What I loved writing about how amazing it is to be older.

I know I didn't expect to be 18.

I was really drinking and using a lot and I was reckless.

And then I didn't expect to be 21 and then I became 50 and I was so young, you know.

But So what I write a lot about is how much drops away that you think is who you are and that who you try to be and who you try to burnish.

Because everybody loves that you have this certain personality or you have the these gifts or you have these accomplishments.

And you start to learn as you get older.

That is the least important stuff about who you are and.

Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis Podcast with Chip Conley, where we explore how midlife isn't a crisis, but a chrysalis, a time of profound transformation that can lead to the most meaningful chapter of your life.

Well, welcome to the midlife chrysalis.

And this is our first episode in which we have a couple, two people being interviewed at the same time.

And this is a really interesting story because the two of them met in their early 60s.

Annie, I always like to call it say Annie Lennox, but it's Annie Lamott.

Annie Lennox is from the Eurythmics.

Annie Lamott and Neil Smith, they're both writers, actually.

I don't know if Neil's a Christian based upon what he said today.

He's definitely spiritual and he's a spiritual teacher, spiritual coach, and he helps people.

What I loved about this episode is the weaving of their stories.

It's almost as if they'd met 30 years ago.

It might not have worked, but somehow in their 60s, it did.

I hope you enjoy the episode.

Well, Neil, you're a refugee from the corporate world, so I want to understand, did you have a midlife chrysalis?

We, we call it the, the, instead of a midlife crisis, this sort of transformative era in the middle of your life that led you to ultimately becoming a writer and a spiritual coach.

What what, what led you to to flee corporate America?

So I'd always been a writer.

So my first career was in journalism and I was a reporter and even entering into my corporate career I was a reporter also, I mean a, a writer also.

I entered through the soft side of PR and corporate communications.

I ended up in the hard side of product development and IT and things.

But I always looked at myself that my default expertise was writing.

What happened though about my corporate career was I was in my early to mid 50s and I accidentally stumbled into spiritual work.

I'd been a atheistic hardcore rationalist all my life and had no interest in spiritual matters and got tugged into it, much to my surprise.

And as that absorbed me, there seemed to be a fairly natural, a bumpy but natural transition out of the work I had been doing into new forms of work.

The, the, the, the odd thing about most spiritual paths, 1 odd thing is that they're very good at defining the work that needs to be done in order to free yourself.

And they're very poor at telling you what you do next.

And so it's because all of life is, to a certain extent, trial and error.

Being in my late 50s, really scratching my head about meaning and purpose and all of those things and not having a clear path where to go.

I kind of drifted out of my corporate life.

I, I tend to think that I wasn't as good at it anymore.

Also, I think that I, I simply, my, as my interest in other things increased, there was a deficiency in my interest in, in my corporate work.

And I, I, I don't think I was very good at it at the end.

And I left completely.

And then I, I just stumbled and kept trying to figure out what to do next.

And I got a, I tried executive coaching and, but the executive coaching ended up turning into spiritual coaching over time.

And that seemed to happen kind of naturally.

I, it turned out I was less interested in momentary crises people had and more interested in the long game.

And so executive coaching is really, you know, quick therapy work.

And that just wasn't interesting to me.

I got interested in death and volunteered for a number of years in Hospice and just watched and sat with people as a volunteer as they died.

And all of that added up into a kind of, oh, I can use my skill set, which is writing.

And this can be the subject matter now.

So I've always thought of myself as a writer and Annie and I talk about this.

The sentence is what's important.

The, the subject matter is quite secondary to me.

And so I've always written, but I, I wrote about subjects that were handed to me.

I was like, you know, a hack writer for hire.

And I love doing that.

It's it's exactly the same thing to me whether it's my subject or somebody else's subject, because my interest is the sentence and the.

It's a it's a craft.

Yeah, Yeah, it's a groove.

I mean, it's just this groove that I know that I'm comfortable in, that I love doing, that presents me with innumerable interesting puzzles that I can solve.

And so I kind of carried that particular form of puzzle making through journalism, corporate work, which was often writing and then or I could turn it into writing in some way.

And then my spiritual life that that showed up in the fit in my 50s.

The the oddest thing happened when I woke up one day around 2013 or 14 and realized that everything that I spent my time with writing Hospice work, coaching people spiritually was what other people would call serving people right service.

And I have never been a person of service.

I wasn't then, I am not now.

It's it's odd that people call this service.

I'm just doing the next thing that seems my role right now.

I have no sense of purpose in it.

I have no sense that I'm serving humanity in any way.

As a volunteer in Hospice, I was like most Hospice workers or the volunteers or paid workers, you'd pay for it to do it, to be around dying people.

It's just a selfish thing.

It's a fantastically interesting way to spend time, spend a day is is hanging around with the dying people and and I've never felt that I owed the world any particular sort of behavior or work.

But but all of my work now is called is within that service category.

It's just odd.

Richard Rohr is one of our faculty members, although he is no he's retired now from MEA and his book Falling Upward, The spirituality for the second-half of life.

Did that have any influence on you at all or Neil?

I don't read a lot of Well, that's not quite true, do.

You read Annie's books.

Let's let let's I want to understand.

I read all of Annie's books.

OK, there you go.

Now you got extra point.

You, you, you checked the box there.

So Annie, how, how is your spirituality your your Sunday school teacher?

You're, you've written quite a bit about both religion and spirituality.

And how does how does your spirituality weave in Weave with meals?

Doesn't in, in any obvious ways, like I said, I'm really seriously a Christian, a left wing Christian.

And that's my, my guy is Jesus and I'm very, very attentive to him and to what I believe he would have me do.

And just sort of endless talks and prayer and appreciation.

And Neil's a lot more ecumenical and I, and really ecumenical.

And you can ask Neil about any wisdom school at all and he can tell you a great deal about its origins and its main scripture and what it teaches.

And, and I'm not like that at all, but we both have a huge life in nature, a daily and huge life in nature.

And that's A and Neil comes to my church sometimes and he really loves it, but it's just not his path.

He was an atheist Sunday school teacher for years.

But yeah, I was raised by atheists.

And so I was really given free reign to come up with on my own path.

Talk a little bit about that, Annie, because I know your father was a writer and, and you grew up in in San Francisco or in or in Marin in.

Marin, Yeah, in Marin.

So where did your where did your curiosity around religion come from, and where did your sense of humor come from?

I think my sense of humor developed because I, I was really badly bullied as a young girl because I had this crazy hair and I looked, I was very different looking and boys just set on me as a way of kind of self soothing themselves and having some sense of self esteem.

It was just devastating, as you can imagine.

And I discovered pretty early on, by first grade, I was understood to be the class clown.

And I had discovered that if I could think of something as a retort to whatever they were shouting at me as they went by on their bicycles that I won and, or that I even the playing field.

So I got funny early on and with spirituality, I, even though both of my parents were atheists, I, I was raised in by two best friends who who had religious parents.

One was a woman I still walk with, you know, 66 years later in Shelley and her mother was Christian Science.

And I, I just grew up at that house because our house was pretty unhappy.

And I grew up with Missus Eddie.

You know who ends up being the founder of New All New Thought, right?

Yeah.

And Mary Baker, Eddie and and just this in the Bible.

And she would just read to her three kids and me every morning.

And I had this secret belief that in the late at night in the dark, when I was afraid and sad, that if I said hello or are you there, that something heard me and drew closer.

And so I spent most of my teens trying not to have anything to do with Jesus because my made my parents so nervous because they just thought Christians were crazier than you had to be.

And my father had been raised by missionaries in Japan and so he had a complete aversion to it.

And you know, to the he was raised Presbyterian, which they call God's frozen chosen.

And I ended up being a Presbyterian aunt drunk.

What happened were somewhat during my 20s, I was drinking and taking a lot of drugs and I was really studying a lot of Eastern philosophy.

And Ramdas was a really huge part of my coming to believe that you could use the word God and that you could devote your life to union and to reunion and to restoration with who you really were and with, with a sense of wholeness and, and awakened consciousness.

And that it wasn't just hippie BS.

But I kept trying to not be a Christian.

And I always loved Jesus and I always really loved Mary, but in a kind of friend, you know, they were kind of a friend, friend, friends or something.

And then at when I was 31, I was living on a houseboat.

That was a 10 by 10 and very, very broke.

I had four books out, three books out.

And I would go over to this flea market and I'd hear this, the music that my parents had raised me on, which was the music of the civil rights movement, which was Joan Baez and Pete Seeger and the Weaver singing the great old gospels of the Deep South.

We shall overcome and, and our, you know, swing low, sweet chariot and we shall not be moved.

And it resonated for me because I'd grown up on these spirituals.

And, and so I came in and I sat down and for about a year, six months, I left before the, the Jesus part, the sermons, I just wanted the love company and the healing breath of people who loved one another and loved God.

And we're trying to be people of goodness in the world.

And and then at some point I just got tired of trying to escape from the Jesus part.

And I just said one day sort of bitterly on the dock, walking back to my house, cut hold, I said to God, Oh, I felt him.

I've written a lot about this, but I felt Jesus sort of like a stray cat.

And I'd felt him kind of running around near my feet for a while.

And you don't feed a stray cat, right?

Because all of a sudden it's not a stray cat.

All of a sudden it's your cat.

So I'm not stupid.

So I put it off as long as I could.

And then one day I just said, oh fine.

Would you like some milk, Jesus?

But I had a radical black preacher who was very into the, the movement of, you know, the Berrigan brothers and.

And not Cecil, was it?

Are you talking about Cecil Williams?

No.

No, it was a tiny, tiny, tiny failing church.

His name was James Noel and he looked, he looked like Marvin Gaye, which didn't hurt.

But he also had given me like the new seeds of contemplation and all of Thomas Merton.

And there's a lot of emphasis on, on, on consciousness and, and awakening and just being people of, of love and accepting that we were loved as is, which had not crossed my mind unless I was on the exact right combination of drugs and alcohol.

And it seemed to be the message that we were here because we were beloved and we were here to be the beloved.

We were here to offer bread for the journey to people who were not doing very well.

It had been a sanctuary church during Vietnam.

It was a church that was mentoring.

It was in a ghetto.

And it was, you know, there are 40 people there on a big day.

And but I love the music and they didn't hassle me or try to get me to figure things out or to join Bible study.

They just could see that I was extremely lonely and hurting.

I didn't have a scent.

I was bulimic, I was anorexic.

I was hungover.

I was and I had three books out and I've lived in Marin my whole life.

So I was loved out of all sense of proportion.

But they could see that on the inside I was just Swiss cheese.

And they got me water and little by little I started to fill back up.

And then about a year later, I got sober.

I know I have friends of mine, like people like Deborah Amador Delarosa, who are friends of yours through the program.

And I hope I I hope Deborah doesn't mind me mentioning her name here.

And your journey to being in recovery is phenomenal as as still a relatively young mother with Sam, your son.

And what's it like being a humanist Christian in this age we're living in right now?

Well, you know, of course in on one level just mortifying because all the people that are public Christians are also, I would say racist and anti everything that I love about life.

I identify as a feminist.

I certainly identify as somebody who loves, cherishes and involves myself in the LGBTQ community.

I'm pro women's rights.

I'm and so, you know, they don't sell my books at Christian bookstores.

I think for good reason.

They're probably distressing, but because I think God loves everybody and I don't think there's a hell.

So that's like not good Christian doctrine.

If you're a conservative, you know, there's you would be surprised by how many of us there are, by how many people ran screaming for the for their from their cute little lies drum fundamentalist or very conservative Catholic or Christian families, but found their way very much to Richard Rohr and ROM Dos and these people that could be so gentle and dear and also funny, just so tender hearted people without like an axe to grind or a a position.

So I let people know I'm a Jesus person in case they want to talk about it.

And then I mostly don't try to proselytize or or get people to to come back.

You know, I just say, well, this is what it, you know, in the recovery, we talked about it.

We share our.

Attraction, not promotion, Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, Attraction, not promotion.

And so I just try to be a person who was saved and and filled and guided one day at a time.

30-40 years later.

I converted 40 years ago, I got sober 35.

So I just try to be the word, you know, the and the word is love.

And so I just try to be that.

And people are curious.

What's it like being a left wing Christian writing for the Washington Post these days?

I love your column.

I the the Post was smart enough to bring you on board and especially the topic, which is usually topics that are oriented toward a reader who is in their 60s, seventies or beyond a both.

What's it like working for the Post these days or actually being a writer for the Post?

And, and more importantly, you know, what do you, what do both of you believe has gotten better with age in your life?

I wrote 12 pieces on age for the post, and then I've written a few since then on the resistance from the point of view of being an older person with sore feet.

But so I loved writing those pieces.

People that are most of my friends are very, very progressive and most of them think that the Christianity is just kind of like, it kept me alive.

You know, I'm alive because I had this boundless little church and and most of the people that are I identify as being very staunchly Christian are not anywhere near as left wing as I am.

And so, you know, it's always been the same that you kind of in recovery.

We should also say take what you like and leave the rest.

But with writing these pieces about being older, anytime I mention God, even an acronym like goodness or the gift of desperation, which is what got most of us sober who have gotten sober, people will complain in the letters and I cannot stay away from the letters.

I mean, at the ripe old age of you would think that we can go not to read some letters, but I what I loved writing about was the how amazing it is to be older.

I never I didn't expect to be 18.

I was really drinking and using a lot and I was reckless and then I didn't expect to be 21.

And as we were saying when we were coming up like somebody who is 50.

It was like, you know, Jessica Tandy and Hume Krennan, and then I became 50 and I was so young, you know.

But So what I write a lot about is how much drops away that you think is who you are and that who you try to be and who you try to burnish.

Because everybody loves that you have this certain personality or you have these gifts or you have these accomplishment.

And you start to learn as you get older.

That is the least important stuff about who you are.

And that there's, there's somebody way down there who is the same as they were when they were four and probably will be if they live to be 80.

And that is the sense of spirit and, and awareness.

And you know, we both of you know, and I love that definition of Ramdas's that, that we are loving awareness and that well, because in older age, so much drops off that has to do with these created personas and these perceptions of the world of how well we're doing.

You just get more and more and more to coming back to that.

I'm loving awareness.

You know, I'm just, I'm watching you get older and you start becoming a lot more watchful, a lot less opinionated, a lot quieter.

And yet I'm extremely opinionated.

And a million people might read what I wrote in the Washington Post.

About half of them are going to complain.

It just goes with the territory.

I love one of your quotes and and I used it in one of my books once and I'm Here to Be Me, which is taking a great deal longer than I had hoped.

How about you?

How about you meal?

When in my corporate career, I noticed something that actually I kind of watched over the course of my coaching practice and it holds up, which is imposter syndrome tends to build through the 20s, 30s, well into the 40s and then tends to decline.

And by the end of the 50s, it tends not to be there.

It people have almost always shed it.

And I think what they, what happens between the 20s and the and 60, let's say, is that it gradually dawns on you that everybody's faking it.

Everybody in the next decision they make are depending on patterns and, and memorized patterns and a little bit of information and essentially guessing.

Once you know that you're guessing and that you have blind spots and that everybody else is guessing and they have blind spots.

And I've survived Despite that.

I think it, I think life just gets easier after 60, after the mid 50s, most people I know, obviously for some people it gets harder and more rigid.

And there's a, there's no locked in template for this.

But most people I know realize that oh, the point of life is to suffer and adapt.

Not because at adaptations your superpower it is, not because suffering is a good thing, but because later in life it just feels so good to take things more lightly.

Let me piggyback on to that to say also one of the great blessings, and I wrote a couple of columns about this is that when you're younger, like even in your 50s, you, you compare your, your insights to other people's outsides and you see people that look right or they have a lot of money.

They seem to have it together.

They would what seems from the outside to be a beautiful marriage.

And you know by the end of your 50s that people just have a lot of struggles and problems and stuff is coming up with their heartbroken that that's the central part of the human experience is heartbroken and this existential loneliness.

And it doesn't matter if you're happily married, doesn't matter if you had kids or didn't have kids or have grandchildren or didn't.

It's just part of the human condition.

And so God, you go a lot easier on people because you start to realize that and you have so much more in common than what you thought you had when you were younger because they had this or they were good at this or you were this.

They would never have what you or this or that.

And you all of a sudden you're just kind of in diff.

You have different biographies and you you have different, you know, again, you have different coverings, but that you give up a lot of that sense of how different we all are.

And you just you feel a lot more tenderly towards people.

You know, before I had a a brilliant gimlet eye to what was wrong with people, you know, And now I just think, boy, God, that's a heart.

Like I can even look at Trump and I can think that is a heartbroken man.

That is a man who has never been loved.

That is him, except by his daughter, and that was it.

Some, you know, some people luck out and as they age, they start to notice that they're judgement of people and things gets in the way of things, right?

You can't have judgement and intimacy at the same time.

And for me, and I think a lot of other people, well, I just kind of crave intimacy now, right?

And intimacy is who I was when I was 3, right?

I wasn't judge mental.

I didn't have regrets.

I didn't predict the future.

I just was where I was intimate with the world.

And that age becomes a return to rock solid intimacy on good days where I, you know, I became a gardener.

That's that's not an accident that I became a gardener as I was older.

It isn't an accident that older people start to garden.

It's an intimacy with the world, a really close intimacy that lacks judgement.

Those flowers and bushes and fruit trees and redwoods in in our yard, they decide what they're going to do today.

I don't decide for them.

I can't be judgmental of them.

I just have to tend them a little bit and mainly just watch them and be with them.

Well, people become like that too.

I, it doesn't help for me.

Yes, of course I vote, and I have to have a political opinion of Trump.

But Trump, like most CE OS, is living living a completely unlovable, unloved, miserable life.

But also the, I think that's a really good point about being older is that the, the value of intimacy become when you're younger, you're striving, you know, you're on, you're in the rat exercise wheel and it's Lily Tomlin.

Tomlin famously said the one problem with being on their rat the rat exercise wheels.

You're still a rat you know.

And at some point as you get older Holder the value turns away from that endlessly trying to stay one step ahead and and to achieve and what not and into intimacy.

The miracle that you have three incredible friends to whom you can say anything with whom you have ridden the the Rapids with whom you have gone through death and complete catastrophic loss and and experience resurrection at the same time.

But so in recovery, we talked about intimacy as being into me.

I see.

And part of the blessings of being old age in older age is that you do see how screwed up you are, how screwed up we are, how flawed we all are, how wounded, how neurotic, how petty, how narcissistic.

There's so many things about Trump or anyone you want to name I can identify with.

I'm that way.

But so that has to do that.

That gives us the opportunity, as we see into ourselves to to let people off the hook a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more because we have it.

It's like, Oh yeah, I got that too.

Yeah.

You know I was always told and we all were told that meaning and productivity were connected and to have meaning I had to be productive in some way.

Well as I get older I look at meaning and productivity as the distraction and simple fascination might be the purpose.

It's like the the two origin stories in the Bible which and Hinduism has the same 2 origin stories.

Essentially, first origin story is US without judgment and it's all good, right?

It's just fascination with what is.

And the second origin story, judgment comes in the knowledge of good and evil and everything gets screwed up because of that.

What can I return to my 3 year old self who's now buttressed with a huge amount of practical knowledge and and maturity and adulthood and I can be as intimate with the world on some days as I was when I was 3.

I just have two last questions.

What I hear is something that feels like a bridge to the workshop you're leading in November, which is how to tame the inner critic.

And I know, Neil, you've written quite a bit about the inner critic from what I've seen.

And, and Annie, you're inner critic.

Sometimes you, you laugh about your, you have, you have a sense of some.

There's a beautiful Richard Ward quote, which is a humiliation a day, hopefully mild.

So that to have a sense of humor about you're, you're just that critic.

And talk a little bit about what the workshop will be like in terms of how does someone coming to this workshop who has a really strong inner critic, learn how to to have a sense of humor about that critic.

OK, I'll go because Neil's too close to it.

So I started hearing the word inner critic on our, I think our second date, Neil said.

Maybe our first date, Neil, we're having coffee because I can't eat with people.

And Neil said, I asked what kind of work he did.

He said, well, have you ever heard a voice inside you that keeps you small or afraid or desperate to appear to be doing better than you are?

I said, have I ever like, I heard it this morning.

I'm hearing it right now, you know, and and he started talking about this work.

Now Freud calls it the Super ego and and I've been writing about it for years without having that term for it because I mean, I talk talk a lot in bird by Bird, my writing book about it that there's this voice.

It says, Oh boy, don't, don't write that.

Talk about beating a dead horse or New York writer, New York editors or book reviewers, They're going to hit, you know, and that that voice that you need to learn to tame.

Now, Neil wrote a whole book on it called Better Days, and it was about accepting it and learning to identify it as something that kept us alive as young children.

It kept us safe.

It kept us from running out into the street.

But at 71, I have really excellent Traffic Safety understanding and I don't.

Every cell phone, I step out into the street and Neil has these long arms and he pulls me back to the curb.

But I'm mostly pretty good about it.

And so it just freed me because he had these techniques which he can share over the course of the workshops on on saying to the inner critic, oh, it's you.

This isn't truth.

This isn't the reality of who I am.

This is something I internalize as a very young child because my parents drum beat the the drum beat was the inner critic and my teachers and my culture and I want to be free.

I want to be wild again.

I want to make a lot more messes than I was ever allowed to make in the interests of creativity and wholeness and restoration.

So that's the sort of work that he does with people and it it just blows people's minds to identify and visualize their own inner critic and to be able to to work with it.

It's very, it's kind of mechanical work, oddly mechanical, very repetitive work.

They're just sort of simple techniques.

The problem is that the inner critics got, you know, decades advantage over me.

And so to wear it down to get it to like move to the side takes lots and lots of repetition.

So what my work is, is to introduce some simple techniques that work for me and have worked for other people.

That's all I know.

I don't know they'll work for you, but I know that they've worked for other people.

That over time releases you to the freedom of choice and your own choices and A and a wider view of the world.

I actually do tend to believe that 9095% of the path to freedom of a sense of ease in life is getting that voice to move to the side.

Wow.

I'm I'm excited.

I have spent my life taming that inner critic and I've gotten better at it with time because of a sense of humor.

I mean, that really has what been to be able to laugh at myself, which is something I just couldn't do when I was growing up.

I you know, I grew up with a Marine captain father and I was doing my best not to show the world that I was gay.

And so the idea of having a sense of humor about, you know, the things that were my shadow side was something I look back and I just say like, wow, I wish I could have told that little kid or that teenager, you know what, you're you're so lovable, Chip.

But we're going to be together in November.

My last question is this.

Let's say that someone 20-30 years younger than you comes to you and says, hey, I want to have some coffee with you.

No, no, no meal with you, Annie, we're going to have, I'm going to have coffee or tea with you and with you also kneel separately.

And they said, give me a wisdom bumper sticker, not something literally, but like a figurative bumper sticker that you've learned along the way that has sort of in many ways defined who you are today or how you live your life today.

And is there an origin story behind that?

I wrote a novel 35 years ago or something like that, about a young girl, Rosie.

I wrote a trilogy.

But in the novel where she's a very, very serious tennis player, there's a man, a kind of dark, shadowy man who may be scary to the to the girls where I knew I was a tennis player in tiny white tennis clothes.

And but he's like, he's like a shadow following her.

And finally he's alone with her.

But it's kind of a weirdly safe situation.

And he says to her, this troubled kid whose father's died and everything, who's struggling, who's so miserable if she's only ranked seven, which I could get ranked seven in California and just be miserable.

And he's he looks at her and he says, you are pre approved.

And so with all of my stuff, you know, this side of the grape, a very important Dioshan priest whose past said to said to me years ago, we don't get over here much.

And I'm going to have a lot of the same foibles and obsessions and fixations this side that, you know, my whole life here, I just am.

I'm going to worry about my thighs.

I just AM.

And I'm 90% better, right?

That's a wonderful gift of being older.

But we don't get over here much.

But I over and over and over seeing Annie you pre approved.

What?

About you.

Neil Yeah, You know, the the the probably most famous 20th century Hindu master was Ramana Maharshi.

And I got interested at some point during my spiritual adventure in Ramana Maharshi.

It was a natural place to go.

And I went to his ashram and India and Tiruvannamalai and spent some little bit of time there, 11 days, and kind of paid attention and paid attention to the surroundings and read the little bit that he wrote and other people wrote his, wrote down quotations of his.

And while he was alive and everything about him comes back to simply asking the question, who am I?

What happens when you ask that question is if you're like most people, you answer roles.

I'm a father, I'm a, I'm a writer, I'm a coach, I'm a this, I'm a that.

I'm a baseball fan.

I'm a nice person, I'm a mean person.

I'm a, you know, a son.

I'm these things.

And then eventually you start to think of those.

Those are my surface.

Who am I underneath?

And I think it's much more interesting than anybody thinks when they start to explore who are they biologically and soulfully without all beyond all of the role.

And it's hard work.

It's hard to see that stuff because nobody, nobody's ever encouraged you.

And everybody's said things like it's ineffable or oh, that's a soul.

You can't define soul.

No, you can define who you are.

And that doesn't take anything away from it.

It isn't like a role, it's a it's usually an abstract noun of value, like I am strength or I am wisdom or I am love, for I am truth or I am indeterminate.

All right, you know, I am those things and in those things I'm exactly the same as everybody else.

So empathy comes from, derives from figuring out who I until I know who I am under all the roles, I'm I'm separated from everybody.

But when I learn who I am under the rolls, I am with everybody.

Cardiff.

Yeah, we have gotten it backwards.

We say we have a body or we are a body and we have a soul that I actually think we are a soul and we have a body.

And so it's a beautiful way to end.

Thank you.

I'm thrilled that we're going to be in Santa Fe together and that you love Santa Fe and we'll see you this fall.

And yeah, just thanks for the beautiful work that you do and for giving some hope to those who are single in their 60s or beyond and to realize like, oh, wow, this could happen.

I got married three days after I got my first Social Security check.

Thank you, love you.

See November.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did.

I, I would say my 3 takeaways from this one is number 1 is do not count love out.

Do not believe that if you've hit a certain age, you cannot find a new soulmate in your life.

And you know, Annie and, and Neil, they can finish each other's sentences.

It is very clear.

They also are very different.

He has sort of a masculine energy.

She has a more of a feminine energy and between the two of them, it's very clear that they want to spend the rest of their lives together.

And that didn't, you know, happen on their doorstep until their early 60s.

So number one is do not count love out and #2 is do not count spirituality and religion out.

You know, Annie grew up in a in an atheist family.

Neil was a devout athlete atheist in his adulthood.

He was he was very a brainy very much in his head.

He was.

They both studied philosophy in college.

But Annie was sort of in the party circuit and the enjoying the good life of actually, frankly dealing with her addiction to alcohol.

And so the idea that Christianity was going to come along and tap on our door was a surprise.

And it was that combination of the Christianity and then leading to stopping drinking 3738 years ago.

That's it was that 1-2 combination.

And in the case of Neil, it wasn't until his late 50s when he was getting out of the corporate world and, and really sort of exploring spirituality in, in a, in a a new way that surprised him.

So, you know, I, I'm a big fan, as I mentioned, Richard Rohr's book Falling Upward, the spirituality for the two halves of life.

For those of you who are curious, spiritually curious in at age 50 and beyond, highly recommend it.

And then I think the third thing I would just say is that both of them, you know, with their final answers, he said, who am I?

And she said pre approved.

There's an element of age being something that allows you to tame your critic, allows you to get to a place where you have a sense of humor.

You see yourself as not trying to be perfect.

You realize, as, as Neil said, everybody else is just faking it as well.

And the imposter syndrome somehow actually slides away.

So I, So what?

I, what I get, I, you know, I mentioned Annie's quote.

I'm here to be me, which is taking a great deal longer than I had hoped, but what I see is 2 people now in their early 70s who are solidly themselves who they are in this life.

And so I hope you enjoyed it.

Look forward to seeing you next week.

Thank you.

Thanks.

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