Phere and COVID-19

Hello, and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grohl, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. So, normally, Sean and I are recording episodes a couple weeks ahead of time. We have a couple of those done, but we decided to just stop this week and record one to address fear and COVID 19 and what that means for us through the writing process and what it means for us when we're crafting our own story. So I feel like this is a really good episode. We dive into what Sean understands about fear, which is pretty high based on the book Cognitive Dominance he helped write. So, yeah, I think it's a really helpful episode, and I hope you enjoy it. So let's jump in and get started. So, Sean.

Well, it's normal for you to be at home and isolated, but it's a little different for me.

With everything going on with the COVID 19, and we're just kind of stuck and waiting. And I've been thinking, like, it's weird if, when I've seen people just putting out content like normal without talking about it, I've always. I've been feeling like it's a little off. So I thought, like, we could just talk about it, and I thought it would be an opportunity to visit some of the stuff you learned writing the book Cognitive Dominance, and some of the stuff that came out of that with the fear that we've talked about in the podcast before and how we can start approaching this both just as people, but as writers and storytellers, too.

Yeah, I think it's. It's. I was talking to Mark McLaughlin, the neurosurgeon that I wrote Cognitive Dominance with last week, and we were just sort of both kind of gobsmacked that the concept that we worked on in the book is this idea of the fear, which is a P H E R E as opposed to an F E A R. And.

Where this thing came from is when we were exploring how best to metabolize our anxieties and our fears and all that sort of thing. And Mark, as you know, is. You know, he's been a practicing brain surgeon for 25 years. He's gone through innumerable operations. He's spent 50,000 hours perfecting his craft, and every single second, he goes into an operating room. Before he does, he has this moment of sheer anxiety, fear, stress, whatever you want to call it. And over his career, he developed these techniques to enable him to go into the operating room to operate on and actually literally drill into someone's skull and operate on their brain without letting fear overwhelm his goal. And his goal is always to have the best possible probability of success in every operation. So that is generally how the two of us came together was I'm, I'm fascinated by how people experience unexpected events in their lives and how they metabolize them in such a way that it doesn't destroy them. In fact, it makes them even stronger and more resilient in the face of unexpected phenomena. Right. So.

So this COVID 19 is, is if you look at it abstractly as opposed to obsessively looking at the minutia of news on Twitter and on networks and press conferences and things. And instead of, if you kind of look at it as a storyteller.

It'S probably the most clear representation of what Mark and I call a fear that, that we could even ever imagine. So let me just take a couple of steps back and build on what, what a fear is.

It's a drop in event that has been unexpected. So if I'm walking down the street and I don't see a banana peel, I step on the banana peel and I fall. And the banana peel represents an unexpected event. As I'm walking down the street, I don't expect to see a banana peel. So when I do encounter the banana peel, it drops into my life and it can cause change. So unexpected events are the mechanisms of change in our progression through life. So the size of these unexpected events can vary. Right? So at the very minute level, there are things like the banana peel. Like usually I would be able to spot the banana peel and walk around it. So it doesn't have much effect on my ability to get from across the street to, you know, another, to a store or something. So a banana peel isn't really going to affect me all that much. And then there are greater and greater instances of these unexpected events that can change my goal.

If something happens where I get sideswiped by a bike and I get knocked onto the ground and I break my arm, I'm not going to be able to go to that store any longer. That's a moment of irreversible change. So if you look at COVID 19, you can say to yourself, well, what is this thing? You know, what are the objective realities of this thing? And what are the subjective realities of this thing? So objectively, we can look at COVID 19 and we can delineate all of its DNA, its properties. And we have wonderful research scientists, research really spending 18 to 24 hour days exploring the objective reality of COVID 19. And what they're doing is they're trying to figure out how to best, you know, take care of it so that it doesn't affect us in the instances that it already has. So they're trying to find a cure or a response to this unexpected event objectively. So we've got to support that. And I think we've got the finest minds across the globe who are examining this and sharing information at, you know, in instant time. So I have, I personally, since I have a, a degree in science, I feel confident that those minds are going to figure out the objective realities of COVID 19. Okay, so on top of that we have subjective, the subjective component of COVID 19 and the subjective reality of it is that we need to stay away from each other. Which is really, it's, it's like the reverse of what, what we've been thinking for the past, ever since sort of the, the globalization movement of the early 1990s where you know, we had all of the governments in the world saying if we can just create a global economy, then we will create greater prosperity across the globe and won't that be great? So let's all work together, let's open up the borders, let's make sure that people can flow through this global ecosystem as easily as possible. So that has been the operating procedure for 30 years. So all of a sudden we have a drop in event of this, this spherical unit microscopic, called a virus called COVID 19. And it's subjectively changing the world. So and, and it's done this in extraordinarily fast way. So over a period of three months, the entire globe is now the narrative. We all share a narrative now. So we have a global narrative today that we didn't have three months ago.

So that's kind of interesting to me as a storyteller because, because before COVID 19, every single nation state had their own micro narrative that served as the people living in that narrative, as their macro narrative. So if you were a Spanish citizen, you believed in the Spanish macro nation state narrative. If you were a Chinese citizen, the same thing. A US citizen, the same thing. A Canadian citizen, the same thing. And now we, we've got a meta narrative, a narrative above nation state. Because the objective reality of COVID 19 is that it's an equal opportunity.

Scourge. You know, it's, it's gonna, it's gonna attack any human being.

In a similar way. So we have this meta narrative now and this global fear is, is a very large ball of unexpected change. So as we are, are coming to terms with this new narrative and it is.

There are very few times, in fact.

I can't think of many.

And it's probably always based upon a, an environmental, natural change that requires every human being to look at our similarities versus our differences. So subjectively, we're now all human beings, less than Iraqis and people from Nepal or people from Saskatchewan or people from Kansas. So we're all sort of like, well, we all have this genetic material and we're all part of this species. And isn't it, this is a serious problem. What are we going to do about it? And instead it's, nobody can say, oh well. And people try. This is why it's really important to understand story, right? So.

To say that any one human being is responsible for the rise of an unexpected event that occurs naturally from the environment is not helpful and it's not true.

So this virus could have arisen anywhere.

And the conditions that occurred in China are conditions that occur in the United States, they occur in France, they. So the natural world is an equal opportunity evolutionary system. So just back to this concept of the storyteller and the unexpected event. This is the unexpected event is the, the necessity. It's the thing that drives all story. So at every level of story, from the beat to the scene to the sequence to the act, to the subplot, to the global plot, to the trilogy plot.

You must have unexpected events that occur in every unit of story. And COVID 19 is the mother of all unexpected events because what it has created is a global narrative that eliminates all of these incredible cultural nation state ideas. It's above all that. So to look at COVID 19 objectively and subjectively, we can all, you know, sort of embrace this monumental and global.

Drop in of unexpected change.

So that's what these, these unexpected events do. They require metabolism, they require thoughtful, reasonable approaches to figuring out how to deal with this thing, right? So, all right, so that's one section of it. It's the unexpected event. And this fear ball comes from Carl Jung and it comes from his examination of all the way back to alchemy and the original alchemists. And Sir Isaac Newton was actually one of them. They believed in, in this notion of the metaphysical.

Unit of change. And they believe that if we could harness these unexpected units of change and use them and mechanize them. Then that would be an extraordinarily powerful tool. We could change, theoretically, lead into gold.

Yeah, that's.

When you say alchemy, that's the only thing I think of and know about. So obviously it's more than that.

Well, alchemy was. Okay, so we have the science that we all know and love today. And science is based upon the notion of what is so the material world. So science is based upon really examining material life, everything from physics to chemistry to biology. And so the theory is, is that the world began with the Big Bang and that was the birth of physics. So subatomic particles, time, space, that sort of, you know, blew up during the Big Bang. And from that emerged the atomic structure of the atom. So, you know, hydrogen with one proton, one neutron, and one electron eventually emerged out of that Big Bang. And from that, the entire molecular periodic table eventually arose out of that. So from physics, physics begat chemistry. And then after the chemical world, you know, birth things like Earth and all that stuff, the chemistry actually started to be able to form its own structures, and those macro structures somehow began to merge, and from which emerged biology. So living forms.

Emerged out of chemistry. So that's what science is about, is examining physics, chemistry and biology with very specific tools. That's the scientific method. Now, that's one side of the equation. The other side of the equation is metaphysics. So what metaphysics is about is the abstract notion of, well, what's behind these things, right? What actually caused physics to come together with chemistry to biology? What is the substance of the abstract notion of change? What makes these things accidentally and randomly come together and create forms and patterns? It's chaos theory, right? Like, what is the. What is the. The substance of things that emerge out of random chaotic motion?

Right?

So the alchemists and these are sort of people who believed in notions of metaphysics combined with material physics. They believe that there were. It's called sort of the. And J.K. rowling talks about it in the Harry Potter series, is the philosopher's stone. It's sort of this. This incredible substance that if you were able to drop into the material world, would cause incredible changes. So using mind tools, like, you know, what changes somebody's mind, that's metaphysics. So the alchemists were about bringing together the notion of mindful technologies that we have a difficult time measuring. Like, how do you measure a thought beyond the electrical impulses? They believe that the world of thought and the world of metaphysics and the world of storytelling. Because stories actually change the world in ways as powerfully as an atomic bomb. We now have a meta global narrative that has changed every single person on this planet in. In the matter of three months. That's extraordinarily powerful. So the alchemists believe that these two worlds could come together, the material world and the immaterial world of the mind. And alchemy is about bringing them together in such a way that we can harness that power to control the world, to bring certainty, to be able to say, oh, well, we're having trouble, we need some gold. Let's just convert this lead into gold, because we have this philosopher's stone that can do it. So all this stuff about magic and the black arts, they sort of were things that came off of the alchemical traditions of pre. It was actually concurrent with the scientific revolution, as I stated. Isaac Newton was an alchemist, right?

Yeah, I remember reading about that in the past.

Yeah. So it's a really. I mean. And this is one of the things that fascinated, I think, J.K. rowling, when she was like, well, what do I do? How do I, you know, how do I do a Hogwarts, which is about magic in a way that is historically grounded in fact. And she brilliantly came up with, you know, Nicholas Flamel was.

This alchemist that was a contemporary of Isaac Newton. And it was believed that he came close to this.

Primal substance called the philosopher's stone. And what I've sort of taken from that is that if we look at the philosopher's stone abstractly, as opposed to actually being able to own.

Would be this thing called the fear. And so the fear is the substance of storytelling, and it's the thing that causes change that's. And it's an unexpected event. So.

Just to get back to Carl Jung, he read all of this material and he came up with the concept, I think he called it an AON A I O N. And he proposed that it would have sort of the same form as the atomic structure, so it would have lots of sort of energy within it. And so. And Mark, in my book Cognitive Dominance, we really played off of that theme and we came up with this concept of this sort of atomic structure, of the fear which drops into our life like that banana peel and changes the course of our ability to attain our goals. So COVID 19, in my estimation, is objectively a virus that affects a very specific part of the population. And when we're dealing with viruses, we have to do certain things to keep down the infection Rate. And it seems like globally we've come to that conclusion and things are happening to try and contain the spread of the virus. And so objectively I'm sort of saying to myself.

I need to self isolate. I need to actually do what I've been doing for quite some time now. So this isn't really a big problem. I've been in quarantine since I was 41 years old.

And so that is, you know, the role of a lot of story people. We're introverts, right? A lot of us are introverts. And so this notion of being alone in a room with your computer and, and creating things out of nothing isn't so terrifying to us.

Right.

It's kind of the way things are. But subjectively.

We have to think about what's the global narrative. How can, how can we as, as storytellers and writers and artists, how can we help people metabolize this very, very big global. This is sort of like the equivalent of, you know, uranium. You know, this is a very, very large molecule of fear. Even though it's microscopic, subjectively it's dominating all of our inner narratives, which, you know, so my, my point about it is like, if you use the story grid and, and these concepts of the objective and the subjective and you start looking at your world.

Abstractly.

What it really helps you do is to stop sort of churning through the news cycle and stop churning through, oh my God, I don't know what to do. And what it does is it allows you to start to engage, to actually deal with and metabolize the changes that are occurring in the global sphere, while also enabling you to think about story in a very micro specific way. So if you say to yourself, what's. I know this is probably.

I'm just gonna say it anyway. If you say, I'm writing a scene, what's my COVID 19 drop in event? You know, what's the thing that's going to really, you know, really affect my protagonist? Now it doesn't mean that it has to be that sort of global pandemic viral threat. It could be discovering, you know, a matchbook from a hotel room that's in your wife's purse.

Yeah.

And your wife hasn't had a cigarette in 18 years. So that that tiny little matchbook for a particular person could be a, like a COVID 19 event to them. It might not be to other people, but to them it would be. So if you start thinking about unexpected events and how it can cause people to have a very emotional fear response Very quickly now. Let me just quickly go through the science of fear.

So fear is an emotion. It's. It's probably the primal. There's probably fear and pain are the two primal emotions.

Fear.

It's sort of the phenomena of fear occurs like this. Okay? Something happens unexpectedly that we didn't anticipate. So the first thing that we do, our five senses are seeing our sight, our smelling or hearing, etc. They pick up this unexpected event from this vast amount of information. And what it does is it goes right into a place in our brain called the amygdala. And, and the amygdala is sort of the primal brain. It's the thing that takes care of a lot of things that we don't have the time to think about. Okay. So what the amygdala does when it starts to get this response from our five sensory senses is that it basically tells us to freeze. Stop.

And that's our first response. We freeze. And the next response is, let's get out of here. We want to run away. So knowing this is really important. So if you have the urge to run away, you know what? Cool. That's exactly. It exactly makes sense. There's nothing. If you didn't have the runaway response, you would. You would have.

A brain problem.

And there are people who don't have it and they don't survive very long.

It's actually a very big problem. Okay. So you freeze, and then you want to run away. And the trick is to know that. So when you get that feeling, oh my gosh, I need to run away, you can actually say, oh, cool, this means something unexpected. Just drop, dropped in, right? So you can back channel it and you can say, the reason why I want to run away is something just happened that is unexpected. So I need to pay attention to whatever just happened. And then what you do is you start to take a look around, you sense the environment, what just happened that is making me want to run away.

And guess what that does? That starts to temper and dampen the anxiety and the necessity of needing to run away. It's amazing. So your, your desire to run away gets a little bit less and less and less the more you think about what just happened. So thinking about the objective and subjective realities of COVID 19 is actually going to dampen your anxiety, which is awesome. Okay, so the third thing, and this is really interesting, and I learned this not too long ago, there's another place, like, and it's so cool, and it's. I forget what it's called, but it's like this little area.

In the center of our brains. And this is in all mammals, right? So they discovered this in mice, and then they've been able to locate it in human brains. There's this little thing, and it's right in the middle of our brain. And when they sort of give it electrical impulses, it. It actually makes mice courageous.

And they've done experiments with, with human beings too. And when they stimulate it, it makes human beings more courageous. All right, so we've got our freeze, our flight, and then what happens is.

We make some choices in our minds that actually starts to send neural impulses to this center of our brain. And this gives us courage. And this is an actual.

Third stage. And what Mark and I kind of put forward in cognitive dominance is the way to stimulate that sort of section in our brain is to start doing things like looking at the objective and subjective components of an unexpected event. And then once that thing starts, gets stimulated, guess what happens? You start to have the. What's called the fight impulse. So it used to be that people thought it was freeze, flight, fight, and that it was a three stage process, but it's actually freezes the first stage and then that immediately shifts into flight. So you don't really have control of it. So you freeze and then you have the I gotta get the hell out of here response. And then you either run or if you stay and go, oh, this is the I want to run away from this experience. That means that something just happened that I need to take a look at. Let me start thinking about what just happened a microsecond ago. Oh my gosh, look down on the ground. There's a snake. Okay, well, what kind of snake is it? Well, it doesn't have, you know, it's not really that close to me. So how am I going to best deal with this snake? If I stand here and freeze, it's probably not going to, you know, snap at me because I'm not moving anyway. When you start thinking of that, what do I do about the snake that triggers that part of your brain which is the courage response and that fights the fear. So.

I find this tremendously helpful to me when I get nervous. Right, yeah. So when COVID 19 started, you and I, of course, immediately got on the phone and we started saying to ourselves, well, what are we going to do here? Because this is absolutely going to have a negative effect. It's going to be a negative influence on our cash flow.

Right, right.

Yeah. And literally we got on the phone within hours after the you know, shelter in place, order started to come across the country. So instead of us, you know, freaking out and it's nice to have a person that you can talk to and talk through it because everybody's a little bit embarrassed to be freaking out.

Yeah.

So when I, when, when we started talking, in the back of my mind I'm like, don't freak out. Tim's going to think you're a baby if you're freaking, freaking out about this. So. Right. And I think you were probably the same way. Like, I'm gonna act real cool.

Well, it was more like, well, Sean seems calm. I guess I'll stay calm.

Right. And so that's a good thing to have is people to hang out. And the great thing about our technology is you can do it over the phone, you can do it on a zoom call. It's not the end, you know, so you can stay away from people and still communicate with them in deep ways. So, so what did we do in those phone calls? But we were looking at the objective and the subjective, right? So the objective facts were, well, we're going to lose X number of dollars, our cash flow is going to go down. And then we had to say to ourselves, well, what are the subjective things? You know, and this is really important when you start looking at subjective issues is you need to go back to first principles of your, what I call your, kind of your cognitive operating system. Right. So I'm always updating my cognitive operating system because I want it to be as attuned to reality as possible. So when things are going well, I like to think about my cognitive operating system because that means I do, I'm not under a lot of pressure, so I can really make choices without a gun to my head, so to speak. So when things are going well, I try and think to myself, well, what is my long term goal here? What is it like? If I had to really boil it down to what are the most important things to me and then I can say, well, it's definitely my family. They're number one. I got to make sure that they're okay. That's, that's what I care the most about. And then, and then if I can do the things that I know that I should be doing in order to take care of my family, that's a bonus. Right. So if I can self actualize while also.

Bringing in enough revenue and, you know, necessities to take care of myself and my family, that is basically it. Now I can extend my family. It can go beyond my wife and my three children. It can go to. Well, what's. Well, Tim and his family, that's an extension of my family. So I'd like to make sure that whatever we do, Tim and his family can be taken care of and Steve, and Steve and his family. And so you see how I'm like sort of broadening my circle, right? And then I look at the probabilities and I say, well, how, how deeply affected is my broad circle of family going to be by this unexpected event? Is there a way that I can manipulate objective things like dollars in a bank account in such a way that I can protect, you know, the, the revenue streams that people rely upon from Story Grid and from Black Irish. So Jackie and Casey and all the other and Valerie and the Story Grid certified editors who, who are paid for the work that they do for Story Grid. I want to make sure that we can protect that, that global, the Story Grid Guild. How can we make sure that we're taking care of those people? So that is really a great thing to do because then it really limits my search space. Now I don't have to worry about taking care of everybody on the planet. I have to worry about this really wonderful circle of family. And.

I work towards subjectively.

Making sure that everyone knows that they're being supported by me as in the best possible way that I can. So that's a great method to get rid of all that flight fear. Like, yeah, sure, I, I also thought like, I'm going to suck every dollar I can out of every bank account that I have and I'm going to put all the money under my mattress and I'm going to, you know, get a big pipe and suck all the water out of the stream down the street. You know, that's crazy. You know, it's not crazy. It's reasonable if you're operating under a flight fear situation.

Right.

All right, so you can see how story and understanding the structure of story and understanding how the change events in story are extraordinarily helpful to me to contend with unexpected events because those are the things that drive a story. So it's this.

You know, it's this very, very helpful. If you can understand the structure of story and to understand the notion of fear and how it, it gets people to be fearful, then you have a toolbox that can help you start triggering that really cool part in the middle of your brain that gives you courage. It gives you the courage to think through and metabolize unexpected events in ways that will make, that will prove to be meaningful. Because the most important thing is like the principles and the values that you embrace in times of leisure, right. In times of no stress. You know, this is really important to me and I love story. So I'm going to dedicate my life to spreading my love of story. That's, that's my thing, you know, that's a thing that I thought of years and years and years ago. And so when things get very stressful, I can go, okay, well, what is my thing again? Oh, my thing is about story. Okay, so how can I maintain that meaning while contending with something that's difficult to deal with? Now I've got something that I can always go back to, right? So is draining my bank account and running away from the world and turning off my Internet connection, is that going to help me with my meaningful life and generating a love of story? No, that's not going to be so good. That's not going to end up well. I'd rather, you know, just continue to do everything I can to expand the story universe than to run away. All right, so just having that thought, guess what that does, that triggers courage in my mind. And it goes, oh, cool. So yeah, so you're not going to do that. So how can you do that other thing? So you maintain the values and the principles that you care about and that generates courage. So COVID 19 is. It's this big ball of global narrative meta abstract drop in event of a big ball of fear. And we storytellers deal with fear every single day of our life.

We construct fictional p H E R es in order to induce our characters fears.

So when it happens in the real world, we already have the tools necessary to break these things down, metabolize them, and to abide by our core values. So that's the way I'm. I'm dealing with COVID 19. And I think all of the story grid people are intuitively probably doing the same thing.

You know, how do you. I mean, I've talked for so long now. How do you. How are you dealing with this, Tim?

You know, it's interesting, as you were talking, I was thinking through just even how I deal with like little things that come along.

I feel like.

I've.

A while back I read this book called the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. And the thing that is the most that drives, that's driving like me and Candace crazy is we talk about all this stuff is that every time we start trying to talk about something, it ends with, well, we don't know what's going to happen. Right? Like, we can't talk about the vacation we had planned. We can't talk about the kids going back to school. We can't talk about. I mean, she started her new job yesterday. We can't really talk about that. Like, we can't talk about anything without the end of the road being like, we don't know. And for me, it's.

It's been this step of.

Just understanding that that's how life actually always is.

You know, and so.

Really focusing on. Because the joke is like. Which is getting old already, but like, the night, you know, at night I'm like, so what you got planned tomorrow? You know, because it's like, oh, we're going to sit around the house. But.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I like, it's interesting that. That freeze and then the flight and then the fight and then the idea of courage coming in the middle of that. And I think for me, it is a lot of, like, what you talked about, of, like, what's really important to.

Me.

You know, feeling what I feel in the moment because it's really easy to start like. Like when we were talking about. When you were talking about us processing what this means for Story Grid, it's like, well, it's really easy to be like, well, so many people are suffering and so many, you know, people are dying and people literally don't have work and. And, you know, I shouldn't worry about this stuff. And, you know, that can be a trap of, like, talking yourself out of the fear too, instead of just sitting in it, feeling it and letting it tell you some things without obsessing over it. And I don't know, it's been a lot of.

Really, it's helped me think, well, today I'm going to do today, because I have no idea what tomorrow could be.

Because it's like, one of my good friends owns the gym I go to and actually work out where I have my office. And he was like. He kept trying to like, okay, we're gonna do it this way and we're gonna do it this way and we're gonna have smaller classes and we're gonna make sure we clean everything. And then the mayor comes in, is like, okay, all gyms shut down. And he's like, well, I mean, like, the first line of his email to the. To everybody was like, well, we tried, you know, And.

And so it's.

I feel like it's. That.

That'S how I've been dealing with it is like anytime I find myself starting to spin up a future. I realize, like, now is all I have and which is always true, but is especially.

Kind of in my face right now.

So, yeah, I mean, I, I think. I think there's a part of. Not to go too matrixy here, but.

That was really the kicker of that story is that.

I think collectively across the globe, there's a tremendous opportunity to level up our ability to deal with unexpected events. I think we've been sort of.

Living in a simulated certainty reality and that the narratives that we've embraced in our lives from little kids, are now coming under a lot of assault. They're breaking down, they're fragmenting. So the idea that if you do the following things, you will become successful if you study hard in elementary school and you do well in junior high school, and you do well in high school, and then you go to a good college, and then because you go to a good college, you will be embraced and hired at a corporation that will take care of you for the rest of your life. And then you will get your retirement fund and then the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All that narrative is now obviously not working any longer. And there is no certainty there. There is uncertainty. And no matter how intelligent and how quickly we can come up with technologies and means to mechanize ideas and to figure out patterns, everything in the biological sphere breaks down eventually.

So that is just a reality. That is a deep, deep reality of our, our existence. And we can either fight that reality and say, well, no, we're going to figure out a better way and get the perfect system so that everybody is perfect all the time and nobody has any bad feelings. Well, that's never going to happen.

So this event has basically done a couple of things.

To me, it is clear, it is absolutely clear that we as human beings have far more similarities than we do differences.

Right, Right.

So, oh, man, we're all in this together. There's just no way around that fact. And that is a beautiful, beautiful thing for people to understand. Oh, my gosh, we're all in this together. It. This is a thing that has no. It has no political agenda. It's just. It attacks and it attacks all of us in ways that we, we can, we can eventually figure it out. So that's number one. And the second thing is the way that I've been thinking and processing the world is not really attuned to the way the world is.

So this idea of the power of now is extraordinarily great because you can make a choice today. You can make a choice And I make this choice. I try and make this choice every day where I say, now's the time to turn off the Internet and go across the street and play lacrosse or, you know, shoot hoops or play a board game or do the dishes or do something else that can actually, you know, make that moment a little bit better.

Yeah.

And this is. So we're getting this time out. You know, I read somewhere recently, and I thought this was a really good thought, is that someone said, well, COVID 19 is sort of nature's way of sending us to our rooms for, you know, messing up. You know, we're all taking a time out from nature. They're like, no, you've really messed up the world a little bit too much. You all need to go to your room for a while. And that's kind of a cool idea because.

We need to think about what our purpose is.

Is what we are doing, the most meaningful thing that we can come up with. Have we figured out that thing that we're really good at and makes us happy?

So, yeah, the power of now is really important. We've got to live for today, and we also have to live for each other in the long term. So it's got this double whammy message. COVID 19. It's like, you got to live today and you got to think about the future, and it's not paradoxical. You can do both.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the StoryGrid podcast. For everything StoryGrid related, check out storygrid.com and we now have our books from StoryGrid Publishing available. We have my book the Threshing, along with several craft books that we think you're really going to like. So if you go to storygrid.com books you'll be able to find those there as well. If you want to check out the show notes for this episode or any past episodes, all of that can be found@storygrid.com podcast. If you'd like to reach out to us, you can find us on Twitter @StoryGrid. We have also been building a very strong community over at the Story Grid Guild, where we have a lot of writers meeting daily to write together and level up their craft. So if you'd like to learn more about that, you can do that@storygrid.com.

That'S G U I L D. And lastly, if you'd like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcasts and leaving a rating and review thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at Story Grid. We hope you stay safe and we will see you next week.