you were at each given point with
Speaker 1: some precision, or you know, in real time you asked,
Speaker 1: you could describe where you are when you're on page six.
Speaker 1: The second thing, which is maybe a little bit under praise,
Speaker 1: is just the willingness to bless that. You know, whatever
Speaker 1: your reaction is on page three, to go, yep, that's
Speaker 1: my reaction, I own it. You know. I'm not going
Speaker 1: to say I haven't read enough. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: say I'm stupid. I'm not gonna say I don't know
Speaker 1: about the Russians. I'm probably wrong. I'm going to say, well,
Speaker 1: for better or worse, this is where my mind has
Speaker 1: been put. And that's what I have to work with.
Speaker 1: You know, that's what the artist has to work with,
Speaker 1: whereas he left me on page three. So blessing that,
Speaker 1: and then finally, once it's all done, your ability to
Speaker 1: articulate what has happened to you. And that's really rich
Speaker 1: because the temptation, especially for someone like me who was
Speaker 1: a working class person and didn't have an early education,
Speaker 1: and like college in English, you're always inclined to give
Speaker 1: up your authority about your own reaction and seed it
Speaker 1: over to experts. So that's why you know, in class,
Speaker 1: a lot of times undergrads are trying to sound like
Speaker 1: somebody else. They're denying their own reaction in favor of
Speaker 1: someone they've read somewhere, or an acceptable way of sounding intellectual.
Speaker 1: That's a form of denying, you know, your own reactions.
Speaker 1: So what I've seen over the years of students is
Speaker 1: that it's a really exciting thing, starting with these Russian
Speaker 1: stories to help somebody learn to value and bless their
Speaker 1: own reactions, and then to try to articulate those just
Speaker 1: as they are without dressing them up, you know, trusting
Speaker 1: that if you have an experience and you describe to
Speaker 1: me as succinctly and accurately as you can, that is
Speaker 1: by definition literary. You know, if one is read enough,
Speaker 1: you know, I say, so, that's really exciting and it
Speaker 1: and it broadens out to say, you know, any of
Speaker 1: us is an authority, and we are the watchers of
Speaker 1: our own minds, and when you go out into the world,
Speaker 1: and whether it's a yard party or a revolution, or
Speaker 1: a solar eclipse or a passionate love affair, the same
Speaker 1: process is in effect. You know, we're there, we have
Speaker 1: a reaction, we bless it, we articulated. So I think
Speaker 1: this is one of the arguments that you don't hear
Speaker 1: much anymore. But why literature is a great thing for
Speaker 1: a young person to train herself in because it's everything,
Speaker 1: It's everything. Yeah, there's a spiritual teacher by the name
Speaker 1: of Addy Ashanti who was hugely important to me. I
Speaker 1: mean still is very important, but at a point so much.
Speaker 1: And the thing that he said, I mean I've heard
Speaker 1: it a thousand times, right, But something about the way
Speaker 1: he said it finally drove at home, and it was
Speaker 1: trust your direct experience, not the direct experience that you
Speaker 1: think you should have. You know. So he's a lot
Speaker 1: into inquiry. Who am I ask yourself that? But then
Speaker 1: of course you know you're gonna want to answer that
Speaker 1: with the answers that you've read in books. You've got
Speaker 1: to trust your direct experience, you know, whatever that direct
Speaker 1: experience is trusted. And then I love what you said
Speaker 1: and the way you you actually talk about doing in
Speaker 1: the book, notice that direct experience and then articulate it
Speaker 1: to the best of your ability. It's that real trusting process. Yes,
Speaker 1: you trust that thought, and I think part of the
Speaker 1: articulation is also to have a little correct skepticism about
Speaker 1: your reaction. Now the words like when I was an
Speaker 1: engineering school, we're always taught that you do your experiment
Speaker 1: and part of your report is to reflect on the
Speaker 1: limitations of the experimental design, so you don't assert more
Speaker 1: than you should. So I think, you know, for me,
Speaker 1: part of the book was to say, here are my reactions.
Speaker 1: They're just my reactions, and also they might be awful
Speaker 1: little bit that little note of humility, because who's read enough,
Speaker 1: you know, who knows everything? And every time you read
Speaker 1: a story you're in a particular state of mind and
Speaker 1: so on. So I think that that whole process, with
Speaker 1: a little touch of on the other hand at the end,
Speaker 1: you know, is really powerful. I think that's so true.
Speaker 1: Maybe this would be the last point we'll touch on
Speaker 1: before we wrap up, because I wanted to ask you
Speaker 1: about that in a little bit more de tale, because
Speaker 1: you say, the writer goes through and you know you're
Speaker 1: revising your own work, or let's keep it with revising
Speaker 1: your own work for now. And you sort of read
Speaker 1: this sentence gives me a positive or negative and and
Speaker 1: you say that that writer's ability to trust themselves and
Speaker 1: their voice is really really important. And I don't know
Speaker 1: if you brought it up in this book or if
Speaker 1: I heard you talking about in a different conversation, but
Speaker 1: talking about intuition. And I think intuition is a really
Speaker 1: interesting thing, and this idea of trusting ourselves as a
Speaker 1: really interesting thing because I've had different experiences in life,
Speaker 1: experiences now as a as a hopefully healthier, wiser person,
Speaker 1: where I sort of trust my intuition. But I also
Speaker 1: know that there were plenty of times when I was
Speaker 1: twenty four where it was absolutely certain that going and
Speaker 1: getting a shot of heroin and stealing somebody's purse was
Speaker 1: absolutely the right thing to do. That was my intuition.
Speaker 1: So I'm so curious about in general, this idea of
Speaker 1: in intuition, how to know when and where to trust ourselves,
Speaker 1: knowing that, as you're pointing out on one hand, that voice,
Speaker 1: our internal voice, is the most important thing we have
Speaker 1: as a writer. I'd argue it's one of the most
Speaker 1: important things we have as a human and as we've
Speaker 1: pointed out lots of different ways in this conversation, boy
Speaker 1: do we have a tendency to get it wrong? And
Speaker 1: I think you touched on it there for a second
Speaker 1: in your last response, But I'm wondering if you could
Speaker 1: say a little more. Yeah, Well, for me, you know,
Speaker 1: intuition might be it's definitely an approximate word. In terms
Speaker 1: of writing. I always imagine that you've got a kind
Speaker 1: of cartoon bubble over your head when you're writing, that's
Speaker 1: telling you all kinds of things. In the worst case,
Speaker 1: it's giving you a big conceptual read out of your story,
Speaker 1: and it's over controlling it analytically that I can usually
Speaker 1: get rid of. Then you say, okay, is there anything
Speaker 1: up there? Still? Well, there is there, Always is, you know,
Speaker 1: unless you're some kind of amazing genius, there's always little
Speaker 1: taints up there. I trust my intuition to the extent
Speaker 1: that rumination has stopped, and for me, rumination stops in fascination.
Speaker 1: So in other ways, it's the story that I'm right
Speaker 1: has pulled me into it by the fourth of a
Speaker 1: sentence and convinced me that it's actually happening. Rumination isn't
Speaker 1: the thing anymore, and my intuition is just located in
Speaker 1: the microscopic way on the phrase. The phrases that are
Speaker 1: coming by my eyes. Basically, those are small intuitions, and
Speaker 1: in that spirit, they're kind of free of rumination, and
Speaker 1: they're also free of a lot of the stuff in
Speaker 1: that cartoon bubble, like good writing should sound like this
Speaker 1: or you know whatever. Now, when you had the intuition
Speaker 1: about stealing a purse, my guess is you were heavily
Speaker 1: under this sway of a cartoon bubble that was full
Speaker 1: of all kinds of concepts that were so endemic to
Speaker 1: you that you may didn't even notice them. I think
Speaker 1: you'd make the argument that that was either well, that
Speaker 1: it wasn't your deepest intuition because it was clouded by
Speaker 1: that that I don't really know, you know, but something
Speaker 1: like that. But I think the beauty of writing is
Speaker 1: that you're asking the intuition to do a very small thing,
Speaker 1: which is to have an opinion on a phrase. You know,
Speaker 1: it's not it's not giving you a world view, it's
Speaker 1: just giving you. So maybe it's like training wheels they
Speaker 1: can do that much. You know. That's a great way
Speaker 1: to say it. And I liked what you said a
Speaker 1: minute ago to about recognizing the limits, you know, when
Speaker 1: you're doing a study, here the limits of the study.
Speaker 1: You know. I've been talking with some clients about this,
Speaker 1: you know, trusting yourself, And I said, well, I think
Speaker 1: I trust myself, and I trust myself that if I
Speaker 1: need to make a big decision that I'm going to
Speaker 1: go get input and feedback from wise people. Now I'm
Speaker 1: not going to necessarily take whatever they say, but I
Speaker 1: trust myself enough. I've got a method of gathering information
Speaker 1: and filtering and thinking through it that I'll arrive at
Speaker 1: the right answer. It's not that I trust that out
Speaker 1: of my being immediately emerges the right answer. I love
Speaker 1: what you're saying there, that intuition being these small micro movements. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and at leads to another thing that I talked about
Speaker 1: in the book, which is iteration. So in writing, I
Speaker 1: trust my intuition on Thursday, knowing that I get another
Speaker 1: shot at it on Friday, and I'm not disavowing my
Speaker 1: Thursday reaction. I'm just building on it. So in the
Speaker 1: same way, you know, I think we can act on
Speaker 1: our intuition with positive intentions, good faith. If we fuck
Speaker 1: it up, that's part of a story too, And it
Speaker 1: doesn't mean you're a terrible person. It doesn't mean you
Speaker 1: can't trust your intuition. It's just part of the process,
Speaker 1: the long term process of trusting your your intuition, which
Speaker 1: gives you a chance after a chance, to hone it
Speaker 1: and to improve it. Otherwise it's too much like Russian roulette,
Speaker 1: you know. But if you say, yeah, I'm gonna take
Speaker 1: my best shot at it and forgive myself if I
Speaker 1: screw it up, And in writing, that's enacted literally by
Speaker 1: just showing up the next day and reading it once
Speaker 1: more and going, oh, yeah, I got that right. Oops,
Speaker 1: that's not it. So I think the big lesson for
Speaker 1: a writer is that you learn that you're not you're writing.
Speaker 1: You're also not any one of those writers. You're all
Speaker 1: of those writers, all of the twenty writers that went
Speaker 1: into writing a six page story. You've been all of
Speaker 1: those and none of them are binding. You know. That's
Speaker 1: a beautiful lesson, and it means that you're never any
Speaker 1: one person. You're just an evolving series of people. And
Speaker 1: that to me gives me a lot of hope, because
Speaker 1: otherwise it's too severe. You know, if I'm stuck, if
Speaker 1: I'm really just one identity, I've already messed that up.
Speaker 1: And I think that is a absolutely beautiful play to
Speaker 1: wrap up. Couldn't say it better. So, George, thank you
Speaker 1: so much. You and I are going to continue in
Speaker 1: the post show conversation where we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: what you get out of reading and kind of what
Speaker 1: literature does for you listeners. If you'd like access to
Speaker 1: that other post show conversations, add free episodes, and lots
Speaker 1: of other great parts of being in our community, go
Speaker 1: to One you Feed dot net slash joint. George, thank
Speaker 1: you so much. I've been so excited for this one
Speaker 1: and it's been really fun. It's been really fun for
Speaker 1: me too. Eric. Thank you for having man. Thank you
Speaker 1: for your beautiful mind. If what you just heard was
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