448. A Daily Dose of Wonder with Kelly Corrigan

You know what makes things feel more okay? Kelly Corrigan, the host of Kelly Corrigan Wonders and the author of so many wonderful books (my favorite is Tell Me More). Today, Kelly and Nora dig through a treasure trove of (more than) okay things, including unexpected gratitude from an adult child (CALL YOUR MOM!), a book about a possible alien encounter, slow but steady civic progress and much more. 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

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I’m Nora McInerny, and It’s Going To Be OK. Notice that I didn’t say everything is going to be OK. I don’t know that, I don’t believe that in general, but some things are OK.

And if you are a person who is acutely hyper aware of all of the bad things in the world, if you are, like me, a person who skews towards the anxious and the worst case scenario, you are why I make this show.

Because while there are many things that are not OK, I know that even in the darkest of moments, there are always rays of light. Even when everything seems like it’s horrible, not every single thing is horrible. This is not bright sighting.

This is not spiritual bypassing. This is not saying, oh, that’s not true. This is saying, this is also true.

So in a world filled with terrible things, we are here to put some OK in your day, to lower the bar, not to find the best things in the world, but to find and share the OK things that are all around us. Today, we have quite a lot.

We go to a lot of places today. We are talking about unexpected moments of recognition. We are talking about earth ships and wizards.

We are talking about slow, but persistent civic progress and panning for gold and so much more. But more importantly, we have a very special guest with us today.

Kelly Corrigan is the author of many, many beautiful, beautiful books, including a personal favorite of mine, Tell Me More. She’s also the host of the podcast Kelly Corrigan Wonders.

She has great bangs. She has great glasses. She has a great attitude, a great mind.

She is so wise. She is so wonderful. She is joining us here today to share the OK in her world.

Kelly Corrigan, thank you so much for being here on It’s Going To Be OK.

I need it, I need this.

We all need it. I made this podcast because I am, ooh, I’m known to be a little bit of a downer, if you can believe it. No, woman who started a podcast called Terrible, thanks for asking.

You know, I am, I know this. Like everybody has, you know, sort of like an aunt, a mother.

It’s, it’s, it’s, I would say it’s almost always a woman where when you talk to them, you’d be talking about anything and then they’ll be like, oh my God, did you hear? And then they just tell you something horrifying.

Do you know Debbie Downer from Saturday Night Live?

It’s worse.

Okay.

I’m worse, right? Cause I’m, I’m, people are like, how is that connected to the topic at hand? I’m like, oh, it’s not.

But seriously, have you heard?

Oh, it’s not.

Kelly, I went to a party, huge for me.

Yeah, well done.

I went, I went, I was brought by a friend to another friend’s party. I was visiting New York City, freezing cold, four degrees. Okay.

So I’m already in, I’m already, I had to stand at the bookshelf at the party midway through and say, don’t bring up the Epstein files to myself out loud. I said, stop bringing it up. Stop it.

Stop. Stop out loud. I had to face a bookshelf and I had to say, Nora, stop being weird.

Stop it. Everybody knows all the things that are happening in the world. Stop bringing it up.

This is someone’s birthday party.

Okay.

It’s hard. I have the same problem. I really do.

I want to know what everybody thinks. I want to know what they’re most appalled by. I have my standard set of questions.

Who do you think is the single most powerful slash evil person in the administration? Who at the end of the day really believes that we should get all the people out of here?

Yeah. Rank them in order and then also tell me what punishment would you give?

Yeah. That’s good. You won up to me.

That’s really good. My husband’s like, Kelly, don’t. Kelly.

I know. I’m going to try not to.

I’m going to try so hard.

Part of it is, I suspect that there are reasons why both of us podcast and one of them is a low tolerance for superficial conversation.

So sometimes it’s hard to downgrade from the deeper, longer look we’re taking in an interview, to the chit chat about your kitchen remodel or your weekend in Santa Barbara.

So I get lost there and I want to bump the conversation into something meatier or more personal really, even just more personal. It doesn’t have to necessarily be tragedy, but I don’t know.

I think the whole reason why I want to interview people all the time is because I want permission to ask the better question.

And I want to understand people. I want to understand people and I want to know how we all fit into the world, especially in these trying times. And the times have been trying for quite some time.

I check my watch. Times are still trying.

Yeah, I’m checking. They’re still trying.

The times are still trying. They won’t stop trying. But I almost have to have these conversations with people because if you are only on line, then you think, OK, everybody who isn’t me, it’s got to be horrible, right?

Like, and everything has to be horrible. And so I just need some confirmation that, like, we actually probably do, we probably do align on more things than we think, don’t we?

Yeah, I think that I think that I’ve been watching the news more since we went to war. And the the chiron in times like this is actually accurate where it says breaking news.

But, you know, a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, there wasn’t breaking news 24 hours a day. Didn’t didn’t change the chiron. It kept saying breaking news.

And it’s like you are wearing people out. Like, vigilance is metabolically expensive, as my friend Lisa Feldman Barrett says, the neuroscientist, like, stop poking people into that place where it’s like, there is only trauma and drama.

There’s nothing else. So like, God bless you for wanting to draw attention to the something else that is also true.

It’s also true. It’s also true. It is a survival.

It’s kind of a survival skill. And, I mean, I did steal this from my now dead husband, but Aaron always said, It’s Going To Be OK.

And he would say it when I was like anxious about really important things like, you know, putting together a PowerPoint presentation for great clips. I was up all night panicking. God, I hope I really got across the importance of the 799 haircut.

And he said it when he was sick, and he said it.

Let me just take you through this real quick. So what I’m thinking about for my bangs, but then also in the back. So let me just flip through to slide 12.

Here, I couldn’t, I truly, at this point in my life, I could not even do a presentation to people I worked with.

I was so nervous about speaking to people, like talking about things. I just thought everything I said was dumb, like I just couldn’t do it. And he was like, what is wrong with you?

He just did not have any of those fears. But anyways, he said this all the time. He said it when he was sick.

He said it when he was dying. I obviously didn’t believe him. I was like, you have a brain tumor.

Right.

Doesn’t seem like this is going to be OK.

I doubt it. And also, it’s probably pushing on something in your brain that’s leading to you.

Right. Making you say these insane things.

It’s making you say crazy things, like it’s going to be, sure, OK. But it’s not like you said, it’s not the denial of all of these terrible things. It is like zeroing in on these because, you know, breaking news will break you, as you said.

You’ve got to you’ve got to do something to remind yourself that it is not all it’s not all terror and horror. Like there are beautiful things in the world. So I asked you.

And by the way, we say OK, because I also want to lower the bar a little.

Yeah.

You know, I don’t want I don’t want it to be just like a full highlight reel. I really think that we can we can lower the bar and be amazed by things that might not amaze us. And I actually think that’s more important when things are truly bad.

So I’m going to put you in the spot and I’m going to make you share your first OK thing.

OK, so this is really this is fits right into your acknowledgement that these positives can be seemingly microscopic.

And my microscopic positive is that as we’ve been talking, I got a text that Claire was calling my daughter who’s 22. She’s a year out of college. She’s living and working in Los Angeles.

She has a full time job in an office with health insurance. It’s like so many gifts. I hardly know where to begin.

But she was calling to say thank you for giving me this 10 pack of yoga. So I gave her a gift and I thought there’s so much in that.

So for people whose kids are much younger and you’re still saying say thank you, say please, say thank you, say please. At some point, it will become automatic. And then even beyond that, the territory beyond that is that it will become genuine.

They’ll actually feel gratitude. This 10 pack of yoga was not very expensive. Like she could have paid for it herself.

But it was like, Claire, I’m happy to like support your wellness. Like if you were in therapy, I would be happy to pay for it. And like your yoga is a lot less expensive.

But what made me happy is she could have texted and she didn’t. She chose to call me. She is basically like had her big dopamine hit in class, and then she’s giving me a dopamine hit with this call.

You know, like it’s like what comes around goes around. Like I always used to say to the girls when they were little, you get what you give. And one time, Georgia, Claire’s older sister said, Yeah, well also you give what you get.

And she had had a hard day and somebody had been crappy to her. And so she was being a little crappy to us. And it was like, yes, so, so let’s all acknowledge that these things are in a loop.

And Claire calling, Claire, first of all, choosing for her like little treat to be yoga classes is deep self knowledge.

It’s like picking something really like with long term value versus like a new pair of jeans and then giving me that little jolt of gratitude every time she comes out of it and just letting me hear her voice in that moment like to because as she

says, like sometimes I am more prone to call you when something’s gone wrong than when something’s gone right. And I’m trying to correct that.

I was like, you are like you’ve noticed that at 22 and you care about me at 22 and how it might be affecting me and then you want to correct for it. Like, I love you. I’m so grateful to you for giving a shit about how all this is landing on me.

I just think that’s like amazing. So yeah, that is it’s a small thing, but it’s a really big thing for me. And it just holds a lot.

It holds agency. It holds self-knowledge. It holds gratitude, like all these kind of super skills that at the deepest level make me feel like, oh, you’re going to be fine in the world.

You would be safe without me. You now know things that you need to know. And that not only are you on your feet financially, but you’re on your feet emotionally.

Like, you know how to take care of yourself. The thing about kids in this age where there’s a handoff happening, where it’s like, I’ve been taking care of you, and now you have to take care of you.

And when they first start on the job of taking care of themselves, understandably, predictably, they’re not that good at it. They drink too much, they don’t sleep enough, they don’t exercise, they eat like gummy bears instead of kale.

They invest sometimes in the wrong people, they get on the wrong feedback loop. And it’s very painful to hand off that job because I’m good at it. I’m good at caring for them.

I know how to feed them. I know that they need to take a shower every day. I can get them out on a walk.

I can trick them into eating some protein. And I can hide the gummy bears. There’s a lot of things that I can do.

And then you have to let go. And then you kind of have to watch. And that’s very painful.

And so when you start to see your kid pick up the real work of taking care of themselves, there is kind of a profound relief involved.

Yeah. Oh, it’s really beautiful. You’re describing my 20s.

I was very, very messy. And we have like, you know, we’ve got big kids and we’ve got little kids, even though the little kids are getting bigger, but they’re always going to be the bigs and the littles. And it is it’s so hard.

It’s so hard to launch somebody and not want to. I understand a helicopter parent. I really do.

I get it.

I understand.

I understand the like all the various forms of they’re always always really de-machinery. Like one was a snowplow parent, like, you know, eliminating all obstacles. Like I get that too.

I get that too. But yeah, that’s really beautiful. And when I was at that age, I called my mom often and very not not for her sake, literally only for mine.

Right. Just like calling her.

They just vomit all over you. They just vomit all over you.

Yeah. And when I got a cell phone, which I got probably at age like 22, I would like call her on my way to work, walking like from the subway to my office. And I’d be like, OK, bye.

Just.

Yeah.

That was the eight minutes I had. Bye. Over.

Right.

And I didn’t even know she existed as a separate being. Like it’s part of what thrills me about Claire’s observation that like she wants to sort of bat.

She wants to treat me to a good mood every now and then instead of just calling when like, you know, the she hit her car against a tree and has to take, you know, there’s no coolant and, you know, all these things that go wrong. Yeah.

That’s so ahead of schedule, in my opinion. Like I didn’t really understand that my mom was a person with her own dreams and emotional terrain and good days and bad days. And I mean, I don’t think I think I was probably like 35 or something.

I mean, I just remember calling her when I first became a mom and she picked up and she’s like, hello. And I was like, I’m sorry. She’s like, what are you talking about?

I’m like, I’m just so sorry. I’m so sorry. There’s so many things I should have understood sooner.

Oh, dealing with my own, you know, mom guilt, constant judgment of myself, really never feeling good about myself as a parent, I would say maybe once every six months, I’m like, I don’t think I’m the worst one, right?

Has given me so much more compassion for my mom. And I feel like I’ve called her and had those conversations who were like, you did such a good job with four of us being so annoying constantly.

You would get home after a long day of work and I would be like, take me to Target. Take me to Target. I need a new lip smacker.

And if I don’t have it today, there will be consequences. Like just fully oblivious to the fact that she was a person with any kind of need. That was a really good one, Kelly.

Our inside joke in our family is Bridget is waiting, which is like Claire wanted me to take her to her friend’s house.

And she looked at me just with horror when I was like, you’re going to need to wait for a second. You need to hold on. And she goes, Bridget is waiting.

And I was like, Bridget, Bridget, 12 year old Bridget.

Not Bridget. Oh, got to go.

Because she’s got such a big important life that she’s got to. Oh, I got we got to go then.

Sorry. Bridget is waiting. I didn’t know.

Bridget is waiting.

Call.

Call the police. We want an escort. We need to get there fast.

Bridget is waiting. I didn’t know. I’m sorry.

Why didn’t you say it sooner? Why didn’t you say so? Because I didn’t know Bridget was waiting.

Oh, my God. This is worse than I thought. We must.

We’ve got to go. Got to go. Oh, God.

I really appreciate that. And I also had my daughter, Sophie, is 19, sophomore in college. And like she calls me on her way to class.

You know, like she calls me like and like just to chit chat, like just to chit chat. And I think it’s so cute and it’s so sweet.

And I was so, you know, excited about her going to college, of course, and about her like finding something that she’s really excited to do. And also, you know, sad, it changes your family every time, like a kid leaves. And it’s it is so nice.

Like, I love when my phone rings. I love when it’s her and she she really, yeah, she just wants to. She just wants to chit chat.

She just wants to talk like girls. And I really love it. And actually, the cutest thing, this is now one of my OK things, but I’m still going to I’m still going to do my original one is when she calls me with her friends, like she’ll FaceTime me.

Yes.

And.

I mean, that means that she’s kind of proud of you.

I like I hope you’re taking out for everything it’s worth, because what it means is like, I want my friends to know you. Yeah, I want them to see you and hear you and have an experience of you.

Yeah, it’s really sweet.

It’s very flattering.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I especially love. She’s like, my mom will give you good advice.

And I’m like, I don’t know that that’s true, but I will say that I have been 19. And so I do have like some I’ve got some perspective. OK, I have some perspective.

But 19 year old me would have said, oh, you should call him or I actually go wait outside of his apartment is what I would do.

OK, and wear this. Yeah, this will work.

Yeah, yeah, he’s going to regret it. OK, OK, he’s not going to break up with you if you’re like at his apartment when he gets home. Or that’s what I would do.

OK, so Kelly, have you been to New Mexico ever?

I have been to Santa Fe a long time.

OK, I, you know, I’m now a resident of the American Southwest.

I’ve been here for almost six years. My goodness. I have always felt like very like spiritually called like to to this part of the country.

I can’t explain it. You know, I’m of Irish descent. I’m a bog person.

Why would I feel so physically at home in the desert? Does not make sense. My dad loved the desert.

He would spend, you know, winters outside of Palm Springs. Yes, my parents were married. He did not like winter.

My mother had a real job. My dad was a freelance writer who wrote infomercials, so he could kind of work wherever and he chose Palm Springs. He would winter out there and I visited him and I was like, I just love the desert.

I’ve got to be here. I came to Phoenix for the first time with Aaron when he wanted me to meet his mom. He did not mention his mom was in Phoenix, Arizona, and we would be flying there and staying with his parents for the weekend, which we did.

And I got off the airplane and was like, I love it here. So you haven’t even been outside. I was like, I can just tell.

I can just tell. New Mexico is so more magical than any other part of the Southwest. And I could say that with the certainty of a woman who has been there twice.

And I went this past weekend, I went to Taos, New Mexico. It’s north of Santa Fe. It’s about 7,000 feet above sea level for people who care about that kind of thing.

It’s like right near like the Rio Grande Gorge, which I had to drive over and was very, very frightening to me. Just really, really beautiful, like deeply spiritual land. And I was there with three of my cousins who were all basically the same age.

And my cousin, Johanna, lives in Northern California. She is so different from anyone that I’ve ever met, aside from our grandmother, our shared grandmother. She truly, she is marching to a drum that really nobody else knows is playing.

And like, she just is so deeply creative. Everything that she does, she’s so interesting. She’s so funny.

Her life is so unusual. And she had wanted to go to Taos, specifically to stay in an earthship. Do you know what an earthship is?

I sure don’t.

You’re going to be on board.

I’m going to get you.

I’m going to be on the next plane.

You will be on the next plane. I’m telling you, this is a community of self-sustaining homes. This guy, Michael Reynolds, started, he was an architect, a builder, kind of a hippie, got there in the 70s and just started building.

Really wanted to build things that were sustainable, started building out of recycled material, out of garbage. Right? Like taking a bunch of, they weren’t tin cans at the time.

They were like steel beer cans, I guess, in the 70s, binding them together to make a brick, covering those bricks with Adobe and concrete, trying to bring down the cost of materials, trying to eliminate garbage, trying to sort of live sustainably

with the land, harvest water, grow your own food, not need heating and cooling. So he’s testing things. He’s making weird stuff. At this point in time, there’s not a lot of laws in this area around building codes.

Nobody really knows what he’s doing. He’s building a pyramid. He’s doing whatever he wants.

It turns into now this community of over 100 homes that are fully self-sustaining. So they’re harvesting the rainwater that is then filtered. The gray water from the toilets ends up watering the indoor greenhouse that can grow food.

It’s south-facing windows, just a full wall of glass built into a berm of earth. Earth and tires. You would not know this looking at the house.

Looking at the house, you’d say, I guess I’m in a Harry Potter situation, right? They kind of have a magical quality to them. They’re all a little bit unusual.

It’s called an earthship?

Earthship.

It is an earthship.

We all have to go. Let’s have a retreat. A Nora and Kelly retreat in the earthship.

We’re going to the earthship.

We’re going to build an earthship because I bought books. I was fully bought in. And I am a person who needs to use a red light mask every day and, you know, and likes a certain kind of pillowcase.

And I was staying in the earth. I was of the earth. I was with people who I love more than anything.

And I got to meet all of… We got to meet just these people who live so simply and so richly and are thinking about the world and the way that we live in such a different way.

Even though you walk into this house and it has like every, you know, it’s 70 degrees year round, whether it’s three degrees outside or a hundred degrees, you know, like there’s a TV, there’s, you know, there’s a refrigerator, there’s…

It’s not a hobbit hole, although there’s like some hobbitness to it, but at night we went outside and the silence, Kelly, like, it was like being in a sensory deprivation chamber. And it was stars, it was clouds.

We believe that we saw unexplained aerial phenomenon, formerly known as UFOs. How else can you explain a blinking green light sort of darting across the sky? It’s not a plane.

We don’t have to get into that. But we just had like… Don’t get stuck there, stick with me.

I can’t get stuck there, but we did. We were like, we’re all seeing this, right? We’re all seeing this.

But it was such a beautiful experience. And you have to leave. That’s the thing about a trip, right?

You have to leave, you have to go back to your real life. And just mentally, I keep putting myself back into that house, like back under that sky and just thinking like all of that exists too. Like all of that exists too.

That’s a great line to put on your wall.

All of that exists too.

I’m going to bring one prop because…

Oh, fantastic.

There were books. OK, one more. And left it in the other room.

One second.

Stand by.

OK, so this is not the copy of the book, but this is the book by the guy who started this. OK, he’s 81 years old now. This book is called A Coming of Wizards, A Manual of Human Potential.

And, you know, we were on a spiritual journey on this weekend. But so, the book that I read this weekend was in color, but this is about four wizards. So this is the black and white version.

It’s not quite as impactful. It’s just not. But it’s about how he built the houses.

It’s about being visited by four wizards who kind of told him about the nature of time and space and all of that.

But I’m just going to read you a line from it, because we were really touched by this whole book, so much so that we went on online and bought paperback copies.

It’s where you were.

That’s where I was. That’s the one. That’s the one.

And it’s so beautiful. It’s so comfortable. I truly like, I don’t know.

It was really magical.

It’s crazy.

Yes, it’s crazy.

So these are solar panels.

Those are, at the front, it’s windows. Then there’s solar panels that get all of the electricity that you need. The water is all like harvested and then recycled.

Look at that sky. Look at that sky.

We’re going.

We’re going. I’m telling you.

I gotta get off this call. I gotta go book my flight.

You have to.

We’re going.

OK, so this, I’m going to read you an excerpt because… Please.

OK.

Pass slowly through the network of loosely woven realities. Do not allow yourself to snag on any single thread. The spaces between these threads are the spaces that will let you float unattached through any real world snags.

Your inherent magic, your energy band, will then steer you to dimensions beyond your wildest dreams, where no threads of reality exist, where multi-directional forces are at play, where time is not, where matter is not.

Just a glimpse of this will reduce the grip of the swarm and allow your energy to flood unrestrained through the real world and beyond. And I love him. Now I’m in love.

Now I’m in love. Yeah. I believe it all.

I’m obsessed. I believe it.

Every syllable of that.

Every syllable of this, OK? And am I going to build an Earthship? Only time will tell.

But like, it just, yeah, I don’t know. There’s just something about that, like knowing that, like, I don’t know. I think this weekend was about like the importance of imagination.

You know, when I was with a cousin of mine who just lives like a very deeply imaginative and creative life and is not sort of beholden to all of the, I don’t want to say pressures, but almost like, you know, taking off all the boxes that I very

easily become obsessed with. And we got to just be surrounded by that kind of energy. People who like look at the world and just see something different. And I think really almost everything in our world is the result of like a lack of imagination.

You know, it’s like, what if what if we just did it differently? What if we just did it differently?

Yeah, that’s related to acclimation, I think. And acclimation is such a dangerous thing. Like we just decide, well, this is how it is, and this is how it works, and it’s never going to change.

So I am very attuned to that switch flipping within me. When I hear myself say something that represents fundamentally that I’ve acclimated. And this is why travel and new experiences and novelty is so essential to good thinking.

Because it reveals a different way of doing things that breaks your own assumptions about what is the way it is. It’s just the way it is here. Like we eat dinner around 7, and in Spain they eat dinner around 10.

And neither one is the way it’s done. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You keep expanding out.

This woman I knew in Marin used to take like a cereal box, and her goal was to get all of her family’s garbage for a month into the cereal box.

And she had just made it her business to not buy the hype, to not accept things the way they seem to be, to not acclimate to the amount of waste that each one of us generates in a 24-hour period. And she did it.

I mean, my friend, our mutual friend’s name is Melissa, and Melissa used to send me these pictures and be like, look, this is her whole month’s worth of trash. So yeah, acclimation is just something to be aware of.

Yeah. Garbage men hate her. The garbage industry.

Yeah.

They like big garbage does not like this story.

Will get censored. Don’t you don’t hear a segment on trash in this episode. It’s because big garbage got to us.

Big garbage.

So my real one that I wanted to share was that it’s sort of related to that quote you just read.

And I have a quote to read is that I just did a live event in Los Angeles with the writer George Saunders, who wrote Lincoln in the Bardo and Vigil and Swim in the Pond and the Rain. And he’s a very beloved guy and for very good reason.

And he has this new book out called Vigil, which I loved. And so I went down there to interview him and also to see Claire, who lives in Los Angeles. And a thousand people came.

They were waiting in line for more than an hour. When I pulled up at, I think I was supposed to be there at 630 for an eight o’clock start, there were people in line.

And I just thought, oh, this is so moving to me, that there are a thousand people waiting patiently to listen to a conversation about literature. And he’s not a popcorn writer. It’s highly readable and it flows.

But, I mean, it’s advanced. Like the places he’s taking you, the messages, the characters, the actual form of his writing is pretty challenging. Like it’s definitely the kind of thing that they’re reading in masters and literature courses.

And there’s no quick fixes in his messages. There’s no thing about optimization or longevity hacks or how to get rich quick or, you know, he’s basically saying like we are incredibly flawed.

And the moments in which we can see that, that we’re not permanent, we are not separate and we are not central, are our most hopeful moments.

But to me, I was like, look at all this hunger that is represented here for something better than this trivial feel good bullshit content that you and I are adjacent to because people who write books and people who make podcasts are sitting right

next to the charlatans and the gurus and the over-promisers and the simplifiers. And George Sanders is not simplifying anything. So I’ll read you the quote that I called out, which I loved, but I thought I was weird for loving it.

And then I went to the room with a thousand people and I was like, here we are, here we are. We’re not weird. So he’s talking about this problem, which is that most of us confuse our opinion for the way things are really and generally.

And so he says, I think, therefore I am wrong, after which I speak and my wrongness falls on someone else also thinking wrongly. And then there are two of us thinking wrongly and being human.

We can’t bear to think without taking action, which having been taken makes things worse. So this is like a trippy and very true assessment of the way that we work.

And the ways that the way we work complicates our lives and creates suffering in all directions. And people were lined up to hear it. And I just found that deeply encouraging.

These are all people who are looking at themselves critically, are open to being partially culpable for the way things are, are not superior to another, are who are truthful about how incredibly easy it is to think that you are permanent and separate

And right.

And right.

And that your story about the world is the world. Just understanding that gap will just get you so far. And it’s hard to stay that.

Like sometimes I can see it more clearly than others. And sometimes I can work my way into it with some effort. But it’s very difficult to stay there, to stay in that place where it’s like, this isn’t like that.

Somebody once said to me that their favorite way to insert curiosity into their thinking is to say, is it true? So like if Claire or Georgia were to call me and say, I think my boss is mad at me. And I’d say, oh, tell me more.

And they’d say, well, and I’d say, is that true? Is it true that they think dot dot dot or that they want dot dot dot? Like, do you know?

Which pushes you towards the territory of intellectual humility, which is to me like a deeply hopeful position to take relative to the world. What don’t I know? Because there’s so much in every situation that is obscured.

Absolutely.

I have a lot of little post-its and notes to myself around my walls for me to look at. And one is something that I wrote down after I visited my uncle. He just died, rest in peace.

And he was a philosopher, like just a true philosopher. Like he died at 89, just shy of his 90th birthday, and was still like writing for philosophy journals. OK, he never had used the internet, Kelly.

So he did have a computer, but he had to print stuff out and like mail it in. Like he was just a pure soul and a pure mind. And my cousin’s husband put it this way, the smartest man who never made you feel stupid.

Oh, how lovely.

What a lovely, lovely attribute.

Oh, so lovely. And, you know, he did not like attention or compliments.

Surprised we were even allowed to have a funeral with like a real, you know, where the priest had known him and had been taught by him and was like allowed to actually speak about him.

He was like, he would hate this, but we’re doing it anyways, right? Because also a funeral is for the living. But I had gone to visit him, I had an interview and I recorded some things.

And I had said to him, like, you just know so much. And he goes, oh, no, I know nothing. And I wrote that down to remind me kind of the same thing, right?

Like, what is the use of certainty? It leads me to rigidity. It leads me to be adversarial and in curious.

And, you know, to bring it back to the coming of wizards. To bring it back to the coming of wizards. There’s an illustration in here.

And he wrote, when I encounter a wolf, I become a wolf. When I encounter a lamb, I become a lamb. And I texted it to my mom and I said, when I encounter a bitch, I become a bitch.

Like, you know, you get what you give.

You get what you give and you give what you get.

And it’s all connected. Here we are.

And another thing I love about your example, Kelly, of people lining up to see something, is that experience belongs only to the 1,002 people I know, I know.

Who are in that room. And they all shared that.

It was so communal.

That moment in time will never come again. It’s so communal. And as far as I know, and I’m not an expert in zoology, I don’t know any other animals that gather to look at other animals and watch them do something.

And I think it’s the cutest thing about people. Two cutest things about people. One, every day, we’ve got our little habitats and we’re like, these are my favorite things.

Look at them. Look at them every day. We’re like, look, I put on my little outfit.

And the second cutest thing we do, besides build ourselves these little dioramas, is go and look at each other and appreciate each other.

It’s true.

It’s so cute.

Yeah, I often say we’re the only species that watches the sunset.

Yeah, that’s true.

So this is wonderful things about us.

Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, and appreciating, you know, somebody else’s, another animal’s talents is just so deeply cute.

Picture the lion.

Like, God, look at that guy.

Yeah. Be like, man, you wouldn’t. Oh, my God.

This guy’s got great ideas.

Right. I love him. Come on.

Come with me. I’m going to listen to the lion.

We do have to stand in line, so I’m going to get there a little early. But exactly.

It’s going to be a five hour thing, top to bottom.

I’ll save you a spot. I’ll save you a spot.

OK. They were the nicest people. I mean, no surprise there, but nobody wanted to leave the room.

Oh, I love that.

There’s so much lingering.

And I was like, I know. I don’t want to leave.

I love that. OK, I’m going to text you something so you can observe it as I’m, while I share it.

Great. OK, this is so fun. I could do this all day.

Oh, good, because then I’m just going to make you come back once a month.

OK, so this is amazing. It’s a video. Amazing.

Where did you find this?

This is so good.

It’s connected to the fact that humans are the cutest animals. OK, this is a video of a now defunct Olympic sport. It’s called Ski Ballet.

We are the cutest animals. We’re the cutest animals. It’s a woman doing cartwheels.

I mean, truly dancing on skis. She’s doing ski ballet. There’s several women doing ski ballet, doing flips on their poles.

Skiing is one of the most frightening things I can imagine. Let’s just strap some sticks to our feet and slide down an incredibly steep hill. And I don’t know who would have had to invent this as a sport.

It looks a little bit like ice skating. It looks a little bit like modern dance. It looks a little bit like gymnastics, but they’re wearing snowsuits.

They have ski poles and skis. And it’s set to music. They’ve got a routine.

And somewhere out there, there are probably, I mean, this is the 80s and the 90s. We used to do the Olympics. It felt like we did the Olympics less often, didn’t we?

Yeah, we did.

It was a four-year thing, yeah.

Yeah, it was a four-year thing. And honestly, I think that’s how it should be, but that’s neither here nor there. I know people are very passionate about the Olympics, but I say, let it build, right?

Let us anticipate it a little bit more, please. A little more scarcity would go a long way. So there’s probably, I would guess, less than a fewer than a dozen medals for Ski Ballet out there, but they’re out there.

Someone has them. Someone has an Olympic medal for a sport that I did not know existed until-

They have to write in. Everyone has to share this podcast as widely as they can. We have to find the people.

And they can come with us to the Earthships.

To the Earthships.

We’re tying it all together.

Everything is connected. And I don’t know if I’ve- This video has, I think, over a million views.

I’m probably 500,000 of them because it’s just so enchanting. It’s so beautiful.

And so endearing. It’s such an insane- I mean, so I wrote a piece for The New York Times called Please Pass the Awe, A-W-E.

And it was during the Olympics. And it was somewhat related to everything you’re saying, which is like, what a- I mean, if you just step back a teeny bit, what a quirky, crazy thing that we do.

I mean, it’s now it’s big business and, you know, it has all these global implications. But really, it’s like people made up games. And then people started competing in the games.

And then people started throwing a lot of structure and finance around it. And still, if you’re missing like the hit of awe, you’re crazy. Like watch the skeleton where they’re on their tummies.

It’s so endearing, it’s such an insane… So I wrote a piece for The New York Times called Please Pass the Awe, A-W-E. And it was during the Olympics, and it was somewhat related to everything you’re saying, which is like, what a…

I mean, if you just step back a teeny bit, what a quirky, crazy thing that we do.

I mean, it’s now big business, and it has all these global implications, but really, it’s like people made up games, and then people started competing in the games, and then people started throwing a lot of structure and finance around it.

Still, if you’re missing the hit of awe, you’re crazy. Watch the skeleton where they’re on their tummies on the luge thing, and their chin is like two or three inches from the ice, and they’re going 80 miles an hour.

Like, if that doesn’t turn your wonder wheel, you have to retune yourself because you got to take it where you can get it. And that is such an obvious source of the restorative, regenerative spirit of awe.

And people, regardless of the big money machines that surround the Olympics, at the end of the day, it is, with the exception of the children who are kind of forced into this, which we’re not, that’s not what the show is about.

We don’t go there, right? See?

See how you slid right there?

See how I slid right into it? I said, I can, I can ruin this party. I can ruin this party.

And I will. These are people who picked a thing, love this thing and want to do this thing as well as they can. And I have not sustained my interest in any activity for that long.

And I don’t know that I could. OK?

I know. How about the, there was this woman, Elena Taylor, something. She was like 36 years old.

She did Monobob and she won. She has two deaf children. Both her children are deaf and she signed.

I did it to them when she won the gold. Are you kidding me?

I intentionally, someone described that to me and I cried. And I didn’t look at it. I was like, no, I’m good.

It’s amazing.

Totally amazing.

Yeah.

Kathleen, if you’re listening to this, you texted me about it and I said, no, no, I won’t.

I won’t go there.

I won’t go there. I can’t go there. Yeah, it’s just too beautiful.

It’s too beautiful. And somewhere out there, somebody is very, very proud of their ski ballet. Olympic medals.

And I want to know you. Help me find these people. Yes.

Help me find these people. Where are they? Are they still doing this?

How do they get into it? Where did this all happen? I have to know everything.

This is how I also feel about, you know, earth ships. I like to get in, like to, like to know. And also, how amazing.

All these things are just happening in the world or they did happen in the world.

Simultaneous with all the horrible things that we know are also happening in the world and not or. Like, it’s all true. It’s not Pollyanna.

It’s all true.

Yeah, it’s all true. All right, what else do you got for me?

My last one is about electric buses in Madison, Wisconsin.

So I guess 28% of the emissions in the United States come from public transportation. So for a long time, people have been trying to figure out how to make electric buses.

And it’s really hard in cold locations, because if you have an electric car, you know that like the battery just goes basically in cold weather. And so they tried and failed many times.

And in Madison, they were banking on this one company that was going to help them come up with this battery, extend the battery life of these buses. And that company went out of business.

So it wasn’t a smooth road, which is part of why it gives me hope. It wasn’t like they struck gold. It was just, you know, just determination.

And it’s municipal determination, like municipal improvements is a very hopeful thing. Like that’s a tiring place to build your career. Like things often don’t work.

Everything’s underfunded. Everyone is tired. And over time, over decades of doing that work, you get beat up and disheartened.

And somehow these people, even though they had the kind of this nightmare experience, the first time they tried to do it, where like the alarms on these buses, these electric buses were going off all the time, still persisted.

And they found this way to charge the buses like en route. So you can pull up underneath this thing, and it looks like a big giant plate that’s on top of the car. And you kind of like touch base with the battery.

And in a matter of minutes, you have another 100 miles, another 200 miles that your bus can go. So anyway, after like tons of trial and error and a lot of failure, they figured it out.

And it’s super consequential anytime anything happens in one municipality because it often, thank God they’re all sharing information, they’re all sharing best practices.

So there’s 100 other cities that are really cold and either have given up on the possibility of electric public transport or are in one of the valleys.

And so when you have a success like this and you have a game plan that you can pass along, it has this sort of these outsized repercussions.

And the last thing I’ll say about it that gave me hope is this, like I love the idea of positive externalities.

Like you were just trying to solve this one problem, and yet it had this ripple effect, and yet it kept all the employees that were a part of this thing, gave them more hope, gave them more longevity in their careers, kept the expertise in the

building kind of thing. There’s the morale went up and morale being up is like a driver of progress for sure. Like hope is the engine.

But then the other like little, not so little positive externality is that all the people who count on buses and sit at bus stations are exposed to these terrible emissions. So like the air around a bus station is bad air.

And so like the same people get punished for everything. The same people whose lives are made harder by everything that we’re not doing right, like education, roads, blah, blah, are also like sucking in this shitty air.

And if you go to electric, then you put decent air around these people.

Yeah. Yeah.

And there’s probably five other super inspired and inspiring positive externalities to this story, but that’s just like a few. And I think incrementalism, especially in like public policy and, and, you know, city work is incredibly hopeful.

And I think maybe as I, as I’ve gotten older, I’m more impressed by incrementalism because it, you know, when you’re young, you’re like, tear it down, you know, remake everything. And it’s like, well, that’s probably not going to happen.

It’s not really how the world works. Like, especially in like public policy, it’s like these tiny moves by these people who won’t, who won’t give up, who won’t walk.

So I’m very inspired by public service and I’m very inspired by these kind of quiet, you know, uncelebrated, but meaningful and measurable changes that people are making.

Everything gets, everything is connected, Kelly. Everything’s connected. And so you said, it’s not like they struck gold.

And guess what my, guess what my thing is? My thing is about gold. My next thing is about gold, okay?

And this is, I think this has been, you know, a few weeks of very novel experiences. And I am, I’m not known as a fun mom. Okay, I’m a stay at home mom in the sense that I won’t leave my house if I don’t have to, you know?

I just say, what if we just stayed home? And, you know, I have stay home kids too. Kids, my kids are like, oh yeah, it’s movie night.

Movie night is at home. Okay, we watch movie night at home. My kids like brunch at home.

My kids like to have Sunday dinner at home and have people come to us. And our oldest is 24. He still like spending time with us.

How lovely. And he said, what if we did something outside the house? And I said, okay.

And I realized that every time I drive to Las Vegas, which is a few times a year, I drive through Wickenburg, Arizona. And I always see a sign that’s like pan for gold in Wickenburg. And I thought I got a pan.

I always wanted to stop and pan for gold. I’ve just never done it. So I go online.

And I find a place that says panning for gold. There’s not a lot of information on the website. It’s still under construction.

It’s quite under construction, even though it kind of looks like a GeoCities page from like 1998. So it says, call or text this number for details. I text, I say, yeah, how much does it cost?

Is there like a specific time? He says, it doesn’t cost anything. I said, that’s what are you talking about?

It doesn’t cost anything to pan for gold? Are you nuts? Apparently, we drive.

It is not just the drive to Wickenburg, which is like an hour and a half, then you’re off roads. I mean, they made a road. I discovered, I think they made most of it themselves.

I am nauseous. We’re, you know, oof, we’re, ooh, in like the Wickenburg mountains, I’m like, I’m going to puke. This can’t be safe.

We finally find it. We get there. It’s unclear where to go or who’s in charge, but I find this woman.

She’s lovely. She’s like, yeah, this is it. This is where you pan for gold.

She leads us over to a little table filled with water. She ends us each a shovel and she says, dig some dirt. We dig our dirt.

She ends us the pan. She shows us how we dip it in the water and you just shake it back and forth. You just shake it back and forth.

And then it, you dunk it more. That takes the rocks out. That takes out other stuff.

What you’re looking for is a line of black sand. So the black sand is actually gold. Once it all burns off, there’s like a couple little shimmers, right?

You start to see the shimmers. You start to get a little greedy, honestly. You’re like, I’ve got to get more gold.

I’ve got to deal with this. She doesn’t care just anything. And we’re just sitting there, I would say probably for an hour, just panning.

We end up with like these little plastic baggies filled with what we’re told is gold. I’m not going to verify. How would I?

You got to get a fire. You got to get a kiln. But it was so meditative.

It was so beautiful. And it also felt like, isn’t that what we’re all doing all day, every day, just sort of digging through the dirt, trying to find something that sparkles, something that’s real, something that is valuable.

And as always, the day took a turn. I got to talking. This woman, her name is Kathy.

So lovely, right? She took us on a tour of the mines because they bought this land. They knew that there was one defunct mine.

They didn’t know there was like 30 defunct mines. So they’ve got plans to build this into a destination, tons of mines. So they keep finding mines.

This one was flooded. They dug it out. They found like the rail carts.

So we’re in a mine. We are in the earth. And she has like a special blacklight.

She’s like, well, I didn’t know you needed a special one. So to see some of these gemstones. So I finally found it just looks like, it just everything looks gross.

I don’t know if you’ve been in the mines.

I think I’d be scared a little bit.

Were you scared? Yeah, I’m too tall. I’m a claustrophobic person.

I like a small, I’ll sit in the back seat because I like a small space in a lot of ways, but I don’t like to feel, you know, my nightmares are all like, I’m trapped somewhere. I can’t get out. You know, I’m too far into a mine.

You know, I’m like, no, how do you know this is structurally sound? I’m trying to ask casually, you know. And when you cleaned out this mine yourself, you did what exactly?

Who is holding this roof of this mine up?

Yeah.

What would you say? Because the mountain’s right on top of us. So like that.

OK. And so one again, it felt like a very, it felt like there were a lot of souls. There were a lot of souls in that hole.

I’ll say that they did not feel unfriendly, but she shines this light and like this dark wall, like lights up glowing and it’s a fire opal. That’s like imbedded into the wall of the mine.

And it gets its color from, you know, from the earth, from like the iron and name another element or mineral.

But it’s like this beautiful, beautiful, like glowing, you know, red, gold, like just beautiful stone just, and you turn off the light and it’s gone. And she turns it back on and it’s there.

And, you know, my youngest who’s a true capitalist, always got a hustle, will pick the lemons off our tree and then go out in our front yard and try to sell them for $5 a piece.

Well done. God bless the dreamer.

People are like $5. He’s like, yeah, that’s what I said.

Well, it’s got gold in it or something.

Yeah, you can go to the grocery store, but they won’t be these lemons. So it’s your call. I’m right here with this $5 lemon.

We can go to the store and roll the dice. OK, I’m telling you, this lemon is worth $5. So my youngest goes, why don’t you just take it out of the wall?

And she goes, because then I wouldn’t be able to show you. So I don’t know what a fire opal is worth. It feels very valuable, but the value to her was that it is there to like share with other people.

And I just thought that was so beautiful and she was so beautiful. And we got to go do this thing that didn’t cost us any money and was so peaceful.

And perhaps, I can’t tell yet, there will be signs, but I might be rich based on whatever is in that sandwich baggie.

You know, that thing about her valuing, sharing it over owning it or converting it into dollars really honors what is true. If you ask 200 behavioral scientists from around the world, what would make somebody happier?

Putting some money in their bank account or sharing something beautiful? It’s just like a known fact. And so she’s the wise one for sure.

Yeah, isn’t that beautiful?

She’s capitalizing in the right way.

Yeah, yeah.

Later, she did tell me she had a mine for sale. And I got to say, I am concerned. OK, she’s like, you know, you could buy a mine.

And I said, I have had a good time today.

Yeah. It’s like, I mean, we’re going to buy a mine.

Yeah. Matthew’s like, he’s he’s he stands by me no matter what. Dumb scheme I become obsessed with.

And he was like, hmm, nodding.

Yeah. Just nodding. Yeah.

Once they really get to know you, they know that it’ll fade in time. And so they don’t need to put up a big barrier, you know, or argue you off the off the ledge. They just, Edward does that too.

He just nods like, good. I love it. Yeah.

Cool.

Let’s start a school.

It’s a great idea.

Yeah. Let’s let’s buy a mind. That’s great.

Yeah. Yeah. Keep talking to Kathy about this.

That seems like something totally normal.

Yeah.

For you to do.

I’m just going to go over here and check my emails, but you guys talk for sure.

Yeah. You guys should, you should definitely explore this. See where this goes.

Kelly Corrigan, you are, you are a fire opal. You are a fire opal in the minds. Thank you so much for being here.

You’re so wonderful.

Oh, I loved it. I’ll come back anytime. I’m going to keep a running list now in case you need me to finish it.

You have to, you have to, you have to.

And I will see you. I’ll see you again. I’ll make you do this again.

So watch out.

I loved recording today’s episode. Kelly Corrigan is like a hug for your soul. She described the show as a hug for your nervous system.

I love that. I feel like we should adopt that. This is a hug for your nervous system.

It’s definitely a hug for mine. Hope it’s a hug for yours as well. If you can’t get enough Kelly Corrigan, join the club.

It’s called Everybody. Go find her podcast, Kelly Corrigan Wonders. I will actually be on her podcast on March 29th.

So listen up, listen up. Listen to that episode as well. She said she would come back.

I think we’re going to have to force her to do that. Let me know what you think. This is a group project.

This podcast is a group project. So I do want your OK things. Maybe one of you would like to be on the podcast.

I don’t know. Send me, send me your OK things. There’s a phone number you can text.

It’s 502-388-OKAY. 502-388-OKAY. That’s 6529 is the last four digits.

If you, your phone doesn’t, I think everyone’s phone shows them the letters that go with it, doesn’t it? Or the email is IGTBO at FeelingsAnd, that’s and,. co.

IGTBO at feelingsand.co. I’m Nora McInerny. This is It’s Going To Be OK.

This episode was produced by Marcel Malekebu. Our theme music is by Secret Audio. They have an album out.

You may or may not hear my voice on it, which will be the worst part of an otherwise great album that is linked in our episode description. So wherever you are, however you’re feeling today, I hope you know It’s Going To Be OK.