Curious stories of coexistence

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Challenge you.

“We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?”

And even change you. I literally feel like I'm in different parts of it. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.

From TED and NPR. I'm a newszomerotie. These are the sounds of a family of otters. They're in a river, some adults with their pups, chattering and playing.

And then they start to form sort of a line, a chain of otters, crowning the small fish swimming amongst them. They heard fish with their pups. They technically corral them because they're often corraling them against a fixed surface like the side of the canal. This is Philip John's.

He's a myologist and geneticist who studies animal behavior like those in these otters.

“And I think what's going on is the pups are following really simple rules that might go”

swim next to mom if there's a fish in front of me eat it. And the adults are coordinating things through their vocalizations. So, you know, there is one vocalization that somebody's saying that's like, okay, dive. You know, here we go and they all dive together. That's really cool.

Otter behavior is, of course, fascinating. But what's more surprising, perhaps, is where exactly these otters are. Not off the Pacific coast or in North American rivers. These otters are living and thriving in the middle of one of the busiest, most modern cities in the world, Singapore. It's got this crazy enormous architecture and it is kind of a city in the jungle.

City state home to six million people and all kinds of high tech companies all surrounded by

trees and waterways. And because of this geography, the city is a mix of steel and glass skyscrapers and wildlife. Some of that wildlife is extremely charismatic. We have a pie of horn bills. These birds with really, really large bills. We have things like flying lizards. They're in the genus Draco.

We have coologos, which is one of my favorite. These strange, not turtle and gliding mammals. And then there are tons of snakes in Singapore. Some of them are quite beautiful.

“They remember when one of my early outing, somebody said, oh yeah, when you walk over there,”

just keep your eyes open because there's a cobra that hangs out around there. Yesterday, I was walking at home and, you know, I walk home between these brand new giant condos, you know, they're over 30 floors high. They're glassing steel. And I look up and there's a white bellied sea eagle, you know, this very large bird,

circling one of the condos. And it's, it's just incredible because, you know, it's kind of like

the structure of the position of, you know, nature and modernity, which brings us back to the others that live here too. The Asian small-clod otter and the more common and larger, smooth coated otter. This is a really social species of otter. They have multiple breads that live with the dominant pair, the matriarch and the patriarchy. And so you might have a family of 20 animals. And this might be, you know, three successive breads of offspring that are still living with

the parents. harmonious, large families of otters sound lovely. But here's the problem with all these otter families prospering side by side. They defend territories and they defend the violently. They fight. And the fights are injurious. You know, otters get hurt. Sometimes otters get killed. It's not pleasant to watch. Philip remembers one particular beef between two otter families that played out downtown. And by right downtown, I mean, right downtown at rush hour,

the otters would swim toward each other and they're screaming at each other and they're swimming around their biting and the, the water is beat to a froth. And you look on the banks and they're literally thousands, tens of thousands of people who are on their way to work, you know,

Every day we hear about nations, different groups of people struggling to get along. Humanity seems

“unable to overcome its differences. But what can we learn from more unusual examples of strange”

bed fellows? How are different species or provocative scientific ideas? Maybe even conflicting emotions finding ways to live in harmony? Today on the show, coexistence. Ideas about what we can do to adapt, make peace with, maybe even find pleasure in conflict. When biologists Philip John's first arrived in Singapore, he learned that this wasn't the first time that routy families of

otters had made their home there. All of this was just incredible to me. Here he is on the Ted

stage. And part of the reason it was incredible to everybody is that the otters were returning after a long absence. So we know that there were otters in Singapore, in sometime before the mid 20th century. But then Singapore started to change. It modernized, it started to industrialize and all of a sudden the waterways got filthy. What happened was they started to fill with sludge, industrial pollution, and dead animals to the point where they stank. And otters live in water.

They eat fish in water and they couldn't eat and live in waterways that were that dirty. So they left. But things changed again. Singapore enacted policies to clean up their waterways

and they were really, really successful. So all of a sudden instead of having waterways that were

filled with filth, we had waterways that were filled with fish. And from the otters' points of you, they were feeding troughs. So they came back. And now we have lots of otters all over Singapore. How many otters are we talking here? Are we talking like you turn a corner and you look at water and there's an otter there? Yeah. The otters live in the waterways and the waterways typically

“have some kind of park around them. I think they're probably 20 families. And if you're an otter,”

being an otter is pretty cool in Singapore because you know, you wake up, you fish, you roll around in the dirt, you play, and then you go back to sleep. And it's kind of awesome. And so I can

be on one side of the river, looking across the river, watching a family of otters do its thing

through binoculars or a camera. And they're absolutely unfazed. So they don't take any mind of you. But I have to ask you, like if you put in the words, otter and Singapore, there's some crazy headlines that come up. Yeah. So not all the interactions have been benign. There have been a very few incidences where the otters have bitten people. And I think all of those were cases where either somebody was behaving unwisely or where the otters had pups. And when otters have young pups,

they become defensive. They're less likely to be sort of sanguine about people getting close to them. I have to say, especially the British press seems to love picking up stories like this one. Fearing for his life. Man attacked by pack of otters in a Singapore park said he thought he was going to die. 26 wounds on his botox legs and fingers while on his usual 6 a.m. walk. That case, as I understand it was a case where the man was very close to a group of otters.

And it was a big family. And another man jogged directly through the group of otters. In this case, the guy who got bitten was kind of an innocent bystander, but the otters got confused. You know, it's hard to think of a situation where running through a group of wild animals is acceptable. And the otters aren't small. They can hurt somebody. So that's been one issue and it has been an issue. And otters also have eaten a lot of fish.

They're private home and killed more than 50 fish. You know, people keep fish in Singapore. People keep koi and these koi are large. They're expensive. They're long live. They're pets. They're pets that they're with us all over 20 plus years. You know, and when I say expensive, I mean the koi pond might have tens of thousands of dollars of koi in it. You know, those kinds of human wildlife conflicts or things that we can't kind of sweep away.

“We have to be realistic about them. But within that context, I think there's room for”

people and animals to coexist even in some places as urban as Singapore. And so people who might start otter watching because they want to get photographs of cute pops might continue to do other things because they've formed a connection with nature. And we see this all the time

otters or to a pair of foreign bills on campus or to a bird that visits them on their balcony, we need these personal connections and we see them all over the place. Singapore has enacted a lot of policies that make these kinds of connections a lot easier. There are over 300 parks in nature reserves. Singapore has a plan that no one should be more than 10 minutes away from some kind of park. One of the effects of this is that people will have more chances to interact with nature

“and they'll have more chances to care. I think we're trying to get away from something where”

nature is over there on the other side of a fence or a wall or something like that. Nature is something that's around us and above us and beside us and that's true in lots of places including in cities. So I think this also raises other questions such as "Can cities be wildlife refuges?" Is this something that we can protect and maybe foster and grow? As cities grow and there are more humans on the planet and we spread and take more space,

what are some of the lessons that other city dwellers or urban planners can take from how humans and otters are figuring out ways to coexist? We have to be realistic that we can't accommodate all wildlife. Having said that, we can be remarkably accepting of a lot of wildlife.

One of the most amazing things to me was the mountain line that lived in Griffith Park

in Los Angeles for years and not everybody is thrilled about it and there's good reason to be

“concerned about having a large wild cat living inside the city of Los Angeles. But I think for”

the most part people were kind of proud of it. If you go to social media sites of people who have things like camera traps in their backyard, a lot of people are thrilled that they have bobcats periodically in their backyard or that they're coyotes that come and visit in their backyard. And again, there is the potential for human wildlife conflict. Coyotes eat a lot of cats and dogs. We have to be clear right about that. But I think in many cases we can make some very modest

concessions and when we do coexistence is certainly possible and it's maybe something that can be encouraged. That's my hope. It really is kind of wonderful to do things like walk-to-work and see

gliding lizards, seeing lizards that are gliding from trees. Right, just amazing things like this

or to see, you know, eagles flying among the skyscrapers, it just crazy things like that.

“You know, if familiarity breeds empathy, then I think it helps us to have more familiarity.”

That was Phillip Johns. He is a biologist and associate professor at the Yale National University of Singapore College. You can watch his full talk at TED.com. On the show today, ideas about coexistence. I'm a new Shazamuroti and you're listening to the TED radio hour from NBR. We'll be right back. These days, it feels like the news changes every hour. Well, NPR has a podcast that does that too. NBR News now brings you a fresh five-minute episode every hour of the day with the latest,

most important headlines in episodes that are clear, fact-based and easy to digest.

Listen to NPR News now on the NBR app or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the TED radio hour from NBR. One, two, three, four, five. Can you hear me? I'm a new Shazamuroti. Hi, Avi. Hi, good to speak with you, one. And you and today on the show, co-existent. It sounds like it's clicking in and out a little bit. Okay, let me see, maybe the connection with other humans, animals,

and whatever is out there in space. Would you mind just introducing yourself? Tell us your name and what you do. My name is Avi Lough, and I have the privilege of being a scientist, meaning that I can follow my childhood curiosity without pretending to be the adult in the room. If you know a lot about astrophysics, then you know who Avi Lough is. For the past four decades, he has been a leader in the field. I'm a tenured professor at Harvard University,

and then I was also a chair of the Astronomy Department at Harvard for nine years.

I've been the director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard. I was the founding director of Harvard's black hall initiative. He's written nine books. I chair the board of physics and astronomy

of the National Academies to chair the advisory board for the breakthrough starshot initiative. Yeah, he's a big deal.

But over the last decade or so, he has put that reputation in jeopardy by searching

“for something else in the cosmos. I think it will be the biggest discovery in science ever made”

in terms of its impact on the future of humanity. Science of life. We are searching for artifacts that may have been manufactured by extraterrestrial civilizations. That's right. Avi is looking for aliens. Yes, that's my latest hobby. But why? Why go on a quest that to some of his fellow scientists sounds ridiculous? You know, one reason I search for hiring intelligence in interest that are space is because I don't often find it here on earth. As far as Avi is concerned,

the scientific method requires us to ask questions and seek answers. So, why is he doing this? He says, "Why not?" But exploring the possibility of extraterrestrial life

“has created a huge rift between him and many of his colleagues. They are questioning whether”

his ideas should even exist within their scientific community, just as Avi wonders whether we humans coexist with other life forms. Space is vast. It's measured in tens of thousands of lighters just within the Milky Way galaxy alone. So, to imagine, you know, there are other beings like us on similar rocks far away. It's very natural. I mean, you're right. Everyone, we love to watch movies about other beings that might be out there in the universe. We love to think about this

idea that we might not be alone. It is fascinating to people. And you are saying, well, you know, let's use the science to see if there is a way that it might be. Sure. Exactly. Let's use the

scientific method, which is basically, let's not imagine anything the way Hollywood does. Let's

not assume anything to make progress. We need to collect data and, you know, no knowledge does not fall

“into our lab. And so, you have to put effort, money, time in order to design, instruments that”

will detect those very challenging signals. Here's Avi Lob on the Ted stage. I'm just a curious farm boy. And I wonder about the world around. And I hate to behave like the adults in the room because they often pretend to know more than we actually know. And that bothered me since I was a young kid. And so I decided to become a scientist and answer the questions based on evidence, not based on prejudice. And for 70 years, we've been searching for radio signals.

This is equivalent to staying at home and waiting for a phone call that may never come because

nobody cares that we are lonely. A much better approach is to check if there is any object in our backyard that may have arrived from a neighbor's yard like a tennis ball that may tell us that the neighbor plays tennis. People often say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but they're not seeking the evidence. So let's just look around. To understand why Avi began his search for alien life, we need to go back to 2017

when scientists spotted a strange object in the sky. This was an object called Omuamua, which means the scout in the Hawaiian language. It was discovered by telescope named the Panstars in Hawaii on Mount Haleakala. Omuamua was unlike anything Avi and other astrophysicists had ever seen before. And it raised a lot of questions. Namely, what was it and where did it come from? At first, you know, we just knew that this is an object from outside the store because it moved too fast

the solar system. So everyone assumed that it must be an asteroid or a comet. The type of objects

we find within the solar system rocks or icy rocks. But there was no cometary tale. Even more perplexing was the way that the object moved through space. The object showed a push away from the sun by some mysterious force. And so it's a shift. There was something pushing it away from the sun. It's a non-governmental acceleration. But there was no cometary of

“operation, no gas or dust around it. So the question was, what is exerting this force on the object?”

Scientists looked for an explanation. Any explanation. You know, some of my colleagues argued

maybe you can explain these anomalies by imagining a hydrogen-nice bag, a chunk of frozen hydrogen.

We've said there's someone that said, well, maybe it's a nitrogen-nice. And then someone that said, well, maybe it's a dust bunny. But Avi wasn't convinced. He suggested another hypothesis that perhaps Umura was not naturally occurring. Perhaps it was produced by something or someone from another planet. Perhaps it was alien technology. And just the suggestion that it might be artificial got me into trouble because I was not supposed to consider that possibility. How

“dare you even think about that? Uh-huh. It's a rock of a type that we've never seen before period.”

Avi published a paper about his hypothesis, which launched a slew of criticism from his colleagues,

who said that he was leaping to the conclusion that Mua Mua was proof of aliens without exhausting every other possibility. All of the alternative explanations had issues. And I just said, let's keep the artificial origin on the table because we are producing space trash and other civilization might have done the same. Then in 2023, two scientists published a paper in nature with a new explanation for Umura that it was simply a comet with no tail.

Scientists now call this a dark comet and object that moves like a comet but looks like an asteroid.

“The explanation does not satisfy Avi. Because the only way you define a comet is by detecting”

its cometary tail. That's what a comet is. So if you say that an elephant is an unstriped zebra, you know, that sounds strange because it's not the same animal. Okay? And so my point is, when you don't see a cometary tail, don't call it a comet. In 2024 researchers found more objects that move like comets but look more like asteroids, calling them "dark comets." By now, most scientists have moved on from the Umura debate. But the public is not.

Ever since his suggestion that Umura could be a sign of alien life, Avi has gotten more attention and funding from people outside the world of astrophysics. He may have lost favor with his colleagues, but he's gained a whole new audience. Yes, on the one hand, the public really was extremely fascinated by this possibility. And I got a huge amount of attention from the media, something that I was not familiar with before. And I was also contacted by literary agent

to write a book which ended up being extraterrestrial, became bestseller. And I participated in about 3,500 podcasts interviews. Netflix is producing a documentary. Thanks to all this attention. In 2021, Avi co-founded the Galileo Project at Harvard. A research program dedicated to searching for alien technology on and near Earth. Avi and his team have received millions of dollars in private funding from a long list of

Umura wealthy donors. We built an observatory at Harvard University. It's a unique observatory. Usually astronomical observatories are focusing on a small portion of the sky and looking at very distant sources. But here we are looking at the entire sky all the time. And in particular, searching for objects near Earth that are just overhead. And they were using infrared cameras, optical cameras, radio sensors, audio sensors, and analyzing the data with machine learning software.

Using state-of-the-art algorithms to figure out if there are any objects that are not familiar.

we know about airplanes, leaves, clouds, satellites, balloons, drones. These are things we know

“about. And is there anything else? And if we find an object that is maneuvering in ways that does not”

mimic the flight characteristics of non-objects, we will write a paper about it and share it with a scientific community. And for me, having more data is really a bliss because once you have a lot of

data, it will become clear whether we're dealing with a rock of a type that we've never seen before,

or maybe some artificial object. And at some point, it would be impossible to ignore it. There are probably going to be people listening who are saying, why? And these are scientists on Earth right now who would say, "Why are you giving Avilab the mic?" You have become a bit of a pariah in your field. I want to quote one astrophysicist Steve Dash, who said people are sick of hearing about Avilab's wild claims, it's polluting good science, conflating the good science

we do with this ridiculous sensationalism and sucking all the oxygen out of the room. There's a

lot of iron towards you, a field that embraced you for the longest time. And now, what's it like

having them call you names? Yeah, I really don't like that, but one thing I learned is that you know, if you don't want to get dirty, don't mad wrestle. So I don't respond to those. I am still the director of the Institute for Thin Computation. I work with students, I work with postdocs, I just gave a lecture at the black hole initiative about premodial black holes. So I continue to work on other subjects as well and the people who know me, you know, are very

supportive because they know that I'm doing it, not out of any other reason than advocating for

“something I believe in, that should be studied. And, you know, I borrowed the approach from”

the research on dark matter that I worked on early on in my career. You know, we don't know what

85% of the matter in the universe is. So billions of dollars have spent on the searches for dark matter specific types of particles that were proposed by theories like myself. We're very much rewarded by attention and so forth. So I have that experience. And for me, it's no different, but for some reason, this particular subject is making some people very upset. And those are people who are upset about the public attention that I'm getting. You know, when I gave my class at

Harvard, in the opening lecture, I asked the students, what is the strongest force in academia? Is it gravity? Is it electromagnetism? They were quiet and then I answered the question, myself, I said, no, it's jealousy. Huh. Okay, can I ask you, how, how would you know? You've given us several examples of all the data and specimens that you're collecting and sort of sifting through all of this? How will you know, for sure, what would be the moment where you could tell the rest

of the world? Yes, we are not alone. We are co-existing with something else that is alive. Well, that's relatively straightforward. If you have good enough data, for example, if we had an image of an interstellar object, then you see bolts and screws and you see that it looks like a technological object. There is no doubt that it's not a rock. That would be clear evidence. Let's say this did

“happen. How would it change things for us? What do you must have imagined this scenario in your mind?”

Yes, I think it will change our perspective because when you find a partner, it changes the meaning of your existence. We know that from our personal lives. And here I'm just talking about finding a partner in the global scheme of the cosmos. These are all the earth's sun systems. There are 100 billions of them in the Milky Way galaxy alone. We see so many houses like our own and to me, it's very natural to imagine that there are residents that we can learn from. So just paying attention

to our cosmic neighborhood, you know, we allow us to mature and realize that what we usually care about is not as important as the bigger scheme of things. And we could do better by paying attention

Way galaxy. They look like lights in cabins of a giant spaceship, the Milky Way sailing through space.

“And I wonder if there are other passengers in those cabins, there are a hundred billion of them”

comparable to the number of people who ever lived on earth. It would be arrogant to think otherwise that we are alone, that we are unique and special, especially if you read the news every day. We are not the pinnacle of creation. There is room for improvement. And so the next Copernican Revolution would be that we are not at the intellectual center of the universe. Not only that we are not at the physical center of the universe, but actually,

you know, we arrive to the play relatively late. We are not at the center of stage.

The play is not about us. We should be modest. We keep thinking that it's about us, but it's not.

“And we better find other actors that will tell us what the play is about.”

That was Astrophysicist Avilob. He is a professor of science at Harvard University's Department of Astronomy. Since we spoke Avil has put out similar theories about another interstellar object called Three Eye Atlas, which was discovered in 2025. It is still being studied, but for now, NASA and the majority of the scientific community maintain that its origins are natural,

not alien. You can see Avilobes, [email protected]. On the show today, co-existence. I'm Anush Zamorodi

and you are listening to the Ted Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. These days, it feels like the news changes every hour. Well, NPR has a podcast that does that too. NPR News Now brings you a fresh five-minute episode every hour of the day,

“with the latest most important headlines in episodes that are clear, fact-based and easy to digest.”

Listen to NPR News Now on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the Ted Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anush Zamorodi. On the show today, we are exploring co-existence. And our next speaker tells us the story of her family. A warning we do talk about suicide. We really can't have happiness without sadness. We can't have joy without pain. We also cannot have bravery without fear. Instead of being opposites, those things are teammates.

It took writer Laurel Breitman decades to understand this lesson. But the seeds were planted in her childhood. Quite literally, she grew up on an avocado ranch outside of Los Angeles. We are about 20 miles inland in a really gorgeous canyon that is lined with fruit orchards. So you can often smell avocados blooming or lemon trees blooming. Her earliest memories are of her parents teaching her and her brother how to work on the ranch.

You know, pulling out orchards that we're failing in planting new orchards, rebuilding the main ranch house, restoring the corals and really just rehabbing the landscape in a lot of ways. We helped spread fertilizer and prune and we would just kind of take breaks and play and then come back and help them. Alongside those farming chores, Laurel's father also taught them some other life lessons. But they were really specific skills to like what my dad cared about.

So like all the member nations of the UN, how the Dewey decimal system worked. You really want me to like beat men at things that were stereotypically male. That was like a thing a point of pride. So he wanted me to be able to like outfish any guy who might dare underestimate me or repair a carburetor or be really good at pool. These were skills he wanted to pass on because when Laurel was three years old,

her father was diagnosed with bone cancer. It started in his knee, then metastasized and spread to other parts of his body. And so from that day forward, we lived between scans. So sometimes

before he had a recurrence was about four and a half, five years. Oh wow. So that was a great

“period of time. But that's how we lived. You know, we tried to fit as much life and memory making”

and togetherness into those periods of time between therapy or surgery or treatment or scan. So for most of her childhood, Laurel grew up with a constant feeling of dread knowing that every one of those lessons and memory making moments was her father's attempt to make the most of the time he had left. So another thing my dad did was that he taught himself how to be a beekeeper. And he knew that ancient Egyptians had used honey to treat wounds and for other

medical applications. It's a really good natural antibiotic. And because of that, honey that the Egyptians put away is still good. Like in some cases thousands of years later. So he started putting away a lot of honey like buckets and buckets of honey. And he knew that the honey would outlive him.

“And I think he hoped that, you know, we would start it into our coffee or tea long after he was gone”

and we would think of him and we would know how much he loved us. He was so scared and heartbroken that he was going to have to leave us before we were ready before he was ready. Amazingly he lived 14 years with this disease. So he I lived as partners as many many times over

and, you know, he always used to tell us like when I can enjoy life with you and your mom and your

brother, I'm going to die. And then I was a junior in high school and I found a pill bottle and there was a little note tied around it. There was dosage instructions on the note and I kind of immediately knew what it was. Suddenly everything clicked into place and I realized my dad had a lethal prescription. You know, right to die medication was not legal in California though

“at the time. And so I knew I wasn't supposed to know about this. And so I just wrapped it up”

and I put it back in the cabinet and then I never spoke of it again. And so that added another sort of dread layer I'd say to the everyday where I knew he had this but I didn't know when he was

going to take it and he didn't know when he was going to take it. Tell us how it finally happened

about six months later he and I got into a terrible fight on the phone. I wasn't at home and I had called home and he was hassling me about my college applications of all things. They were they were doing a few weeks and he was telling me I had to get them in and you know I was a certainly teenager you know and I yelled at him and I was like I don't know why you're giving me such a hard time like I was so mad and I hung up on him and as I was hanging the phone back in the cradle could hear

him say strongly through the phone I love you and I was just like I am not saying that back he needs to know he's being unreasonable and I slammed the phone down and unbeknownst to me that was the last time we would talk and the reason he was hassling me was because he knew he was going to take his medical aid in dying medication and he knew I was going to be upset and not be able to apply to college and he wanted to make sure I did it and by the time I got home a few hours later

he had taken his medication and he was unconscious and I would never hear its voice again

that was your senior year of high school yeah I was 17 I mean it's kind of amazing what happened next you at least on the face of it absolutely thrived you went to Cornell University you played division one sports after being an all-American lacrosse player you were class president you were a summa kanlaudi you wrote bestselling books like you went to MIT for a PhD like you again on the face of it did

your father proud yeah you know I did you know in the wake of his death I felt so guilty I lived with a crushing sense of guilt that you know someone who was good would not have hung up on her dying father would have said she loved him here here was somebody who had sacrificed everything for time to teach me things you know like how how to beat a man at pool you know I felt because of that that when it really mattered I had let him down

child like I took them as a literal to do list and I went down the list and I was like okay

“he wanted this for me I'm going to do this he wanted that he didn't get to see this place I'm going”

to make sure I get to see this place and I I really approached his dreams for me as like marching orders I dealt with his death by doubling down on the things he wanted for me and then in my mid-30s I realized I was just completely exhausted. Laurel Bratman continues from the Ted stage I had been living my entire adult life in a way to prove to myself that I was good I was using achievement and all of the shiny things that come along with it as a way of anesthetizing my own

bad feelings of shame regret and fear those feelings were so big I worried that if I let myself

feel them for even a minute I would never ever feel anything else again but you cannot kill negative

feelings sadly with work and avoidance and my and came back with a jolt on the outside I was successful and thriving and on the inside I was anxious terrified and questioning my worth by avoiding all of the negative feelings I was muting the fantastic ones too I was so scared about missing out and losing more of the best things in life joy, awe, love, wonder that I couldn't even let myself experience them I needed to find a new way to be I wanted to find a new way to be

I had learned that when a young person has a trauma they can get stuck developmentally at that age of whatever age you were when the hard thing happened so I was kind of like you know a place to see an ant in amber but as a 17 year old so I got sort of developmentally stuck in some ways at 17 and I felt like I needed some help moving past that and opening myself up to feeling everything I mean how did you come to that realization because you say it took you years to

understand that your father expected himself to be superhuman and by extension you too how did you figure out that like I mean that could be the end of the story and my father died and I took

everything he taught me and I had this amazing life but you know yeah if only I mean what happened was

was a little bit harder to understand and I reached the end of the list and I wasn't happy immediately you know what I noticed kind of first was that it was getting really really hard for me to be in relationships and I really wanted to be in love and I wanted partnership and when I got close

“to people I got really uncomfortable I think I was just you know scared I to this day I hate falling”

in love you know it's terrible to love anyone or anything because it can be taken for you so I did a bunch of stuff I interviewed a ton of grief specialists and therapists but it would hit me the hardest was becoming a volunteer at a grief support organization for kids so many of them thought they were bad too they'd been out of the room playing when their mom died or they'd said something in anger to an ill parent that they regretted and I could so clearly see that the

painful things that happened to these kids were not their fault so the first time I was able to see

that that was probably true for me too by blaming themselves the kids were making their losses make sense even though it hurt to blame themselves it gave them a reason for the terrible thing that happened like losing someone they love for no reason at all maybe some of you can relate often when we feel difficult things we blame ourselves because it's easier than admitting we

“have no control that's what I had been doing for the 25 years since my dad died but just because”

you feel guilt and shame does not mean you did something wrong just because you feel regret does not necessarily mean you should have acted differently it sounds very simple and it is very

test you and teach you at the same time what struck you about the way these kids were

“processing or dealing with losing someone in their life that was different from what you had gone”

through at a center like this the kids are around other kids who have had similar experiences

and was a really powerful thing for me to watch when activity we would do is you know draw your

grief and I remember sitting next to one child who was drawing a sneaker wave of grief kind of like has tsunami and I remember them getting pretty sad explaining it and then two seconds later like they're on the jungle gym you know shrieking with joy and watching that really affected me profoundly because I realized I could do the same for myself that I the hard things could live a long side my joy that I could be working and I could take a beat and I could let myself have a

have a moment and then I could get right back into it what did happy sad or this coexistence of to vastly different emotions or we think of them as being vastly different what did that look like

“for you I had to learn how to do it I think I saw the depth of my despair and it scared me so”

much that I needed to bury it and it really wasn't until I realized that that grief that I had tried to to lock away and that was masquerading as self-doubt and as shame and guilt was going to keep me from what I wanted most in life which is to love other people well and to be a service and to connect with people and places and things but I will say it's like a daily practice and it comes up in the damnedest ways so like I have this thing that I can't add someone to my favorite

list of my phone or something terrible will happen to me and so I finally like I think we've been

married for like a year I like finally added my husband to my favorite list on my iPhone and it was like

“you can you can do this all it's gonna be fine I guess what he is still with us you know I live in”

an area too for example where wildfires are now a constant threat and I have to make peace with that you know so I was so scared that if I hung the things I loved on the wall that they would burn down that I you know it would slow me down from grabbing them as I as I left the house you know so I this is a daily daily practice where I have to live with the anxiety and the fear and somehow let my enjoyment and pleasure find a way in around it and through it that was best-selling author

Laurel Bratman her latest book is called What Looks Like Brevery an epic journey through loss to love you can see her talks at ted.com by the way in 2017 a wildfire did reach Laurel's childhood home the ranch burned down and she lost many of the structures her father had built to pass on

but miraculously the chicken coop survived which was incredible and a few other things

including one small shed and I was going through it and we found a bucket of honey like a five gallon bucket of honey and it was fine it wasn't even smoky you know even in the wake of like the devastation of the wildfire the million other kinds of losses that come for us and had come for me honey itself was just perfect as if it had just been poured in the bucket yesterday and so now you know I don't have any family photos left or very few but I have honey if you or someone you know

maybe considering suicide or is in crisis call or text 988 to reach the suicide and crisis lifeline thank you so much for listening to our show today this episode was produced by James Delahousee Katie Montelione and Harshana Hada it was edited by Sanna's Mexican poor Rachel Faulkner White and me our production staff at NBR also includes Fiona Guren and Matthew Clutier our executive producer is Irene Nuguchi our audio engineers were Jimmy Keely Becky Brown and Zo vangenhoven our theme music

Alejandra Salazar and Daniela Bellarezo I'm a new shizamorodi and you have been listening to the

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