Grief as a Catalyst with Jonathan Lear

Oct 1

Episode 5

Grief as a Catalyst: The Philosophical Dimensions of Mourning with Jonathan Lear

Jonathan Lear teaches philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is a member of the Committee on Social Thought. He is also a trained psychoanalyst and, in addition to treating patients, does psychoanalytic supervision and consultation. He is the recipient of the Sigmund Freud Award for 2023 from the American Association of Psychoanalytic Physicians. His books include Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life and Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. His book Freud was ranked number one in the Guardian (UK) Newspaper’s list of top ten books in psychoanalysis. Lear serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The weight of grief descends upon us all at some point in life. It arises from loss, whether of people or parts of ourselves we can no longer recognize.
When it comes to the unbearableness of grief, our primal instincts may be to swallow the feelings and push forward. But it is only when we allow the feelings of mourning and embrace what loss means that we can unmask the transformative nature it holds.
Through his extensive body of work teaching philosophy, practicing psychoanalysis, and publishing a series of books on the topic, Jonathan Lear has taken all he has come to know and study about grief and used it to analyze his own deeply personal confrontation with the mourning process.
In this episode of the Art of Listening, Jonathan will take us on a historical journey from ancient times to modern day as he discusses his studies that tie together the practices of philosophy and psychoanalysis, the importance of dialogue in thoughtful discovery. We’ll also learn how these studies provided Jonathan with the foundation to form his own philosophical findings on the process of grief and mourning.
Chapters
1 - Jonathan’s international philosophy studies (3:24)
2 - How philosophy led Jonathan to psychoanalysis (6:19)
3 - Where ancient philosophy and modern psychoanalysis intersect (8:59)
4 - The role nThe Art of Listeningarratives play in the psychoanalytic setting (14:01)
5 - Grief and mourning, and maintaining hope in human life (25:22)
Links
Jonathan Lear
Jonathan’s Books
Eileendunnpsyd.com
Jonathan: [00:00:02] The beginning of an analytic conversation, that there's a common commitment to the thought that if you'll just let this conversation unfold, a universe of meaning will show up.
Eileen: [00:00:19] I'm Eileen Dunn, and this is the Art of listening, a podcast that delves into the incomparable power of human connection and the magic of good depth talk therapy. Today's guest is Jonathan Lear. Grief is complicated. It comes from a stain, a rough patch, an unwanted marker on our lives. And while we might not want to welcome it, it is inevitable and a necessary part of our existence. Grief is about loss of relationships we held dear, of places that saw us through deep transformations of time, significant and material to us only in memory. Facing loss, our instinct, almost primal, is to ignore this pain. To delegate it to the dark, unvisited or effortfully forgotten corners of our being. Yet what it needs is confrontation. It needs to be acknowledged and processed, not necessarily understood, but dealt with, lived through, as we will discuss in this episode. We can and must allow for mourning. And as Jonathan Lear will tell us.
Jonathan: [00:01:43] Mourning is that which turns change into loss.
Eileen: [00:01:49] Our conversation with Jonathan is a fascinating one. Together, we'll discuss how un censoring the difficult parts of our narrative can give us freedom to continue our journeys and to make room for new growth. You'll hear him talk about his inspiration from conversational revelations of ancient philosophy, something in which he is classically trained. We'll learn about his own discoveries at the nexus of psychoanalytic and philosophical thinking, particularly that of grief, mourning, and the importance of allowing for imperfection. Before we begin, however, I want to once again give you a few questions to think about and I will share my thoughts at the close of the interview. When you think about loss in your life. Loss of all kinds. What made them losses to mourn as opposed to simple changes in your life that had and have no emotional meaning? Then notice whether you experienced your feelings of mourning as a process. A profoundly personal process that actually creates expanded space for gratitude and joy within you. With these prompts in mind, let us get to our guest, Jonathan Lear, a philosopher and a practicing psychoanalyst known for his works such as Imagining the End, Mourning and Ethical Life, Radical Hope, and Open Minded Working Out the Logic of the Soul. You started your studies in philosophy? How early in life did that field interest you and what drew you to it?
Jonathan: [00:03:33] Well, first I want to say I think most children are already philosophers, and they may lose that interest over time as they become adults. But I think the philosophical impulse like, why am I here? Who am I? What is the world? Where did I come from? Where is everything going? These are questions that children have, I think, all the time. And so when my philosophical interests began, I'm not entirely sure. I think it's sort of lost in the mists of time, but I explicitly got interested in philosophy when I was an undergraduate. I mean, first I went to Yale and I was a history major, and I had friends who were philosophy students, and what they were doing was just very intriguing to me. I think I was a little scared of the academic discipline of philosophy, because you're supposed to do logic, and logic just seemed very forbidding. And then at the end of my undergraduate career, I got a scholarship, a fellowship to go to Cambridge, England. And actually in those days, the tradition was to do a second bachelor's degree rather than move on in your studies, which I did, but I thought it was a time, you know, it gave me a great chance to start again. And so I summoned up my courage when I got to Cambridge, and I decided I wanted to, as they say, read philosophy. That was the official beginning, and I just fell in love with it as soon as I really started it.
Eileen: [00:05:03] When you decided you were going to risk it and engage it, you really connected personally and it opened you up.
Jonathan: [00:05:09] Well, I was very lucky to be in the place I was and in the company of others that I was. It was an enormous good fortune, because Cambridge in those days was a place where philosophy was really alive. And, you know, I do think there are these little locations in time and place where, I mean, who knew? In Athens, I mean, Athens is just a small town, you know, in the fourth and fifth century B.C.. I mean, here are just a very small number of people. I mean, there Socrates was a teacher of Plato, and Plato was a teacher of Aristotle. And here you have three of the greatest philosophers who ever lived. How could they all be in the same neighborhood? It's just astonishing. They were real people. They were individual human beings who happened to be in Athens and had the conversations they were able to have, and it's a gift to the world. And I felt that Cambridge, in the years I was there, had a genuine liveliness in philosophy. The people who were teaching it were actually doing it. They were philosophers, and I had the privilege to just be in their company and that that's just a lifetime gift.
Eileen: [00:06:20] So it's brilliant just to dip into how monumental that time was for you at Cambridge. And then, you know, obviously you came back to the States and somehow philosophy took you to psychoanalysis.
Jonathan: [00:06:32] Yes, I think it did. I mean, firstly, when I was in Cambridge, I was there first as a student and then was later offered a job and spent, I think, about 12 years there. During the years I was teaching, I became more and more interested in psychoanalysis. There were two reasons for that. I mean, one was I was busy trying to think through not just how to sort of teach the ancient world, teach Socrates or Aristotle. These are two great figures for me. But also to think, if Socrates were alive today or Aristotle were alive today, what might they be interested in that they didn't have available? And I became more and more intrigued by the idea that psychoanalysis was doing something that would have fascinated both Socrates and Aristotle, that there was some kind of approach to human being, to the nature of human life that psychoanalysis was getting at, that I ought to know about. Because, again, part of the spirit of Cambridge was not just you wanted to teach the ancients, but you wanted to try and understand how the ancient philosophy, for instance, still matters. You know, there were people around me in the academic community who were very interested in psychoanalysis, too.
Jonathan: [00:07:50] So I got very interested in it. And then also I wasn't in psychoanalysis itself, but I during this period, my father died and somebody in my family, a cousin of mine, just sort of said, this might be a good time to talk to somebody, you know, without really knowing much about what I was doing. I looked up a local psychotherapist and started to talk about things. You know, it wasn't that I felt I was particularly depressed. I felt I was just sad my father had died. But I went to talk to somebody. And then I was just very struck by how much. I felt it helped me, so I was both struck grateful and puzzled, like, why was it that talking and listening should matter so much now? This person was not, you know, it wasn't psychoanalysis, but the person I was seeing was psychoanalytically minded. And so that sort of added to my sense of, hey, there's something going on here, and I don't understand what it is, but it feels important and good. And so, I don't know, after many years in Cambridge in some sense came time to return to the United States.
Eileen: [00:09:00] That's a big paring of experiences, time in life, right? Return to your home country, take on a new language and way of seeing the world. But I really, really understand your point about your fascination with and study of the ancients, in an ever new way, to bring them to life means you're living. Going on, thinking about them and bringing them to life is a project.
Jonathan: [00:09:29] Thank you, I agree. I mean, there are very, very important differences between the way Socrates did philosophy and the way we do psychoanalysis. But there are some really important similarities. And one of the similarities is that if you read the really Socratic dialogues that Plato wrote, what you see is that they usually begin with a chance encounter, Socrates meeting somebody else in the street, and they begin a conversation. For Socrates, that's how philosophy begins in a chance encounter and a chance meeting in the beginning of a conversation, like a chance fellowship or, you know, I think like letting people say whatever comes into their mind, the beginning of an analytic conversation, that there's a common commitment to the thought that if you'll just let this conversation unfold, a universe of meaning will show up in a similar way with Aristotle. He's less involved in the original meeting in a conversation than Socrates is, but he is involved very much in observing the details of life, of all living things trees, humans, scallops. He wants to know how they live and he is committed. All of his work is committed to the thought. You know, if you just pay attention, a universe of meaning will open up for you. I find a similar impulse in psychoanalysis of allowing a conversation to open up a universe, if you'll just allow it to.
Eileen: [00:11:15] This connection that Jonathan is drawing between ancient philosophers and modern psychoanalysis. It's fascinating. Anyone who has read the texts of Plato of Socrates will have undoubtedly realized that they often take the form of dialogue, though sometimes one sided, as conversation has a tendency to be. Great thought comes from the challenging of perspective. The outsider prompts to fill in the gaps. The other party with which to bounce ideas off of, as one would say in the modern day. While we have new terminology, or perhaps a deeper universal understanding, it is an ancient philosophical truth that if you allow a conversation to unfold, a universe of meaning will open up. As professional listeners, we hold this truth dear. It is the reality of our every day. Each conversation we experience is a new universe. And these universes, while they may not be similarly privileged, exist in everyday life all the same. But, as we approach this from a professional listening point of view, the critical thing to notice is that real listening ought to be effortless, like floating with your whole body in water. When you relax and trust that the buoyancy will hold you. How convenient. And this is exactly what I offered back to Jonathan. When you say that meaning will unfold, it really takes a lot of pressure off of the idea that you're supposed to engineer something or make something happen.
Jonathan: [00:13:00] I completely agree, and that's the thing. I mean, I among the many things I love about psychoanalysis is the fundamental rule, the fundamental rule being, you know, please say whatever comes into your mind without any inhibition. Even if a person can't do that, which I would say is the overwhelming rule rather than the exception, it's the rule. And this was, I think part of Freud's genius is to see that the failure to follow the rule is every bit as much of value and of interest, and as revealing of a world is if somebody did follow the rule that actually, whether they follow it or they don't, everything is of great value. And that's part of letting the conversation unfold, is seeing that it doesn't unfold naturally. It's actually quite conflicted and restricted and inhibited. But again, with the patience and attention, you'll see that that too will open up a universe of meaning.
Eileen: [00:14:02] The surprise factor as opposed to the expectation and the control. It reminds me of how I read somewhere where you were saying, 'I'm skeptical of narrative'. It's like if someone's just telling a story that they are -- quote unquote -- conscious of or in control of, then how open for discovery can it be?
Jonathan: [00:14:21] I agree. On the one hand, I do think narratives are important. I don't want to, you know, sort of have a blanket skepticism about the very idea of a narrative. But I think it's very important not to over idealize them. And also especially I think, you know, this is I think many analysts agree with me about this, but to recognize the defensive uses of narratives, that there's something relieving. People want to have stories about themselves, and they want to have stories that have a beginning, a middle and an end. That's sort of what narratives do. They tend to tell a story that, by its very nature, leaves a lot out. So I'm all in favor of people having narratives, but not without paying attention to, you know, are there defensive reasons that this should be my narrative rather than not? Why am I restricting my sense that my self-understanding consists or would only consist in having a narrative?
Eileen: [00:15:22] I mean, it's a short step to meaning from there of necessity. We are meaning makers.
Jonathan: [00:15:28] We are meaning makers. That's exactly, I think, exactly right. And I think part of meaning making is getting good narratives about ourselves, good being truthful ones, ones that are accurate and insightful. But part of meaning making is also consists of poetic moments, disruptions, moments of irony. For instance, it's easy to leave them out, and I think that that's what psychoanalysis opens up, is an awareness that you can come up with a really great account of yourself. But there's always a further question, which is what imaginative use are you putting that narrative to? However insightful, however true, however, getting to the bottom of things it is, there's still a further question. I find that just a fascinating feature of human life that we are creatures who can keep the question going.
Eileen: [00:16:26] There's a pivot there between what I would say, what we're given, and then what we do with what we're given. We don't have control over our beginnings, but we do have freedom to know what the truth is of that, as opposed to what we can't stand for it to be or what we wish it was. And that business of needing some one else who knows us well, who we trust. To join us in that endeavor of getting honest with ourselves. Seems like the core question of questions personally.
Jonathan: [00:17:00] Yeah, I like the way you put it, because I think this human capacity to keep going imaginatively, it's somewhat fragile, and it cannot happen in conditions of overwhelming danger or dread or suffering. It needs a safe environment. I think you're right on target with emphasizing that part of the psychoanalytic conditions, part of what we're trying to set up for our analysands is conditions of safety, such that they can take up this human capacity to sort of keep on going with the imaginative thinking about who are they, what are they up to, and what is their world all about.
Eileen: [00:17:50] In a positive, useful way, I mean, imagining can be and often is profoundly negative and damning. When you said, you know, the ancients acted like unhappy childhoods weren't an issue. And yet we know that there's suffering that's built into peoples' beginnings, that then comes to mediate their openness or their closeness to making imaginative use. And that's where the work of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, as we think about it, comes in. And I'm also appreciating these themes that you really used creatively in this last book, imagining the end and the positive meaning of mourning. You know, I was struck like, you know, mourning is not only not bad, it's really good, you know, was a takeaway that I had from from reading this recent work of yours. But there's so much that goes on at that intersection philosophically. psychoanalytically just thinking about, you know, day to day, real life, human nature more of us than not. That challenge at the borderline between that's it, I'm screwed. And wait, whatever it's been before, even if it was yesterday or, you know, 30 years ago, you know, what am I doing with it now? I mean, it's no small thing.
Jonathan: [00:19:15] Absolutely. You know, I just want to say, firstly, just go back to something you said at the beginning of your remark, which was one of the things you can see if you look at the sort of expanse of Freud's career, it seems to me that one of the markers of like, how does thinking develop was in the ever more present acknowledgement of there being something negative in the human soul. I use the word soul just like psyche equivalent terms, but that it's the phenomenon of World War One and all the destruction and people coming home with what he called the war neuroses that he began to see. You know, there's something negative in the human psyche, something that wants, you know, death, non-being, destruction. And he posited, you know, the death drive around, whatever, 1919 as this negative force. If you go back to the ancient Greek philosophers, especially the philosophers, and I don't mean the tragedians, you don't see the same reckoning with this negativity that you do see in more contemporary thinking, and certainly in Freud's thinking about the negative therapeutic reaction is one example of it. And, you know, the death drive, this sort of, you know, he's positing some kind of internal move in the direction of non-being rather than being. And of course, this has gotten taken up in more recent work with the psychoanalytic understanding of envy. You know, that, I think is a big difference from if I read Aristotle or if I read Plato and Socrates, I don't see that same concern for negativity. And I think it's very important that we do think about the negativity inside.
Eileen: [00:21:02] How do how do you understand that?
Jonathan: [00:21:04] Well, I think it's very hard to understand, and in part because I think it itself resists understanding. I mean, part of its own negativity is that it's not there to be understood, it's there to take things down. I can't quote you off the top of my head. You know, Iago at the end of Othello, there's the figure of Othello, who is, you know, I'd say he's a jealous figure. And then there's the figure of Iago, in contrast, who is an envious figure. At the very end of the play, Iago basically says, I have nothing more to say. It's as though part of the negativity of envy or this whatever these negative forces are, is that they of their own nature resist understanding. I think that's actually quite important, because understanding is itself a move towards the good. It's a move towards putting things together of binding. And what we're talking about is the force that's unbinding, that's really against putting things together. It's sort of in favor of nothing, nothingness. Right, right. And so it's hard to say. I mean, it's I think it's extraordinarily difficult and, and it's very important that it's difficult. It's not just that, you know, it's not just that it's like solving a difficult equation. I mean, there's a lot to be said about that. It's a fascinating issue. But I think a lot more work needs to be done on it. But if I may say, by contrast, the things that you were saying towards the end of your comment just now was about mourning... I think is precisely the opposite kind of movement, because what it is doing is it's the form of registering loss in the mode of making meaning, you know, the paradigm is when you lose a loved one. You're so involved in the memory you're trying to figure out, well, what did my relationship mean? Who was he or she, what did we do together? What didn't we do together? What are my regrets? What didn't work? What did work? All of that is an enormous, you know, synthetic. Effective exercise in facing loss. And even...
Eileen: [00:23:16] If it hurts.
Jonathan: [00:23:17] Even if it hurts, it's tolerating. It has to hurt.
Eileen: [00:23:21] Yeah, by definition, for...
Jonathan: [00:23:22] The sake of understanding. And, you know, here I was talking earlier about how teachers have helped me. I was very helped. I mean, you know, when I came to New Haven and started training as an analyst, I mean, one of my really important teachers was Hans Loewald. We met often over many years, and one of his, I think great essays is on internalization, mourning and the superego. A kind of point I feel I learned from him is that mourning isn't just it's a much more expansive, pervasive phenomenon than we might at first think that we have paradigms of mourning. A loved one, a parent, a child, wife, husband, spouse dies, and we mourn their loss. And there's the paradigm. The way I understand Loewald the kind of point he's getting at is the kind of point I wanted to develop in this book, which is that mourning marks the human condition, because every time the kind of creature we are, which is basically erotic creatures, I mean, this is I think this is where Freud goes right back to Plato, that we relate to things via being attached to them, and also sort of balancing attachment and separation and coming to understand your another person than me. We have a relationship, but we're not identical. You don't do everything I want. That's part of your separateness, that successful human development of understanding boundaries, attachments, separations, differentiations, all of that is to be understood very broadly construed as a mourning process, because there's always separation involved. Given the kind of creatures we are, there's always coming to terms with separation, which in the background involves some kind of acknowledgment of loss.
Eileen: [00:25:24] And here we reach the crux of our conversation, our cogito. If you'll humor me, allowing room for the most difficult processes in our lives is a merciful act, one that creates space to move forward without being stuck or dragged backward. This space we create for grief cannot and will not always be understood. As Nancy McWilliams said in our interview with her. The intent to understand is what matters most, not the achievement of perfect understanding. And when we have yet to make sense of our feelings, it's hard to believe that they will take us somewhere that we want to go. We may try to logic our grief and painful emotions away, to create a barrier which blocks us from being able to process, to mourn. It's only when we allow ourselves to mourn. To feel and follow the feelings that we're finally able to learn what it is that our feelings are trying to teach us. And as Jonathan implied, mourning is an individual process, a transformation of the soul. Still, that doesn't mean that other people or a space between is not needed. In fact, grieving is a time when we need others as much or more than ever. We act as witnesses for each other, the necessary human support for the inner work that is each of ours to do. Transforming sorrow into deepened dignity with grateful awareness. This is a humanizing, a freeing process. During our conversation, these ideas prompted another question in me if mourning is a meaningful and transformational experience, is there a privilege to attachment? And when it comes to loss, does it always come back to human attachment? Or do we mourn things that are abstract? As sure as we mourn people, I put these questions to Jonathan.
Jonathan: [00:27:27] I don't want to make generalizations. I like, again, taking specific instances and and thinking about them. But I wrote a book called Radical Hope, which is about the Crow Indians and the destruction of their way of life by American government and how they lived with it. It's a book of philosophy. It's not meant to be a book of history or sociology or anthropology, but it's a book about how do you go about relating to a way of life to which you were attached no longer being possible. And I think that's, you know, I think we're worrying about that now in our own context about what have we taken for granted about how to live a human life, like in our culture and our society? Is it all about to come to an end, and how do we feel about that now? It's coming up right now for us, I think mostly in the form of anxiety, because we're worried about the future rather than mourning about having lost the past. So the temporality is a bit different. But I think we do share as a culture. We share a tremendous anxiety that, you know, we're going to be forced to be in a position of mourning very soon, that the climate is going to make it so that we can't live the way we used to and would like to.
Jonathan: [00:28:47] And how are we going to feel about that now? Mourning is the act of imagination that transforms what would otherwise be mere change into loss. I mean, you know, at one time an aunt, you know, or a fly is alive and the next moment it's dead. That's a change in the world. One time, you know, I was writing on a piece of paper, and then I thought it, you know, I didn't need it anymore, and I threw it away. That's another change in the world. What makes change loss? There are other animals who are very I mean.... And I'm sure there are many others. I mean, there are other animals who are very capable and do experience loss. But if you wiped all those animals out of the universe. I mean, if all humans died and all elephants died and all similar similarly minded animals were extinguished, why would the universe have anything in it that counted as loss? I mean, there just wouldn't be any such thing. There'd just be changes. How do you turn a change into a loss? Some changes are losses. They really are losses. But it requires person to be there to suffer the loss and make it into a loss, not just a change. What does that... Well, it's mourning. Mourning is that which turns change into loss...
Eileen: [00:30:21] We've talked so much about philosophy and allowing space for grief, but to create that space, we turn to our modern practice of depth talk therapy, psychoanalysis being the deepest possible practice... which is exactly why Jonathan fell in love with it.
Jonathan: [00:30:46] Part of what I love about it is I think... at its best... it's a truly great technique and it's like a, you know, a master craft. I think that it's something you can keep getting better at over life. And when I think of, you know, when I go see a great pianist and I just think they are masters and they, you know, they've spent their life getting better at playing this very piece of music. And I think that psychoanalysis is, when done seriously and well, is a master craft in that sense that you can always learn by listening, always get better at what you're doing, always think about things fresh. So I mean, I'll just say the other thing I do. So I didn't go the route of becoming a supervising analyst or a training analyst. I just didn't have, you know, the time or really the inclination to do that. But what has happened in a kind of ad hoc way is that trained analysts who were already fully qualified, already outstanding analysts, every now and then somebody gets in touch and just wants to talk a case through with me, just to have another pair of ears listening to what's happening and help them see things, maybe from a different perspective or whatever. So that's the other thing I do is to, you know, it's not part of the training of anybody or the supervising of anybody. At least I don't conceive of it that way. It's more like consulting. But when analysts who are fully qualified not in training, people get in touch and want to talk through a case. I love to listen to the material of two people, one of whom isn't me. You know, I become the third about what is to be heard in the conversation.
Eileen: [00:32:31] It's a great natural byproduct and evolution, and I can imagine the richness there for you and for those that seek you out. Not surprisingly, the theme that keeps coming across over the course of our conversation is something about, I want to say, freedom. If it's not too big a word, freedom to listen, freedom to pursue, freedom to discover, freedom to mean it. To be alive and wondering about what's happening in the name of making meaning in the broadest sense of the word without pressures. But the bigger truth is something about being open to the road that unfolds before you and really taking it, trusting it, that there's going to be something here for me and going on allowing yourself to be molded and affected. I have one more question for you. Although I could keep you here all day, the question is this. It seems like you're constantly listening to the world around you and following where your curiosity takes you. Where is it taking you next?
Jonathan: [00:33:31] You might be surprised to hear, I don't know. I'll find out. I'm waiting to find out. I have a lot of confidence that if you just. If I wait, things will become clear. I mean, what I've been doing the last chapter of my last book, Imagining the End, is about gratitude. I don't know, is that the end of what I was doing when I wrote about gratitude, or is it the beginning of something new? I don't know, it's too soon to tell.
Eileen: [00:34:07] After such a powerful discussion, not unlike the fruit of mourning, I am filled with hope. I'm reminded that to feel the pain of a loss is to show us that we have truly loved and intrinsically valued the object of our loss. Perhaps grief is simply the act of sitting with emotion, listening to it as it continues to unfold... A tribute, a monument, even, to the meaning of our attachments. It's that space between, again, in a different way. Grief takes place in the spot within us where our supremely personal self sensitivity meets our humility. The depth awareness that we are one among always have been and always will be. That it's all so much bigger than us. Ourselves alone. The mystery we're living together, and that our thread of the tapestry is as vital as every other. Not more, not less. I bet many of you have known that genuine grief. The grief that keeps you in the car to finish crying or bent over, handwritten letters exchanged, savoring and reliving the evidence of who and what was that can never not be until there are no more tears. No matter how painful and apparently unending mourning does give way, it does relieve. And that is no discredit to you or the object of your love.
Eileen: [00:35:41] It dissipates the painful side of itself, as sure as it leaves an indelible mark of honor. It's the trail, the journey, the life path you are cutting with your willingness to love and to be loved. And thirdly, you know this... Survival won't do. We as humans are not here to merely exist and endure this life we've been given. As Emerson famously said it, "No one suspects the days to be gods". We have the capacity to create our own meaning, whether it's immediate and tangible or vast and ethereal. In this process, we use all the experience we've ever known as human beings... The givens and the losses, the failures and the achievements, and most importantly, our experience of love to manifest our truest, most personal and meaningful existence. This has been the art of listening. Again, my name is Eileen Dunn. Please join us for our next episode, as we continue to dive into the space between speaker and listener. You can follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, if you enjoyed the show, please leave a review and a five star rating. It helps us grow so that we can keep bringing you new conversations. And we'll see you next time.