Its OK to feel overwhelmed. Heres what to do next Elizabeth Gilbert
Transcriber: Joseph Geni
Reviewer: Krystian Aparta
Chris Anderson: Well, hello, Helen.
Very nice to see you.
CA: You staying well?
Helen Walters: How’s it going?
CA: These are mad, mad,
mad, mad, mad days.
So many emotions.
Not all bad, happily,
but I’m just so aware that,
among the people listening to this,
some are in really tough times right now.
I hope this is going to be
a beautiful hour of therapy and help
in its own way,
because we have with us
just an extraordinary author,
an extraordinary mind,
Elizabeth Gilbert,
obviously known for her astonishing
best-selling success
with “Eat, Pray, Love,”
although her favorite book
from my point of view
is called “Big Magic,”
where the subtitle is,
“Creative Living Beyond Fear.”
“Creative Living Beyond Fear.”
Now when you think about it,
that is a pretty good agenda
for today’s conversation, I think.
Liz describes the emotional
landscape of our lives,
I think like no one else I’ve read,
and I’m not even her target audience.
She’s really extraordinary in doing that.
She gave an amazing TED Talk
11 years ago now,
“In pursuit of your creative genius.”
It really reframed
how to think of creativity.
It’s been seen, like,
19 million times or something,
and it’s really changed
how a lot of people –
they’re just open to the creative genius
coming from the outside.
So it’s a delight to welcome
to the TED Connects stage
Elizabeth Gilbert.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Hey, Chris.
CA: Great to see you.
How are you? Where are you?
Who are you living with or staying with?
What’s up?
EG: I’m fine.
I don’t want to brag,
but I’m in New Jersey,
where anybody would want to be.
I’m by myself.
I’ve got a little house
out in the country,
and I think I’m on day 17
of no human contact
other than virtually,
and I’m well.
I’m not anybody you need
to be worrying about right now.
So I’m good.
CA: Wow.
Well, so in a way, you’re having
a related experience
to what so many people are having.
I mean, these are days
of isolation for many people,
and that brings with it
lots of difficult emotions, in a way.
And we’re going to go through
many of them, I hope, in the next hour.
So I’m hoping to talk with you about –
I wrote down a list here:
about anxiety, loneliness, curiosity,
creativity, procrastination, grief,
connection and hope.
How about that? That’s our agenda.
Are you up for that?
EG: I think that’s the whole buffet.
(Laughs)
Just a little light tasting menu
of all the mass of human emotions.
Let’s do it. Absolutely.
CA: I think it’s probably good
to dive straight in
with the anxiety that I know
a lot of people are feeling right now.
So many reasons to be anxious,
both for yourself, your loved ones,
and just for this time and for the world
and how we all get through this.
Have you been feeling anxiety, Liz?
And how do you think of it?
What can you say to us?
EG: I have been,
and I think you would have to be
either a sociopath or totally enlightened
not to be feeling anxiety
at a moment like this.
So I would say that the first thing
that I would want
to encourage everybody to do
is to give themselves
a measure of mercy and compassion
for the difficult emotions
that you’re feeling right now.
They’re extremely understandable.
I think sometimes our emotions
about our emotions
become a bigger problem,
so if you’re feeling
frightened and anxious,
and then you’re layering shame
on top of that
because you feel
like you should be handling it better,
or you should be doing
your isolation better,
or you should be creating more
while you’re alone,
or you should be serving the world
in some better way,
now you’ve just multiplied
the suffering, right?
So I think that the antidote
for that, first of all,
is just a really warm,
loving dose of compassion
and mercy towards yourself,
because if you’re in anxiety,
you’re a person
who is suffering right now,
and that deserves a show of mercy.
The second thing that I would say
about anxiety is this,
that here’s what I think
is the central paradox
of the human emotional landscape
that I’m finding particularly fascinating
right this moment,
and it’s really come to light for me.
So there are these two aspects
of humanity that don’t match –
hence the word paradox –
but they really define us.
And the first is that there is no species
on earth more anxious than humans.
It’s a hallmark of our species,
because we have the ability slash curse
to imagine a future.
And also, once you’ve lived
on earth for a little while,
you have the experience to recognize
this terrifying piece of information,
which is that literally anything
can happen at literally any moment
to literally any person.
And because we have these vast,
rich, colorful imaginations,
we can see all sorts
of terrifying movies in our heads
about all of the possibilities
and all of the scariest things
that could occur.
And actually, one of the scariest things
that could occur is occurring.
It’s something that people have imagined
in fiction and imagined in science,
and it’s actually happening right now,
so that’s quite terrifying.
The paradox is that, in that level,
we’re very bad, emotionally,
at fear and anxiety,
because we stir ourselves up
to a very heated degree
because of our imaginations
about how horrible it can get,
and it get can get very horrible,
but we can imagine it even worse.
The paradox is that we’re also
the most capable, resourceful
and resilient species
that has ever lived on earth.
So history has shown
that when change comes to humanity –
either on the global level,
like it’s happening now,
or on the personal level –
we’re really good at it.
We’re really good at adaptation.
And I think that if we can remember that,
it can help to actually mitigate the fear.
And you can remember it
in a historical perspective,
by looking at what humanity
has gone through,
and what we have not only survived
but figured out how to thrive through.
And you can also look at it
at a personal level,
where you can make an inventory
of what you yourself have survived,
and notice, as I often notice,
my panic and my anxiety
about the imagined future
is deadly on my nervous system,
but I actually have discovered that when
there’s an actual emergency in the moment,
I tend to be pretty good at it.
And I think most of us are like that.
You’ll see that repeated in history
in so many examples.
I think about those heartbreaking
and devastating phone messages
that people were leaving
for their loved ones
from the towers on September 11th,
and you can hear the calm,
the calm in peoples' voices.
The biggest emergency ever was happening,
and in that moment,
intuition told them what to do.
The important thing to do now
is to make this phone call.
And I think if you can trust
that when the point
of emergency actually arrives,
you’ll be able to meet it,
and then when the world changes,
you’ll be able to adapt to it –
it certainly helps me calm down.
CA: I mean, I guess there’s a reason
why fear is there.
It didn’t just evolve by accident.
It’s supposed to direct our behavior
and help us avoid danger,
and it’s just that sometimes,
it gets out of control
and actually gets in our way
and damages us.
I mean, any specific advice
on how someone could turn their fear
into something useful, at this moment?
EG: Can I tell you a story that I’m using
as a touchstone for myself right now
and drawing wonder and inspiration from?
So, some of you may have heard
of a young woman named Amanda Eller.
She was in the news recently,
because she got lost in Hawaii
in the wilderness for 17 days,
and there was a massive,
massive hunt for her,
because she had left her car,
she’d gone for a simple hike,
had left her phone in her car,
went up into the woods,
took a wrong turn,
and then had this disastrous 17 days,
fell off a cliff, broke her leg,
walked for 40 miles on a broken knee,
lost her shoes in a flash flood.
She had to sleep packed in mud
in order to protect herself
from the cold and the mosquitoes.
She was eating moths.
I mean, just a harrowing
story of survival.
I met her recently,
and she was so lit and radiant
with this kind of serenity
and this kind of wonder and joy,
and I said, “How are you like this?
You went through one
of the most traumatizing things
that a person could go through.”
She said, “First of all, I discovered
that I can survive anything,”
going back to this idea
of how resourceful and adaptive
humans actually are.
But the piece of her story
that I am using like a life raft right now
is that she said,
on her second day in the jungle,
when she realized that she was truly
and very much in trouble –
she’d already spent one night in the woods
and she was completely lost
and she was totally alone
and no one knew where she was,
and she was full of terror –
she said she closed her eyes
and she prayed or asked or requested,
she made a wish to herself,
to consciousness, to the universe,
and she said, “Please take my fear away,
and when I open my eyes, have it be gone,
and have it be gone
and have it not come back.”
And she opened her eyes, and it was gone,
and it was replaced by intuition.
And I think intuition
is a little bit the opposite of fear,
because fear is the terror that you feel
about a frightening imagined future.
Intuition can only happen
when you’re in the moment.
And so, from that point forward,
she did not experience fear
for the rest of the time
she was in the woods.
She just was guided
by some deep intuitive sense,
located somewhere
between her sternum and her navel,
and in every moment,
she would ask it, “Right or left?”
“Up or down?” “Eat this? Don’t eat this?”
And just trust it.
Complete, absolute surrender
to the intuition of the moment.
And she said it hasn’t returned,
the fear hasn’t returned,
and she still guides her life that way.
So it’s a return to some sense
that there’s a navigational
system within you
that will, if you stay present
in this actual moment,
tell you what to do
one moment to the next.
Now, if you want to suffer,
pop out of the moment
and imagine a future,
and then you can suffer indefinitely.
So it is almost like a spiritual
or meditation practice,
and anybody out there who’s done
any spiritual or meditation practices,
this is what you were practicing for.
You were practicing for this moment,
and those of you who haven’t tried that,
this might be a really [inaudible]
to be centered in the instant.
CA: Wow, that’s a remarkable story,
and I guess what I’m hearing
is two things.
It’s one, just the reaching out
to the universe there,
but specifically, there was a decision
to let go of the future
and just to focus on the moment.
EG: That’s it, yeah.
Nothing will bring you
more pain than the future,
and what I’m seeing happening right now –
I said this to you the other day, Chris –
is there’s a relatively small
percentage of the population
who will suffer physically
from this disease,
and there’s a larger percentage
who are going to suffer
economically from it.
But then there’s this massive,
uncountable number of people
who will and are suffering
from it emotionally,
and right now,
those people are my concern,
because they’re really in pain,
and there’s millions and millions of them.
CA: So you’re living there
by yourself, Liz,
and many others are in that same
circumstance right now.
I suspect some are feeling,
like, crushing loneliness.
Talk about that.
How do you handle loneliness
in a situation like this,
when it’s so alien to everything
that we as a social species
are usually about?
We crave other people. We crave touch.
We crave hugs.
We want to be there with people.
How can we avoid this being
a period of crushing loneliness?
EG: I don’t think you can avoid it,
but I think you can walk toward it.
And I think that, for me,
I’ve deliberately, many times in my life,
gone off into isolation
in order to face those things.
I’ve gone on long meditation retreats.
This year, I was in India,
and I spent 17 days alone
with no contact with anybody,
which was a weird practice run
for what’s happening right now.
And as I see people really losing it
and feeling like they’re crawling
out of their skin,
either from anxiety, fear, boredom,
anger, blame, loneliness, depression,
all of these things that come up
when you are forced
to just be in your own presence.
I know all of those feelings
because, as a meditator,
I’ve experienced
all of those, in stillness.
The hardest person in the entire world
to be with is yourself,
and so the only way
that I learned, as a meditator,
to be able to survive
and endure my own company
was with universal
human compassion toward me,
and to recognize that this is a person
who is suffering right now
from loneliness,
and this person needs kindness
from self towards self.
And it’s a very high teaching,
but I think that it’s a very interesting
moment to practice that.
And so what I would suggest to people –
and again, this takes
a certain amount of resolve
and it takes a certain amount of curiosity
about learning more
about the human experience –
what I’m seeing people do is people
are spinning away from that isolation
because they’re so terrified of it.
What happened with the world right now
is that basically all of our pacifiers
were yanked out of our mouths.
Everything that we ever
can do and reach for
that can get us out of having to be
in the existential crisis
of being alone with ourselves
was taken away.
And I see people rushing to fill it,
I mean, constant Zoom meetings
and constant parties online
and constant interaction,
and all of that is lovely,
but from a spiritual
and psychological standpoint,
from a creative standpoint,
I would say if you have
any curiosity about this,
don’t be in such a hurry
to rush away from an experience
that could actually transform your life.
I think sometimes the experiences
that can transform us the most intimately
are the ones that we want
to run away from,
and I think of a story that the Dalai Lama
told about one of his teachers.
When the Chinese invaded Tibet,
and all the monks
were running into India for safety,
one of his teachers,
who was one of the great masters,
the last glimpse
that the Dalai Lama had of him
was that he was walking into China –
very patiently and very slowly, toward it.
Everybody else was running away from it –
he was walking toward it,
and I think there’s a level
at which first responders do that,
and in the real world,
in an intimate way,
they go into the emergency,
they go toward the emergency.
All the people who are trying
to solve this now in worldly ways
are walking toward the emergency.
But there’s a way that you can do it
emotionally as well
and that is to walk with curiosity
and with an open mind
toward your most difficult
and painful emotions without resistance,
and say, “What is it like
for a person to feel like they don’t
have something to do for an hour?”
(Laughs)
And you can open up
your compassion in that.
There’s so many lessons in compassion
that can be found here.
How about a general universal mercy
that we can all feel
toward people who are
in solitary confinement.
Let’s have that be
part of the conversation.
Now you’ve experienced it
for two days in your own house.
Maybe it’s time
to change the prison system?
You see how hard this is.
Or you can have compassion
toward people who have lost a loved one
and they’re alone.
By feeling your own feelings,
you can open up your feelings
more universally toward the world.
So I think there’s a great opportunity
here for growth on the personal level,
but you have to have
almost a whimsical curiosity
to be the one walking into China
rather than the one away from it.
And that’s how I’m doing it right now.
CA: So let’s follow up
on that word “curiosity”
that you’ve used a few times there.
I mean, a lot of wisdom that I’ve heard
sort of thrown around online right now
is, “This is a great time
to follow your passion
and dive deep into whatever it is
you’ve most been wanting to do.”
I mean, in “Big Magic,”
you made an argument
that following your passion
isn’t necessarily the wisest strategy.
You argued, no, don’t do that,
follow curiosity.
Does that apply now? Make that case.
EG: Yeah, you know,
I’ve been on a personal crusade
to rid the world of the world “passion”
as an instruction for people
on how as they should be living,
because I know that in my case,
it brings me nothing but anxiety.
“Purpose” is another one
that has become a cudgel
that we use to bludgeon ourselves
into thinking that we’re not doing enough
or that we’re doing life right
or that you’re supposed to be more useful,
more productive,
you’re supposed to be changing the world,
or uncovering some particular talent
that only you have
and with it, you’re supposed
to transform everybody
and monetize it, no pressure.
I start to get hives even repeating that,
but that’s what we’ve been taught,
that purpose and passion are everything.
I would like to replace it
with a far gentler word,
and I think “curiosity” is very gentle,
because the stakes are so much lower.
The stakes of passion say you have
to shave your head and move to India
and get rid of all your possessions
and start up, like –
It’s so intense.
But curiosity is a very simple,
universal experience
that causes you to want to look
at something just a tiny bit closer,
and you don’t have
to change your life around it.
You just look,
and it might be taking a weekend
to try something new for a little while.
It’s almost so easily missed,
and I think so many times,
we’re looking way up at the sky
for the sign from God of what our passion
and what our purpose is supposed to be,
and meanwhile, there’s this lovely
little trail of breadcrumbs of curiosity
that if you can slow down –
and again, this is about not rushing
out of the experience
of being silent, still and alone –
if you can slow down,
you might be able to see them.
But if I could say one thing
I’m noticing is an obstacle right now –
because I think a lot of people thought,
“Isolation, great,
this is the perfect time
for me to learn Italian
and take that calligraphy class
and start writing that novel,”
and they find that they’re actually
in a paralysis of anxiety
and they’re not creating anything
or doing anything.
First of all, again, like,
a blanket of mercy on you.
These are hard times,
and it might take you a minute
in your nervous system and your mind
to adjust to the new reality.
But the second thing I would say
is that when people are saying
they’re having trouble
with their creativity
because they’re in isolation,
I might daringly suggest that perhaps
you’re not in enough isolation.
And by that I mean, are you monitoring
how much external stimulus
you’re bringing of this disaster
into your home?
So if you’re sitting
watching the news all day,
what you’re doing is you’re bringing
the disaster into your work space.
You’re bringing it into your soul.
You’re bringing it into your mind.
And you’re going to create
the opposite of a creative environment,
an environment of fear, panic and urgency.
So I think if you’re going
to be a good steward
of your creativity right now,
you have to isolate
a little bit from the news.
And that doesn’t mean disconnecting,
it means I get up every morning
and after I’ve meditated,
I read the New York Times
and I give myself 40 minutes with it,
and then that’s it for the day,
because I know
that if I bring in any more,
I’m going to go into a traumatized state
and then I won’t be able
to follow my intuition,
I won’t be able to help people,
because I myself will be suffering,
and I won’t be able to be present
for this very interesting moment
in my life and in history,
and I want to remain present
for it as much as I can.
So there’s a discipline of being
a good steward of your senses
and deciding what you’re going
to put your senses in front of.
CA: Helen.
HW: Liz, there’s an outpouring
on Facebook of gratitude for you.
People are so grateful,
and grateful for the calm
that you are instilling in us all,
so thank you, from them and from me.
We’ve also had a number
of questions about grief.
We’re kind of dealing with grief
at a different scale at the moment.
One person has already lost
five people to coronavirus.
And so any thoughts
of how to manage grief at this scale
or how to process this in a way
that honors both them and yourself?
EG: First of all, my condolences.
And I think any words that I would say
about somebody who just lost
five family members
could only be inadequate.
Grief is bigger than us.
It’s bigger than your efforts
to manage it,
and if you want to hold yourself
and your family members
compassionately through grief,
you have to allow
that it cannot be managed.
And I think that grief management
is something that we’ve kind of created
in our very Western idea
that if we can figure out something,
we can avoid suffering from it,
so if we can figure out
how to translate grief
and if we can figure out
how to walk through grief,
then we won’t have to experience
the magnitude of it.
Many of you know that I lost
the love of my life two years ago
from pancreatic and liver cancer,
and I was with her when she died,
and I’ve been walking through
my own path of grief,
so I know what it feels like to lose
the person in the world
who is the most important to you,
which is of course
the biggest fear that we all have.
I know that you can survive it,
but I know that you survive it
by allowing yourself to feel it.
And again, to go back to the metaphor
of the monk walking directly into China,
into conflict rather than away from it,
do you have the courage
to let it break over you like waves?
I wish I could remember her name.
There’s this extraordinary woman who wrote
a book called “Here If I Need You,”
and she’s a chaplain
for the police department in Maine,
and she’s in charge
of knocking on people’s doors
and giving them the worst news
they’re ever going to hear in their life,
when she goes with the police
when something happens.
And she told a story once
that I found very moving
and very helpful for me in my grief.
She said what she’d witnessed
through years and years
of sitting with people
through what is literally
the worst moment of their life,
the nightmare of that loss,
is that when she knocks on that door
and tells that person,
your daughter, your family member,
your husband, your mother has been killed,
there’s this universal collapse
where the person will just be –
it is the tidal wave that comes
and just takes you down
and you lose all civilization,
you lose all your attainments,
all your wisdom.
Nothing can stand up to that.
You literally go to the floor.
And you sob and you grieve,
and she holds them through that.
And then she said that what she’s learned
is the most astonishing thing,
that that never lasts
more than a half an hour, that first wave.
It can’t.
You actually physiologically
can’t sustain that,
and if you let it break over you
and you just allow it,
then within a half an hour,
usually sooner –
and she said this has happened
every single time she’s been with somebody
with a loved one’s death –
the very next thing that happens
is that that person calms down,
they catch a breath,
and the next question they ask
is a very reasonable question.
“Where is the body? What do we do next?
When can we have the funeral?
Who else was in the car?”
And with that question, she says,
they start to rebuild their new life
already with this new piece of information
that even an hour ago
would have seemed unsurvivable.
And she uses that
as an example of, once again,
the tremendous psychological
resilience of a human being.
And it doesn’t mean
that they will never grieve again.
It doesn’t mean that their grieving
journey is over.
It just means that, somewhere
in their mind, that it’s landed,
and now, already,
they’re making a plan about,
“OK, who do we need to notify,
what’s the next thing we need to do.”
And again, if you can remember this
as you go through your panic,
if you can remember
that in the moment of emergency,
there will be an intuitive, deep sense
that will tell you there’s going
to be some next steps
and it’s time for us
to take those next steps,
and if you can also remember
that resilience is our shared genetic
and psychological inheritance –
we are, each and every one of us,
no matter how anxious you feel you are,
no matter how ridden
by fear you feel you are,
every single one of us
is the genetic survivor
of hundreds of thousands
of years of survivors.
Each one of us came from a line of people
who made the next correct intuitive move,
survived incredibly difficult things,
and were able to pass their genes on.
So almost to the biological level,
you can relax into a trust
that when the moment comes
where you will be faced
with the biggest challenge,
you will be able to draw
on a deep reservoir
of shared human consciousness
that will say, “Now it’s time to make
the next move, and we can do this.”
HW: So beautiful. So many more questions.
I will be back.
EG: Thanks, Helen.
CA: Thank you, Liz.
I think the author’s name
was Kate Braestrup.
EG: That’s it.
CA: I guess that’s a book,
if you need a book right now,
“Here If You Need Me” by Kate Braestrup.
EG: Very good, yeah.
CA: Liz, you and I got to have
a conversation
a few months after Rayya passed away.
It was actually the first-ever episode
of the TED Interview podcast we did.
And I found that it was probably
my favorite episode ever
of the TED Interview.
And it was so moving how you spoke
about your grief then.
And I feel like that’s a potential
resource to people.
I know we were both
sitting there shedding tears,
and I found that an extraordinary
experience personally, to be sure.
But somehow …
in this moment,
if you follow this journey of curiosity,
if you walk towards
some of the harder moments,
do you think that this actually
can be a creative time for people
if they’re willing to do that?
EG: Absolutely, and I don’t think
creativity in this case
has to necessarily mean
that you write the Great American Novel
or start that business
you always intended to start.
It doesn’t need to be so literal.
We’re going to be creating
new worlds and new lives
on the other side of this,
and we’re going
to be doing that individually
and we’re going
to be doing that collectively.
I think of the shoots of small trees
that can only come up
after massive forest fires,
where seed pods have to explode
under great heat.
We’re in a kind of crucible
moment right now,
and I wouldn’t begin to have the hubris
to predict what sort
of creativity will come,
but look, if history is any measure,
what we’ll probably see
is people at their best
and people at their worst.
But I think we’ll see
more of people at their best,
because that’s typically how it works.
CA: I mean, your model
of how creativity happens
is that it doesn’t all come from within.
It’s not like you have
to sit there, saying,
“OK, this is my moment to be creative.
Come on. Be creative. Be creative.”
It involves, fundamentally,
an openness to something coming to you,
to be open, to be curious, listening,
but then just to be open to that moment.
Perhaps that could apply
even more now than ever,
just because we have this huge distraction
of the news,
some other distractions are taken away.
Is there a chance that if people listened,
they actually can receive
more at this moment?
EG: I think so, and I think, again,
if you stop thinking
about your self-isolation
and your social distancing as quarantine
and you start thinking of it as a retreat,
you’ll find that you can’t
really tell the difference
between quarantine and retreat.
You know, a lot of you out there
have dreamed, I’ve heard you,
because I talked about going
to India to an ashram for four months
and God, I can’t tell you
how many people I’ve heard say,
“I wish I could do that.”
I’m like, “Well, you got it.”
And by the way, this is what it felt like.
This is what it felt like to learn
how to be present with yourself.
I think my screen needs to move a bit.
To learn how to be present with yourself
means sitting in a lot of terror,
sitting in a lot of anxiety,
sitting in a lot of fear,
sitting in a lot of shame,
and being able to allow that
without having to resist it,
without having to reach outside yourself
for something to numb yourself with.
I also want to tell a story
that a friend of mine,
Martha Beck, told me
about when she goes to South Africa
and teaches animal-tracking courses.
And she works with all these great
African animal trackers,
and these old men who have had
these skills passed down for generations.
And she was using it as an example
of the difference
between focus and openness.
So I think sometimes
the mistake people make
when they want to be creative
is they think they have to get
really focused,
and focus is an anxiety-producing
energy as well.
You’ve got to drill down
and you feel your whole body tense.
But what she described witnessing
in these animal trackers
is when they go out to hunt the lions,
these old, old men,
the very first thing they do
is they sit down against a tree
and they appear to go to sleep.
They drop into a state that she calls
and that the mystics call
“wordless oneness.”
And wordless oneness,
you can also call meditation.
You can also call it the zone.
But it’s a stillness where you actually
can drop your nervous system
into such a quiet place
that you have 360-degree awareness
of your senses and of presence.
And they’ll sit like that,
apparently doing nothing,
for an extremely long time,
just looking through
half-lidded eyes at the world.
And then, maybe an hour, two hours in,
all of the sudden, they’ll say,
“The lion’s over there.”
And so for me, I’ve learned
to hold my creative wishes lightly
in that same way.
I’m between books right now
and I don’t have an idea for a book
and in the past, that would have
made me really anxious,
but now I know – take a lot of naps,
go for a lot of walks,
do a lot of drawings.
I’m doing weird little art projects
as I’m sitting here, to distract my mind.
CA: Wait, wait. Bring that back.
Hold that up.
EG: Owls. (Laughs)
CA: Aww.
EG: Aren’t they dear?
CA: They’re beautiful. Goodness me.
EG: Well, I’m just playing with color
and texture because it calms me,
and I think if you can’t think
of what to do right now,
I would suggest doing what you used to do
when you were 10 years old
that made you feel happy and relaxed,
and that’s often creativity and play.
And for many of us
who were anxious children –
and I was an anxious child –
we learned at an early age
that we could sedate ourselves
with our curiosity and with our play,
and then, usually around adolescence,
the world taught us that there were faster
and more immediate ways
to bump out of that anxiety
through sex or substances
or distraction or workaholism
or whatever we did
and not have to sit with ourselves.
And I think right now
is a really good opportunity –
You actually were on the right track
when you were 10, whatever it was.
So, you know, get some LEGOs.
Get some LEGOs, get some coloring books,
just get your hands in the mud,
do whatever it is that will actually
ground you into this,
again, to take you out
of the futurizing and the future-tripping
that’s going to cause you
nothing but anxiety
and not going to make you be of service.
There’s such a thing, too,
that I just want to touch on
if I can, for a minute,
about empathetic overload
and empathetic meltdown.
We’re taught that empathy is a good thing.
I would suggest
that in a case this traumatic,
what you want to talk about
replacing empathy with is compassion,
and the difference is extremely important.
So compassion means
“I’m actually not suffering right now,
you are,
I see your suffering,
and I want to help you.”
That’s what compassion is.
Empathy is “You’re suffering,
and now I’m suffering
because you’re suffering.”
So now we have two people suffering
and nobody who can serve,
and nobody who can be of help,
and if you knew
how your empathetic suffering
actually makes you into another patient
who needs assistance,
you would be more willing
to dip into compassion.
And what underlies compassion
is the virtual courage,
the courage to be able to sit with
and witness somebody else’s pain
without inhabiting it yourself so much
that you become another person
who is suffering
and now, there are no helpers.
And it takes an enormous amount of courage
to be able to watch that
without diving into it and joining it
and becoming sick yourself.
CA: I mean, if empathy is just a feeling,
does compassion,
your use of compassion imply
that it’s turning that feeling
into something potentially practical
to actually do something,
if you can, for that person?
EG: It’s recognizing
that if I feel your pain,
I can’t help you in your pain,
because now my pain has taken over me,
and sometimes, I think
all you need to do is know that
and it makes you turn the ship. Right?
One of my favorite
teachers, Byron Katie, says,
“My favorite thing about my suffering
is that it isn’t yours.”
“My favorite thing about my suffering
is that it isn’t yours.
My favorite thing about your suffering
is that it isn’t mine.”
So it will be, eventually,
we all take a turn suffering.
You cannot move
through this earth without it.
When it’s your turn, you’ll know.
When it’s not your turn,
stay out of that field
of somebody else’s pain,
because you can’t help them
when you’re in pain yourself.
And then see if you can find
the inner resolve and courage.
And I think some of that
is just based on accepting
the Buddhist First Noble Truth,
which is that suffering
is an unavoidable aspect of life on earth.
We’re all going to be in it at some point.
We’ve all been in it at some point.
And now, how can I help?
I’m not saying this is easy.
I’m just saying, also, if you’re suffering
from empathetic overload
and empathetic meltdown,
which means your adrenals are up,
your stress is up,
your endorphins are down,
you’re going into
a parasympathetic collapse –
this would be another time
to discipline yourself
to stay away from the news,
because you actually
will have a breakdown,
and you won’t be able to help
the people around you
who are the people who need help.
CA: But have you seen any signs
that if someone takes that empathy
and compassion, let’s say,
and decides to act in some way,
big or small, on behalf of someone,
that actually shifts how they feel,
that there’s a healthiness to that?
Or is that the language
of just inducing more guilt in people?
EG: No, I think there’s
a beautiful healthiness
that can come from being of service,
and that’s also how I’ve been
medicating my anxiety through this,
by showing up in ways that I can
with whatever resources I’ve got.
Here’s what you have
to keep in mind, though,
and this is what I keep reminding people.
Right now, in my own personal sphere,
there is more need
than I have resources to fix.
So I have to begin with that reality,
and I have to have the courage
to sit in that reality soberly
and acknowledge that that’s the case.
The second thing I think
emotional sobriety
would require of me right now
is to recognize that this is going
to be a marathon, not a sprint.
And so the first week of the crisis,
I had this deluge
of all my really energized,
let’s-save-the-world friends,
all my creative friends,
everybody was e-mailing, texting, Zooming,
and they all had a response.
“Let’s do this! Let’s do this!
Let’s fix it this way!”
And I found myself
joining with some of them
and not joining with others,
just, again, based on my intuition,
but I also found myself cautioning them,
“Guys, this is a marathon.”
We’re in mile one of what’s going
to be a very long marathon.
So pace yourselves,
and pace your resources.
Don’t overgive to the point
where you collapse,
because we’re still going
to need helpers two months from now,
and we’re still going to need helpers
six months from now.
And so, find a steady pace
and be willing to be in it
for the entire long haul.
CA: Yeah. Helen.
HW: Such great advice, Liz,
and so many questions pouring in.
One of them is from a therapist
who confesses that she,
and many of her clients,
are having trouble with the letting go
of control in this moment,
and wonders if you have any advice
on how to let go of control
in order to be willing to feel
everything that we’re enduring.
EG: Just this …
This sense that you had
that you had control
was a myth to begin with.
And that may not be comforting,
except that I find it very comforting.
You know, control is an illusion,
and there are times
where we’re able to fool ourselves
because we’re so good at technology,
we’re so good at creating safe worlds
where we’re able to trick ourselves
into believing that we’re in control
of any of this.
But we’re not,
and the paradox, for me, of surrender
is how relaxing it is.
Nobody ever wants to surrender,
because nobody wants to lose control,
but if you recognize
that you never had control,
all you ever had was anxiety,
and then you let go
of the myth of control,
you’ll find that, I find that if I even
say that sentence,
“I’m losing control,”
and then I remind myself,
“You never had control,
all you had was anxiety,
and that’s what you’re having right now.”
So you’re not letting go of anything.
Surrender means letting go
of something you never even had.
So there’s an awakening
that’s happening right now,
where what’s happening
is not that you’re losing control.
What’s happening is that,
for the first time,
you’re noticing that you never had it.
And the world is doing its job.
The job of the world is to change,
constantly,
and sometimes radically,
and sometimes immediately,
and it’s doing its job,
and that is also the norm of things.
And again, we are adaptive
and we’re resilient and we can handle it.
But I don’t kid myself for a minute
to think that I’m in control of anything
that’s ever happening.
My realm of control is extremely small.
It’s usually about, like,
might be able to go get
a glass of water right now.
Like, there’s not a lot
that I’m in control of.
And I’m actually
(Inaudible) I’ve ever been.
HW: One more question
from online, if I may,
and then I will jump off again.
You know, Chris, you and I,
we’re all in a pretty privileged position.
TED has been able to go remote.
We’re able to work remotely.
But many, many, many millions of people
in the US and beyond
are not able to do that,
and people are really suffering.
How can we help?
What are your thoughts about people
who are not able to socially distance,
who are losing their jobs,
the global catastrophe that is unveiling?
How can we think about that
in a humane and compassionate way?
EG: It’s crushing,
and again, as with the same case
of the person who said
they had lost five family members,
I can’t, sitting in this position
of comfort and safety,
say anything that I think
is going to be accurate
and appropriate to that,
other than to say that I just think
of this Indian proverb
that I keep going back to,
which is, “I store my grain
in the belly of my neighbor.”
Western, capitalistic society has taught
and trained us to hoard long before this,
long before this happened
and people were hoarding toilet paper
and canned goods.
Advertising and the whole capitalist model
has taught us scarcity,
it’s taught us that you have to be
surrounded by abundance
in order to safe.
The disconnect between
those who have and those who have not
has never been bigger,
and never in my lifetime,
and probably in any of our lifetimes,
has there been an invitation, again,
to release the stranglehold
on your hoarding.
This is not the time for hoarding.
This is the time to store your grain
in the belly of your neighbor,
in a way that is emotionally sober
and accurate to what you can give,
and to look at that
in a really honest way,
to not put your own family in danger,
to not put yourself in crisis,
but to be able to say,
“What can I offer in the immediacy?”
And then, in the longer term,
a conversation about
redistribution of resources,
and why do so few have so much
and why do so many have so little?
But that’s not a conversation
I can fix today.
That’s, again, outside
of my realm of control.
But what I can do
is unleash the white-knuckled grip
that I have on what’s mine
and make sure that I’m going
into the world with an open hand –
again, not a panicked open hand,
where I’m going to destroy myself
to save somebody else,
because then there will be no helper left,
but in a reasonable way.
I cannot save everybody. I can save a few.
And that’s the tragic,
but, I think, sobering reality
that I can offer right now,
and again, underlying all of that,
undergirding all of that
is a recognition that anything
that I have to say about people
who are in extraordinary
suffering right now is not enough.
HW: I’ll be back. Thank you.
EG: Thanks.
CA: Liz, talk to me a minute about anger.
Like, I think a lot of,
just from the conversation we just had,
or just listening to you there,
there are so many reasons to feel
angry right now about what’s going on.
And part of me feels we should be.
That’s what anger is for.
It’s to highlight things
that are unjust and unfair
and that we must pay attention to,
and yet part of me
is honestly scared of it.
I think there could be
an eruption of anger that’s dangerous,
both personally and for society.
Have you felt anger?
What are you doing with it?
EG: I feel anger at every
White House press conference,
and I think all thinking people do.
I feel angry that this wasn’t
taken more seriously early on.
I feel angry at myself that I didn’t
take it more seriously early on.
As much as I feel contempt and disgust
for government officials
who I feel were slow to recognize
how serious this is,
I also have to be really candid
that three weeks ago,
I was one of the people
walking around saying,
“Why is everybody overreacting
to this so much?”
So I think we also have to own
our own piece of that,
and I think there are
rolling waves of awakening
that are happening in people,
and so a lot of the anger I feel right now
is for people who aren’t taking this
seriously enough,
who aren’t quarantining themselves,
who are putting other people in danger.
But a month ago, that was me.
I was in the Hong Kong airport,
sallying through the Hong Kong airport
while everybody was scurrying around
in masks and gloves,
and I was like, “What’s the big deal?”
It takes people as long as it takes them
to come to awakening,
and some people, we have
to also acknowledge, never will.
Anger has its place,
and I think that righteous anger,
which is the kind of anger
that says a violation has occurred here,
a humanitarian violation
is occurring here,
can be very stirring for transformation.
Again, it’s how comfortable can you be,
sitting with these discomforting emotions,
and what are you going
to do with your anger?
CA: Umh.
EG: Are you going to lash out
at the people you’re quarantined with?
Are you going to go on Twitter rants?
Is that useful? Is that productive?
And so I think – again, I keep using
the words “emotional sobriety,”
but the emotional sobriety
that would be required
is to feel that anger,
acknowledge it,
to show yourself mercy
for how uncomfortable it is,
and then to steadily, recognizing, again,
that this is a marathon not a sprint,
do what you reasonably can do
to change the situation.
CA: I mean, the part of me
that’s constantly looking
for the better narrative
hopes that the anger we feel now
could almost displace some of –
I mean, the world’s been an angry place
for the last couple years.
There’s been so much
anger inflamed online.
We’ve made each other angry,
often, probably, unnecessarily –
outrage sparking outrage, disgust, etc.
I mean, is there any hope
that this is a massive
societal shaking up?
It’s like, don’t be so silly.
Look at what actually matters here.
And we can at least focus more attention
onto the things that, yes, some things
that we really should be angry about,
but other things that maybe …
you know, could lead people to say
human connection
really matters in this moment.
People from all sides, we need each other.
We just have to use this as a moment
when we come together.
How do you think about that?
Like, how do we turn
some of these negative emotions
into a force for good that at least
gives us some permission
to hope that something special
comes out of all this.
EG: Well, I think you have
to give yourself permission to hope,
and I don’t think it’s unreasonable
to give yourself permission to hope,
because, again, our resilience,
our resourcefulness,
and the way that history has shown
how catastrophe
can lead to transformation,
gives us, actually, I think,
reasonable cause to hope.
One thing that I’m noticing
that I’m, like, a little bit amused by
is that when people start predicting
what the post-pandemic world
is going to be,
I notice that their predictions
seem to be, suspiciously,
in exact alignment
with their personal worldview.
So my friends who are utopians
are already living in this utopian future
where this is going to be the big change.
My friends who are dystopians
are already predicting that this is
the official beginning of the police state
and the disastrous new world order.
I think there’s a lot of hubris
in trying to imagine
what that new world could be.
A quote that I love
that a friend of mine always says
is “When people aren’t busy
being the worst, they’re the best.”
And I think that gives me hope.
And it’s true the other way, too.
When people aren’t busy
being the best, they’re the worst.
I’m terrible at social engineering, Chris,
and you know this,
and you have great, better minds than mine
who can come on and talk
about this on the global scale.
The only world that I have a really
intimate, familiar engagement with
is this one,
and on the individual level,
what I understand
is that the only world that any of us
are ever going to live in is this one.
And so minding this,
and learning how to calm this,
how to open this,
how to get on the other side
of the emotions that are causing
harm to you and others,
that’s my work, you know?
Personally, whatever role I have
in the public sphere.
CA: You’re an extraordinary storyteller
and you already told us
one amazing story earlier on.
Have you come across
any other recent stories
that have given you
reason for hope, perhaps?
EG: Well, I’ll give you one,
and this one, I delight in.
Years ago, 20 years ago
in New York City –
30 years ago, I was in my 20s –
I was friends with a woman
named Winifred, who was in her 90s.
She was this really cool
West Village bohemian artist
who had lived in Greenwich Village
for her entire life,
had had a very storied
and checkered and wild life,
surrounding herself with intellectuals
and poets and artists and adventure,
and she’d had a lot of loss
and a lot of gain,
and she was this extremely
passionate person
who had friends of all ages,
which was something I admired about her.
I was friends with her.
I was 25, she was 95.
But I would call her my very good friend,
and she had a lot of friends.
She was so open to everything.
And at her 95th birthday party,
I asked her, “What have you learned,
more than anything else?”
Because she was
such a creature of learning.
I wrote about her in “Big Magic.”
I said to her one time,
“What’s your favorite book
that you’ve ever read?”
And she said, “I can’t say
my favorite book
because there’s been so many,
but I can tell you my favorite subject,
the history of ancient Mesopotamia,
which I started learning when I was 80
and it changed my life.”
And it did.
She’d gone on these expeditions
to Jordan and Iraq.
She was just so full of living, you know?
And I said to her, “What have you learned
in all of your experiences?
What is the most central thing
that you’ve learned?”
And she said, “Human beings
can adapt to anything.
Human beings can adapt
to absolutely anything.”
And then she said this great line:
“If Martians landed on Earth tomorrow,
it would be off the front pages
of the newspaper by next Tuesday.
We would already be used to it.”
Right? And there’s a level at which
I’m seeing this adaptation happening.
And that is both a good
and a bad thing. Right?
We can get used to totalitarianism,
but we can also get used to –
I’ve gotten used to a world
without the love of my life in it.
We can adapt.
And I keep using that line
as a touchstone for myself,
because I don’t know,
nor do I presume to know,
what the world is going to be after this.
I know that it will be different
from the one before.
I also just have to point out
that all y’all had a lot of complaints
about the world we had before,
and I do a lot of talking,
I do a lot of going around the world,
and [I don’t remember] any one of you
raising your hand
in any of the seminars I’ve taught
over the last years,
and saying, “We are living in a golden age
and I’m so grateful and appreciative
for all that I have,”
now you want that world back, right?
So let’s actually remember that
as we go forward,
that this moment, for some of us,
that we’re in right now,
might be one that we look back
later and say,
“Wow, actually, that was pretty good,
and I didn’t have any gratitude for it.”
So personally, I’m just hoping
that at an intimate level –
and again, this is not a socioeconomic,
global political level,
but it’s an invitation to actually
be grateful for the safety that you have
and the people that you have,
and maybe carry that forward a little bit.
Maybe. We’re really good at forgetting.
Once a crisis is over, we’re really good
at forgetting our gratitude.
It’s one of our great gifts.
But you might want to make a note
to actually try to be grateful
for what you have.
(Laughs)
CA: Thank you, Liz. I think we have
a last question from our online friends.
HW: Yeah, what crisis, right?
So Liz, just a request
for a concrete strategy
to try and reduce the fear or the shame
that is coming at this moment.
EG: I’ll give you mine,
and it may feel weird
and out of reach and woo-woo,
but I’m beyond that at this point,
and it has been a game changer
and a life changer for me.
I have a 20-year-long practice
of writing myself, every day,
a letter from Love.
Now this may not feel concrete.
It may feel very airy.
But what it does is that it helps me
through my anxiety,
and I need it every single day,
because I’m anxious every single day.
I wake up frightened every day.
I wake up shamed every day.
I wake up angry every day.
All of the difficult emotions
that run through the software
of a human consciousness
are running through
my software all the time,
and they cause me pain
and they cause me fear,
and they cause me distress,
and they make me sick.
So, 20 years ago,
when I was going through
a very bad divorce and a depression,
I began this tactic,
and the tactic is that I will
sit down with a notebook
and I will write to myself, from myself,
a letter from Love.
And what I mean by “Love”
is not romantic love.
It’s the infinite, bottomlessly merciful
source of all human compassion.
And every single one of these letters
begins the same way.
It starts with me saying, “I need you.”
It’s a dialogue. It starts
with me saying, “I need you,”
and Love saying, “I’m right here.”
And then I say what I’m going through.
“I’m really angry right now.
I’m terrified. I’m spinning.
I can’t sleep. I’m anxious.”
And then I just allow to come
through my hand whatever,
if you could imagine the most loving,
compassionate,
merciful voice in the world,
if they were in the room with you,
what would you want them to say?
And you say that to yourself.
And so for me,
that usually is a combination
of these sorts of phrases:
“I’ve got you. I’m right here.
I see how distressed you are.
It’s all right.
I don’t need you to feel better.”
I think a lot of our anxiety
is that we want to get out of that feeling
as fast as we can,
and what Love always says to me is,
“It makes no difference to me
whether you’re anxious or afraid
or angry or hurt.
I’m with you,
and I’ll be with you
through this entire thing
for however long it takes.
I’m not going anywhere.
I’ve got nowhere better to be right now
than sitting with you, loving you.
I’ll be with you
at the moment of your death.
I was here with you
at the moment of your birth.
There’s nothing you can do to lose me.
You can’t fail. You can’t do this wrong.
You are infinitely, bottomlessly loved.”
And it’s so interesting to me
that the opposite of fear in my life,
in my emotional landscape,
on the color palette,
the opposite of fear isn’t courage,
the opposite of fear is love.
And that presence, a sense of,
“I’ve got you,” right?
Which is the thing
that we’d all want somebody to say.
“I’ve got you, and it’s going
to be all right.”
I would love to know, neurologically,
what actually happens
in my mind when I do this,
but what happens to me
physiologically is that my mind,
just hearing those words
and seeing those words, settles,
and then from there, I’m able to take
the next intuitive right action
the best that I can.
CA: Liz, you can say no to this,
it may be a totally
inappropriate thing to ask,
but you don’t happen to have
a letter from the last day or two
that you’d consider reading,
all or in part of?
I don’t know how long they are.
EG: You’re putting me on the spot.
Let me see what we’ve got.
Let’s see.
(Inaudible)
OK, so here’s one.
So I was panicking because
I want to offer my apartment in New York
to a woman who is a COVID-19 nurse
who’s volunteered
to come into New York City to help,
and I’m afraid
that I’ll infect my neighbors
if I let her come and stay there.
So I was up in the middle of the night,
thinking, ethically,
is it appropriate for me to do this?
So I wrote, “I need you.”
And Love said, “I’m right here.”
And then I said, “I want to offer
that COVID-19 nurse my apartment,
but I’m afraid that my neighbors
will get infected, and I’m scared,
and I don’t know what the right move is.
Help me.”
And Love said,
“I don’t actually know
what the right answer to that is,
but I’m with you.”
And I said, “But what
do you think I should do?”
And Love said, “Why don’t you just
sit with me right here for a minute
and be with me
and know that you’re held no matter what,
that you cannot make the wrong choice,
that it doesn’t matter
in the grand scheme of things.
You’re my beloved, I’ve got you.
I can see how much you’re spinning,
I can see how tired you are,
and it doesn’t matter to me
whether you make this decision
in the next minute,
in the next day, or not at all.
I’m with you, and I’ll sit with you
through this entire thing,
and I’ll love you no matter what
you decide to do at the end of this.
I will be just as much with you
at the end of this decision
as am I with you now.”
And then, I said, “So what do you
think I should do?”
And Love says, “I think you should
go get a glass of water,
and I think you should lie down
and get some rest,
and we’ll talk about it
some more in the morning.”
What I have found over the years
of writing myself these letters from Love
is that Love never gives advice.
This is actually really good
for all of you who love to give
unsolicited advice to people.
Love never gives advice beyond,
“Why don’t you get a glass of water?
Why don’t you rest?
We’ll try this again tomorrow.
You’re doing your best,
this is a hard time, and I’ve got you.”
So I’ve got 20 years of those journals,
and I’m assuming that I’m going
to need it for the rest of my life.
CA: Wow.
I don’t know, Helen,
I think we might be done.
I think I’m done.
I can’t ask any more after that.
HW: How beautiful. Good grief.
(CA laughs)
CA: Liz, you’re really phenomenal.
You’ve just got this unique way
of articulating
what others can’t articulate,
and you’ve brought all of us
to a very tender, intimate place,
and thank you for that.
EG: Thank you, Chris.
HW: Thank you so much.
EG: And thank you, Helen.
Take care of yourselves, everybody.
We’re right here
with each other through this.
We can do this.
CA: Thank you, Liz. Goodbye.
HW: Thank you.
CA: Oof.
HW: Oof.
(Laughter)
HW: Deep breaths.
CA: Yeah. No. That was special.
That was special to me.
I know that you are all
in different circumstances online,
and that there are so many
elements to this thing.
There’s the problems
that those of us who are isolated have,
and in many ways,
those are the luxurious problems,
and we’re really aware of that.
But they’re still problems,
and we’re going to give space
on these TED Connects
to many other voices as well.
I think we’re hoping to hear next week
from a doctor at the front line,
a voice from India, we hope,
on some of the horrifying things
that are happening there,
and also some pretty amazing proposals
for how the world could come out of this,
like specific proposals on how we get past
this period of lockdown
to bring back the economy.
All of this matters.
So I guess we want Helen
and everyone to come back,
calendar this, share with friends,
and help us figure out
how to use this time best.
HW: I also wanted to flag
that I don’t know if you were able
to tune in for Susan David’s
conversation earlier in the week.
We have launched a new podcast with Susan
that launched on Monday.
We’re calling it
“Checking In with Susan David,”
and she is going to be sharing daily tips
on how to deal with this pandemic.
And so you can find that
wherever you find podcasts
in this day and age.
For this conversation,
we will be archiving it.
It will be on Facebook,
and we’ll also put it onto TED.com.
You can find the TED Interview podcast
that Chris and Liz did last year,
which I confess just made me weep
for … too long.
You can find that
at go.ted.com/tedconnects.
But that’s it from us.
And tomorrow, I want to flag
that we have a very special treat,
which is less chat, more beauty.
We will be joined by the unbelievably
talented Butterscotch,
who is a beatboxer and a singer
and a musician and a sage,
and an all-around delight,
and she is going to be giving us
a glimpse into her world
and delighting us all
with some sonic deliciousness.
So do tune in tomorrow.
CA: Thanks so much, everyone.
We’re in this together.
Stay safe. See you soon.
HW: See you soon. Be well.