Hello. What a time in the life of the world we inhabit. It is dauntingly full of tumult and fear and exhaustion. And it is dazzlingly full of promise and creativity and care. The questions we pursue at On Being, the questions I pursue in a life of conversation, are the ancient, enduring human inquiry, and they have never been so alive or immediate or urgent: What does it mean to be human? How do we want to live? And who will we be to each other?

We have created this app as a place for living those questions, for investing in our inner life, our interior life, our spirits — expansively and richly understood — and joining that inner work with the callings so many of us feel, to bring our highest humanity to this time in the world, to the people around us, to the great challenges before our species.

To begin, I’m going to invite you to set a ritual and intention, a day and time when you will embark on a first course. I recommend that you begin with our course on Finding Replenishment. We all need that right now. And this one especially is designed to be kind of a mini-retreat conducted in the middle of your life. There are six chapters, and each one will accompany you through a week.

Wisdom Practice is the heart of that experience. It’s the first thing you’ll see. It is a 10-15 minute listen, offering some teaching and food for thought and imagination, and a clear, accessible invitation to bring those teachings and that wisdom into the course of your days, to the ordinary interactions and relationships of your life.

Then, for every day of the week that follows, as often as you like, you have the Pause. That is a 2-4 minute listening ritual, kind of a contemplative moment, a
meditation that you can carry around with you through your day, towards integrating this Wisdom Practice into your being and your presence in the world — building spiritual and moral muscle memory.

The Wisdom Practice, and the Pause, in a more concentrated way, also offer prompts for journaling. And I am going to also be directive here and say, as you begin each course, crack open a journal. This will be part of the experience. Let this be a primary companion, in and of itself a spiritual and practical discipline, for all you are going to ponder and stretch and deepen.

So that’s it: Wisdom Practice; Pause; journaling all along the way.

Now, if you find in any chapter that you want to hear more of the background of the conversation that formed the teaching and the Wisdom Practice, there’s also a third section, called Delve. And you can go deeper with that. You can also find the link to the entire conversation I had with that teacher. That’s an optional deep dive for any time.

What you’re also going to see in the app is the On Being episode coming up every week. And that, too, is a way to come into a big, rich conversation with wise and graceful lives, from spiritual inquiry and science, from social healing to the arts.

I want to say a few words before I finish, about the philosophy and the techniques behind this approach we’re taking. The scientific, or the neuroscientific idea behind this, is that what we practice, we become, and that that is every bit as true for qualities of character, for the quality of our presence in the world, as it is for a skill like throwing a ball or playing a musical instrument.

Another aspiration and conviction behind this app and these course experiences is that we believe we can create a community of accompaniment on the generative landscape of our time — by which I mean that, alongside the very highly publicized narrative of danger and dysfunction and decay, enough of us see that we have a world to remake. We are orienting towards that life-giving possibility. We want to meet what is hard and hurting. We want to rise to what is beautiful and life-giving. We want to do that where we live, and we want to do it walking alongside others.

This app and its courses are an offering towards that, an offering of companionship and strategies towards wisdom and wholeness inside ourselves and in life together — wholeness even as the world engages a story of fracture. We can proceed in ways that are at once contemplative and pragmatic. We can seek balance and equanimity even as the ground beneath our feet continues to shift. It always was shifting. We are now living more honestly with the truth of things. And there are wonderful teachers and simple practices and techniques to help all of us come into a different relationship with reality — with what is.

Thank you for being here, for being with me, with us, and with each other, at this beginning.