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Abdul-Rehman Malik (VO): Welcome to This Being Human, I’m your host, Abdul-Rehman Malik. On this podcast I talk to extraordinary people from all over the world, whose life, ideas, and art are shaped by Muslim culture. 

 

Krista Tippett: I think wisdom is different from knowledge or accomplishment, for example, which like, a wise person can be knowledgeable, they can be accomplished. But I think the measure of wisdom is the imprint they’ve made on other lives.

 

MUSIC CONTINUES

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik (VO): Today on This Being Human, we’re thrilled to bring you a conversation with Krista Tippett, a giant in thoughtful media, a voice many of us turn to for wisdom, and frankly, a huge inspiration for this show. Krista’s legacy as a guide to the spiritual and intellectual life has touched millions, and her approach to the art of listening and deep inquiry has influenced countless seekers and creators, myself included. Krista is best known as the creator and voice behind On Being, where for years she’s drawn out insights from poets, physicists, theologians, activists, and everyday people alike. Her conversations offer us something rare and precious: an invitation to explore wisdom, grace, and a profound sense of shared humanity. I had the privilege of speaking with Krista Tippett about the practices, spiritual insights, and values that have guided her work and her life. Together, we explore what it means to seek wisdom in an era of information overload, Krista’s own journey as a listener and witness to the lives of others, and how, through her vulnerability and care, she has become one of the generation’s greatest facilitators of meaningful dialogue. As someone who has spent countless hours listening to Krista’s podcasts, it was a true joy to be in conversation with her myself. This episode is filled with those moments of wisdom that can feel both timeless and timely. Krista Tippett reminds us that the search for understanding is a lifelong practice, one that opens doors to the sacred in ourselves and in each other. So, pour a cup of tea or brew a coffee, and settle in for a conversation that takes us deeper into what it truly means to be human.

 

MUSIC RESOLVES

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Ever since I was young, Krista, I have admired the art of the interview. And I think it was because I grew up in a household that really was engaged in world affairs and conversations about the world. And I remember growing up watching talk shows, you know, it was 60 Minutes. And more than anything else, I got to tell you, Krista, it was Phil Donahue, no doubt. God bless his soul! 

 

Krista Tippett: I know, he just passed!

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Phil Donahue continues to be, after all these years—I’m turning 50 next year. My whole life, I have sort of lived up to say that if I could interview Phil Donahue, I would have achieved something. And the thing that I always loved about Phil Donahue and that I love about you and the way in which you approach your conversations is that art of the first question, you know? And you’ve interviewed some of the most iconic and influential people in the world over the years. And I’m dying to ask you, and I’m just going to do it, What, in your experience, not only makes a great opening question, but how do you, as an interviewer and as a facilitator of conversation approach the first question? 

 

Krista Tippett: It’s such a wonderful question about the question. Because, you know, it’s not as simple as, I think…first of all, I know that we, as human beings, you know, walk into a room or encounter or a conversation and we start reacting to each other and knowing things about each other at an animal, physical level before any words are spoken. So really, the first question is also, and kind of just the settling in, is really about the hospitality of putting somebody at ease. And the first question has to continue that. I mean, you really set the feeling and the ethos for everything that follows. Somebody either starts opening up and softening or they shut down. And, you know, in this world, we’re pretty skilled and we kind of walk around defended for good reason. So it’s super easy to set that off. That’s our default these days. And so then, my subject, you know, when I started the show, the title of the show was Speaking of Faith. And I don’t really think the show changed with the new title of On Being. But what I had started to realize and this is connected to your question, is that I’m not, I think, when you said “speaking of faith,” what people expected was answers and positions. And what I realized is that what I’m really like, my passion is for the animating questions and the animating inquiry behind this part of life and behind the traditions that gave rise to the traditions about what our lives mean and how to lead a worthy life and who we are to each other. And so my question that I’ve really asked a variation on across 20 years is, you know, about the spiritual background of someone’s childhood. And how I came to that was I realized that to ask anyone, certainly a stranger, including me, like, tell me about your religious life. Right? Or like, tell me about your spiritual life, here, as an adult, now. First of all, we’re talking about something that, at the best of times, words are very imperfect, right? 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Yeah, absolutely.

 

Krista Tippett: Like, words fall short. You can’t do justice to that question. And I think it’s just a hard thing to talk about. And so people get uptight and maybe defensive, especially if they’re not particularly religious. But what I found that was so interesting, and I don’t know when I learned this, but I learned that if I asked about the spiritual background of someone’s childhood, that that memory—first of all, memory is in our body, so it gets people in their bodies to ask a memory question. And then that memory is a place in everyone I found that is searching and full of questions and soft. And that’s true even if their experience was an experience of absence or confusion. It’s a place where a lot of questions live. And that’s a wonderful place to start to get people out of these default modes that so many of us are in of presenting, you know, opining…

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: And representing. Because one of the things that that I think is so compelling about On Being and your work over these decades, really, is how little I feel that anyone who speaks to you is representing. That I’m always going beyond those kind of labels and titles. And we’re hitting something much more messy and complicated and rich. It’s like biting into that donut that has a caramel center. And you get through that dry part and all of a sudden it, like, spills out. And I imagine as someone who is interviewing and engaged in those conversations, it must be a banquet of riches. These two-plus decades having all of this amazing stuff spill out and to have to kind of contend with it. 

 

Krista Tippett: I love the word you use of witness. To me, the point of the conversation is to draw out the best of another person and possibly, you know, I want to, I think a conversation is an adventure that you take together and if I’m present enough and my questions are insightful or sensitive enough, you know, they will say something in a way that they’ve never said it quite that way before. And, you know, that’s a moment of surprise and it’s a gift to them. And I do feel like I get to bear witness to that. And then, of course, the miracle of this technology is that, just like, this conversation we’re having now, when it’s out in the world, you know, it’s like time travel. Everyone will be tuning in and having, bearing witness and it will feel present. And, you know, that’s just miraculous and beautiful. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: It is miraculous. Krista, it’s something quite remarkable that after hundreds of interviews that you’ve done and the hundreds that we have all listened to in the millions, your tribe is in the millions and tens of millions, Krista. I don’t think there’s any of us who ever think that for a moment you’re not listening. In fact, we always feel, I always feel, that you’re leaning in. And so I love this idea of your descriptor of listening as an art form, as a spiritual technology. And so I want to get granular with you. 

 

Krista Tippett: Okay!

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Was there an interview or a moment that you remember over the years where that act of deep listening radically transformed the direction of a conversation in ways that you didn’t quite imagine? 

 

Krista Tippett: Well, so, you know, I’m sure it’s happened many times, but the experience that came to mind was interviewing the late poet Mary Oliver. And what was interesting about that is that she gave very few interviews in her life. And so I was really fortunate to, at one point, share an editor with her. And this editor got me in to sit with her. I have to say, sitting with her was like sitting with a wild animal. And I mean that in the way, it was like sitting with a deer, right? Like this creature who you know, if you are not so tender, like so present and unthreatening, if you don’t really create a very hospitable space, that they would run away into the woods. And, you know, she was very private and she didn’t give interviews because she didn’t talk about herself. She had been ill and everybody knew this, but she never talked about what the illness was. She was chain smoking the whole time through the interview. This has never happened before! And I love this because, I love it, I love, as you say, especially when we’re dealing in this realm of the spiritual and the religious, I love, I think people she’s somebody who people would want to put up on a pedestal, and she deserves to be up on a pedestal for the beauty of her life, but just chain smoking and wearing a New England Patriots sweatshirt, and it’s like, this reality! And then I read this poem to her, “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac.” And I had not made this connection, but she said, yes, I had cancer, so I had not made the connection. And then she just started talking about this. And then I said, without thinking, unedited, because I was, she’d been smoking in my face the whole time. I said, and you’re still smoking? [laughter] She said, yes, my doctor just gave me the all clear! Like, okay. So it just went down this road. And also it was such a, you know, for her to share that was a big deal. And I felt really honored by it. And she told stories, like she told me a story about the poem “Wild Geese,” which is this poem that has been so meaningful to so many people, where there’s part of it. She said, “You are not here to crawl on your knees, just let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” And she told me the story behind that poem, which was really not a romantic story at all. I was like, this poem was kind of an accident. It was an experiment in form. She was experimenting with how to do certain stanzas, and then it turns into this incredible array of words and what they meant to people. So that’s the one that comes to mind. But I felt the entire time of that interview that if I took a wrong step or my energy got too harsh, she would literally stand up and walk out of the room. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Oh, that’s, it’s….it’s nervewracking. It’s terrifying!

 

Krista Tippett: Yes, it was! And at the end of it, when I said, okay, I think we’re done and she said, hooray! If you listen to it, she says, hooray, I’m free! So she had actually totally given of herself almost despite her intention. 

 

STING

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Your recent book, Becoming Wise, explores the lifelong journey towards wisdom. And I think, in a way, even in this story about Mary Oliver, right? The search for wisdom feels like a plumb line in your work. If I was to find that rich vein, that cuts across all of the things that Krista Tippett does, I would return to wisdom in observing it just as you have and experiencing it. And perhaps this search is even your North Star, yet there’s something about the word “wisdom” that’s a little bit quaint these days, you know? 

 

Krista Tippett: Yeah. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Wisdom feels like it belongs to the realm of the mythological and the heroic, you know? The search for wisdom is so grand, so profound, so beyond any of us, because the world right now is about doing, at best, right action. But wisdom is something else, isn’t it? It’s like a search for the Holy Grail. Why, and when, Krista, did this search for wisdom become so important to you? 

 

Krista Tippett: Well, again, I love what you’re seeing there. And yeah, the word, it’s, I mean, really all the words we need the most. I mean, it’s like the word God. These three letters, it’s so inadequate. But wisdom also is just…it doesn’t even begin to capture what we’re trying to point at. And so, I wrote that book. And when I started writing that book, what I was trying to do was, first of all, discover, like, what were the big threads that had pulled through? Sometimes people ask me, you know, what do all these spiritual traditions have in common? I’m really disinterested in that question. I’ve never…

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: I’m with you. 

 

Krista Tippett: It’s not what I’m interested in. Right? What I”m interested in and, you know, what does fascinate me is that if I ask people, if I get people very deep into the particularity of their tradition and their experience, and then you hear echoes between what they said and what somebody else said from a really different place, there’s this nuance of insights and vocabulary and practices that are….and I kind of think we, like the big We, probably need all of those again to point at that, whatever it is we’re pointing at, when we talk about God. But I was, in this inquiry of the book, trying to say like, what are the themes with a lot of variety have kind of come through again and again and again. I didn’t have a title for that book or I don’t, maybe I had a working title. I don’t know what it was, but we got to the end of it. And I had identified that and I had like written it and I had pulled out all these different voices. You know, it’s like speaking from so many different angles to these large themes. And it was at the very end that we called it Becoming Wise. So I wasn’t saying, what does it mean to become wise? I realized when I had all these elements that these were elements of wisdom, that they’re features of wise and graceful lives. I think wisdom is different from knowledge or accomplishment, for example, which like, a wise person can be knowledgeable, they can be accomplished. But I think the measure of wisdom, if any of it, any of us think about the wisest people we’ve known, like what that brings to mind for us, it’s the measure of that is the imprint they’ve made on other lives around them. It’s like how these lives radiate and ripple in ways that will never be told in history books, right? But are really the stuff of vitality. It was almost like a back door discovery. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: You know, the story makes so much sense and also is, in a way, a sign of wisdom. You know, wisdom isn’t something we begin with, but that we sometimes unexpectedly arrive to. And boy, I mean, there’s a season, I know that that I, and, you know, my group of friends and beloved ones are going through now, which is a season of the exchange and the passage of generations. My Uncle Amin passed away this last week in his early 90s after having taken care of his wife, who was very ill, for a long time. And I’ve been thinking a lot as I’ve been approaching our conversation, Krista, about this, this idea of wisdom. And I kept thinking about him and it’s exactly as you describe, you know, I don’t think he would have ever said he was wise. 

 

Krista Tippett: No.

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: But there were these beautiful movements, sometimes just little actions, sometimes, you know, little, little mischievous, you know, pushes or pokes that he would make as as elders do to the young ones. And I think back and said, there was wisdom there. And he was imparting it and yet, he would never have thought of himself as wise. 

 

Krista Tippett: You know, I think, yeah, I think it’s one of those descriptors like mystic? You know, I think most people who are generally wise would never say, I’m wise. Just like, I mean, there are some traditions where people can, somebody can say, I’m a mystic, and it’s okay. But most of the time, I think it’s, these are ways of being in the world that are recognized by other people, you know? And that precisely, these are not people who set out to be wise or to be mystics. It is what they became. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: So, do you think…how do you feel about that, then, you know, as someone who’s writing and talking and listening for and about wisdom? Maybe the question isn’t do you feel wise, Krista? But the question is, through age and this incredible journey of conversations and delving into literally hundreds of remarkable lives, do you feel wiser? 

 

Krista Tippett: Yeah, I would not say I’m wise. I would say I’m wiser! I would say that. I mean, you know, so you’re 50. I’m about to turn 64. I love growing old. And I think it is like the best kept secret. I mean, and it needs to stop being a secret because there’s a slowing down, which just sounds so countercultural and problematic, but it is such a relief. It is just such a liberation. I mean, I think part of like, doing it wisely, aspiring to do it wisely, has to do with also accepting it, you know, gracefully, and as a gift. So maybe, you know, the kind of, the aspiring for wisdom part of it is like very actively receiving this change and leaning leaning into it. Yeah. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: This question of age, in a way, pricks me, and brings me back to your fundamental question, the question of upbringing. And the spiritual upbringing. And that, as you said before, that formative, tender, poignant, pregnant childhood space where, you know, all of these seeds are planted. Give us a sense of what that upbringing was for you. But I think more intriguingly, how the seeds of that upbringing now manifest in this age, in this time of your life. And I have to make an editorial comment here, Krista, because if you say that you are slowing down, then I don’t know what slowing down looks like. [laughter]

 

Krista Tippett: Yeah, it’s not about less vitality, but it is about focus. Yeah. I would also just say, I have fallen in love for the first time in a long time in the last six months. And to fall in love at this age without all of the…There’s so many responsibilities ahead of you when you fall in love at those times that we all know, you know, we want to fall in love. In the 20s and 30s, whatever. And it’s just such a freeing thing to love at this point and to like love as a person who knows themselves, which takes a while. Anyway…

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: That sounds utterly beautiful, Krista. As we say, Mubarak Mabrook. May your love grow and always be blessed. 

 

Krista Tippett: Thank you. And I think your question made me think of that, too, because, you know, my family was not so different. And look, we are all human beings, we’re imperfect. Right? And families are supposed to be about love. And although love kind of officially is a soft skill, it’s the hardest thing of all and and the most worth it thing of all. So, you know, I have said, I think I wrote, in Becoming Wise or, you know, I’ve written that I don’t think when I look back at my family, I learned so much about love in the way that I want it to be part of my life now. and that. And it was complicated. Of course it was complicated. Like, you know, my my grandfather, who was a really big influence on me, was a Southern Baptist evangelist. And he was just full of contradiction. He had a lot of rules and a lot of judgment and, you know, he was a hellfire and brimstone preacher. And he was the funniest person I knew. And he was very passionately loving. I realize that he gave me this sense that there is love behind, in this, you know, behind this universe. And to have that, to be grounded in that, is such a gift. And I think knowing his contradictions and complexity, I also understood that’s not something really simple, right? It’s not like it just shows up as perfection, but it’s kind of a bedrock. It’s a sense and it’s an aspiration. And I think if you believe that, you also know that you are called to strengthen that in the world. Right? Because it’s all still up to us for us to manifest that. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Yeah, that’s the thread, isn’t it? I feel like it’s almost like a thread that you grab from that experience of growing up and you start to weave it in many parts of your life. And sometimes, I guess, the source of it gets a little bit lost, andyou come to it later and you say, that’s where it began. That’s where it was cultivated. Even in the, sometimes in the most sort of, as you said, counterintuitive ways and contradictory ways and complex ways. 

 

Krista Tippett: And, you know, if I think about like just the span of a life and, you know, being a mother, what you learn about love that you couldn’t imagine as a child and having these new humans break your heart open and you’re never the same again. I think so much of whatever becoming wise is is really just about being as present and attentive to what happens and conscious. And it’s, so many things happen that are hard. And sometimes things happen that are unbearable and yet kind of holding to the fact that, if we stay with them, you know, like, that’s the only way, that’s the only way to to integrate them and to our wholeness. Even that wholeness has all the complexity and all the array of human experience. And I think, yeah. And so I guess, even when I mentioned like, I’ve really invested in recent years in loving my friends and the friendship. And I’m so glad I did that. I’m so grateful for that. That just opened my heart in ways that I had. And then, you know, to have this new, you know, romantic, but partnership love, companionship, I’m just aware that I have spent my whole life learning how to do this better, which is not to say perfectly. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Sometimes I fear, Krista, there’s been these moments and you reminded me of this as you were speaking about children and friendships and romantic love that sometimes I think our fear is, is that we’ll run out of love. Like, I remember just before my son was born, my anxiety was really like, will I have the capacity and will I have the spaciousness? I love my partner, I love my wife, I love the life that we’re creating. And now this new life is coming. And will I be able to live up to the love that is required to embrace it all? And then that thing happens, as you said, where you crack open and your capacity is shown. And I found it sort of surprising. And it’s that sense of, as you said, learning to love is the hardest thing. And I would think. in our time, the most necessary thing. 

 

Krista Tippett: It’s so necessary. And one of my big kind of, this big campaign I’m on now, or like what what I really want to talk about and I’m thinking about as I look at our world, you know, I look at our country…of fracture, of fracture and contention and violence. And, you know, most of that I can’t touch, but some of it I can. I think that’s something we have to be in discernment about, right? Because if we just take in all the terribleness and we will be overwhelmed by it. Right? But, to say that what the world needs, as the Beatles knew, is love. And what our traditions say, this kind of comes back to this theme of the words that are most important, that are just ruined, because when you say the world needs love, that just sounds so pie in the sky, you know? Rose colored glasses, all the metaphors. But I am thinking a lot about the incredible intelligence of love in our lives, right? Like what you just described, the metamorphosis that you undergo as a parent or as an adult child or as a partner or like, I watch people who are in long marriages. And you mentioned your uncle who cared for his wife, like how people at that stage of life, that kind of new love in action, care in action and how people like break open again and become capable of care that they did…but what feels so helpful to me to think about, is like, what we actually know about love as a hard skill in life is is so unromantic in a way. It’s so reality-based. And it’s something we can practice, right? And so, it would not be about how we feel about the people who vote differently or the people who are on the other side of this or that, like, because in our own lives of intimacy, there are people who we never agree with. Because I’m in a relationship, even though I may have something really serious to say, I have to wait for a time and a way for it to be heard, right? I will not expect, none of us expects the people we love the most to understand us intuitively at every moment. Or, for us, there’s a mystery to the other, even if we adore them. They are also making us crazy at times. And also the things we do for them out of love, we often do in spite of how we feel at the moment. So if we could just get really introspective and serious about what we know about how love works in life, and just apply some of that intelligence to our, to the public, to the world around us, to strangers, to the other. If we think people are going to do us violence, I’m not, those are not the people we’re going to interact with. But most people don’t want to do us violence, right? So this is on my mind. Like, these spiritual virtues as public goods, potentially, and really the only thing that can save us. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: And that I mean, as you’re talking, I’m going back through my own memory banks of listening to your interviews over the years and this question of what is human, right? And what defines humanity, I think, emerges always in your conversations in relationship. And there’s something about being human and being in relationship that I think is one of like, one of these emergent themes. What does your humanity call you to in this moment? And I can’t think of that unless I’m in relationship. Is that how you would define who humanity or being human? 

 

Krista Tippett: Yes. And also, you know, across the years, when I started this show, I didn’t expect to be interviewing scientists, right? That was a discovery. And that was so interesting because I think in the beginning and I was interested in this religious, spiritual, moral aspect of the human enterprise, what I started to realize is that, in our time, like people who are during neuroscience and physics, first of all, they’re in realms of mystery. And some of them have a much more easy and robust vocabulary of mystery than a lot of the religious people I know. But also, they are kind of in their spheres as they look into our brains and our bodies and, you know, evolutionary biology and all that. They are asking the human questions, the great questions. So they’re kind of doing what theologians did before and what philosophers have done before. And so, when I think about that question of what makes us human, what I think about is how in evolutionary biology, in social psychology and neuroscience, we keep learning. And just like, just in these last 20, 30 years, just that we are only, that we only exist in relationship, right? That we need relationship and care from our first breath in a way even that other animals don’t. And even you know, we have this, I think I grew up with this really simplified understanding of Darwinism, you know, which really permeates American culture. And it’s not even what Darwin said, but evolutionary biology, as it has advanced, is saying like fighting, you know, what is it? Survival of the fittest, right? Like being fittest is not our superpower, cooperation is our superpower. That’s how we survive. That’s how we flourish. And even that word, fittest. I don’t know if you know this, but I talked a couple of years ago with this woman named Janine Benyus, who works in biomimicry. And she pointed me to this fact that I don’t think most of us have learned, that the first five volumes of the Origin of Species, Darwin didn’t say fittest, he said fit. And he changed it because then there was this social survival of the fittest for me. But fit to place, fit to purpose like that was about being in a relationship with the world around you and the people around you and the environment around you. And so that’s just, this is just a basic core truth. And I think we have to get back to it because otherwise we don’t survive. 

 

MUSIC

 

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MUSIC OUT

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: There’s something about your response to the moment and slowness and consideration that I think is really powerful, and I wonder if you feel that in your work that you are very consciously trying to pull the reins back and slow things down so you can consider these these deep, difficult existential questions, these urgent, often divisive issues of our time. 

 

Krista Tippett: You know, to be honest, I think that personally, as a human being, I have slowed down, but I think I’ve been better at that as an interviewer most of my life. [laughter]  I think I’m getting better at it, actually, in real life. But, you know, I think because I take so seriously our sacred traditions and the spiritual aspect of being human. There’s a big aspect of that that has to do with an understanding of time and a sense of time, which is not the Newtonian sense of time. Right? It’s not on schedule and it’s not, you know, this thing we’ve invented and that the Internet has invented of “real time,” which is just such a fascinating phrase, as though the experience is real because we are watching it happen, it’s unfolding right now in front of us. But actually what we know and what the traditions of wisdom teach us is that, you know, is just the falseness of that, right? We need space and we need grounding and we need more time to process and actually metabolize and know what it meant. And we need to be asking, and this actually takes a little distance, what feels urgent and what is actually important? You know, that is a religious question. This applies to what I just said of, you know, I think we’re like, stuck in this, in this country, we’re stuck in this loop of, you know, four year time, right? And whatever happens on a Tuesday in November is like, it’s like people pinning their entire feeling of whether they can have wellbeing or exist, right? That it’s, you know, what happens? And I’m not saying that there’s not importance to that, but I have chosen for that not to be my focus. There are plenty of people focusing on that. But what I do know is that that is not how change happens in the big picture, right? It, not because some long ago we decreed that a certain Tuesday in a certain year will be an election. Right? It’s like, we’re all engaged, who are alive in this time. We have these civilizational reckonings and callings and they are both civilizational and intimate. It’s like how I live my life close to home is how I am present to the world and it’s the work of the rest of our lifetimes. And one of the things that makes me hopeful about young people is I experience a lot of them to know that. Because like, I grew up thinking that there were things that my generation could solve in 5 or 10 years, right? Or like I could have these big goals—do you remember like, the world of strategic plans? I feel like, I think that’s gone out the window since COVID, because we kind of learned then that we really weren’t in control. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Yeah, there is no plan that could be strategic enough to contend with a pandemic. 

 

Krista Tippett: Exactly! And also, I think if we actually stopped to realize, when we got rid of them, we realized, yeah, what we always did with those strategic plans is like, when you wrote…or like on a grant report, right? In your year three, there’s that great section that says, what have you learned? And in that section you write all the things that didn’t happen that you thought would happen and the things that actually were really important that you didn’t know would happen. And, but this is reality. And we can have no illusions that we are in this for the long haul. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Does your work then seem more vital than ever? You talk about vitality and I love that word. I think there’s something really beautiful about vitality and about what that communicates about the wholeness of being alive. Because I think that vitality not only comes joy and energy, but also, also grief and consideration and all those things, because they’re all pricks, isn’t it? Our grief is this prick that almost shows that I’m alive. I’m not dead yet. I’m responsive, right?

 

Krista Tippett: Yeah. Vitality has loss in it, vitality has death in it. And vitality has endings in it. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: And I feel like you’re on the cusp in these last few years of all kinds of new beginnings, Krista. Krista Tippett is allowed to be an oracle. As you look at the oracle of the path that you’re taking ahead, what do you see? What do you see for yourself? What is your aspiration? 

 

Krista Tippett: I am in a season of evolution. And, you know, I’m going to turn 64, I’m kind of entering my 65th year. So it’s personal, as well as professional. But, you know, we left public radio two years ago because it was, you know, 20 years, 52 weeks a year. Living on deadlines was enough. And what I started to realize also, like, I don’t want to go at that pace anymore, which is kind of imposed, but also, I needed space to meet what is emergent. And so, right now, you know, we’re not going to be producing seasons like, I mean, we will, there will be new podcasts, but I’m really feeling called right now to write, to get quiet, and to finish some writing that I’ve never been able to prioritize. And also just be out in the world and be present. You know, I’m interested in, like, being in rooms with people in their bodies. And, you know, we just, in The Hague, my colleague Lucas and I, three weeks ago, we did three days with, in The Hague, with Jewish Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel. And this was a small group of people who have, many of whom have longstanding friendships, which obviously have been challenged. And, you know, it would be hard for me to say what was the value of these three days. But I think a value for me was seeing how these people are, you know, committing to stay in relationship with each other. And if I read the newspapers, right, and I said this to them, like, if I read The New York Times, then I think every peace initiative group across these peoples, every friendship has been severed, fractured, broken. And I saw that that’s not true. And, you know, there will be another side to this. There will be a beyond of this. And to kind of see, oh, okay, it’s going to be these kinds of people who are, you know, still talking. And so I’m interested in that, like the quiet places where though the seeds of the transformation kind of in the long term are still being kept alive. And I don’t know what that means precisely about what I’m going to do, but that’s what I’m opening myself to. 

 

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Abdul-Rehman Malik: Krista, tell me about a joy or a meanness that has come to you recently as an unexpected visitor. 

 

Krista Tippett: Well, I suppose it would be this experience that I mentioned of falling in love for the first time in 20 years. And I think what I want to say also about that poem is the words that I’m really cleaving to now as a kind of North Star for me and for our world is the word “wholeness.” Which is not about any kind of false idea that we could make things perfect or solve anything. I think I would say at this point in my life and entering my 65th year is that I’m having this sense of becoming more whole. And that’s a real relief also as a goal. As opposed to the other things I wanted when I was younger, you know, And it feels like a great gift. And I want to have this. I want to be an ambassador. I want to be like an evangelist for wholeness. [laughter]

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Thank you, Krista, this has been a real honor for me. And I try to be a prayerful person, even though I fail at it often. But heartfelt prayers for this next season and the many, many more seasons to come. May your work continue to be vital and important and a source of inspiration, as it has been for so many of us and so many so many people out there. So many humans. Thank you. 

 

Krista Tippett: Thank you. Blessings on your work. 

 

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Abdul-Rehman Malik (VO): You can learn more about Krista’s work by visiting onbeing.org. This Being Human is presented by the Aga Khan Museum. Through the arts, the Aga Khan Museum sparks wonder, curiosity, and understanding of Muslim cultures and their connection with other cultures. This Being Human is produced by Antica Productions in partnership with TVO. Our senior producer is Imran Ali Malik. Our associate producer is Emily Morantz. Our executive producers are Laura Regehr and Stuart Coxe. Mixing and sound design by Phil Wilson. Original music by Boombox Sound. Katie O’Connor is TVO’s Managing Editor of Digital Video and Podcasts. Laurie Few is the executive for digital at TVO.

 

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