Do We Have the Capacity to Handle Life?

A beautiful & profound conversation between Ezra Klein and Kathryn Schultz on how to be a capacious human, and how the word "AND" saves us, and--

Internal view of the O'Neill cylinder (2015) painting by Don Davis. Original public domain image from Wikimedia Commons. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

Dear Beautiful Friends,

This week, I listened to a conversation that was so beautiful and profound, I’m still reeling from it. I don’t want you to miss out. Here are the details:

IT’S HERE: The Ezra Klein Show.

THIS ONE: “Our Lives Are an Endless Series of ‘And’”

IT’S ABOUT: Our human capacity for complex, contrasting experiences and emotions. How does a person navigate from love to loss, horror to daily life, from normalcy to disappointment to awe within short passages of time, even moments? How is it that we can?

Another way of putting it: How does a human even handle being alive in this world, for crying out loud!?

THE CONVERSATIONALISTS: Ezra Klein, commentator, journalist, author, and host of the NYTimes podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, and Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker staff writer and author of the memoir, Lost & Found.

THOUGHTS ON EZRA KLEIN

In a nutshell, I love him. I love his impassioned and measured style of reporting; how he puts complicated issues into historical context, how beautifully he articulates his thoughts and ideas, and presents the logistics behind his theories. He’s an artful, dedicated conversationalist, encourages contrasting views, invites healthy debate. He makes me smarter, more informed, expands my mind and spirit; he’s where I go for understanding, sanity, and beauty.

Yes, beauty, because: how is it that a person can articulate complex ideas and profound feelings with few to no verbal crutches, no pausing and searching for the right phrase or forgotten word 🙋🏻‍♀️ ? I’m in awe of this gift! Ezra, like a great musician, is such a gorgeous, illuminating, and listenable speaker. Maybe it’s the age we live in, but a beautiful thinker-speaker is becoming a new form of music listening for me.

THOUGHTS ON KATHRYN SCHULZ
I didn’t know much about her¹, other than she wrote a memoir called Lost & Found, a meditation on a time when, while watching her beloved father die, she was also falling in love. Now LISTEN TO ME. This thinker, writer, and Pulitzer Prize winner is one of the most mind-bogglingly gorgeous articulators of thoughts and ideas. Schulz swims in the deep end of existential thought pools; her ideas are up there, out there, relatable, aspirational, non-dualistic, hopeful, illuminating, and more. Listening to her answer Ezra’s brilliant questions is such an exaltation of the senses, I want everyone to experience it.

“We live with both at once, with many things at once—everything connected to its opposite, everything connected to everything.” - Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found

• Watch the conversation here.

• Listen to it here.

• Read or listen Abundance, the latest book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

• Read Kathryn Schulz’s Lost & Found.

• If you’re up for it, read Schulz’s “The Really Big One,” The New Yorker, from 2015.

1. While writing this, I learned that Schulz wrote the New Yorker piece about the earthquake and tsunami risk in the Pacific Northwest, where I happen to live, an article that scared the sh*t out of many of us so hard, we got our preparedness kits and readiness training, while others moved to cities less . . . fault-y. This was the piece for which she won her Pulitzer.

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