Mark Nepo

So when I listen to you,

totally in your pain or whatever you're going through, then I am casting a stitch in the fabric of humanity.

I'll give you a personal example of this that was so profound for me.

And this was, my father's gone now about almost 15 years.

And toward the end of his life, he lived to be 93.

And I was visiting him in a hospital and he was, he had a stroke and

I mean he could talk but it was so much work he just didn't and but there I was all of a sudden and it was not a private room and there was all kinds of noise and things clanging and people everywhere and but all of a sudden I was feeding him applesauce with a spoon and it was a very bittersweet beautiful sad

wonderful moment.

And I just fell in my whole life was in that moment, slipping the spoon.

So it didn't hit his teeth and him trying to swallow the applesauce and the tearing of course.

And then I was surprised because I fell into a moment of wonder.

By giving my all to that moment, that detail, I had tripped into the moment of every adult child who ever fed a dying parent.

And I was not alone.

And so it's changed how I understand resilience.

by being authentic and holding nothing back and giving my all not to change the world, but to the detail of the moment that opens to me, I can trip into the larger stream of the mystery of life.

And that's where I was like a fish swimming in that stream.

I was now

by not by trying to swim in the stream, not by trying to fix the world, but by meeting what was presented to me with everything I had, I was in the stream with all of humanity.

And so my encouragement is care for what's before you with all your heart and it matters.

It matters because we do not know, we do not know which gesture of wholeheartedness will keep the world going.