Our first conversation episode, featuring Sean Humphries. Compare the way you feel about your problems in the future to the way you feel during an emergency in the present. Notice the way you live right now in a felt anticipation of the problems of your future, and how that feels deeply uncomfortable. Now recall your last true emergency – the true arrival of a true problem – and consider how it really felt, in that moment. Not the feelings leading up to it or reverberating in its aftermath. Simply in that moment. You will notice it was NOT as uncomfortable – in fact, for many, it is barely uncomfortable at all, but a so-called “Zen” state of simple solving. That is an evolved necessity – because as you know from other less intense but difficult moments in your life, uncomfortable people are often at their least effective. Be not attached to the fruit of your action. Think of any action you might take – one you consider to have any possible outcome in which you are invested. Consider for example an attempt to persuade. In the case of persuasion we are typically focused on the GOAL of that persuasion. We conjure for ourselves a simulated future where we have attained this goal, and in the present we are trying to engender in our future whatever we consider would have been that simulation’s past. Now consider what it would be like to invest all of our attention – to invest ourselves - ONLY in the present moment in which we are relating to this person. The target of our persuading. If they shift in our minds from being a target, a MEANS to produce our wished-for future, becoming instead simply and completely a person to whom we are disposed in a certain way. And then if we then LEAN into that moment and ask of our BODIES what our disposition to them truly is, when FREED of any external or future goals, then the answer beloved is always the same: we simply want joy for each other, and to join each other. We want the simple Joy of Being for each other. But instead we have arranged ourselves in patterns necessitating and invoking an infinitude of pain. And so when one of us comes upon another, and in that moment our pain makes for us some goal which they might serve, then we, instead of noticing that permanent desire for their joy inside us, instead attend to our louder discomfort that tells us to fear and control them. What else might we do? How might we play?