Krista Tippett: I had a professor at Divinity School who always started his lectures with preliminary remarks, and sometimes the preliminary remarks took the entire time. I’m not going to do that, but I did make some notes. I do want to offer some preliminary remarks — some offerings to frame the world that we are going to make together in these days ahead. And to share some of what I see about this moment in time that we inhabit, informed by these 20 years of listening to our guests — some of whom are here this weekend — and listening to our listeners, and listening to our beautiful hurting world, in the excellent company of my colleagues.

We look and listen through a lens on the human condition: the question of what it means to be human, and how we want to live, and who we will be to each other. In this century, I think, we cannot ask the question of what it means to be human without… it is inextricable from…the question of who we will be to each other. Whether we rise to that in all of our endeavors and all of our reckonings, I believe, will be the difference between flourishing or merely surviving.

This is an age of metamorphosis. It is a chrysalis time. This age meets the definition of “deep truth” that was once offered to me by the Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek. The definition of a “deep truth” is that its opposite is also true. Walk around with that! So: this is an age of peril and of grandeur. We have a world to remake, and we are watching much break that has to break for something new to be born — even as we have scarcely begun to metabolize the pandemic that we just went through. I’ve been thinking so much in this last year about this incredible capacity we have as human beings to normalize, to think that we’re “getting back to normal.” There’s surely some resilience in that that saves us and keeps us alive.

But yesterday and today, I was reminded as I got one text after the other of people out there who have COVID who would’ve been here, that this is still with us. We are changed. And there were so many forms of loss and disruption and uncertainty that the pandemic brought — some of them catastrophic, some of them are corrective — but we’re still living with them. We’re living with the chronic stress response that we all experienced below the level of consciousness and are still carrying in our bodies, and the civilizational reckonings and callings that these last years brought to the surface of our life together.

And deeper than that, below that, each of us is feeling the distress of our beautiful natural world at a cellular level.

We are living, as I see it from a human condition lens, with a massively dysregulated nervous system at a species level. Looking at the world this way is to see an underlying undertow of all those echoing, mirroring inflammations and conflagrations that cross nations and continents.

And: it is also true that much is being born. There are so many astonishing things about being alive now. If the ground weren’t shaking beneath our feet at every turn, I think we might be spending all of our time marveling. Our kind have forever looked up at the stars and the night sky and wondered instinctively where we came from. Now, we are the first generation of our species to know definitively that we are made of the very same substance as those stars. We are the first generation of our species to hear black holes colliding, and to take pictures of the beginning of time. They stare back at us gorgeous and wild and strangely resembling neural networks and sea creatures and sonograms and the Internet.

We are grasping that animals have intelligence and language that is as clever and mysterious as ours.

We are learning how forests think and speak, and how moss and fungi hold it all together.

We are the generation of our species that is redefining marriage and family. We are reimagining gender: the root binary of the human condition. Imagine: if we can reimagine the complexity of this binary, perhaps other either/ors could begin to lose their diminishing stranglehold on us.

It turns out in fact — and of course this delights me — that one of the great frontiers of this century, where we are collectively such beginners, is to go inside. To finally consciously inhabit our bodies, our minds, and our spirits, beginning with the fact that the distinctions we made between those things were nonsensical.

They were borne of the limits of our understanding. Now, we know that the gut is the second brain. That memory and emotion and trauma and joy lodge in us physiologically and transmit with genetic effect. That the heart sends more information to the brain than the other way around — which is metaphysically as well as physiologically true! And that those big hard muscles and bones and organs, which early western medicine could dissect and put on a slab, are held together by soft fascia and fluid pathways and subtle energies. And if we don’t tend to those, even as we flex and push at the peak of our strength, our strength is eroding. We must tend to the softnesses and silences within ourselves, and within our collective body, to be vital and whole.

I thought so much during isolation and quarantine how astonishing it was to be learning/re-learning that civilization revolves around something so tender as bodies breathing in proximity to other bodies. And now that we are on this other side of it, it seems to me that this experience we’re having now — when we can assemble human beings in all of our dimensionality, in our bodies, together in time and space — this is going to be where so much resilience and birth comes from for us.

And so, we are gathered.

We don’t take this for granted anymore. It’s precious. We know how precious it is. And, we may not be able to do as much of this moving forward, out of love for our planet. It’s a paradox. So when we do it, it needs to be purposeful. Which is not to say productive. I really hope that this can be a time of nourishment and gift exchange, in this room and in other lovely spaces on this campus, and in the fresh air and over food and by the fire at night.

Several people have asked me in the last few days, what is my aspiration for this gathering? At a very personal level, there are some precious teachers to me in this room who have prompted me to create a vitality map of this stage in my life — what at this time in my life gives me energy and gives me life. One of those things I’ve realized as on that map is being a connector — connecting people who need to know each other. Creating connective tissue between the generative people and projects of our time. I’ve been gifted and privileged to have at this point a really broad view of it. You’re all a physical manifestation of that.

I’m also compelled and inspired by how we are learning in our scientific disciplines with great depth how original vitality functions — which is to say, how vitality functions in the natural world. And it is so striking that the way vitality functions — the qualities of that, the ingredients and features of reciprocity and mutuality, are antithetical to the whole way we’ve structured our life together and our institutions coming out of the 20th century.

I do believe that this generative story of people who are committed to rising to the best of their humanity are the bigger story. Not just as serious and as real, but bigger than the narrative of dysfunction and catastrophe with which we’re so familiar and that we’re so good at telling. But because our world is structured in silos and in separation, we don’t have visibility to what each other are doing. And right now, in this time where we have this world to remake, we don’t have visibility to what each other are learning. It’s hard for us to have shared learning. It’s hard for us to cross-pollinate.

The truth is of everybody in this room: we are in kinship. We personally are in kinship. Our work is in kinship. Our callings are in kinship. And the question that I want to live with you this weekend is how to make that real. How to make it meaningful. How to activate — to use that language of vitality in the natural world — how to activate this landscape as the ecosystem the world needs us to be. How to bring our lives and our disciplines into conversation and interplay.

These next few days are an experiment with 250 people who I most love and esteem in the world. One of the things I hope is that we can have an experience of ideas and conversations and wisdom that accumulate, a conversation that builds, and also that we can have more than a mountaintop experience that dissipates as soon as we get home.

So, our last On Being Gathering was six years ago. This gathering, differently from that one, is by invitation. Everybody here is esteemed as a human being as much as a professional. I think of everyone here as a social creative, imagining new forms of the possible and bringing them into being. One of the things we’re going to explore is a thinker who has influenced me and who’s newly resonant for our century: Hannah Arendt. I was reading something someone said about her, that Hannah Arendt’s thinking was “not so much a political theory as a force field.” I feel like everybody in this room is a force field of healing and creativity in your sphere of work, in your craft, in your field. Everybody here is part of the generative landscape of our time. And we’re going to begin tomorrow morning by investigating how an ecosystem forms, what makes that happen, and try to apply that and think our way into what the implications might be for us.

Everybody here could also be presenting on this stage. Everyone here does a lot of presenting and giving and making. I think at times — truly, this is experimental — I may be interviewing the room, you may be called on. But we’re also going to care for the introverts. There will be cards on your seats, or there’ll be cards tomorrow, and I’m an introvert myself.

I want to say a little bit about emergence, because I’ve been using that word in my correspondence, in my communications. I want to share with you, sadly, that among the wonderful people who are not able to be here because of illness is adrienne maree brown. She wrote me a very, very sad note yesterday.

adrienne talks about emergence and emergent strategy. This is one of those features, these ingredients of the natural world, of vitality. This is our alternative to being too productive in the next few days. Let’s be emergent. Emergent strategy is a strategy for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions. Actually that’s how this always works when it works. It’s an adaptive, relational way of being on our own and with others. Emergence is another way of speaking about the connective tissue that holds everything together. Emergence emphasizes critical connections over critical mass. adrienne has written that the crisis that we are in at scale is in part an attempt “to control or overcome the emergent processes that are our own nature — the processes of the planet we live on and the universe we call home.”

She’s written: “Emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies.” I love this sentence. “Emergence is our inheritance as part of this universe, it is how we change.” To wrap our minds around this, to let it into our hearts and our minds, is to take in intelligence which, again, is antithetical to how we like to structure and plan and strategize and imagine that we can bring about change.

Yet to honor this is just to honor reality. On the ground, we actually know that life does not proceed by strategic plan. That our strengths and certainties are rarely the most reliable catalyst for genuine transformation. In life, day to day, and also life in our workplaces and in our fields of passion and work, chance encounters and surprises; and what does not go according to plan, or what goes according to plan and leaves us wanting; outright failures; the things we call serendipities, coincidences, and accidents; what we call miracles or tragedies, tragedies being things we would call miracles if they had gone our way — these are defining features not just of how we live, but of how we grow. And they unfold moment to moment, relationship to relationship, conversation by conversation, experience by experience.

So we’ll take that seriously this weekend. And by taking it seriously, I mean, we’re going to practice it. We may practice it in the infinity pool and in the trees and around the fire pit at night, in contemplative practice, in yoga classes over coffee and tea. There are blankets and pillows and backjacks over here. So if you feel like your body needs to stretch out and that’s your emergence, please get comfortable at all times.

John Paul Lederach, who’s here, and who is such a hugely important teacher and friend to On Being, one of the great expert (he probably wouldn’t like that word) practitioners of conflict transformation in the world, really impressed me years ago when he talked about how — and he truly has been there on many continents where wars ended, where peace broke out, where genuine transformation happened — John Paul says that always, always, always, the most important things happen in the “tea breaks”, and yet the tea breaks are always too short. So at this gathering, the tea breaks are very long. We’re just going to honor this reality.

Pádraig (Ó Tuama) was going to do some poems tonight, and this afternoon when Lucas and I were wildly texting with him and trying to figure this out, we chose one of his beautiful poems, which I’m going to read to close us out for this session. It is called “The Facts of Life.”

“The Facts of Life”

That you were born
and you will die.

That you will sometimes love enough
and sometimes not.

That you will lie
if only to yourself.

That you will get tired.

That you will learn most from the situations
you did not choose.

That there will be some things that move you
more than you can say.

That you will live
that you must be loved.

That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of
your attention.

That you began as the fusion of a sperm and an egg
of two people who once were strangers
and may well still be.

That life isn’t fair.
That life is sometimes good
and sometimes even better than good.

That life is often not so good.

That life is real
and if you can survive it, well,
survive it well
with love
and art
and meaning given
where meaning’s scarce.

That you will learn to live with regret.
That you will learn to live with respect.

That the structures that constrict you
may not be permanently constricting.

That you will probably be okay.

That you must accept change
before you die
but you will die anyway.

So you might as well live
and you might as well love.
You might as well love.
You might as well love.