John R. Miles

I love how you use metaphors and there's one of the meteor that I think is really profound.

And the meteor is this idea that as we burn through what doesn't matter, we shine brighter.

And I thought that this is an extraordinary metaphor.

How did that arrive for you?

My father had that.

And it was a scary moment, but he was in so much pain that he said it's given him a new release on life in some ways because he was in so much distress before that.

Exactly.

One of the things before we close, I wanted to make sure we talked about is throughout the book, you have stories of saying yes to life, and they're really powerful.

I wanted to ask, in your view, what does it mean to say yes to a life in a way that affirms I matter, this moment matters, and what I give of myself matters?

Yeah, it's definitely both.

And one of the most important shifts I think we need to make that is much

bigger part of Eastern thinking than it is for us in the West, or it's more either or, which I found throughout my career.

Well, the last thing I wanted to talk to you about, Mark, and you've talked about this already in the way you wrote about it in the book, which is one of your most profound ideas is shift in horizons.

And you've talked about how much of life we look forward and then we look back.

But I want to talk about shift in horizons a little bit differently.

I have a really good friend of mine who I went to college with, I've known for three decades now, who was the chief astronaut at NASA.

And he tells me that one of...

One of the most profound things for him was being up in the ISS and having that opportunity to look down.

And he said it completely shifted the horizons in his life because he started to realize the true idea of a ripple of kindness or a ripple of love or a ripple of compassion when you're looking from above how it could impact the world.

from that moment on he would do these things that no one knew about where even if he was up in space he would telephone or find out about a sick child who might be suffering from cancer and he would call them just to brighten their day or he'd go on tracks in the amazon forest to bring awareness to climate change or he would