Krista Tippett: Hello, again. Attending to transformative possibilities that exist inside moments is not something that comes naturally to us, as simple as that sounds, because of all the things we’ve been pondering. We are complex creatures. We are stressed creatures. And everyone we interact with is also complex and stressed, and, very possibly, in some kind of anguish.

I met Sylvia Boorstein when I was invited to do a show, a live, public interview with her about parenting, and about parenting children in a world of flux. This was a few years ago, and the world is still, and again, in flux. I had become aware of her, initially, just in a library, and pulled this book off the shelf titled, That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist.

Sylvia is a very renowned meditation teacher. She’s also, even as she became Buddhist or discovered meditation in her 20s or 30s, she’s really integrated these two identities. She’s integrated what she learns through Buddhism, and honors and holds her Jewish identity and practice. I often refer to her as a “Jewish-Buddhist” mother, grandmother, and teacher. I’ve been with her in a few different settings now, and she just radiates wisdom and calm. She kind of glows with those things.

But she will tell you that she is a “chronic fretter” and that her childhood — and that background of our life, our childhoods, it’s just astonishing how they are with us and shape us all of our days — her childhood was one of anxiety. Her mother was always ill. So Sylvia says she was always, as far back as she can remember, a naturally anxious person, always waiting for the catastrophe around the corner. And she kind of honors this in herself. She says, we all have neurological glitches — kinds of stress places we go — and chronic fretting is her neurological glitch. So what we have in Sylvia Boorstein is someone who has actively shaped her presence in the world across her lifetime, welcoming in her frailties and glitches, toward creating a wise and graceful whole.

There is a discipline of kindness tucked inside how she finds it in herself to be able to engage contemplative tradition in the first place, with the people she’s closest to in her life and with strangers, with the people she bumps up against all day long, just as a human loose in the world.

When I sat with her, I brought to her a statement I’d seen her making that is so intriguing. She said — and this is another way to come at the notion of mindfulness and to crack that open — she said that her measuring stick for how clearly she’s thinking is if she’s able to be kind.

Sylvia Boorstein: The way I keep thinking about it, Krista, is when I’m kind in any circumstance, whatever — if someone cuts in front of me in — you go in with a basket in the supermarket and someone zips in right in front of you, and you only have two items in your basket anyway, so they could have not. So your mind thinks a thought. But when my mind thinks a thought like that — Grrr, they shouldn’t have done that! — in that moment, I’m complicating my own mind with my own negativity, which I’d rather not do.

But if I can catch myself doing that and instead think to myself, Who knows? Maybe he’s late for some place, maybe he really needs to be, maybe this is urgent. May he be well, may he get there in a good shape, may he live happily — then I don’t really mess up my own mind. And so I’m two minutes later in the supermarket checkout. So I’ve done myself a kindness.

And the wisdom, I think, that comes from not upsetting the mind is, you never know. I really don’t know where that person is going. And you never know whether it’s good to go out now or two minutes later. Maybe, you know, who knows what traffic he’ll get into, or I? Just to not fight with the moment. There they are, why complicate it? I think we’re in the habit of doing that a lot.

Tippett: And I suppose we model that for our children, then, and they become like that, too. Do you have thoughts about passing this kind of idea, this kind of teaching, on to children?

Even as I say that, I realize that probably the best way is to be like that. I mean, my daughter, who’s 17 now, she said to me the other day, “So is this one of those ‘Do what I say, not what I do’ things?”

So I assume you model this, but do you talk to your children or your grandchildren about kindness?

Boorstein: I think it probably comes up in the conversation from time to time; I don’t bring it up as a sermon. But I think by what we respond to and what we nurture, that’s really what grows in our children. I think our children learn to speak in a tone that we speak in or to hold people kindly if we do.

I had in my mind — I wanted to tell this. I’ve never said it in a public audience, but I just thought about it recently. I decided that — I’ll find out soon if this is a good analogy, but I was thinking about the GPS in my car. It never gets annoyed at me. If I make a mistake, it says, “Recalculating.”

And then it tells me, “Make the soonest left turn, and go back.”

I thought to myself, you know, I should write a book and call it Recalculating, because I think that that’s what we’re doing all the time: that something happens, it challenges us, and the challenge is, OK, so do you want to get mad now? You could get mad, you could go home, you could make some phone calls, you could tell a few people you can’t believe what this person said or that person said. Indignation is tremendously seductive, you know, and to share with other people on the telephone and all that.

So to not do it and to say, Wait a minute — apropos of what you said before, wise effort — to say to yourself, Wait a minute, this is not the right road. Literally, this is not the right road. There’s a fork in the road here. I could become indignant, I could flame up this flame of negativity, or I could say, “Recalculating. I’ll just go back here …”

Tippett: This is an example of technology instilling us with spiritual disciplines. We find so much to criticize.

Boorstein: No, I think it’s good. And no matter how many times I don’t make that turn, it will continue to say, “Recalculating …” The tone of voice will stay the same.

Tippett: That’s good. I think that’s a good analogy.

[music]

I love the image she gives us of recalculating. It’s another way to think about that pause between the stimulus and the response that Christine Runyan gave us by way of Victor Frankl: walking through our days, understanding that we have this power to resist the seduction of indignation; and, larger than that, that we have this power. We walk around in the most simple, ordinary of circumstances with the power to break someone else’s day or to make someone else’s day with kindness, with a moment of kindness.

And, like all spiritual wisdom, we must offer that to ourselves, too, that kindness to ourselves, if we truly, innately, and in a fully embodied way can offer them to others — if this can become the way we are in the world, even if it’s not the way we started out being, even if everything in our formation or what’s happening to us would suggest that we would be different.

The invitation here is to practice kindness — kindness as a spiritual way of being, even and especially when the most natural move would be something different. We can begin flexing a muscle of stopping, of recalculating. As you work on this, at all times let this intention of kindness to others root in a deep practice of kindness towards yourself. That’s the only way this can become truly instinctive and defining of you, and for everyone around you.

Sylvia, a little bit later in this conversation, talked to me about a mantra she has, and I offer it to you. I have come back to it in the last few years. It is a real gift. And in the spirit of Sylvia, it’s also playful and pleasurable. This is something that she often says to herself when she’s in a moment of anxiety. And she herself agrees it’s great advice and is happy to offer it to others. She says to herself, “Sweetheart, you are in pain. Relax. Take a breath. Let’s pay attention to what is happening. Then we’ll figure out what to do.”

We are going to meditate on that in our Pause, and I will be here when you return again.