 Welcome everyone to another edition of Crisis Conversations, Live from the Better Life Lab. I'm Bridget Schulte, the director of the Better Life Lab, and today I'm delighted to welcome Bruce Filer. He is a New York Times best-selling author. He's done such fascinating things in his life, walked the Bible, set up a council of dads. His most recent book that's just come out, I'll hold it up for everybody. You can see all my cheat sheet notes backwards there. It's called Life in the Transitions, Mastering Change at Any Age. Bruce, we're delighted to have you on here today because I think it's not too hard to say that the entire globe is in the middle of something that you would call a life quake. That's where I want to start. We've got people who are struggling, they're out of work, they're sick, they have loved ones who have died. There's so much uncertainty and fear. How do we, you talk about navigating these life quakes with skill and purpose. Now, I'm not going to ask you to answer that on the very first question, but let's begin talking about what are life quakes and what is this pandemic when you think about it in terms of what we tend to go through in our lives. And then we'll move into how we handle it with grace and skill and purpose. So first of all, thank you very much for inviting me. And I just want to say that I'm a bit of a fanboy of yours and I've admired your work for many years. And for me, you're one of those gatekeepers that if you're interested in a topic, then I'm going to be interested in it. And I'm just deeply flattered that you're interested in my work. And so thank you very much for having me. A life quake is essentially what we're in now. It is a massive life change that is sort of higher on the Richter scale of consequences of normal life changes. And it has aftershocks that last for years. And some life quakes are voluntary, like having children or moving or starting a new venture. But many of them are involuntary, like a diagnosis or a downsizing or a pandemic. And I became interested in this because I went through a life quake. Like I had what I now think of as a linear life. Like I discovered what I wanted to do early in my life. I did it for no money for a while. I had some success. I got married, I had children. And then in my 40s, I was just walloped by life. Right out of back to back to back set of crises. First, I got cancer as a new dad. I asked a group of friends to form a council of dads for my daughters, as you know, and that recently became a series on NBC. I almost went bankrupt in the recession. And then my dad, who had Parkinson's, tried to take his own life, actually six times in 12 weeks. Yeah, it was very powerful how you write about that in the book. And it was scary and we didn't know what to do. And we were dealing with medical and work. And I'm the story guy. Like I'm the meaning guy. So on a whim, I started this thing, as you know, where every Monday morning I would send him a question about his life. Tell me about the house you grew up, the toys you played with, how'd you become an Eagle Scout, join the Navy, how'd you meet mom? And this man who never had written anything longer than a memo, like backed into writing an autobiography. And I became incredibly kind of obsessed with this idea that when our lives go through these changes, we have to rethink and rewrite and update our life stories. And when I started to share the story, with you with other people, everybody had a story. Like my wife had a headache and went to the hospital to die. My boss is a crook. I'm being sued. My brother has stage four cancer. And so I thought everybody was saying the same thing like the life I'm living is not the life I expected. Like somehow I'm living life out of order. And so my process is like I look for it. I mean, there must be a book out there that will give us answers. And I couldn't find one. I said, well, I'm gonna go on this journey. And so I set out, I crisscrossed the country. As you said, I gathered what became 225 life stories. Like the most that's ever been gathered in this kind of process. All ages, all walks of life, all 50 states. People lost homes, lost limbs, changed careers, changed religions, got sober, got out of bad marriages. And then I got a team of 12 people and we spent a year, a year, like combing through these coding them, looking for patterns that can help all of us survive and thrive in times of change. And then, lo and behold, like the big ideas that we go through these life quakes will get into that. Lo and behold, for the first time in a century, the entire planet is going through a life quake. Literally the exact moment this book decides to come out. Exactly, yeah. So, you know, it's interesting, you talked about sort of you have the expectation that your life was linear, that one thing would lead to another. You talk about some of the experts who say we have these kind of Uber narratives that we either have these ascending linear kind of trajectories or these descending, but that really what life really is, is these oscillations of ups and downs and chaos and figuring it out and then getting lost. And it just, you know, as you say, here is everybody now getting lost all at the same time. How do we navigate this individually, but then also collectively together? This is something we're all going through together at the same time. Well, because I have the false intimacy, I feel like I know you through your work. I want to just geek out for a second on the science because like for me, the trap door that opened this all up was discovering something that was entirely new to me, which is that each culture has a way of understanding kind of the shape of our life. So that the ancient world, I spent a lot of time there, they didn't have linear time. They thought life followed the seasons. So life was cyclical, right? To every season, turn, turn, turn. In the middle ages, they think life is a staircase up to middle age. We peak and then it's downhill from there. The way we were grown up, basically since the 20th century, we were told that life is a linear hour of progress, right? So it's really at the stages. Piaget has the stages. Erickson's eight stages, right? This reaches its five stages of grief. The hero's journey, these are all linear constructs. And this reaches its peak with Gail Shee in the 70s who writes passages, which all of our mothers read, that said everyone does the same thing in their 20s, same thing in their 30s, and then everyone has a midlife crisis of 39 and a half. Like literally it said, the midlife crisis must start by 39 and will end by 45. And it's- You know, it's just, not to interrupt you, but it strikes me, you know, that's so much of sort of like the narrative that I grew up with. And then if you're not experiencing that, you feel like something's wrong with you, you know? And I've certainly had experiences like that in my life. It's like, oh, I'm not doing the right thing. And it's just, I wonder if it adds that additional stress and anxiety that, you know, we're all trying to figure out how to live a good life. And it's, there's no one or easy answer. It's what I call the should train. Like you should be doing this, right? Oh, that's good. And what's interesting about this is, right, that what really goes on now is that lives are not linear. Some people have that path. Many, some people are born into a crisis, right? If their family's falling apart, right? Some people will lose a parent as a teenager. I talked to a person who's a tenured MIT professor defining crisis in his life. He was a heroin addict in his 20s when he got sober at 26 and a half, right? Some people are, you know, start a new job in their 60s, you know, move in their 70s. So these, I call it the whenever life crisis. And so, you know, what my data show is that we all go, the pace of change is quickening. So that we have three dozen times in our lives, right? Every 12 to 18 months, we go through what I call a disruptor. Could be small, like having an accident or moving, getting new responsibilities at work could be bigger, you know, like, you know, getting married, having a child, changing your career, becoming an empty nester. Most of these we get through, we're actually pretty good at adapting to change, but when in 10 of them, three to five times in our lives, we get hit by one of these life quakes. And that leads me to the answer to your question, right? Which is the life quake might be voluntary. Yeah. You start a new venture, you try something new, it may be involuntary, you get an illness or you've just lost your job. But the transition that comes out of it must be voluntary, right? So when you first get hit by the life quake, one of two things happens, either you feel chaotic and out of control or you feel sluggish and stuck and like, am I okay? And like, there's nothing I could do when you lie in the fetal position, right? I've kind of done all of those things at different times in my life, yeah. So you're in this state of shock and then the first thing is, if people took one piece of advice from this at the beginning, it would be, decide, lean in to the transition. And then once you get into the transition, then there's this roadmap that I teased out and as you know, life is in the transitions has the first new model for how to navigate these life transitions in 50 years. And I think that that's just a quick point I'll make before we move on, which is this idea of transition has been a little bit out of favor. You know, you and I, I think share a, you know, interest in a lot of the conversation of how we live and the sociology of this and the books on psychology. This isn't really an idea that's been out there because people had this notion that we only went, we had a midlife crisis or that they happened at birthdays that end in zero. It's actually, it's sort of an old fashioned idea that I'm trying to popularize again and lo and behold, the pandemic did it for me because you might be between 39 and 45 right now in which case you're having the old fashioned midlife crisis, but you might be 28 or 32 or 57 or 68 or in the case of my identical daughter's 15, we're all going through it right now. Exactly. So what do we do? You know, what, you know, give us, give us some lifelines. You know, I hesitate to ask this now, but I just, I loved it. You wrote a piece in the New York times recently and you talked about the lupus infabula, the big bad wolf, you know, and as somebody whose father would do the bills and always ground that the wolf was at the door and honestly sort of like led to an entire lifetime of fear of finances and money that the wolf was always going to be at the door. Talk about the big bad wolf and especially now we've got a global, gigantic big bad wolf knocking at all of our doors. Why like, you talk about we need the wolf. And yet, you know, and you're talking about lean into this discomfort. And I love how you quote Pima children who's like one of my favorites like lean into this discomfort. You can't, you know, when you push away from it, you're not taking advantage of what you could learn. But we hate wolves. We don't want them at our door. It's very... Without the wolf, there's no fairytale and without the wolf, there's no hero. Look, I think stop for a second and listen to that story going on in your head. It's the story of who you are and where you came from where you're going and your life, who you want to be. Imagine right now, if you've got a call that you had to rush to the hospital like what would be going through your head? That is called the story of your life. And that story is not part of you. That story is you in a fundamental way. And the story that we would like our life to be is forged actually in adolescence in a lot of ways. It's a fairytale, okay? Or it's a superhero story. But, and we think the fairytale has a hero and a happy ending. But what all fairytales have is a wolf. Is it the wolf appears or a dragon or an ogre or a downsizing or a diagnosis or a tornado or a pandemic? And the truth is that's when it becomes a story. Story is about conflict and resolution. So without the wolf you don't have a story and without the wolf you don't have a hero. And so with that frame is that this is a hero making moment for all of us. And so when you first go into this life transition to address the other part of your question is it looks like an endless empty terrain or like a forest, right? The Hindi's call it forest dwelling, you know the Abrahamic base, it's like desert dwelling. It turns out look at enough of them. And I talked to all of these different people, hundreds of them who went through incredible changes and there's a pattern. And so the first thing that's worth thinking about here is that there are three phases to life transitions. There's the long goodbye where we sort of confront our emotions and sort of say goodbye to the old you. There's what I call the messy middle where you shed habits and you create new ones. And then there's the new beginning where we begin to unveil our new self. And in the old way, like the 20th century way of talking about transitions, they said you must do these in order. You must first say goodbye. That turns out to be fun. Also, it turns out that everybody's good at one phase and they're bad at another. So kind of one piece of advice I would say is one of the things I kind of walk you through in life is in the transitions to identify what's your superpower and what's your kryptonite? Like some people are good at saying goodbye. I talked to a woman whose mother died at 19 and she said three marriages and lots of different career changes. And she says, I underattach to things. Like I'm good at saying goodbye. I like the messy middle. Then I talked to people who are difficult for them to say goodbye. They stick around too long. And I talked to a guy named Rob Adams who was hired to run the Simon Pierce Glass Company in Vermont. He moved his family from the Midwest to Vermont. He starts a month after 9-11, sales drop by a third. Excuse me, not after 9-11, after the Great Recession. Sales drop by a third in the first three months. He should have moved on quicker. It's a family run business. It took a year. And he said, I hated saying goodbye because I liked coaching and leading and my colleagues. But once he got to the messy middle, it turned out he's like, I'm a consultant. Like I was on it. I made to-do lists. And I said, this is what we're gonna do. And he moved his family to Africa to run a nonprofit. So there are these phases. You're gonna be good at something and start there and your transition will go more effectively. It's funny you talk about the difficulty of saying goodbye. I think of people who, like myself, might have stayed in a job a little too long because there is this human desire to try to wanna make it work. Oh, there's something wrong with me that I can't figure out how to make it work. So does sort of leaning into that being ability to say goodbye also mean kind of sitting with that discomfort? Does it require also believing in yourself or believing that there could be another option? And where does story or the power of narrative come in there? Well, so there's three phases to these transitions. And then I have, as you know, seven tools that will help you make it go easier. We won't have time to go into all of them, but I wanna start with the one you just said. The first thing that it requires, like the first tool is what I call accept it. It's to identify the emotion that you're struggling with. So I sat across from these 100 to people in all 50 states and I would begin with a narrative, like tell me the story of your life in 15 minutes. Most people took an hour and then I would do things like high point of your life and low point. And then by this point, I've been with them for an hour and a half or two hours and we'd identified a big transition. And I said, well, let's go in, let's go through the micro steps of how you navigated and let me see what we can learn. And so the first question I asked was, what emotion did you struggle most with in your time of change? Number one answer, fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of not having money, fear of what people are gonna think, fear of is it going to work. Number two answer, sadness. Bad for what I've lost. I liked it in the old way. I liked that job. I liked being married. I liked having my mom around. Yeah, I liked it before the pandemic, okay? And then the third was shame. And that gets to what you said. I'm ashamed that I've lost my job. I'm ashamed that I have a drinking problem and that my kids have turned their back on me. I'm ashamed that I've lost status in some way because of a change that's come over me. I'm ashamed that I was too attached to my kids and now I'm an empty nister. And so I said, how did you, so the first step is to accept these emotions, but then what do you do with them? And I said, okay, how did you respond? Some people write them down. That's valuable for some people. Other people do kind of like, I'm this way, like head down, buckle down, stop whining and get to work. 80% of people, 80, 80, use rituals of some kind. Some of these people are maybe spiritual minded, but most of them are not. They didn't even do it thinking it was a thing, but they had a party. Like I talked to somebody who was born male bodied and felt she was a woman, was trapped downtown on 9-11, covered in soot. She thought if she decided to transition, that she would be ostracized by her family and lose her friends in her job. I think she was working at Lego at the time. And she said, I would rather be alone, did not be true to myself. She decided to transition. She threw a hormone party to sort of acknowledge that the past was not coming back. People, I talked to a woman who had a really tough year. She was a bone marrow donor to her brother. She lost her job. She had a fight with her mother. She went on 52 first dates. And then she said, you know what, this isn't working. So she had a fear of heights. She jumped out of an airplane to say, if I can get over this fear, I can get over my fear of the future. A year later, she was married and pregnant with a child. So there's something about rituals that allow us to say both to ourselves and to those around us that we're making progress. We're taking steps here. The past is past and we're ready for what's gonna come next, however scary it might be. That's really interesting, that sense of fear and that, you know, I guess it's sort of like in some of the things that you've written before, the first step is to just take a step or to try. You know, we have a couple of questions in the chat and Jeziah St. Julian, who is our program assistant and helps a lot with this podcast, she has a question. And so Jeziah, can you unmute yourself and pose the question to Bruce? Sure. Hi, Bruce. Thank you for your help. I love your names. I'm actually seeing it in print for those of you who are listening to audio. J-A-H-D-Z-I-A-H, love it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for everything that you've been sharing thus far. It's very relatable to my own life and I'm sure to so many people who are, you know, navigating the pandemic right now. And so my question does have a little bit to do with this idea of life transitions, particularly during this moment of the pandemic and just thinking about the extent to which there are certain life transitions that appear to be universal almost, right? Like the idea of having a child or navigating, you know, work and changes in, you know, employment. These are things that people are going to experience across their lifetime, but so many people are experiencing them now. And so I'm wondering to what extent do you think it would be helpful or important for, you know, even our policymakers to think about life quakes or to have some kind of familiarity with the term and even with just the information that you present in your book. And what would that mean for creating certain policies that can support, you know, so many people within our society? Like what is that conversation, you know, between creating policies and understanding this idea, this reality of life quakes? Oh, but you're egging me on. You were just prodding me at a moment and like getting me to where my heart is. So let me just say a couple of things here really quickly and then I'll try to answer your question very directly. The first thing I want to say about the pandemic is that this is, I mentioned this earlier, for the first time in a century, a collective involuntary life quake. As you know, Bridget, because you were kind enough to read my book, I kind of analyzed every transition in terms of was it voluntary or involuntary, the biggest one in people's lives. Voluntary was 47%. Involuntary was 53%. And it was interesting that I was born in 1964, so I'm right on the cusp of the boomers and the exers. And I thought, wow, 47% are voluntary. And I had a bunch of millennial coders with me and they were like, really 53% are involuntary. And so people have this different reaction. And then I did personal or collective. And so this is an involuntary collective life quake. That would be like a natural disaster, 9-11, and these are involuntary collective life quakes. But the life quake is universal, but the transitions that are gonna come out of them are gonna be particular to every person. Everybody listening to us is going to have a different thing. Do I have a job? If I have a job, is it the job that I want it to have? Do I need to quit my job, right, to take care of my family? So each person, this is gonna trigger, to use that word in a positive way, not a negative way, trigger a particular evaluation. But the particular point I wanna make before addressing the policy issue here is to say that Xers get this idea that change is happening faster, more than boomers and millennials more than Xers. I think that the millennials understand inherently, there was a time that I was like, oh, I only talk to people over 40 because I need the people who'd been beat up by life a little bit. My wife, Linda Rotenberg, who runs an organization endeavor that helps entrepreneurs around the world and has 500 more or less millennials working for her. She said, no, and it turns out to your question about narrative, everybody has a life story. And so I think millennials are more used to this idea, but they know they're gonna have 15.7 jobs and 11.7 moves. And I mean, I read a statistic recently that my kids are 15, like teenagers today, half of the jobs that they're gonna have have never been invented yet. Because technology and AI are coming so fast. So we have to accept that we're in a period of constant change and then that leads to the policy question. So I think a lot, I actually had a conversation with an educator this morning and we were talking about how schools need to respond to this moment. The kind of the inspiration for this Bridget was work I did on the importance of family narrative and the children who understand that their lives will take an oscillating shape and that no more about their family history are better able to navigate the world. It's the number one predictor of a child's emotional well-being. We wrote about this in the New York Times and an article called Stories That Bind Us and it is the beginning of life as in the transitions. So I actually think that we, on an education point of view, we need to figure out even how to take the moment that we're in now and say as painful and difficult as it is, it's actually a training ground for life transition skills, okay? And so that's like almost like you need to understand your narrative is gonna have wolves and interruptions if you're an adolescent. When you turn to colleges, I actually, college is the first time that obviously college is going through its own sort of transition right now, but college is the first time that people in college are gonna go through a collective transition together. And what is college? Like saying goodbye to your old self, right? When you were living at home, going through a messy middle, finding yourself, do I wanna make these choices or that, do I wanna be, do my homework, right? Do I wanna be a part of your, like who do I wanna be, what do I want? That's it, that's the message, college is the messy middle that prepares you for the transition to come. So I think educators to start thinking of school as a transition skill-based experience as well as an intellectual and social experience would be helpful. And then when you go to the workplace, what are the touch points? The touch points are parental leave, okay? We need leave for dads as well as we need them for moms, you know, the idea of parental leave. We also say family leave because you also need it to take care of yourself. You need it to take care of older people. It's not just parental leave that that needs to be a part of a much larger solution. That's the point I was gonna make next, like you need it when the kids are born, but you could make a very strong case that we all should have in our back pocket a parental leave sabbatical when our kids are teenagers, right? Or our parents are aging. What's going on? Parents aging, being born, what are those? Those are moments of transition, okay? And these are moments that for most of human history were largely dealt with in the world of religion and spirituality and those kinds of community organizations. Now we're in a world where those institutions, as much as I personally love them, are losing power and influence and we are turning to the workplace, right? Because what's going on? You now have three quarters of women working outside the home. You have dads much more involved in parenting. And so these are all moments of transition. I think under using this language will be very constructive for all of us to sort of say, oh, there are tools, there are skills and this is what I've tried to do in life is in the transitions is lay them out. They're actual things we can do. Well, at this point, let me go to a fantastic researcher, great friend, mentor, Brad Harrington, who's with the Boston College Center for Work and Family. Brad, you had a question. I would love to bring you on. Yeah. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, I can hear you fine. I can and I've learned a lot from your institution's work over the years and so it's a pleasure to be with you. Thanks. Yeah, we've been writing a lot on fatherhood for the last decade as you may know and I know you wrote a book which I'm gonna run out and buy now that I remembered that, Bruce. The comment I wanted to make with a question. I've been teaching a course for years at Boston College on, well, the course is now called Finding and Following Your Calling. It's for seniors at BC. And we use one of your articles, which is the stories that bind us. I think you just referred to them in the go, which I think is a terrific thought piece. But one of the things I've had students do, and I did this for 10 years in the MBA program and now 10 years with BC seniors. And the course is intended to help them think about how they're gonna make their transition from the four years of college to the next stage of their life. The first exercise I always give them, Bruce, which you will probably find that's a good idea, is they walk in the first week and I say, by next week I'd like you to write a, I have written and turn in a 20 page autobiography. And at first they sit there and go, what, I could never fill 20 pages, right? And I give them mine as an example, just as sort of a template to look at, in terms of the degree of depth I go into and so forth and what they talk about and not only what happened but how it felt when it happened. And invariably at the end of every semester, well, at the end of the, when they handed in, I say, A, was it hard to do to fill 20 pages? Almost every single kid says no, not at all. Once they got going. And the second, did you enjoy doing this thing? This, absolutely yes. Okay. And there's a little sucking up that may be going on in there, Bruce. But it's so much, it's so much. You do that up in Boston? That shocks me. Yeah, it's the four, they're not four, I didn't know. So, and at the end of the semester, I always ask what was the most valuable thing you did? And almost to a person, I wrote my autobiography and that taught me so much about who I was, my calling and where I was going in life. So the quick thing is, A, if you ever come out on that and then B, I've always encouraged people that I don't have the big stick of a grade of work to take the time to do it and nobody ever does it, okay? Except students who need the grade. Any thoughts on that? Cause I think it, it takes, you know, eight hours to do and it's life changing if you do it. When I, first of all, I love that story. And as somebody who asks people, hundreds of people, tell me the story of your life in 15 minutes. No one took 15 minutes. Everybody took an hour. It was incredibly powerful because in a fundamental way, both Brad and Bridget, what we're talking about here is that a life quake, a life transition is an autobiographical occasion. It is occasion to rethink and rewrite your life story and you add a new chapter that says, I went through a difficult time. I figured out how to get through it. And now I'm moving forward and sort of the most important thing in the world of kind of narrative identity is whether it was voluntary or involuntary, positive or negative. You want to nail the ending. You want to have a positive ending that says, even though it was difficult, I learned something constructive and I'm going to move forward. And I think that gets to really the, where this whole thing started about working with seniors is that basically life transitions are fundamentally meaning making experiences. And we don't have time, Bridget, because we're wrapping up here to go into what I call the ABCs of meaning. A is our agency, what we do in our work and our B is our belonging, and our C is our cause or our calling that Brad was just talking about. What happens in these moments? You say, how do we make them positive and constructive? We say, do I have that balance right? Am I working too hard? I should focus more on my relationships. Maybe I've been a mom and I want to, I'm an intern, I want to give back. Maybe I've been giving back and I've burned out that in these moments, there are occasions to revisit and rethink what gives us meaning and tweak it so that we're more balanced going forward. And so, as we wrap up here, I'll just say, whatever you're struggling with now, I was there, I was there with you. I was very much struggling. And I went out and found these people and they gave me hope and inspiration, but more importantly, they gave me things to do. So whatever you're struggling with, if you come on this journey and meet these people, we're gonna give you something to do tonight, something next week to week after. We're gonna take whatever you're struggling with, whatever transition you're in, and we're gonna make it go a little bit better and a lot more effectively. We can get through this together. You know, I wanna ask one last question to kind of think through this. So many of these crisis conversations that we've been having over the last months, you know, they've been people who are really caught up in this whirlwind of how so much has been disrupted in our lives, whether it's because of the pandemic or the economic turn down or this reckoning for racial justice. And one of the things that we really struggle with or work on here at the Better Life Lab is how much is individual, you know, how much agency do I have, should I have, versus how much is systemic and how much is it, you know, the circumstances that I find myself in, whether it's structural racism or deeply embedded cultural norms around gender or discrimination, you know, and we've got public policies that do not support so many of our families or, you know, we've got systems that are broken and don't work. And so I guess that would be sort of the last thing that I would ask is you do wanna have a sense of individual agency in your life. You're the only one living it. And yet how can we work together in these transitions, in these moments, like in the pandemic when so much has become clear that isn't working, how do we work together to make those systems better, to change our larger story, if you will, like in the United States where, you know, we're supposed to be this land of opportunity and we are not. How do we change that larger collective narrative to actually get there and make that transition? I think the protest movement that you brought up is a very interesting example of this because we've talked about the pandemic as a collective involuntary life quake. What the protest movement and Black Lives Matter and anti-racism and all of the initiatives that have come out of this, this is actually a voluntary collective life quake. It's something that we were all deciding that now there is this reckoning and we want to act about it. And I wanna make a kind of perhaps an unusual analogy, but I wanna go back to 9-11. In the wake of 9-11, I wrote a book about Abraham as the shared ancestor of Jews, Christians and Muslims and I did a lot of interfaith work. And the thing that I learned from that that seems incredibly potent to the question you just asked me is that can we get along? We were in that moment and it looked like we were gonna have a global religious war among Jews, Christians and Muslims. And I did hundreds of interfaith events and I used to say the same thing at the end which is this is so important that we can't sit back and say, I hope they solved that problem over there in the Middle East, right? I hope they get that problem done in Iraq or whatever it is. We all have to do something in our own community and our own neighborhood in our own block. And I gave people the way to have small living room, interfaith conversations, Abraham salons, I called them. That's when I feel like we've learned in the protest movement, right? Which is this problem was built into America, right? This was written into the Constitution and many of the defining moments in American history from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement were about taking it and we now appear to be in this moment and what have we learned? We can't say, I hope they solved that problem. We have to say, in my workplace, am I doing something? In my family, am I doing something? In my neighborhood, am I doing something? In my heart, am I doing something with my own children? That's been the big takeaway for me that's been incredibly positive. And that's what I feel about the pandemic, okay? We may not be able, I mean, we can wear a mask and we can socially distance and wash our hands, but we're not gonna be able to cure the vaccine. What we can do is reflect and look in the mirror and say, what is a change that I want to make? Because the brutal reality is we're not going back. I'm a little bit grumpy about the word resilience because it implies you're going back, you're gonna bounce back, right? In fact, resilience comes from a spring. It's actually a physics word. The spring gets pulled out and it bounces back, going back. Some people may go back, but more of us are gonna go sideways or forward or to a different direction entirely. And the reason that my book is called Life is in the Transitions, which as you know is a William James line from a hundred years ago with the birth of modern psychology is we're gonna have these life quakes. That's the message. And they're gonna come more frequently than we expect and they're gonna last longer than we want. And rather than looking at them as periods that we have to grit or grind or kind of suffer our way through, if we don't look at them as opportunities to grow and recreate ourselves and reimagine ourselves, there'll be some sadness. We talked about saying goodbye. But you can go to a different place. And if you do not, then you are throwing away half your life waiting for the better parts to come. And that is not, okay? You're gonna get the wolf. The wolf is at the door. I mean, your father was right in a way. It may not be the wolf that he expected, but what he taught you is that you're gonna get the wolf and it's often when you least expect it. Remember, the wolf pops out. And the thing is what this thing gave me was more tools to fight that wolf than I ever thought imaginable. Now when the wolf pops up, I feel like, okay, I got 20 tools. If this one doesn't work, I'm gonna try that. And what I've tried to do in life is in the transition is pass along the tools. Like my wife said, I don't care what you think, tell me what they're thinking. So what I did is go out and find other people. You find out what they did. You're gonna feel inspired to make the change more efficiently in your own life. Well, Bruce, thank you so much for joining us today. We are out of time. Thank you all to the participants for joining us. I think that's a wonderful place to leave. That's so much of what we're working on here at the Better Life Lab. How do we learn from this current moment? It's the point of these crisis conversations to emerge better, more equitable, fairer, healthier, and stronger as human beings, as communities and as a country. So thank you so much. I'd also like to thank the New America Events Team, my wonderful teammates on the Better Life Lab, all the people who tuned in. We hope that you will come back next week. We're going to be talking about pregnancy, maternal health and pregnancy discrimination in the pandemic. So in the meantime, stay safe. Wash your hands and we'll see you next week.