Here is the full transcript of Krista Tippett’s talk titled “3 Practices for Wisdom and Wholeness” at TED conference.
In her talk, “3 Practices for Wisdom and Wholeness,” journalist and podcast host Krista Tippett discusses the profound impacts of the pandemic and the necessity of rethinking our approach to life in its aftermath. She introduces three core practices: recognizing and embracing the generative narratives in our lives, living the questions without immediate answers as inspired by poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and pursuing wholeness over perfection in our personal and societal roles.
Tippett emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the positive developments amidst chaos and uncertainty. She advocates for the power of questions to shape our understanding and actions, suggesting that by dwelling in them, we find deeper insights and possibilities. Lastly, she urges a redefinition of ‘vocation,’ encouraging a holistic approach to life that balances professional, personal, and societal responsibilities, fostering a collective journey towards wholeness.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Here is one way to begin to talk about what the pandemic, the post-2020 world, began to set in motion. All together, for a time, we felt for the ground beneath our feet. We remembered that the ground beneath our feet is never as solid as we believe it to be. We remembered that civilization revolves around something so tender as bodies breathing in proximity to other bodies.
We softened. Chasms became un-unseeable. Between the ways we’ve been living and our deepest longings for all of our children and the highest potentials for human flourishing. So how to step into what we have been given to see, how we have been given to learn and to grow.
I’ve been looking back across my 20 years of listening to the world and being in a radio and podcast conversation with wise and graceful lives. And I want to share with you three arts of living that have persistently emerged. Callings. Each of them carries practices towards what it might mean for each of us to participate as we move forward in the remaking of this world.
The Generative Narrative
The first is to see the generative story, the generative narrative of our time. We are fluent in and very familiar with the narrative of catastrophe and dysfunction and disarray. And that is real. But it’s not the whole story of us.
There is also an abundant reality of things going right at any given time. Of learning and growth that are happening, of evolution and breakthrough. One of the things that happens when I use this phrase, “the generative narrative,” and people hear it for the first time is sometimes they’ll say, “Well, give me an example.” And I say, “Just look around you.”
Even when we leave this special place and go back to all the places we came from, it is ordinary that all kinds of people with all kinds of lives are finding ways to be of service. They are standing before a world in pain. They are working with forms that are broken. They’re probably working in institutions that don’t quite make sense anymore, and they’re having an edifying effect on the people around them, becoming healers and social creatives in so many forms.
Now we are strange creatures, and this is one of our strangest qualities. We don’t know how to tell this generative story of us as vividly. We don’t know how to take it as seriously as that story of rupture. And this has started to make sense as we are able to peer more intricately inside our brains and bodies. It turns out that our brains are exquisitely designed to keep us safe and on the alert for danger.
Living the Questions
Our brains are riveted by what goes wrong. They are looking in every instant for what will go wrong next. And this underlying orientation turns up in our most sophisticated places, certainly in the field of journalism, in which I trained. It turns out that we actually have to more actively, consciously orient ourselves if we want to attend to and get riveted by what is good and redemptive.
The invitation here is to take in the good. And just naming, calling it out, that there is a generative story of our time, that you can see it too, this is a way to begin. Take in the good. Let it start to actively shape the whole picture of the world you are working with. And when you do that, you begin to make the generative — this whole landscape of generative people and projects, more visible and defining to themselves and to this world which carries so much pain and so much promise.
My second offering is to live the questions. And this one is a gift from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who became a friend across time and space to me in years I spent as a very young journalist in divided Cold War Berlin. In the early 20th century, Rilke wrote a wonderful series of letters to a young poet in which he counseled, “Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart.” He said, “Try to love the questions themselves as though they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.”
He said, “Don’t try to reach for the answers which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them.” The point is to live everything. Live the questions now, then, perhaps someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answers. Like us, Rilke was a citizen of a young century with spectacular potentials for creating and destroying. And it’s come to seem to me that the great challenges, all of the great challenges before our young century on some level are vast, aching open questions.
Calling and Wholeness
All of our challenges, ecological, racial, economic, spiritual, political — vast, aching, open questions for which we will not have anything like answers any time soon.