Staying Human in a Fractured World: A Conversation with Krista Tippett

Before becoming one of the most trusted voices in public conversation through The On Being Project, Krista Tippett began her career in a city literally divided. In the 1980s, she lived and worked in Cold War Berlin, first as a journalist and later as a special assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to West Germany.

Living in a city divided by a physical wall and ideological lines sharpened her attention to nuance, the weight of human consequence, and the quiet necessity of listening across differences. After returning to the U.S. and earning a Master of Divinity from Yale, Krista began shaping the kind of public conversations she felt were missing: the messy, beautiful, and essential parts of being human.

This February, Krista brings that same depth to Wisdom Keeper Week at Rancho La Puerta, a week centered on healing stories and practices for a fracturing world.

You began your career in West Germany, a fractured country that was full of suspicion, separation, and loss. What did that time teach you personally about how we stay human with one another, especially when we don’t agree, or perhaps when we don’t trust each other?

I learned so much, but here is what is most on my mind right now. However profoundly political and economic systems shape us and even misshape and divide us, we human beings have a deep yearning to be whole. And we cannot be whole on our own; we need each other. We even need “the other” — those who seem so far apart from us in times that make us feel uncertain and afraid for the ground beneath our feet.  This can be suppressed and muted, but it does not die. And there are always people — sometimes those who are most vulnerable — who rise to a capacity we also possess as a species in our bones: to embody hope and healing and creativity even and especially in moments of rupture and despair. In this world, it is both a spiritual and a pragmatic challenge to continue believing in this potential in ourselves and others. We stay human by reminding ourselves, over and over again, that we are complicated and full of contradiction, and so are the people we know most intimately — and so are the people on the “other side” of whatever divide vexes us.  We stay human by remembering, for example, that anger is what fear and pain look like when they show themselves in public. We get curious about the strange, soft human underlay of our life together — and about how to meet others there.

Many of us today feel ‘braced,’ as if waiting for an impact, holding the stress of the world in our physical bodies. When you feel that bracing in yourself, when the outer world feels particularly fractured, how do you personally tend to your inner life? What are the practices you return to?

Some of the most helpful insights from my life of conversation over recent years have come through all we’re learning about the human stress response and the fear response, and the embodied nature of emotion, thinking, memory, trauma, and resilience. There is so much unfolding inside us at any moment below the level of awareness, so much “bracing” we don’t even know we’re doing and aren’t in charge of. I’ll name four deceptively simple practices that are always available. First, pause as much as you can and name what is happening that is stressful, fear-inducing, unsettling. The act of naming what is happening is the beginning of turning away from the powerful, constricting force of fear in our bodies, and finding the freedom to open to the complexity of what is before us. This doesn’t make anything better on the surface, but it aligns what we know “in our bones” with the story of the world around us. Second, take a few conscious breaths and dwell on the restorative out-breath. There’s a reason spiritual traditions link breath with spirit: it joins body, mind, and spirit, thereby realigning our nervous systems.  This makes everything, literally, a little more bearable.  Third, write things down. Call it journaling if you like (and I do). But the simple act of writing by hand — including maybe a list of what you’re carrying, what you’re bracing about  — helps us process emotionally and metabolize consciously even if something is not  “fixable.” Finally, I have learned to muster some tenderness and kindness towards myself in these moments. This does not necessarily come easily to me, or to many of us. And: showing tenderness to myself will almost always cause me to be more tender to the next person I meet.

Wisdom Keeper Week focuses on healing practices like music, poetry, and gardening as ways of making meaning. You’ve spent decades listening to wise voices, how have you learned to distinguish between a practice that is merely performative and one that truly nourishes you? How have you nurtured that authenticity in your own life?

This is a lovely question. The way Western culture and religion imagined body, mind, and spirit as separate and divided is a root of our alienation from our deepest selves and from each other. And music, gardening, poetry, contemplation, walking in nature, the arts, healing touch and movement, delicious and nourishing food — all these things that happen at the Ranch —  they admit no illusion of separation. They re-unite us internally even as they reunite us with the natural world and the larger human experience. They also remind us of beauty not just as an experience but as a value, something essential, health-giving, sustaining. I love this definition of how you recognize deep beauty (as opposed to surface beauty, or mere glamour), which I received from the late poet, philosopher, and theologian John O’Donohue: beauty is that, in the presence of which, we feel more alive.

You often describe this moment in history as both perilous and full of possibility. For those who are exhausted but still willing to stay open, what does the path toward ‘becoming whole’ look like for you right now? How do you move it from a beautiful idea into a daily way of living?

Again, there is so much to ponder here. But a basic life practice I’d commend is what scientific studies have called “taking in the good.” This is related to gratitude, but to me it’s a more concrete instruction. And it is harder than it sounds — not because everything is bad, but because we and our media are so much better at telling the story of what feels catastrophic, corrupt, and failing. You create a practice of taking in the good by actively looking for and seriously taking in what is delightful and beautiful, moment to moment, in the smallest, most ordinary interactions of your days, with beloveds and strangers and the natural world. The existential danger of passively receiving a worldview from news or social media feeds is that we become oriented toward reacting to it, and so even what we dislike shapes and defines us, directly and indirectly. Taking in the good is a pragmatic, granular way to begin to orient our lives and sense of purpose around what gives life and what we love and admire. It is to begin to embody and inhabit the world we want to help make beyond the crisis and flux, the world we want our children to inherit.

Lastly. When you notice yourself getting a little too serious, what helps you loosen the grip?

It’s taken me many decades of life on earth to fully embrace joy as a core value, not merely a lightning bolt but a necessity and a muscle of resilience. I have sought out the wisest of people in my life of conversation. I’ve had to take in that I have yet to meet a wise person who does not smile and laugh easily and know how to laugh at themselves. This has rubbed off on me. It’s also true that the more you give in to smiling and finding things to laugh about, the more natural it becomes. It’s even viral, in a wonderfully wholesome sense.

Find your perfect week through our Events Calendar or learn more about Wisdom Keeper Week. Listen or watch Krista Tippet’s appearance on our podcast Resonate.