Kathryn Schulz
speaker
152 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Kathryn Schulz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
I don't know how helpful it is in a day-to-day way for these kinds of balancing acts you're talking about, which are endlessly hard. But for good or ill, I do think that's just kind of how I look at the world.
Sure. I mean, I'm going to tell a story that sounds like it can't possibly be true. And I swear it is. And what you need to know by way of context for this story is that a year or so ago, my partner and I bought the house across the street from the farm where she was born and raised and where her parents still live.
And we've been gradually renovating it ever since then and incredibly excited to move in and to be near family and frankly, near more childcare. And And so we finally move in and I'm just reveling in this beautiful new home as we settle into it. And then this is only a week ago, my daughter, who's now three and a half, we have these beautiful fields outside of our house.
And she wanders off into the field and she returns with a stalk of wheat. I said, look, mama. And so I'm thinking, oh, she found a stalk of wheat. Fun, you know, children pick up everything, right? Clovers, coins, anything muddy, tarantulas, whatever. whatever they can find. So she hands me this stock of wheat.
And I'm just thinking, oh, how sweet she gets to live in this beautiful setting where the outdoors is full of so many wonderful little things for her to study. And she looks at me very seriously and she says, Mama, we should use this wheat to make bread for people who don't have any. Just one of those moments as a parent where on the one hand, you're just so in love with your child.
You think, I mean, who made this remarkable mind? Like the last thing I'm sitting there thinking like, oh, it's like she found a pretty flower or something. And there she is apparently thinking about like the poor and privation and need. So right away, my kind of sense of the scale of what we were talking about just wildly shifted. But also to be honest, it's just, I felt...
Right alongside feeling overwhelming kind of awe for her, I felt so morally indicted. I mean, I am literally in the middle of, you know, reveling in my pretty new kitchen. And then suddenly I'm confronted with real hunger in the world. And I'm thinking, why do I have this beautiful backsplash? Like, what have I done here? Right?
My three-year-old has more moral clarity than I do about how we should spend our money and our time and what actually matters in life. So, yeah, I mean, in a wonderful way. I feel like my world is full of discoveries that seem small and blossom out into the enormous or seem enormous and then have some kind of bearing on small practical things like how to be a family and how to raise children.
And it's often incredibly humbling and sometimes it's very funny and sometimes it's very moving. And in that case, it was all of the above.
Absolutely. I mean, I think, look, I mean, even the monks are not that monkish, right? I mean, there's a wonderful body of literature about distraction, you know, in these spaces that are supposed to be sanctuaries from all the pressures of the outside world and focus the mind. And, you know, you're meant to just think purely about God.
And if it were easy, we would all be monks and the monks would be better at being monks. It's incredibly difficult.
And they don't have kids, right, which are appropriately, I would never say a distraction. They are the essence. They are the thing we are meant to be paying the most attention to. And sometimes that attention is profound and existential. And sometimes it's like, you know, sweetheart, go put your underwear on. It's just like a lot of parenting is just pragmatics, right?
I don't know that we should aspire, or I suppose we should aspire to be in touch with the beauty and wonderful givenness of every moment. Aspiration does not actually have to be reality.
Like I think aspiring probably is why three and a half percent of the time we have the transcendent experience of like, here I am like curled up in bed with my daughter, reading her a bedtime story and nothing will ever be so profoundly sweet as this. And you feel it deep inside you and you know you will always retain it. And the other 97% of the time you won't.
probably okay you know the amazing thing about these moments of awe at the universe at life at what we have is they are so potent you don't actually need that many of them so i don't think you can give up the goal of trying to have more of them or recognize them but i don't think we need that many of them to kind of sustain our souls
That's right.
Oh, my gosh. I mean, everything in the most wonderful ways. And I found a particular hair tie that's got yellow daisies on it that my daughter loves that vanished for a month, and she's thrilled to come across it again. And I have found... resources of meaning and patience I had no idea existed prior to this. I mean, it is the whole scale of discovery.
I think one thing I've found, well, first of all, just as like a basic reflection on parenting, I've never been so grateful for anything in my life. I was a little bit older when our first daughter was born. And to be honest, I had kind of given up on I don't want to say given up.
I had resigned myself to the possibility that I might never have children of my own and had sort of made a deep peace of the world is full of children who need love and who are a delight to me and I'm related to some of them and that is its own beauty and it can be sufficient if it has to be sufficient and that I did have children of my own and
So much is written about all the things that are difficult about parenthood, and I am not going to sit here and diminish those things. But my overwhelming experience of parenting, it's just delight. I'll never forget when my first daughter was born, my partner and I had this moment. We were getting ready to leave the hospital, and we both were like, So we can just take her home.
Showing 61–80 of 152 · page 4 of 8
← Previous
Next →