Krista Tippett: When my children entered adolescence, I made this decision that as much as possible, I was going to choose to be fascinated rather than terrified. That is not always the right thing to do, it’s not always reasonable, and it’s certainly not always possible. But it’s actually also a move I’m trying to call myself to make at this moment in the life of the world, and I’ve been so intrigued by a comparison someone once made for me — that a picture of the world right now looks very much like a picture we can take of the teenage brain. It is reckless and creative and destructive and magnificent, in equal measure.

What a time to be alive. How is just being alive stretching you, making you uncomfortable, calling you, perhaps, in ways you haven’t paused to consider, to the kind of struggle that is an invitation to new life? Can you walk through the world looking for an experience where you might choose this response, in angel Kyodo williams’s words: “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”?

Consider these words of angel Kyodo williams: “If we could live our lives in a way in which we understand that our deepest learnings, 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.”