Here is one way to begin to talk about what the pandemic, the post-2020 world, began to set in motion. All together, for a time, we felt for the ground beneath our feet. We remembered that the ground beneath our feet is never as solid as we believe it to be. We remembered that civilization revolves around something so tender as bodies breathing in proximity to other bodies. We softened. Chasms became un-unseeable. Between the ways we've been living and our deepest longings for all of our children and the highest potentials for human flourishing.
我们可以用这样一种方式 来讨论疫情大流行, 给2020年之后的世界, 带来了什么样的变化。 总的来说,有那么一段时间, 我们感念我们脚下的土地。 我们记得 那脚下的土地 并没有我们所相信的那么坚实。 我们记得 人类文明是围绕着 如此柔软的的生物发展而来的, 每一个个体都与其他人 同呼吸共命运。 我们变得柔和了。 意见鸿沟不见了, 尤其是在我们秉持的生存方式 和对子孙后代最深切的渴望, 以及人类繁荣的最大潜力之间。
So how to step into what we have been given to see, how we have been given to learn and to grow.
那么,我们要如何介入 这个时代所让我们看到的, 以及我们该如何从中学习 并由此成长。
I've been looking back across my 20 years of listening to the world and being in a radio and podcast conversation with wise and graceful lives. And I want to share with you three arts of living that have persistently emerged. Callings. Each of them carries practices towards what it might mean for each of us to participate as we move forward in the remaking of this world.
我一直在回顾我20年来 聆听世界的生涯, 以及在电台和博客中 与聪慧、优秀的人的对话。 我想和大家分享 在这些对话中不断出现的 三种生活的艺术。 召唤。 每一条都能亲身实践, 意味着我们都能参与其中, 在前行中重构这个世界。
The first is to see the generative story, the generative narrative of our time. We are fluent in and very familiar with the narrative of catastrophe and dysfunction and disarray. And that is real. But it's not the whole story of us. There is also an abundant reality of things going right at any given time. Of learning and growth that are happening, of evolution and breakthrough.
第一步是看到可生成的故事, 我们这个时代生成的叙事。 我们精通并非常熟悉 对灾难、失控 和混乱的叙述。 那些是真的, 但这并不是我们的全部故事。 还有另一种饱满丰富的现实是, 在任意某一时刻, 事情顺风顺水, 关于正在发生的学习、成长、 进化和突破。
One of the things that happens when I use this phrase, the generative narrative, and people hear it for the first time is sometimes they'll say, "Well, give me an example." And I say, "Just look around you." Even when we leave this special place and go back to all the places we came from, it is ordinary that all kinds of people with all kinds of lives are finding ways to be of service. They are standing before a world in pain. They are working with forms that are broken. They're probably working in institutions that don't quite make sense anymore, and they're having an edifying effect on the people around them, becoming healers and social creatives in so many forms.
当我在这样说的时候, 即已生成叙事, 而人们第一次听到 这个生成的叙事时, 有时候他们会说: “好吧,给我举个例子。” 然后我会说: “请环顾四周。” 即使我们离开这个特殊的地方, 回到我们来之前的地方, 很常见的是, 经历着百般生活的 各种各样的人, 都在寻找可以为他人服务的方式。 他们面对的是一个 经历痛苦的世界。 他们正在应对 支离破碎的架构。 他们可能正在已经 没什么意义的机构工作, 他们也在对周围的人 产生启发性的影响, 以各种各样的形式 成为治疗师和社会创造者。
Now we are strange creatures, and this is one of our strangest qualities. We don't know how to tell this generative story of us as vividly. We don't know how to take it as seriously as that story of rupture. And this has started to make sense as we are able to peer more intricately inside our brains and bodies. It turns out that our brains are exquisitely designed to keep us safe and on the alert for danger. Our brains are riveted by what goes wrong. They are looking in every instant for what will go wrong next. And this underlying orientation turns up in our most sophisticated places, certainly in the field of journalism, in which I trained. It turns out that we actually have to more actively, consciously orient ourselves if we want to attend to and get riveted by what is good and redemptive.
现在我们是神奇的生物, 这是我们最奇异的特征之一。 我们不知道该如何精准生动地 讲述我们这个生成叙事。 我们不知道该如何像对待 破灭的叙事那样认真对待它。 光是看见就已经开始有意义了, 因为我们能够更细致地 窥视我们的大脑和身体内部。 原来我们的大脑是被精心设计 来保护我们的安全 并保持危险警惕的。 我们的大脑被差错 牢牢吸引, 它每时每刻都在寻找 下一个差错在哪里。 这种底层预设 往往出现在最复杂的地方, 当然也出现在 我专长的新闻领域。 事实上, 我们必须更加积极、 有意识地调整我们自己的取向, 如果我们想关注 并被善良和救赎的内容 所吸引的话。
The invitation here is to take in the good. And just naming, calling it out, that there is a generative story of our time, that you can see it too, this is a way to begin. Take in the good. Let it start to actively shape the whole picture of the world you are working with. And when you do that, you begin to make the generative -- this whole landscape of generative people and projects, more visible and defining to themselves and to this world which carries so much pain and so much promise.
我邀请大家 去接受美好的事物。 而且认识到并说出来, 它就是我们这个时代的 生成叙事。 你也可以看得到, 这就是开始的路径。 接纳美好事物。 让它开始积极地塑造 你正在应对的 整个世界。 当你这样做时, 你就会开始生成叙事—— 这些更新叙事的人和项目 组成整个生态, 对他们自己和这个世界 都更加可见和清晰有力, 这个世界已然承受着深重苦难, 亦蕴含着巨大的希望。
My second offering is to live the questions. And this one is a gift from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who became a friend across time and space to me in years I spent as a very young journalist in divided Cold War Berlin. In the early 20th century, Rilke wrote a wonderful series of letters to a young poet in which he counseled, "Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart." He said, "Try to love the questions themselves as though they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language." He said, "Don't try to reach for the answers which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them." The point is to live everything. Live the questions now, then, perhaps someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answers.
我的第二个提议 是去亲身体验问题。 诗人雷纳·玛丽亚·里尔克给我启示 (Rainer Maria Rilke) 她成为我跨越时空的朋友, 在我还是一名非常年轻的记者, 在冷战时代被分裂的柏林 度过的时光。 在20世纪初, 里尔克给一位年轻的诗人 写了一系列精彩的信, 他在信中建议道: “对你心中所有未解决 的事情要有耐心。” 他说:“尽量喜欢这些问题本身, 就好像它们是上锁的房间 或者是用特定的外语 写成的书一样。” 他说:“不要试图去寻找 现在无法给出的答案, 因为你将无法亲身体验他们。” 关键是要去体验一切。 现在来体验问题, 那么,也许在很远的将来, 你将会徐徐领会, 甚至自己都未觉察, 在生活中体会到答案。
Like us, Rilke was a citizen of a young century with spectacular potentials for creating and destroying. And it's come to seem to me that the great challenges, all of the great challenges before our young century on some level are vast, aching open questions. All of our challenges, ecological, racial, economic, spiritual, political -- vast, aching, open questions for which we will not have anything like answers any time soon. So I find myself returned anew to this wisdom that when we find ourselves in this situation, we are called to honor and dwell with the questions themselves.
像我们一样, 里尔克是一个世纪之初的公民, 世纪之初蕴含着令人惊叹 的潜力之于创造与毁灭, 并且在我看来, 这是巨大的挑战, 我们的世纪之初 所面临的所有巨大挑战 某种程度上都是巨大的、 棘手且悬而未决的问题。 我们所有的挑战, 生态、种族、经济、 精神、政治—— 广泛、棘手、悬而未决的问题, 我们不会很快得到答案。 所以我又重新回到 这样的智慧, 即当我们发现自己 处于这种境地时, 我们被要求尊重 和细细体会这些问题。
Now we live in a culture that is in love with the form of words that is an answer, an opinion. And we are in love with the way with words that is an argument. But a question is a mighty form of words. As an interviewer, I know that questions elicit answers in their likeness. Answers rise or fall to the questions they meet. And it is a deep, deep truth in science as in life that at any given moment we are being shaped as much by the questions we're carrying as by the answers we have it in us to give. Those moments when a new question rises up in us, stops us in our tracks, those are pivot points. Those are moments when the possibility of discovery breaks in. So the invitation here is to engage the adventure of a new reverence for the questions that are alive in you, the questions that are alive in the world around you.
现在,我们生活在一种 喜欢文字形式的答案, 和观点的文化之中。 而且,我们喜欢摆弄文字, 那就是争论了。 然而问题 是一种强大的言语形式。 作为一名采访者,我知道问题会 引导出与之相匹配的答案。 答案或高升或低就 来匹配与之相关的问题。 在科学和生活中, 都有一个深刻的事实 即在任何给定时刻, 我们既受到我们 所提出的问题的影响, 也受到我们内心深处 所要给出的答案的影响。 那些在我们内心闪现 出一个新问题, 使我们无法前进的时刻, 他们都是转折点。 那是发现可能性的时刻。 因此,我邀请大家 带着一种全新的敬意, 如探险一样体验 你内心存在的问题, 那些存在于你周围世界中的问题。
That question, which I believe almost every one of us standing before our world and its pain and its problems, wondering, "How can I possibly make a difference? How to begin?" Spend some time formulating your variation on that question. Write it down. Commit to having it over your shoulder, in your ear as you move through the next few months of your life. See what it invites you to see and to move towards and to move away from. I have found that if you are faithful to living a question, that question will be faithful back to you.
这个问题,我相信 我们几乎每个人, 面对我们的世界 及其痛苦和问题时, 都想知道: “我怎么可能有所作为? 如何开始?” 请花一些时间来琢磨 有关这个问题的你的方案。 把它写下来。 接下来的几个月 的日常生活中, 承担责任, 谨记于心。 看看它邀请你去看什么, 向哪里进发,以及远离什么。 我发现,如果你忠实于 在生活中亲身体验问题, 那么这个问题就会 忠实地向你显现。
And my third offering is about calling and wholeness. The Latin word for “calling,” “vocare,” is the root of our word in English, "vocation." And in the world in which I was born, vocation was very narrowly equated with work and job title. But we are not called merely to be professional people. We are called to be friends, neighbors, family, citizens. Lovers of the world. And just as there are callings for a life, there are callings for our time. It has come to seem to me that our generation in time, our generation of our species, is called to nothing less than wholeness, that we have it in us to figure out what it would mean to cultivate whole human beings with whole institutions, living in whole societies. The invitation here is to turn your powerful reality-shifting imagination, your intelligence, your energy, your will towards the possibility of wholeness. How to live into that. And I want to be very clear that becoming whole has nothing to do with aspiring to perfection. It is not about achieving perfection, and becoming whole also does not mean that we become less strange or wild or complicated. Becoming whole would mean that we orient together away from what is death-dealing and towards what is life-giving.
我的第三个提议 是关于召唤和完整性。 “召唤” 在拉丁语 中是 “vocare” 这是我们在英语中 单词 “职业” 的词根。 在我出生的世界里, 职业被狭隘地等 同于工作和职称。 但是,我们不仅仅 被要求成为专业人士。 我们被召唤成为朋友、邻居、 家人、公民。 爱这个世界的人。 就像有生命的召唤一样, 也有我们时代的召唤。 在我看来, 我们这一代人, 我们人类族群之中的 我们这一代人, 被召唤成为完整的人, 我们有能力弄清楚 以完善的体制 培养完整的人 在一个完全的社会里 共同生活意味着什么。 这里的提议, 是请大家运用你强大的 改变现实的想象力, 你的智慧、你的能量、你的意志 转向实现完整的可能性。 如何活出这样的生活。 我想说明白, 变得完整 与追求完美无关。 这不是要达到完美, 变得完整也不意味着 我们变得不那么奇异、 狂野或复杂。 变得完整 意味着我们共同努力, 远离死亡的东西, 而转向赋予生命的东西。
Every fracture of our world notwithstanding, the science of our age is revealing all of life in its insistence on wholeness, the interplay between our bodies, the natural world, the lives we make, the worlds we create.
尽管我们的世界每一次分裂, 但我们这个时代的科学 正在揭示所有生命 它所秉持的完整性, 我们身体的内在 互相作用,自然世界, 我们创造的生命, 我们创造的世界。
And every dilemma around our technologies notwithstanding, our technologies have given us, for the first time in the history of our species, the tools to think and act as a species. Take that in. It is the calling of callings to make that more vivid and tangible and real, each of us starting inside ourselves and with the lives we've been given. And across my life of conversation, I have learned that wisdom and wholeness emerge in moments precisely like ours, though ours is writ large, where human beings have to hold seemingly opposing realities in a creative tension and interplay, power and frailty, birth and death, pain and hope, mystery and conviction, brokenness and beauty, calm and fierceness, mine and yours.
尽管我们的技术 存在种种困境, 我们的技术, 在人类物种历史上首次, 为我们提供了作为一个物种 来思考和行动的工具。 想想这些。 这是终极召唤, 要使它变得更加生动、 可见和真实, 我们每个人都从自己的内心开始, 从我们被赋予的生命开始。 在我的人生所经历过的对话中, 我了解到,智慧和完整性 恰好就出现在 类似我们所处的时刻, 尽管我们的时刻很明显, 人类必须要以创造性的 张力和互相作用, 维持住许多看似 截然相反的现实 强力与脆弱, 出生与死亡, 痛苦与希望, 神秘与信念, 破碎与美丽, 平静与凶猛, 我的和你的。
Let's begin.
让我们开始吧。
Thank you.
谢谢。
(Applause)
(掌声)