Finding Closure through Ritual | Florence Williams x Dave Asprey

Is it better, or was it better for you when someone would share that they had a common experience, or was it better when they just listened?

I think there's a place for both of those. I guess, if, if. If you're going to share about your own experience with your friend, make it short. Make it. Make it mostly about them, but. But, you know, help them feel like they're not alone in this experience. You know, this reminds me of another sort of, you know, antidote to heartbreak, which is the idea of ritual. You know, we don't really, in our culture have rituals for heartbreak. We have so many rituals for marriage and not necessarily for the end of it. And one of the places I traveled for the book was Croatia, because there is a museum of broken relationships. Oh, wow. And I just loved. I loved this experience. People from all over the world have sent in objects representing their broken relationship. And some of them are very funny. And then. And then they'll write one paragraph about sort of how this object describes their broken relationship. And it's really a beautiful experience because you see how universal this is, that this is a shared human experience. But you also see how just the act of sending in an object, writing a paragraph, and then seeing it under glass in this beautifully lit display kind of helps encapsulate the whole process, provides a little bit of detachment that you're able to now tell a story about it. And I think that that idea of being able to write about this in a paragraph, it's almost like how I felt when I wrote the last page of my book. There's a little bit of closure. You're never going to get full closure from a big heartbreak, as you said in your introduction, that kind of becomes a part of us. But I think it's very important to be able to have a little bit of that distancing. And sometimes that can come from just the active narrative.

I've seen two other things that. That people do that can be really effective. A while ago, I climbed to the top of Mount Shasta, which is a challenging climb. You know, you've. You've got to spend the night halfway up the mountain. You go at three in the morning with crampons and an ice ax. And it's, you know, real mountain climbing. It's not Himalayas, but it's. It's substantial. And you get to the very, very top, and there's this metal box that's affixed to the rock, and it's got a heavy lid, and you can open it and you realize how incredibly difficult it was. For anyone to carry something that heavy up there because there's a lot of climbing. Every ounce matters. And in there, you'll see notes or photos from broken relationships or people are letting go. But the mo. The thing that gave me just kind of goosebumps, not just because it was cold, was someone had worn a railroad spike on a necklace that weighs a couple pounds. Include worn it for a long time like they were carrying a burden from a relationship, and they decided to leave it there in a sacred spot.