John O'Donohue

And that is...

I was listening to John O'Donohue today, and there's this book, he's written a lot of really interesting books, and what I like about listening to his work is that you basically learn something new every time that you listen, and you just think like, huh, I haven't thought about it that way, or I've never really thought about what he's saying, and And today he was talking about wind blowing through the chambers of the heart and the inner landscape.

And I thought, wow, that's interesting.

So I used to sell vacuum cleaners.

And it was even longer than that, but I didn't feel comfortable saying longer because that is Amazing.

And whenever I would tell people that, they'd just be wowed by it.

And I thought, you know, it's a little bit like what John O'Donohue is saying right now, that if you stretch out, you have all these chambers in your heart, kind of like how this microfiber is kind of put together in very, very small little pockets.

And If you were to stretch out that entire landscape of your heart, it would show all of the emotions that you've had in your entire life.

And now we have this 24 hours of breaking news.

And so I think relative to the blue wave or whatever the outcome is, you know, I was thinking about this last night and it brought to mind the world, the words of John O'Donohue.

I don't know if you're familiar with him.

He is the late John O'Donohue, an extraordinary philosopher, poet, former Irish priest.

And he said, be excessively gentle with yourself.

And that's the message.

So if it doesn't go as well as we hope, I think the first thing we have to do is not be disheartened and not let it break us, but rather we have to take a break.

The first thing to do is take a break.

Vulnerability has a certain quality of immediacy.

It's like if my wife and I had a big fight this morning, I call John or I call Brian and I say, hey, can I tell you what happened just now? People often say to me about these kinds of conversations, Chuck, you're so vulnerable.

And I'll tell them, no, I'm not.

I can be open in spaces like this, but I reserve vulnerability for a few.

But I think there is this pretense of when pastors get up on stage or therapists share something of their life online.

John O'Donohue, the late priest and poet, calls it a kind of, I think he calls it a fluorescent spirituality.

The lights are bright.

And he said, the best kind of spirituality is reserved for dim lights over a glass of wine and an intimate conversation.

And the whole back half of the book, I had to way slow down because it's that deep.

And oddly enough, he was best friends with this Catholic priest named John O'Donohue, who passed away not so long ago.

But the brain...

The mind.

i think i think that probably in the work that you and i do we're we're inviting people into vulnerable spaces, you know, the kinds of spaces where in the moment, I mean, the space that I just named a moment ago, that, that was a vulnerable space because in the moment I was caught, right.

And, um, I was kind of undone and I was held by a couple of people and it was very, um, safe and it was very contained and it was very precious, you know, um, I think that nowadays, you know, I really like the work of John O'Donohue.

If you're familiar with John O'Donohue, Anup Kara, you know, he talks about this fluorescent culture that we're in with bright lights and where we're always on and where we have to expose ourselves all the time.

It feels like, you know, this is what this is what we've been doing for so long with reality TV, right? That goes back by 2025 years now.

And these, these talk shows where there are, you know, people's, um, you know, uh, uh, the sex of the child or the, or the father of the child is revealed on the Jerry Springer show or something like, remember this, try to think of what it was back in the day or,