Krista Tippett: Welcome back. As we move forward, I want to name yet another easy — too easy understanding of hope that we need to set aside in reimagining hope as a muscle. And that would be that hope is a response to things going well. It would be a rush to optimism that insists that things will turn out OK, that things will be all right — and that can be an avoidance of the fullness of reality, an avoidance of what needs to be faced and the stretching and growing that are possible. This easy hope is wishful thinking as a form of denial.

I think about Brené Brown’s research on vulnerability and courage, and one of the things she has described through her social science research is that when people have been shielded from adversity, that that creates hopelessness in them. She has found — again, through working with massive amounts of people and data — that hope is an aspect of wholehearted lives, and wholehearted lives do not have all the cards stacked in their favor. These are lives in which people have come through things they did not know they could get through to the other side on. Bravery and hope are connected to struggle. There’s actually a scientific observation that hope is a function of struggle. So here we are. This is a basic human reality, one of those basic puzzles of the human condition.

And our teacher this time, angel Kyodo williams, speaks expansively and prophetically to the layers and layers of struggle and possibility just in being alive at this moment in time, as a member of this generation of our species. I think that Rev. angel Kyodo williams is one of our wisest voices on the spiritual aspect of social healing and social transformation — I would say social evolution — the social evolution that we are called to. She is an esteemed Zen priest, and she’s the second Black woman recognized as a teacher in the ancient Japanese Zen lineage. Her imagination about us and our future is an offering towards the muscle of hope, a way of being present to what can feel like the overwhelm of now and all it is calling us to.

So before you hear her, I want to share a little bit about the context of the conversation I had with her and how it speaks to this basic human condition. She said to me, “We are this massive collection of thoughts and experiences and sensations that are moving at the speed of light. And we never get a chance to just be still and pause and look at them just for what they are, and then slowly, deliberately sort out our own voice from the rest of the thoughts, emotions, the interpretations, the habits, the momentums that just seem like they’re trying to overwhelm us at any given moment. She has this wonderful phrase from her tradition that she offers up to the rest of us — “For those of us who are not monastics, the world is our field of practice.” So listen to a little bit of my conversation with her.

Rev. williams: Our teachers — as much as we love our embodied teachers that come in flesh and bone and sit on cushions — are really the people, the situations that we confront, moment to moment, day to day, month to month, year to year, that incite a sense of discomfort, dis-ease, awkwardness in us. And rather than seeing those moments as threats to who we are, if we could reorient, if we could center in our relationship to ourselves as evolving, fluid, ever-expansive creatures, whose role is to be in observation of: What is that? What has that inspired? What has that called forth in me, that discomfort that is speaking to something that feels solid and fixed and is now challenged in its location? — if we could do that, if we could live our lives in a way in which we understand that our deepest learning, our deepest capacity for growth comes not from walling ourselves off from the things that make us feel a sense of threat or discomfort, or out of alignment or out of sorts, but rather figuring out what is speaking to us when we feel those things, and what do we have to learn from that teacher that is embodied in that situation, that moment — not so that we become something different than who we are, but that we’re evolving into a greater and greater sense of what it means to be fully human — to be radically, completely in the truth of the human experience and all of its complexities.

I think that if we can move our work, whatever work we’re up to, whatever kind of desire that we have for our own development in life, to be willing to face discomfort and receive it as opportunity for growth and expansion and a commentary about what is now more available to us, rather than what it is that is limiting us and taking something away from us, that we will — in no time at all, we will be a society that enhances the lives of all our species. We will be in a society that thrives and knows that the planet must thrive with us. We will be in a society that knows that no one that is suffering serves the greater community and that no one that is suffering is not an indicator of the ways in which the society itself is suffering.

Tippett: I like that faith of “in no time at all.”

Rev. williams: In no time at all.

Tippett: I’m impressed with that. [laughs]

Rev. williams: In no time at all. [laughs]

Tippett: You mean that?

Rev. williams: I really do. I think we have — we are evolving at such a pace. Even what we’re experiencing now in our society, we’re just cycling through it. We’re digesting the material of the misalignment. We’re digesting the material of how intolerable it is to be so intolerant. We’re digesting the material of 400, 500 years of historical context that we have decided to leave behind our heads, and we are choosing to turn over our shoulders and say, “I must face this, because it is intolerable to live in any other way than a way that allows me to be in contact with my full, loving, human self.”

And it’s part of it. It is part of it, to go through the fits and the denial. There’s a death happening. There is something dying in our society, in our culture, and there’s something dying in us individually. And what is dying, I think, is the willingness to be in denial. And that is extraordinary. The willingness to be in denial is dying in a meaningful number of us, the tipping point. It’s always been happening, and when it happens in enough of us, in a short enough period of time, at the same time, then you have a tipping point, and the culture begins to shift. And then what I feel like people are at now is like, “No, no, bring it on. I have to face it. We have to face it.”

[music]

Tippett: The invitation here, first of all, at a very elemental level, is to take in the magnitude — the peril and the promise of being alive at this moment in time. The invitation is to make a shift when we can — when we can get out from under that sense of overwhelm — to ask what the incredible fullness and gravity of now is making more available to us, rather than how it is limiting and uncomfortable.

In Part 2, the Pause, we are going to settle into a pause to make those moves and to start actively looking for who will be our teachers — what situations can be our teachers.

Savor your time carrying all of this through your day, and I’ll be here next time.