Why do you act in this world?
What the hell else am I put here to do, but to act? I got a privilege to have a life with a physical body that is shared with all of these other galaxies of beings.
Even in not acting, I am acting. Inaction is an intentional form of action. I don’t think acting means doing stuff all the time. I am acting, that is what I was put here to do.
What gives you hope for the future?
You! And all of them.
If you think about it, doesn’t it make sense that stuff happens—like your story—over and over again every day for all kinds of people and yet if you look, so many people are doing so many amazing things. People keep trying, acting, iterating, creating, hoping.
Why do they do that, because a lot of things don’t work out. It feels like that is something truly inherent to what it is being human. It is truly part of us, and that is a knowing for me, a deep knowing and thus I act from that. So you inspire me.
If you were to condense what gives you hope into three words or a very, very short sentence, what would it be?
You do! Every beautiful soul.
It is not just hope, it is conviction. Hope is this idea of a start of something: it is a start without [evidence], it doesn’t make sense but I still belief in this any way.
Conviction is very clearly to me, if this was not supposed to work out, it wouldn’t have worked out by now. The physics of this all working out, of us not blowing up multiple times per second, because of the instability of the atoms and all that. All of that has me be like: “Alright, well clearly this is supposed to work out, because there is a million ways that it wouldn’t have.” At that point it’s a conviction, and then there is a frustration around “I don’t know how it is going to look.”
What makes you think that you make a difference in this world?
Sometimes I feel it, that’s been rare, but getting more frequent. Most of the time, I see it or somebody tells me. I see it in people’s lives.
How does it look when you see it in people’s lives?
I see actions they are taking, that they wouldn’t have been taking. I see a life that they have, that wasn’t going to happen based on where they were headed. They are actually living it, not just like “hey cool insight,” but really living it.
From time to time I have a sad Sunday and don’t know what to do, why I am acting, if I will make a difference in this world, if you could make me do one thing on Sad Sunday, what would you make me do?
I would make you do five things. I always say, if you are having a break from yourself, you always look at these five things: have I slept enough, have I eaten, am I hydrated, have I moved, and the fifth one: when is the last time I spend time with people I love. Doing those five things, that is the due diligence to figure out if you are just being a jack ass.
If the sadness is still there after you have done all those five things, then this is what I do:
I find the most inane thing I can find, say this pen, and then I contemplate it. I try to figure out how was it created, and just dive deeper and deeper into it: how was it created, who created it, where does it come from, what country, who touched it, has anybody touched it before me, who will touch it after me, where will it go when it is not in my possession anymore, could I create it if somebody gave me a thousand dollars? I couldn’t create it. This is crazy: it is a pen, it cost me like two fifty nine, but I couldn’t create this pen or this plastics tag.
So what I basically do, is that I blow my own mind by picking the most inane thing possible and then contemplating it until my mind can no longer compute what it took for that thing to be there. And if inane things don’t jazz you because “Yeah well that thing doesn’t matter because it is a pen” then I say, go look at nature and then go contemplate a tree—the most simple. Do the same thing there.
When I blow my own mind, it takes me to the present, because it’s like “aw yeah, that is really kind of a small problem, okay. Like shit is obviously working out. There is a tree there, it turns sunlight into physical matter, ah fuck.” You know, and I know it doesn’t work for everybody, but that’s my thing.
Cool, thank you so much.
You are welcome.