The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
A Perspective From Lebanon: Who Will We Be When Things Get Hard? | Frankly 140
01 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What prompted the host to reflect on their perspective this week?
Good morning. Today is Thursday, April 30. And I had planned this week to do part three of how to think about the future. But alas, I had to take a knee. And I don't mean an artificial knee. I mean, take a knee as in take a break, because reality caught up with me a bit this week, as it probably does to many of you at times. So I'm going to put that analysis to next week.
The last few weeks, I've been in reflective mode, shedding my skin, perhaps shedding multiple skins. And part of this is I've been working too hard, four years with twice weekly content, juggling a lot of commitments, always on with meetings and presentations and paying attention to world events, which are not minor at this point.
But a big part of my pause this week was because I had a conversation Monday morning that kind of reframed everything for me. Bit of a bit of a splash of cold water lightning strike for me. A close friend of mine, actually, my meditation coach lives in Beirut, Lebanon. and has been living through daily bombing periodically for years, but definitely daily recently.
She's hosting two families in her small apartment. She has lost friends in the last week to murder her words. She lost her family farm with like thousand year old olive trees to occupation last year. So instead of doing our normal meditation routine this week, we just talked about what's happening in Lebanon and her thoughts and her experience. And I.
wanna get her on the podcast and she just won't. And I understand all the reasons why. So I'm just gonna share a little bit of her story because I think in many ways it's a microcosm for our times. She described to me what it's actually like to hear the bombs come down in the distance and the way that the mind anticipates where the next bomb might fall, but having no way of knowing where.
And so that means her body and the people staying with her and presumably everyone are in constant fight or flight. But with respect to flight, they have nowhere to flee to and no one directly in proximity to fight with. So she explained to me how that anxiety has been residing in her nervous system for years now, but especially the past month or so.
She told me she can't sleep because every time she falls asleep, her dreams or nightmares, I guess, are extrapolations of the worst possible future for her and the people she loves. And yet, She is one of the most grounded, peaceful, serene, wise people I know. She's a lot younger than me. She started a weekly meditation for like 60 people in her community.
That number is growing, and incidentally, it includes Lebanese Jews, which I found surprising, though I don't know much about the situation. But somehow that practice of meditating, convening together, at least in her, I don't know any of the other people results in this equanimity and spaciousness and
I don't know how best to say it other than an aware, empathic detachment for the people in her community, for the world. That's super empowering. And according to her, absolutely essential, which is why she thinks more people should develop such a practice. She also shared that
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Chapter 2: How is personal experience influencing the host's understanding of resilience?
But I don't want to evangelize that to others. Each of you are going to have your own list of what you're willing to fight for. My main point here is for people to actually have one. So no one knows what's coming. But what I realized this week is many of our nervous systems know it or feel it.
Many people watching this video feel facsimiles of Lebanon in our daily lives, watching what's happening unfold in the world. We're walking around in some version of fight or flight right now. or at least most of us, and this was a big metacognitive realization after my call with her, she is in Beirut with bombs falling and people she knows dying and no end in sight or exit.
And in many ways, her nervous system, because of the practices she's developed, is calmer and more grounded than my own, sitting in my chair, watching the news, being on calls, I am creating internal fight or flight response to, from my vantage point, nothing is actually fight or flight, at least not yet.
So I think whatever happens, a big part of our work is separating our internal responses to our external world. And on that, we do have agency. We have choice. We have the ability to research and develop and create new practices in our lives. And I think one of the first steps, to paraphrase Bayo Okumolafe, the world is urgent. We have to slow down, pause.
and widen the aperture of what we're seeing and how we're planning and how we respond. Because almost no good decisions get made when our bodies are telling us we're in a life or death situation, but we're really not. Whatever happens in the days and months and years ahead with the war, with AI, with politics and all that, the effects of the carbon pulse won't pause.
And the planetary boundaries and the nieces and nephews and cousins that are the other 10 million species we share planet Earth with, they're not going to get a ceasefire. So all that work is still going to be here after our pause, when we come back to it. So I don't have any pithy ending or recommendations or solutions to suggest.
All I can say is start a practice, go outside, breathe, maybe cry. If that's pent up, put your hand on a tree. Call someone you love. Notice what's emerging and budding in the fields and in the forest in spring right now. I saw a meadowlark this morning and I watched it sing for a few minutes after I first identified it on Merlin because we haven't had meadowlarks here in a few years.
These all sound like small things, but these small things are how our nervous systems remember that it's safe. Safe enough to think and act clearly again. And it's only in that state, I think, can we be of use to the rest of life in the future.
So I am somewhat fluent in, as I refer to it, biophysical macro, and I do increasingly see that the next horizon for my curiosity and my work is biophysical micro. Who are we and who might we become individually and in groups as humans, knowing what we know, sitting at the precipice of a species level transition? And I'm learning about all this, but I am really a newbie.
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