3 Practices for Wisdom and Wholeness | Krista Tippett | TED

79,167 views ・ 2023-10-11

TED


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Here is one way to begin to talk about what the pandemic,
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the post-2020 world, began to set in motion.
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All together, for a time,
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we felt for the ground beneath our feet.
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We remembered that the ground beneath our feet is never as solid
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as we believe it to be.
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We remembered that civilization revolves
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around something so tender
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as bodies breathing in proximity to other bodies.
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We softened.
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Chasms became un-unseeable.
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Between the ways we've been living and our deepest longings
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for all of our children
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and the highest potentials for human flourishing.
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So how to step into what we have been given to see,
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how we have been given to learn and to grow.
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I've been looking back across my 20 years of listening to the world
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and being in a radio and podcast conversation
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with wise and graceful lives.
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And I want to share with you three arts of living
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that have persistently emerged.
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Callings.
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Each of them carries practices towards what it might mean
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for each of us to participate
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as we move forward in the remaking of this world.
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The first is to see the generative story,
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the generative narrative of our time.
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We are fluent in and very familiar with
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the narrative of catastrophe
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and dysfunction and disarray.
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And that is real.
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But it's not the whole story of us.
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There is also an abundant reality
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of things going right at any given time.
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Of learning and growth that are happening,
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of evolution and breakthrough.
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One of the things that happens when I use this phrase,
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the generative narrative, and people hear it for the first time
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is sometimes they'll say, "Well, give me an example."
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And I say, "Just look around you."
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Even when we leave this special place
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and go back to all the places we came from,
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it is ordinary
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that all kinds of people with all kinds of lives
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are finding ways to be of service.
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They are standing before a world in pain.
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They are working with forms that are broken.
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They're probably working in institutions that don't quite make sense anymore,
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and they're having an edifying effect on the people around them,
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becoming healers and social creatives
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in so many forms.
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Now we are strange creatures,
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and this is one of our strangest qualities.
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We don't know how to tell this generative story of us as vividly.
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We don't know how to take it as seriously as that story of rupture.
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And this has started to make sense
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as we are able to peer more intricately inside our brains and bodies.
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It turns out that our brains are exquisitely designed to keep us safe
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and on the alert for danger.
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Our brains are riveted by what goes wrong.
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They are looking in every instant for what will go wrong next.
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And this underlying orientation
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turns up in our most sophisticated places,
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certainly in the field of journalism, in which I trained.
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It turns out that we actually have to more actively,
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consciously orient ourselves
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if we want to attend to and get riveted by
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what is good and redemptive.
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The invitation here is to take in the good.
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And just naming, calling it out,
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that there is a generative story of our time,
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that you can see it too,
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this is a way to begin.
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Take in the good.
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Let it start to actively shape the whole picture
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of the world you are working with.
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And when you do that, you begin to make the generative --
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this whole landscape of generative people and projects,
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more visible and defining to themselves and to this world
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which carries so much pain and so much promise.
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My second offering is to live the questions.
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And this one is a gift from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke,
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who became a friend across time and space to me
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in years I spent as a very young journalist
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in divided Cold War Berlin.
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In the early 20th century, Rilke wrote a wonderful series of letters
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to a young poet
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in which he counseled,
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"Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart."
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He said, "Try to love the questions themselves
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as though they were locked rooms
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or books written in a very foreign language."
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He said, "Don't try to reach for the answers
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which could not be given to you now
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because you would not be able to live them."
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The point is to live everything.
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Live the questions now, then, perhaps someday far in the future,
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you will gradually, without even noticing it,
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live your way into the answers.
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Like us, Rilke was a citizen of a young century
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with spectacular potentials for creating and destroying.
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And it's come to seem to me
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that the great challenges,
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all of the great challenges before our young century
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on some level are vast, aching open questions.
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All of our challenges, ecological, racial, economic,
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spiritual, political --
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vast, aching, open questions
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for which we will not have anything like answers any time soon.
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So I find myself returned anew to this wisdom
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that when we find ourselves in this situation,
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we are called to honor and dwell with the questions themselves.
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Now we live in a culture that is in love with the form of words
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that is an answer, an opinion.
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And we are in love with the way with words
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that is an argument.
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But a question is a mighty form of words.
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As an interviewer, I know that questions elicit answers in their likeness.
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Answers rise or fall to the questions they meet.
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And it is a deep, deep truth in science as in life
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that at any given moment we are being shaped
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as much by the questions we're carrying
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as by the answers we have it in us to give.
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Those moments when a new question rises up in us,
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stops us in our tracks,
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those are pivot points.
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Those are moments when the possibility of discovery breaks in.
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So the invitation here is to engage the adventure
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of a new reverence for the questions that are alive in you,
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the questions that are alive in the world around you.
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That question, which I believe almost every one of us
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standing before our world and its pain and its problems,
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wondering,
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"How can I possibly make a difference?
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How to begin?"
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Spend some time formulating your variation on that question.
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Write it down.
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Commit to having it over your shoulder, in your ear
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as you move through the next few months of your life.
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See what it invites you to see
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and to move towards and to move away from.
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I have found that if you are faithful to living a question,
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that question will be faithful back to you.
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And my third offering is about calling and wholeness.
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The Latin word for “calling,” “vocare,”
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is the root of our word in English, "vocation."
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And in the world in which I was born,
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vocation was very narrowly equated with work and job title.
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But we are not called merely to be professional people.
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We are called to be friends, neighbors,
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family, citizens.
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Lovers of the world.
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And just as there are callings for a life,
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there are callings for our time.
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It has come to seem to me that our generation in time,
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our generation of our species,
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is called to nothing less than wholeness,
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that we have it in us to figure out
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what it would mean to cultivate whole human beings
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with whole institutions,
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living in whole societies.
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The invitation here
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is to turn your powerful reality-shifting imagination,
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your intelligence, your energy, your will
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towards the possibility of wholeness.
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How to live into that.
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And I want to be very clear
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that becoming whole has nothing to do with aspiring to perfection.
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It is not about achieving perfection,
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and becoming whole also does not mean
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that we become less strange or wild or complicated.
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Becoming whole would mean that we orient together
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away from what is death-dealing
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and towards what is life-giving.
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Every fracture of our world notwithstanding,
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the science of our age is revealing all of life
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in its insistence on wholeness,
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the interplay between our bodies, the natural world,
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the lives we make, the worlds we create.
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And every dilemma around our technologies notwithstanding,
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our technologies have given us,
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for the first time in the history of our species,
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the tools to think and act as a species.
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Take that in.
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It is the calling of callings
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to make that more vivid and tangible and real,
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each of us starting inside ourselves and with the lives we've been given.
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And across my life of conversation,
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I have learned that wisdom and wholeness
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emerge in moments precisely like ours,
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though ours is writ large,
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where human beings have to hold seemingly opposing realities
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in a creative tension and interplay,
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power and frailty,
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birth and death,
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pain and hope,
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mystery and conviction,
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brokenness and beauty,
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calm and fierceness,
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mine and yours.
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Let's begin.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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