good morning I’m excited to be here
today’s theme is solve for X and for me
X has always been a story and the
challenge or the equation or the problem
of solving for it is how to tell it in
the most appropriate way in the best way
how to get true stories out to people
and make them really respond to them for
the last 14 years I’ve worked for
National Geographic and I’ve gone out
into the world and I’ve tried to come
back and write big picture stories you
know what these stories are they’re sort
of the the story that takes a
complicated idea or a person or a place
or an event and boils it down distills
it into the broad-strokes consider for a
moment National Geographic even if
you’ve never read it before you know
what we do Lions we tell you everything
you want to know about lions right we
will boil that thing down into a cuddly
ferocious predator for you we will tell
you everything you want to know about
elephants sharks mummies we own that we
have mummies in the basement of national
geographic global warming that’s another
one that we do well we will turn global
warming into a map it’s the prettiest
way to experience a looming catastrophe
so for years I did this I did this sort
of big picture narrative and it’s not a
bad way to do it the big picture
generally helps an audience understand
something quickly and get into an idea
or a subject that they may not normally
be exposed to but there’s also dangers
with this idea and a few years ago I
started to feel weirdly aware of how we
are increasingly sort of flooded with
these big picture stories almost on some
days to the exclusion of everything else
so I wanted to change I was ready for a
change and I was casting around for a
way to do this I no longer felt like
life was a headline that I wanted to
sort of coast
through I think you all know what I mean
if we think about the country for a
moment we’re sort of living in a
headline summary era are we we have
things like China rising we have the gun
debate raging on and the one that I keep
coming back to is a nation divided do
these do these headlines or these big
picture stories actually make us more
connected to our shared reality I don’t
think so and in fact after too much of
it I start to feel disconnected from
reality
I want to retreat I want to move away
from it and I think a lot of people I
know a lot of people feel this way we
want to retreat from the flood from this
feeling of being surrounded and
constantly bombarded and it has the
effect the big picture actually has the
effect of making us Sartre start to
think and behave in smaller ways we pull
back we associate with groups of people
who think like we do we sort of tribal
eyes and this does not make us more
aware it actually has the opposite
effect of making us feel a little bit
more estranged and and small so where
did this change for me a few years ago I
was asked to go to a remote desert in
northern Kenya to do a story on a lake a
lake called Lake Turkana a beautiful
lake in the middle of a sort of nowhere
this enormous place had a problem the
water was so slowly drying up a
combination of climate change and
economic pressure was working to
evaporate this massive lake and so in
the not-too-distant future
this beautiful jewel in the desert which
is home to 10,000 crocodiles and flocks
of flamingos so large that they would
blot out the Sun and sort of a fabulous
pink confusion when they took off this
would vanish and there you have it I’ve
just sort of summed up the big picture
for you National Geographic is sometimes
the Journal of bad things about to
happen
unfortunately so I went to this place
and I spent a few weeks traveling around
the lake and talking to the people who
lived there and trying to understand
what was going to happen to them if this
beautiful natural feature suddenly
vanished
vanished even over time and so I was
doing this I was working with
photographer we were travelling we’re
talking to people we were in asking them
to share their stories with us but when
I got to this fellow story it really
started to change for me this man is a
fisherman was a fisherman and one day he
had gone down into the warm brown waters
of Lake Turkana to check his nests
he was standing waist-deep or maybe
chest deep in the water and he heard a
sudden noise behind him and then a
crocodile attacked and clamped its jaws
around his waist and started swimming
out toward deeper water with him in its
mouth this is amazing and he told me
that he felt no pain he remembers a
white light he remembers that the sounds
of human voices in the distance and the
sounds of birds almost like music
there was this warm feeling a sense of
peace he told me he would rather have
stayed there instead he came to his
senses and realized what was happening
and he did something that they teach
every boy in his town if you’re ever
attacked by a crocodile go for the eyes
and so he did he jammed his thumbs into
the eyes of this crocodile and it spit
him out long enough that so that he
could swim to shore and he had made it
onto land and it was stepping up out of
the water and he turned around and the
crocodile had come back for him to take
one last chance he was able to escape he
made it to the local clinic where they
stitched up his injuries and it but he
wasn’t healed and he was in no way on
his way to healing later that night he
fell asleep and he had a dream that the
crocodile had crawled up out of the lake
and come to find him in the clinic he
had a dream that the crocodile was
crawling down the hallway to get him now
this guy has never recovered from that
and to this day he’s never gone back
into the lake he now makes his living a
meager living by repairing the Nets
of other fisherman this was an amazing
story from a storytellers perspective it
had everything you could possibly want
it had drama it had a strong character
who could remember things like that had
happened to him for example this guy
remembered what the crocodiles mouths
smelled like
and he described it as when you crush a
fat tick this feeling of old blood and
rot that’s amazing stuff but I knew that
it would never make it into the pages of
National Geographic because despite its
vividness and its richness it was too
small it didn’t speak to that big
picture of water disappearing climate
change and sort of a landscape in
transition now I have notebooks full of
stories like this from years of work in
the field and it felt like such a waste
to me this man’s story would just live
in my notebook or die in my notebook ink
fading on paper and my you know study
somewhere with a row of other notebooks
containing similar stories and I really
wanted to find a new way to do this and
in Africa at that time I was complaining
about it to my editor and he said dude
relax have you ever thought about
Instagram and I had not because
Instagram for me was like cats and food
and Kardashians and it was like I was
like selfies things that I’d you know I
see them every day do I need to see more
of them but so I was grumpy enough and I
resisted and I had never adopted
Instagram but so finally I got myself an
account and I started to explore it and
I realized that this was an undiscovered
country for storytellers like me because
here you have a very powerful thing
happening you have a photograph and then
you have a space for words and when
people see a photograph they have this
immediate reaction to it it almost
happens unconsciously
a moment is created where we can enter a
story together if you do it right and so
I started to play with this the word
space is about 300 words so that’s not
much although people do complain that
long captions are a problem on Instagram
but I started to cast around and look
and I realized that the Gettysburg
Address is less than 300 words so you
could copy and paste one of the most
famous speeches in American history and
plop it into an Instagram caption and
read the whole thing without even having
to scroll so if you know not to compare
myself to lick it but we had a powerful
space here we had an opportunity so we
started to tell stories on my own
Instagram account stories like this
woman whose title she lived in the same
village as a gentleman who was
taken by the crocodile and her title
translated out of the dasa next language
into English as healer of last resort
through this wonderful probably butchery
of what her actual title was but this
was the only way we could render it into
English and she was the one who when the
clinic had failed when the medicines had
failed when you were hundreds of miles
away from a paved road and you can’t
find any respite from your illness you
go see her and she takes you down to the
same water where that guy was attacked
by the crocodile and she sits you in the
shallows and she covers you with that
warm ancient mud and rinses the badness
away back into the void of the lake this
is a wonderful story these two women
were in their community they were
something like midwives but they also
practiced female circumcision now when I
went to Africa into this part of Africa
I thought I knew all I needed to know
about female circumcision brutal
primitive screw that I didn’t think
there needed to be much more of a
conversation about this practice but the
journalists didn’t me also realize that
I do need to talk to these women about
it and I realized something amazing when
they started to talk to me that they
were subtly and slowly changing this
practice they were rebels insurgents
within their own culture and by making
the smallest little cut just drop of
blood they realized that they could
satisfy the desires of the elders who
were in charge of everything and also
start to phase this practice out they
could see a time in the future when it
would no longer be necessary or part of
their culture and by doing this they
were saving dozens of girls from a
brutal practice that they had endured
themselves now this was a wonderful
story this is the kind of story when
you’re a writer you want to find it but
it wouldn’t fit into National Geographic
magazine it was outside the scope of
that big picture that I was starting to
do so I told it on Instagram now let’s
back up for a second why would a writer
like me who’s used to dealing with
thousands of words and a dozen pages in
a magazine want to go to this tiny
little space with a phone and there’s a
couple of reasons for it mostly it’s
about audience
National Geographic the print magazine
has four million subscribers most of
them are older most of them are white
and most of them live in the United
States Instagram is an entirely
different universe it’s 800 million
users it’s like a galaxy of stars 80% of
them live outside the United States and
most of them are young now if we can
leverage this this combination of
Instagram in National Geographic we’d
have something truly remarkable because
Instagram
national Geographics Instagram feed is
one of the largest in the world when I
started it was about 50 million
followers but now it’s up to nearly 90
if we could reach even a fraction of
that audience we could tell stories that
we’d never been able to tell before we
could deliver all these vignettes these
smaller stories these individuals in a
way that would touch people immediately
in a way that the print magazine never
could so we started an experiment we
started to do this and we sort of
hijacked National Geographic speed we
didn’t ask permission we didn’t tell the
executives we were gonna do it and this
also allowed us to not have editors
looking over our shoulder we just
started to tell stories on Instagram on
National Geographic speed and we reached
tens of millions of people and it was an
amazing response it used to be that it
took a year or so before I would ever
even get a letter from a reader of the
magazine and they would tell me
something like you spelled this wrong
not encouraging but here on Instagram we
would have sudden and immediate reaction
not all of it good you’ve all most of
you have been on Instagram you know what
the comments look like after a while and
one of my favorite was the people who
told me that my captions were too long
it’s like I’m not forcing you to read it
man you don’t have you can skim through
this and the other people who bother to
tell you that they’re going to unfollow
you because you wrote too much that’s an
interesting phenomena but we started we
since that my early experiments we’ve
told dozens of stories on this platform
and we’ve been able to reach people in a
way that we could never have done before
we’ve told stories that sort of tug
immediately at your heartstrings animal
human friendships here this boy didn’t
have many human friends but he had found
a baboon a young baboon and they were
inseparable and within this story there
was a tragic kernel which is something
that humans are also drawn to the baboon
would ultimately grow up and we become
too strong and too aggressive to be a
playmate anymore and so what usually
happens is that the men of the village
would take it out into the woods and
they would have to kill it but we
sometimes just told stories that were
just more fun and more interesting and
here you have an iceberg being towed
across the North Atlantic sea right
through the territory where the Titanic
had sunk more than a century ago this
one was read ibly popular for some
reason and I think it’s probably because
it looks like a swimming pool and then
we had Stuart so we try to capture
wonder we tried to capture a sense of
relationships a sense of joy and sadness
but we also tried to explore moments of
empathy and this is one of the more
complicated stories and controversial
ones that we ever attempted because this
is the face of the enemy this is an Isis
fighter and he had just been captured in
the city Iraqi city of Kirkuk where had
gone to tell a story about the battle
against Isis this young man had been
interrogated all night and he was
probably after I interviewed him being
going to be led into some backlot and
shot because in Iraq that’s what you do
with the Isis fighters what’s the point
of keeping them around as I spoke with
this young man I sort of had this
feeling as many of us do what do we what
do we need to talk about here you’re an
evil person you’ve made a bad choice
this man was 21 didn’t go to college
didn’t really go to high school he had
been captured sneaking back into his
city to visit his mom now this created
an interesting moment because suddenly
was just a stupid kid with a mother that
he wanted to go see he had been out on
the frontlines for who knows how long
who knows what he had been experiencing
and he just wanted to go home and see
his mother most of us can identify with
some feeling like that right and most of
us have probably made a really stupid
mistake that we regretted does that mean
that this guy should get our sympathy
does it mean that he should have been
those are not questions that I have to
answer but it does allow us to explore
the question and think about it in a new
way so since that time we’ve done as I
said many stories on his big Instagram
tap platform and I find that’s an
incredibly effective way it’s my most
favorite place to try innovative stories
and to try new types of storytelling we
don’t do the same stuff that we would do
in the National Geographic magazine
we don’t do newspaper reporting we try
to do other types of telling other types
of sharing and find other ways to open
up a conversation with the audience and
you know let’s let’s be real about this
this is Instagram okay so we’re not
we’re not changing the world here this
is just one way to feed yourself with
refreshing stories and after all of
these experiments I’ve learned a few
things and one of them is that people
want small stories they want short
stories that open them up to the wonder
of the world and that give them some
other way to react to the stream that we
are constantly bombarded with most of
you have probably felt this way there’s
too much news too much Trump too much
guns too much violence too much
everything it’s like I want to check out
but the small stories create a space in
the stream they give us a sense of calm
and they allow us to do a couple of
things one of them is to be more aware
we actually don’t live at that big story
level most of the time we live in a
dense fabric of interconnected stories
that are constantly moving and shifting
this is where our lives happen in the
connections that we have with other
people and with little events this is
where the wonder truly it is and if we
start paying attention to this we’re
more mindful like the yoga instructors
want us to be right there’s nothing
wrong with that but we also take back a
creative control over the way we react
to the world and that is what we really
want we want to experience this sense of
expansiveness and connectivity to the
stories that affect our lives and we
start paying what would happen if we
started paying more attention to these
things we would open ourselves up to
moments of wonder
and we would regain that sense of
connectivity and expansiveness that we
so naturally desire thank you
[Applause]
[Music] you
today’s theme is solve for X and for me
X has always been a story and the
challenge or the equation or the problem
of solving for it is how to tell it in
the most appropriate way in the best way
how to get true stories out to people
and make them really respond to them for
the last 14 years I’ve worked for
National Geographic and I’ve gone out
into the world and I’ve tried to come
back and write big picture stories you
know what these stories are they’re sort
of the the story that takes a
complicated idea or a person or a place
or an event and boils it down distills
it into the broad-strokes consider for a
moment National Geographic even if
you’ve never read it before you know
what we do Lions we tell you everything
you want to know about lions right we
will boil that thing down into a cuddly
ferocious predator for you we will tell
you everything you want to know about
elephants sharks mummies we own that we
have mummies in the basement of national
geographic global warming that’s another
one that we do well we will turn global
warming into a map it’s the prettiest
way to experience a looming catastrophe
so for years I did this I did this sort
of big picture narrative and it’s not a
bad way to do it the big picture
generally helps an audience understand
something quickly and get into an idea
or a subject that they may not normally
be exposed to but there’s also dangers
with this idea and a few years ago I
started to feel weirdly aware of how we
are increasingly sort of flooded with
these big picture stories almost on some
days to the exclusion of everything else
so I wanted to change I was ready for a
change and I was casting around for a
way to do this I no longer felt like
life was a headline that I wanted to
sort of coast
through I think you all know what I mean
if we think about the country for a
moment we’re sort of living in a
headline summary era are we we have
things like China rising we have the gun
debate raging on and the one that I keep
coming back to is a nation divided do
these do these headlines or these big
picture stories actually make us more
connected to our shared reality I don’t
think so and in fact after too much of
it I start to feel disconnected from
reality
I want to retreat I want to move away
from it and I think a lot of people I
know a lot of people feel this way we
want to retreat from the flood from this
feeling of being surrounded and
constantly bombarded and it has the
effect the big picture actually has the
effect of making us Sartre start to
think and behave in smaller ways we pull
back we associate with groups of people
who think like we do we sort of tribal
eyes and this does not make us more
aware it actually has the opposite
effect of making us feel a little bit
more estranged and and small so where
did this change for me a few years ago I
was asked to go to a remote desert in
northern Kenya to do a story on a lake a
lake called Lake Turkana a beautiful
lake in the middle of a sort of nowhere
this enormous place had a problem the
water was so slowly drying up a
combination of climate change and
economic pressure was working to
evaporate this massive lake and so in
the not-too-distant future
this beautiful jewel in the desert which
is home to 10,000 crocodiles and flocks
of flamingos so large that they would
blot out the Sun and sort of a fabulous
pink confusion when they took off this
would vanish and there you have it I’ve
just sort of summed up the big picture
for you National Geographic is sometimes
the Journal of bad things about to
happen
unfortunately so I went to this place
and I spent a few weeks traveling around
the lake and talking to the people who
lived there and trying to understand
what was going to happen to them if this
beautiful natural feature suddenly
vanished
vanished even over time and so I was
doing this I was working with
photographer we were travelling we’re
talking to people we were in asking them
to share their stories with us but when
I got to this fellow story it really
started to change for me this man is a
fisherman was a fisherman and one day he
had gone down into the warm brown waters
of Lake Turkana to check his nests
he was standing waist-deep or maybe
chest deep in the water and he heard a
sudden noise behind him and then a
crocodile attacked and clamped its jaws
around his waist and started swimming
out toward deeper water with him in its
mouth this is amazing and he told me
that he felt no pain he remembers a
white light he remembers that the sounds
of human voices in the distance and the
sounds of birds almost like music
there was this warm feeling a sense of
peace he told me he would rather have
stayed there instead he came to his
senses and realized what was happening
and he did something that they teach
every boy in his town if you’re ever
attacked by a crocodile go for the eyes
and so he did he jammed his thumbs into
the eyes of this crocodile and it spit
him out long enough that so that he
could swim to shore and he had made it
onto land and it was stepping up out of
the water and he turned around and the
crocodile had come back for him to take
one last chance he was able to escape he
made it to the local clinic where they
stitched up his injuries and it but he
wasn’t healed and he was in no way on
his way to healing later that night he
fell asleep and he had a dream that the
crocodile had crawled up out of the lake
and come to find him in the clinic he
had a dream that the crocodile was
crawling down the hallway to get him now
this guy has never recovered from that
and to this day he’s never gone back
into the lake he now makes his living a
meager living by repairing the Nets
of other fisherman this was an amazing
story from a storytellers perspective it
had everything you could possibly want
it had drama it had a strong character
who could remember things like that had
happened to him for example this guy
remembered what the crocodiles mouths
smelled like
and he described it as when you crush a
fat tick this feeling of old blood and
rot that’s amazing stuff but I knew that
it would never make it into the pages of
National Geographic because despite its
vividness and its richness it was too
small it didn’t speak to that big
picture of water disappearing climate
change and sort of a landscape in
transition now I have notebooks full of
stories like this from years of work in
the field and it felt like such a waste
to me this man’s story would just live
in my notebook or die in my notebook ink
fading on paper and my you know study
somewhere with a row of other notebooks
containing similar stories and I really
wanted to find a new way to do this and
in Africa at that time I was complaining
about it to my editor and he said dude
relax have you ever thought about
Instagram and I had not because
Instagram for me was like cats and food
and Kardashians and it was like I was
like selfies things that I’d you know I
see them every day do I need to see more
of them but so I was grumpy enough and I
resisted and I had never adopted
Instagram but so finally I got myself an
account and I started to explore it and
I realized that this was an undiscovered
country for storytellers like me because
here you have a very powerful thing
happening you have a photograph and then
you have a space for words and when
people see a photograph they have this
immediate reaction to it it almost
happens unconsciously
a moment is created where we can enter a
story together if you do it right and so
I started to play with this the word
space is about 300 words so that’s not
much although people do complain that
long captions are a problem on Instagram
but I started to cast around and look
and I realized that the Gettysburg
Address is less than 300 words so you
could copy and paste one of the most
famous speeches in American history and
plop it into an Instagram caption and
read the whole thing without even having
to scroll so if you know not to compare
myself to lick it but we had a powerful
space here we had an opportunity so we
started to tell stories on my own
Instagram account stories like this
woman whose title she lived in the same
village as a gentleman who was
taken by the crocodile and her title
translated out of the dasa next language
into English as healer of last resort
through this wonderful probably butchery
of what her actual title was but this
was the only way we could render it into
English and she was the one who when the
clinic had failed when the medicines had
failed when you were hundreds of miles
away from a paved road and you can’t
find any respite from your illness you
go see her and she takes you down to the
same water where that guy was attacked
by the crocodile and she sits you in the
shallows and she covers you with that
warm ancient mud and rinses the badness
away back into the void of the lake this
is a wonderful story these two women
were in their community they were
something like midwives but they also
practiced female circumcision now when I
went to Africa into this part of Africa
I thought I knew all I needed to know
about female circumcision brutal
primitive screw that I didn’t think
there needed to be much more of a
conversation about this practice but the
journalists didn’t me also realize that
I do need to talk to these women about
it and I realized something amazing when
they started to talk to me that they
were subtly and slowly changing this
practice they were rebels insurgents
within their own culture and by making
the smallest little cut just drop of
blood they realized that they could
satisfy the desires of the elders who
were in charge of everything and also
start to phase this practice out they
could see a time in the future when it
would no longer be necessary or part of
their culture and by doing this they
were saving dozens of girls from a
brutal practice that they had endured
themselves now this was a wonderful
story this is the kind of story when
you’re a writer you want to find it but
it wouldn’t fit into National Geographic
magazine it was outside the scope of
that big picture that I was starting to
do so I told it on Instagram now let’s
back up for a second why would a writer
like me who’s used to dealing with
thousands of words and a dozen pages in
a magazine want to go to this tiny
little space with a phone and there’s a
couple of reasons for it mostly it’s
about audience
National Geographic the print magazine
has four million subscribers most of
them are older most of them are white
and most of them live in the United
States Instagram is an entirely
different universe it’s 800 million
users it’s like a galaxy of stars 80% of
them live outside the United States and
most of them are young now if we can
leverage this this combination of
Instagram in National Geographic we’d
have something truly remarkable because
national Geographics Instagram feed is
one of the largest in the world when I
started it was about 50 million
followers but now it’s up to nearly 90
if we could reach even a fraction of
that audience we could tell stories that
we’d never been able to tell before we
could deliver all these vignettes these
smaller stories these individuals in a
way that would touch people immediately
in a way that the print magazine never
could so we started an experiment we
started to do this and we sort of
hijacked National Geographic speed we
didn’t ask permission we didn’t tell the
executives we were gonna do it and this
also allowed us to not have editors
looking over our shoulder we just
started to tell stories on Instagram on
National Geographic speed and we reached
tens of millions of people and it was an
amazing response it used to be that it
took a year or so before I would ever
even get a letter from a reader of the
magazine and they would tell me
something like you spelled this wrong
not encouraging but here on Instagram we
would have sudden and immediate reaction
not all of it good you’ve all most of
you have been on Instagram you know what
the comments look like after a while and
one of my favorite was the people who
told me that my captions were too long
it’s like I’m not forcing you to read it
man you don’t have you can skim through
this and the other people who bother to
tell you that they’re going to unfollow
you because you wrote too much that’s an
interesting phenomena but we started we
since that my early experiments we’ve
told dozens of stories on this platform
and we’ve been able to reach people in a
way that we could never have done before
we’ve told stories that sort of tug
immediately at your heartstrings animal
human friendships here this boy didn’t
have many human friends but he had found
a baboon a young baboon and they were
inseparable and within this story there
was a tragic kernel which is something
that humans are also drawn to the baboon
would ultimately grow up and we become
too strong and too aggressive to be a
playmate anymore and so what usually
happens is that the men of the village
would take it out into the woods and
they would have to kill it but we
sometimes just told stories that were
just more fun and more interesting and
here you have an iceberg being towed
across the North Atlantic sea right
through the territory where the Titanic
had sunk more than a century ago this
one was read ibly popular for some
reason and I think it’s probably because
it looks like a swimming pool and then
we had Stuart so we try to capture
wonder we tried to capture a sense of
relationships a sense of joy and sadness
but we also tried to explore moments of
empathy and this is one of the more
complicated stories and controversial
ones that we ever attempted because this
is the face of the enemy this is an Isis
fighter and he had just been captured in
the city Iraqi city of Kirkuk where had
gone to tell a story about the battle
against Isis this young man had been
interrogated all night and he was
probably after I interviewed him being
going to be led into some backlot and
shot because in Iraq that’s what you do
with the Isis fighters what’s the point
of keeping them around as I spoke with
this young man I sort of had this
feeling as many of us do what do we what
do we need to talk about here you’re an
evil person you’ve made a bad choice
this man was 21 didn’t go to college
didn’t really go to high school he had
been captured sneaking back into his
city to visit his mom now this created
an interesting moment because suddenly
was just a stupid kid with a mother that
he wanted to go see he had been out on
the frontlines for who knows how long
who knows what he had been experiencing
and he just wanted to go home and see
his mother most of us can identify with
some feeling like that right and most of
us have probably made a really stupid
mistake that we regretted does that mean
that this guy should get our sympathy
does it mean that he should have been
those are not questions that I have to
answer but it does allow us to explore
the question and think about it in a new
way so since that time we’ve done as I
said many stories on his big Instagram
tap platform and I find that’s an
incredibly effective way it’s my most
favorite place to try innovative stories
and to try new types of storytelling we
don’t do the same stuff that we would do
in the National Geographic magazine
we don’t do newspaper reporting we try
to do other types of telling other types
of sharing and find other ways to open
up a conversation with the audience and
you know let’s let’s be real about this
this is Instagram okay so we’re not
we’re not changing the world here this
is just one way to feed yourself with
refreshing stories and after all of
these experiments I’ve learned a few
things and one of them is that people
want small stories they want short
stories that open them up to the wonder
of the world and that give them some
other way to react to the stream that we
are constantly bombarded with most of
you have probably felt this way there’s
too much news too much Trump too much
guns too much violence too much
everything it’s like I want to check out
but the small stories create a space in
the stream they give us a sense of calm
and they allow us to do a couple of
things one of them is to be more aware
we actually don’t live at that big story
level most of the time we live in a
dense fabric of interconnected stories
that are constantly moving and shifting
this is where our lives happen in the
connections that we have with other
people and with little events this is
where the wonder truly it is and if we
start paying attention to this we’re
more mindful like the yoga instructors
want us to be right there’s nothing
wrong with that but we also take back a
creative control over the way we react
to the world and that is what we really
want we want to experience this sense of
expansiveness and connectivity to the
stories that affect our lives and we
start paying what would happen if we
started paying more attention to these
things we would open ourselves up to
moments of wonder
and we would regain that sense of
connectivity and expansiveness that we
so naturally desire thank you
[Applause]
[Music] you
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