I'm asking you, Susan, in this moment, why are you there? 'Cause you don't have to be.

You're right.

I, I don't.

I'm here for two reasons, right? The holding out in hopes that things will change and, you know, certainly the, the benefits are amazing.

You know, I'm hoping by thinking, wow, maybe this is just a personal phase of mine that I'll just move past it.

I'll grow through it.

Maybe it's not as bad as what I'm thinking I'm feeling that it is.

When we first came into this conversation, how did you articulate the reason for this season, and how are you articulating it now?

But I feel that's wrong.

Okay.

Well, uh, you know, the, there's two way, there is two ways to go about it.

One is you could just let them worry about it.

[laughs] But if you, if you have something you don't want or something you do want, you know, yes, put that on paper.

Talk to them about it.

Um, uh, one of the things you might think about, and I don't know how you feel about this, but body donation is something that helps other people.

How do you support a friend who is dying? Thank you for taking my question, Tina." And Susan, yeah, I'd love to start with you on, on any advice you could offer Tina.

So Susan, when did you realize that you and your husband had different values around politics?

When we were younger, we sort of didn't worry too much about it.

On voting day, we'd rock up, get the vote over and done with.

It wasn't till down the track, I guess, when we became proper adults, and discussions about, what was it at the time? It was the emissions trading scheme and all that sort of stuff.

Discussions came up.

[gentle music]

[laughs] But now Susan's kids are in primary school, and she's got concerns about what they'll absorb from her husband and his family's politics.

You never know what your kids are gonna pick up, what influence they're gonna take and run away with.

Susan will be our reader, followed by a 20-minute share by Karen C.

Ready? Okay.

I'm ready.

All right.

Good morning, everyone.

Susan, recovered compulsive overeater.

Okay, starting with the last paragraph on page 51 in We Agnostics.

"We asked ourselves this: Are not some of us just as biased and unreasonable about the realm of the spirit as were the ancients about the realm of the material? Even in the present century, American newspapers were afraid to print an account of the Wright brothers' first successful flight at Kitty Hawk.

Maybe I'm concerned that I will disappear.

That's why I think our spiritual lives are important too, because there's a contribution to the karma.

It's there, and we don't have control over it, but we give ourselves to it to some extent.

Uh, well I just was talking to somebody, and the, her experience, she described it as like the Seurat pointillist painting of Sunday in the Park, and each dot makes a whole in this beautiful way.

That dot was just, in that moment, was put on that, and then it kinda gets lost among all the other dots.

And it was $100.

Well, it's so moving and shows how much love in the face of so much struggle and pain.

It gave them strength that they could still give to you when things were so, so difficult and scary for them.

[gentle music] Sometimes the clarity is not there anymore, or I'm losing color.

When that happens, I get scared and I worry.

This is Hadley's Insights and Sound Bites, where people facing vision loss share what's helped them cope and adjust.

My name is Susan and I presently live in Florida, but we spent most of my life in upstate New York, which I miss dearly.

It was about 40 years ago, and all of a sudden my eye started bleeding, and my husband was a patient of the Retina Institute up in Boston.

He called them, gave them my symptoms, and they kept somebody on staff who's a retina specialist and who- whatever people he would need, so that when we got there, they were prepared to help.

Well, I went through, feels like 30 billion tests and surgery, and the bottom line is they don't know why my eye hemorrhaged.

After that, I went through a period of being fearful because they did not know if that would happen to my other eye.

Mm

... and we try things on.

We try a turnaround thought on, like a different shirt, and go, "Well, how does that make me feel? Oh, it makes me feel more, like, empowered, more like, yeah, I can go out and I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to see as much fun, how much fun I can have." And, like, that...

And also our brains, we have this thing called a reticular activation system.

I call it, like, our little GPS system or our radar, our RAS, and what we put into our brain is what then our brain is looking for.

So it's sorta like when you decide you wanna buy a red car, you see 'em, all you see is red cars.

So if you put into your brain, "Summer's gonna suck if I'm not drinking," then that's what your brain's looking for.

Mm-hmm.

It really is.

Yes.

The invitation to play, uh, is, has been fabulous.

It's, uh, it's so much fun now, and, um, we're just having, we-- you know, it's not always net free.

Uh, so th-there are places where I still get, um, I don't relax well, like when I'm preparing for a trip.

So I have really been working on myself to stay grounded, just give myself enough time, you know, take care of myself in between, do self-care, uh, and that's, that's been helpful.

But if, you know, there's the slightest hint of stress, uh, it can, it can create some, mm, disturbance in the, the force, you know? [laughs] And, uh, and so, um, you know, I, I try to s-set a vision every day.

Is that how you'd say it?

Tell us.

Uh, after being smoke-free for three years and smoking unfortunately way too long in my life, I was able to quit.

My physician, family physician, suggested that I have a CT scan, so I did, and that scan showed some calcium deposits and a nodule that was odd shaped and fuzzy.

So they, uh...

he asked me to have a PET scan.

The PET scan came back glowing, which is a bad thing in your lungs.

I was sent to a thoracic surgeon, and he looked at it and said, "I would probably give this another three to six months just out of protocol to watch it, see what happens, but we have a new software here at the hospital, and I'd like to run it through the AI software." And simply by putting a cursor on the image from the PET scan, gave it a prediction of eight out of 10, positive for cancer.

Mm.

No, that's not w-

Wear them for a few hours.

See if you feel any different.

If you don't, great.

If you do, consider why.

I should get going.

You're a smart girl, Nikki.

[power shutting down]

I'm sure we can-

This is bullshit, all right?I didn't sign up to be a guinea pig in some new agey cult experiment.

Sorry, what?

Find some dirt.

Everyone has dirt.

Right now, you're on the receiving end, Nikki, a size 12 pink leather knee high wedged straight up your ass.

Go get a bootYou understand? Then everything changes.

It's mutually assured destruction, and if you both stand to lose, you win by default.

Tell us.

After being smoke-free for three years and smoking, unfortunately, way too long in my life, I was able to quit.

My physician, family physician, suggested that I have a CT scan, so I did, and that scan showed some calcium deposits and a nodule that was odd-shaped and fuzzy.

So they, uh, he asked me to have a PET scan.

The PET scan came back glowing, which is a bad thing in your lungs.

I was sent to a thoracic surgeon, and he looked at it and said, "I would probably give this another three to six months just out of protocol to watch it, see what happens.

But we have a new software here at the hospital, and I'd like to run it through the AI software." And simply by putting a cursor on the image from the PET scan gave it a prediction of eight out of ten positive for cancer.

Mm.

My mom, Susan.

But we had you.

Oh, you were married when you had me or you were not married when you had me?

Not married.

And so after that, his name was Gerald.

We were at a Christmas party at the home of one of our friends in our Sunday school.

Her name was Toni.

As we were visiting at the party, Toni asked me where we lived.

She had lived in Bartlesville her entire life, and I had only lived here about four years.

And I told her where we lived and she said, "Oh, I think one of my friends that I went to school with lived in that house." And I said, "Oh, really?" And she said, "Yeah, I think he did." And she pulled down her yearbook.

And she said, uh, "Yeah, yeah, he, he did.

I think it's easy to just dismiss that.