Maggie Jackson: The Wisdom of Uncertainty
Everything Happens with Kate Bowler
Everything Happens Studios
4.8 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2024
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
These are uncertain times for so many of us.
But, according to writer Maggie Jackson, perhaps there is deep wisdom to be uncovered too—surprising gifts of curiosity, creative thinking, open-mindedness, and ways forward through the (often) unpredictabilities of life.
In this conversation, Kate and Maggie Discuss:
- How uncertainty might foster creativity, resilience, and mutual understanding
- Why we avoid ambiguity and a few small steps to help us become more comfortable with not knowing
- How the practices of imagination and perspective-taking can help us see the potential in others
- Why focusing on outcomes can close you off from picking up new information, nuance, or other peoples' perspectives
- Why experiences contrary to our beliefs take longer, sometimes even weeks, to process
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode of Everything Happens is brought to you by booking. |
| 0:04.3 | Booking. Yeah. |
| 0:05.8 | Book whoever you want to be on booking.com, booking dot yeah. |
| 0:11.7 | This episode is sponsored in part by the Fetzer Institute. |
| 0:15.0 | Despite the time and money were pouring into policy reform to address society's biggest challenges, |
| 0:22.0 | how much progress are we making really? |
| 0:24.8 | The Fetzer Institute believes in cultivating ancient wisdom traditions to tackle today's |
| 0:29.5 | problems. |
| 0:30.9 | Fetzer is catalyzing a movement of leaders and funders who are applying a wide variety of faith-based and spiritual solutions to the world's toughest challenges. |
| 0:40.0 | Learn more about how to bring faith and spirituality back into the conversation at fetzer.org. |
| 0:47.0 | Oh hello, my name is Kate Bowler and this is everything happens. And I'm not a fan of uncertainty. It just there's this terrible feeling that I feel like is the feeling of inching toward the edge of a cliff. |
| 1:06.0 | Like you can feel your little toes dankle over the edge, you feel the gust of wind making your knees shake. This feeling of living in uncertainty. You can't |
| 1:18.0 | unknow it. It's anxiety and fear and also requires us to have some hard-won courage. |
| 1:29.0 | But these are uncertain times for so many of us. If you turn on the news, you hear more about the delicate |
| 1:36.8 | geopolitical conflicts and fragile democracies, not to mention our personal lives that are always riddled with unknowns and what ifs. |
| 1:47.0 | I've come to believe that the trick is not learning to escape uncertainty. I mean that's so much of what I love talking about |
| 1:55.6 | with our guests is how do we learn to live here like this and turn the volume up |
| 2:02.1 | on our hope and our courage. |
| 2:05.0 | Today I'm speaking with someone who studies uncertainty and, and this is the fun part, |
| 2:12.0 | the surprising gifts of being able to withstand it, |
| 2:16.2 | the curiosity it encourages, the creative thinking it allows for, |
| 2:22.8 | and the discipline of living with an open mind toward others |
... |
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