John Dickerson's Navel Gazing: The Meaning Behind All This Navel Gazing

John Dickerson
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Subject to credit approval. Daily Cash is available via Apple Cash card issued by Green Dot bank, member FDIC, or as a statement, credit terms and more@applecard.com. dot hello and welcome to Navel Gazing, episode nine of season one. Notebook 58, page 10 September 16, 2021. You don't measure your life the way you measure your writing.

Nan Nan is our youngest who I encountered in the kitchen, fresh from the garret, where I had just pawed through the box of notebooks for the first time, the exercise you experienced in episode eight. I was lolling around with a head full of frothy ideas, trying to figure out just what to make of that experience. Lily padding through periods of my life on the orange carpet, there had been something transporting, curiosity, poking, inviting about the exercise. There was something in this material I should do, something with, whatever was there. But what should I do?

It was in this frame that Nan discovered me. I unfolded the contents of my thought and received this life advice.

In retrospect, I'm surprised that any conversation took place at all, let alone one sufficient to produce a quotation to be copied down into the notebook. Nan, who at the time was 18 and a senior in high school, liked to be in those parts of the house which had as their defining characteristic. Their sole characteristic, really, was that they were spaces in which Anne and I were not. A sense of being alone that started this podcast in episode one, to Nan, would have been heaven.

I dont remember the scene in the kitchen precisely from September 2021, but my supposition is that when I arrived, Nan had been preoccupied, uncaffeinated, focused on the promise of the coffee maker. The kitchen is narrow, like a subway car, but unlike a subway, the kitchen only has one exit. There was no time for Nan to hurl the grappling hook out of the window to make the escape. Usually Ann is the one who gets pinned down when I arrive in sundry moods, trying to work out my writing out loud, which is what I think I'm doing, but which is more correctly seen as a kind of elaborate fishing for compliments exercise, where I come in waving around my latest notion, seeking universal agreement and bristling at any corrective suggestions, which is the ritual I perform until I realize that the corrective suggestion is, in fact, in fact, the correct suggestion. Oh, honey, it's the best part of my day.

And now you know why Anne is a saint. Mustering the social energy day after day for this kind of thing is a real chore. Here's what I was trying to puzzle out, though, as I came upon nan. What did I owe the collection of notebooks? And what did I owe myself?

I make meaning of things for a living. So these questions were more than a personal moment of introspection. They were a professional test. Didn't the notebooks demand to be figured out through writing? Wasn't there a book in this collection?

Something about memory, the passage of time, parenting, attention to the divinity of life's small moments? If there wasn't a book, it wouldn't be the material that faltered. It would mean the writer had failed, that I had failed. Stand back. Hot take in the kitchen.

I was in the throes of a hot take. Hot takes are the worst, the scourge of social media. They are the product of the blurting response galloping ahead of the consider what you're saying impulse.

But hot takes are only corrosive if you stab everyone in the chest with them, as if you've just said something that is blindingly obvious and elementally true, as you expect, maybe marble quarries to spring to life to produce stone into which artisans will chisel your wisdom, which to you is nothing more than the smooth operation of your dandy cerebellum. When the hot takes are kept to yourself, bold, speculative, but mummified, the hot take is a crucial part of figuring things out. Its the scientists hypothesis, necessarily based on limited information, designed to be overturned by new information, or affirmed. If youre lucky enough that it goes that way. No one could be a good observer, said Darwin, unless he was an active theorizer.

Heres the theory I was testing out. If you spent a lifetime making meaning of things, which is what a journalist does, and youre presented with a collection of your own making, shouldnt you at least be able to make meaning of that? If you cant, with this zesty harvest close at hand, doesnt that render a verdict on your quality as a meaning maker? And since youve devoted your life to that meaning making, doesn't that render a judgment on your life? You don't measure your life the way you measure your writing.

Came back the response from Nan, which was exactly correct. It's one of the joys of parenting when you hear wisdom back from your kids. Life is about much more than what you do, even if what you do is a vocation that follows you into the kitchen, the bathroom, the corner saloon, or drives you to the corner saloon, as the case may be. The second reason Nan spoke truth is that the kind of measurement I was positing in my theory misunderstands writing. And being a writer, writing is hard.

It disappoints. It's nonlinear. You may get better at writing as you age, but you level off or you get more ambitious as you get better, which means the level of possible defeat is always the same at every level, because you're always raising the bar. Also, nimrod, just because you think you can write about one thing doesnt mean you can write about another kind of thing. And you call yourself a writer.

Measuring your life by the skill of your writing would be like measuring your life by your ability to lift school buses. Youre setting yourself up for failure. So I return to the garret in the glow of my childs wisdom about the stakes of this material. Nan's wisdom helps snap the initial frenzy to definitively solve the meaning of the notebooks, a reminder that life is broader than any one domain, even for someone whose vocation is meaning making. I was freed from my existential response, which I had blundered into how quickly a brain can go from theorizing to theorizing about failure.

So there it was, resolved to measure your life by your ability to write about your own life. Even when the sous chef has laid out all the material in this tidy stack of notebooks. That would be a foolish measurement. As foolish as measuring your life by the ability to lift a school bus? I was resolved, im going to build a wooden boat or something with my free time.

Then I looked at the box of notebooks and then looked down at my knuckles, which were white from gripping the bumper of the school bus as I strained to lift it, while misses McClatchys homeroom pressed their faces at the windows like ham in the plastic Applewood package. The desire to do something with these damn notebooks was not dispelled by the visit to the kitchen and the espresso shot of unassailable wisdom. Why? I shall try to deconstruct what was going on and lay the parts out on the lawn so we can take a look at them. I will travel upstream from my impression to see if I can find the source, and I think in this exercise there are universal principles which can be teased out of what we all by now in this episode nine can agree are my highly idiosyncratic ways of bumping through the world first, I was experiencing a classic stock taking moment, a normal kind of life assessing moment that lands on your lapel at funerals, high school reunions, at weddings, or on vacation, when your parent fills the silences with questions about why you haven't amounted to much.

And did you know your cousin Alphonse is a doctor? In a stock taking moment, you are forced to reckon with your dreams, your regrets, your progress, and whether there needs to be a change around here. When youre a writer, everything is copy. Nora Ephron said that, so youre apt to react to personal moments like stock taking as an opportunity to write, or at least sharpen your view of the world with the material at hand in a way that will somehow add to your writing or your powers of observation. The author Dan Pink came up with the idea for his book on the topic of regret while attending his daughter's graduation.

Struck by the passage of time, he started to catalog his regrets about what he had done and what he had failed to do since his college graduation. It inspired a great book about how regret is actually a superpower when you use it right. The other common traits I see in my reaction are the traits of instinct and obligation. We all have instincts, the nudges, the inklings, the source code that guides our thinking. When one surges up from the deep shale and breaks the surface, thats the first little step in an idea that might become something.

An experiment. Track these subconscious prompts yourself. Youll notice them behind moments like why and when you change lanes, how you size up a new colleague, when you know you're going to speak up at a meeting, how you know when a conversation at a gathering is growing stale, when you know you should go back home before your ailing father gets too sick. Nicholson Baker the author locates the growth of these instincts with the passage of time, reaching a certain age in life. In his book the Mezzanine, he describes what the main character in the novel has come to know when he's reached this age in life with fewer total cells.

He's talking about brain cells here, but more connections between each cell. The quality of your knowledge undergoes a transformation. You begin to have a feel for situations. People fall into types, your past memories linked together, and your life begins to seem as it hadn't when you were younger, an inevitable thing composed of a million small failures and successes dependently intergrown. So I had something like this going on.

I had an inkling something could be done with this material. Based on the thousands of stories I've written in my career, not so much a knowledge that there was a detail in the notebooks with a story behind it. It would have been better, frankly, if, after moving, I had found a bag of cash in a box, or a gun on the mantle of the new place, or Lenny Bruce's phone number written in one of these notebooks. Then we'd have a story instead. The instinct here was that I could look at the material long enough and find some story that was in there.

Somerset mom said, there is a philosophy in every shave, which has always meant to me that if you were clever enough, you could take any act, even shaving, and pipe in deep meaning. Or perhaps better said, you could discover the meaning that was there all along, the philosophy you were following, and then write that up. All you needed was the skill to pull off the tarp, see it, and there it was. Or perhaps you're a James Baldwin fan. The conquest of the physical world is not man's only duty, Baldwin said.

He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. But I shouldn't have to quote talented writers to haul me into the frame of writing I had perhaps the strongest force propelling me to follow up on this instinct. Obligation to myself. Implicit in the notebook habit was an obligation to do something with the collection. Otherwise, why write in the notebooks in the first place?

This line of thinking, however, could be a case of what's known as the sunk cost fallacy. The sunk cost fallacy is the tendency to continue investing time, effort, or resources into a project or decision based on what you've already invested, even when it would be more rational to abandon the whole damn thing and move on. Just because I've invested time and effort into filling these notebooks over the years doesn't necessarily mean I'm obligated to do something grand with them. The value of the notebooks might lie in the act of writing in the notebooks itself, not in some future payoff. I can come up with answers to wriggle out of this sense of obligation.

Here are perfectly good, reasonable reasons that the notebooks are good on their own terms and dont require a big summing up moment first, the notebook helps you notice in the moment, live in the moment by tuning your life to high alert, and thats its own reward you see more keenly. You live awake in the world your startled ears always hear. You dont need to engage in the big summing up dance to get all of that. Also, writing in the notebook excavates thinking in the instant youre doing it, and you can go on and then take action based on those thoughts, leaving the contents of the notebook as husks of that action that dont need another visitation or another pass. Do you buy those two arguments?

Do they sound familiar? They will sound familiar to the diligent naval gazanist because they are the conclusion from previous episodes which undermines my case. I can only pop these answers out because I loaded them into the PEZ dispenser after the meaning making exercise of going through the notebooks and trying to sum up their meaning. So those two arguments are actually the product of feeling the obligation and writing the obligation that I was just trying to argue. I didn't need to listen to drat.

Navel Gazing is sponsored by Field Notes another week, the final episode of this series, but another week of people emailing me and telling me about their new field notes habit and what they've written down and what they look forward to writing down and what they might do with all of this someday. So if you'd like to get on the bandwagon, I think it's a bandwagon for sure. Visit fieldnotesbrand.com and save 10% on your first order by using the coupon code. Gazing also makes a good gift for people, a subscription to fieldnotes. So go to fieldnotesbrand.com and save 10% on your first order by using the coupon code.

Gazing this episode is brought to you by audible, the destination for thrilling audio entertainment. I've recently been thrilled by a novel by David Archer and Vince Vogel, and it's called a burden of the assassin. And I realized as I was listening to it, which is I listened to it around the house when I'm on my morning walk. If Anne isn't here, it is so much fun to be in the grip of genre when it's like galloping along. Last night I was listening to it as I was going to bed, and usually I fall off to sleep pretty quickly, but in this case I was listening all the way up to the moment that the sleep timer goes off after 15 seconds, and it was right at the moment, like one of the things was happening and I had to wake up to press it and listen to what was going to happen next.

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That's audible.com navalgazing or text navel gazing to 500. 500 to try audible free for 30 days. It is Ryan here, and I have a question for you. What do you do when you win? Like, are you a fist pumper?

Ryan
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Dahlia Lithwick
It'S opinion Palooza season here. It's late. I'm Dahlia Lithwick, the host of Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts and law and the Supreme Court. As this Supreme Court term hurtles towards its close, the justices are handing down decisions that will shape our politics and our lives for years and decades to come. My team and I are putting out analysis of the biggest cases just as quickly as we can, bound to our closets and fire up our laptops to speak to you.

From presidential immunity to social media content regulation to domestic abusers gun rights, we will be here unpacking the news for you. Listen to Amicus wherever you get your podcast.

Josh Levine
Hi, I'm Josh Levine. My podcast, the queen, tells the story of Linda Taylor. She was a con artist, a kidnapper, and maybe even a murderer. She was also given the title the Welfare Queen, and her story was used by Ronald Reagan to justify slashing aid to the poor. Now it's time to hear her real story.

Over the course of four episodes, you'll find out what was done to Linda Taylor, what she did to others, and what was done in her name. The great lesson of this for me is that people will come to their own conclusions based on what their prejudices are. Subscribe to the Queen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now. A public service announcement. I have just committed what is known as an ouroboros, a self referential and self perpetuating bit of discourse which is symbolized by a snake eating its tail, though that doesnt seem like a good thing to do if you are a snake.

John Dickerson
My research tells me that this symbol for Ouroboros is a positive one that represents unity and the natural, eternal cycle of destruction and recreation. So who am I to argue with some quick Internet research that affirms and elevates my impulses? Now, if you are running while listening to this little bit of logical loop de do about obligations. It may have caused you to plow into a hedge or swallow you in vertigo. It almost did that to me while I wrote it.

But I suppose I'm seeking to show how slippery the question of motivation can be, especially when filtered through the distorting lens of a mind trying to spin a narrative for an audience. And while we are on the topic of spinning a narrative, it turns out the story of a snake eating its tail is also linked to our exploration of inkling and discovery. According to a famous story, german chemist Auguste Kekule was struggling to understand the structure of benzene, a common organic compound. Despite years of research, he couldnt quite grasp how the six carbon and six hydrogen atoms were arranged. Then he had a dream of a snake biting its own tail.

The image jolted Kekole awake, and he realized that the structure of benzene might be a closed ring of carbon atoms with alternate single and double bonds. The discovery was crucial because it provided the fundamental framework for understanding the structure and behavior of a vast array of organic compounds, from pharmaceuticals to plastics. The breakthrough laid the foundation for the field of organic chemistry. The dream delivered the inkling. The obligation to scientific discovery delivered the result.

This is also true of Newton and the apple from the tree, if that story is even true. And our old friend Archimedes and the water in the bathtub. Ok, back to looking just at obligations, though, and how they should or should not rule us. You can choose to follow up on an inkling. An obligation is stronger.

Theres more guilt associated. Its a chore on Saturday that you owe yourself a funeral you must attend, a duty of honor. We owe ourselves. Weve put in the effort. Weve made the promise.

Weve signed a contract with our future selves, and we feel pressure to stick to the terms. Its whats behind getting in the cab, putting on the running shoes from that previous episode youve hopefully listened to, or youll not know what the devil im talking about. When we commit to a practice like notebook keeping, it creates a sense of duty to honor that past selfs effort, which must mean seeing it through to some meaningful end. When people advise in commencement addresses to be true to yourself, they are encouraging us to stick to our obligations to ourselves, to thine own self be true, says Polonius to Laertes in the hamlet. Okay, but what does that mean, be true to yourself?

This advice presupposes a defined self. Everybody got one of those? Or is yourself something that has changed over time? I have already lost touch with a few people I used to be Joan Didion wrote correctly. Is being true to yourself a challenge of definition, defining the self, or a challenge of commitment, sticking to that true self?

Is it that you're not focused enough to stay true to yourself, or you don't know exactly the shape of yourself that you're supposed to be being true to inklings and obligations are linked. If your sense of obligation propels you to act on your instinct, you have an instinct that you should attend the funeral. And then you remember that you are the kind of person who attends funerals because you believe attendance is meaningful for yourself and for others. You rediscover your obligations through your inklings. I have a wise friend, David Onik, who made this all seem very clear to me.

He told me the story of a family friend who was visiting. He didn't really want to interrupt his Saturday to go see his parents friend, but he also knew that he believed in the power and benefit of those kinds of family connections. He recognized an obligation to that belief of his, which he had found to be durable and true in his life. And so no matter what he really wanted to do in that moment, he trusted in the obligation to that thing that in other times he had found durable and true. As a journalist, I have always felt compelled to make chaos conform to some kind of aesthetic order.

I've believed that if you sit down long enough, write enough outlines, arrange the post it notes correctly, kill the passages and puns you've fallen in love with, and welcome the advice of good editors that you can write a true thing. Writing is organized thinking. If you want to know something better, assign yourself the task of writing about it. When Gwen Ifill, the anchor of PBS's Washington Week, would invite me on her Friday night show, I would assign myself a story to write that Friday morning in order to force myself to do the reporting and write through the material to understand it. It was the only way I could feel I'd mastered the ideas before I went on television.

It was my homegrown version of Em Forster's how do I know what I think until I see what I say? But I also did it because I wanted to be worthy of Gwen. She was a model to me, and I felt an obligation to meet her example. So there was that obligation of practice to apply what I believed had been true to me and aim it at this material. And why would I want to do that?

Because, remember, we are in a stock taking moment in which the evidence of a past self comes up against its current model and the basic question, which I think is universal, is, who is this me that we're talking about here? But most acutely, the notebooks were an obligation to a past self. I felt an obligation to keep faith with my younger self, who had left all of these breadcrumbs in the notebooks. Did that person have a view of what the version of himself would do with these entries? Maybe not a vision, but definitely a faithful, a hope.

Is there a stable, constant you to be true to? Or are you always in the process of forging a contingent self through your choices and actions? Arthur Brooks writes in the Atlantic about two methods of self. There are those of us who step out into the world and discover ourselves, chisel away the stone that starts in a block to find the masterpiece inside. And then there are those who forge themselves in the world, not discovering but building, like perhaps a painting created on a blank canvas.

Which are you? I think the answer comes from our experience with inklings and obligations. There is a push and pull between them. We get an inkling, and we launch ourselves into it. Then, like an artist's idea, things change when you get going.

The act of creation takes you well away from the impulse that kicked you off in the first place. It must. Nothing is created that is known in its entirety from the first step. So the initial impulse is vital, but then so is ditching the impulse as you're in the throes of creation. But if you're ditching impulses, what's guiding you all the while?

What's guiding you is you're trying to make each additional impulse true to the self through some act of obligation that you feel to stay on track with. Your vision and your values, which you have to believe in the moment, are stable, unchanging things.

I have now turned this decision about whether or not to take up this project of writing about the notebooks into an attempt to figure out how we build ourselves into a life, which is the larger project of this podcast.

Notebook 75, page 46 47 September 2021. When your dog dies and your son goes to college and you are confronted with your life's work, it all boils down to one alarm. The clock is ticking. If a scream is better than a thesis, I was hearing some kind of scream. But what was the thesis?

This notebook entry jumps ahead in the month of September 2021. I'm probably a couple of weeks out from cornering Nan in the kitchen, three weeks from the living room declaration in our old apartment of episode one. So what is the thesis? Now that we've come to the final episode in season one. Well, I found some things along the way which I wouldn't say represent a grand thesis, but which I think are very worthy.

Little thesis lets that deserve naming. I would not have understood that advice giving is more about the giver than recipient before this, despite having passed along the quote many times that we talk to others about the things we need to hear. I really believe, after giving it such careful consideration, that noticing is a practice like meditation, and that noticing rewards noticing. I now believe that it is so true that attention to the small allows discovery of wonder in the world, keeps you stuck, ungrateful, and slows time, rescuing you from the pull of the algorithm. We're in a different age from which we need the rescue of noticing.

Our minds flit because they are designed to flit, but our natural inclination to flit is hijacked. We are in an age where the vast organized skills of smart people are aimed at removing our attention from our control. And attention is the only thing that creates meaningful art, relationships, joy, love. Noticing can be a protection in that world. Three other thesis lets that ive found one, the present reframes the past.

Two, you can withdraw from the world to participate in the world more fully. Three, transitions surface the longing for order. But order is elusive, which is why transitions hit us like an arrow in the living room. That's just the way it is sometimes incomplete, uncertain. Hang in there.

It's a natural state, not proof of some disorder. I have also learned that the number 1016, the subject of the fourth episode, could have allowed a reference to ethelred the unready who died in 1016, presumably, as Stephen Colbert pointed out, because he didn't see it coming. These moments of strange discovery found up here under the sloped roof on the orange carpet. That's your doing, because you drew them out of me. What was this life?

What is this life? Thank you for asking. And that's where I locate the largest thesis of this project with you. We started this podcast in the living room with a conversational bid on a lonesome Sunday. I said in this project I was sending a ping out into the world.

As the first season comes to a close, I'm overwhelmed by gratitude and hope, stirred by the pings back that I have received most. Especially because what I have heard from you has been such a surprise. I imagine that some of you might join for the ride. You would connect to a story you'd endure, the jokes, you'd find a quote from someone that maybe you found useful in your day. What I did not expect was the stories you would tell me about your day, the noticing you did in the present, or the memory that came back to life for you.

The recitation for me of a small moment in your day that you thought was worthy of a notebook, even if you didn't have a notebook or a story you told me about your mom or your dad or your dog. Loves lost and new loves found. All the love that would come through those notes in response to whatever we created together in this podcast. Here's just one example from Carolyn Roosevelt.

Carolyn Roosevelt
Hello John. You're quite right. Dropping you a note has been on my to do list. Just a ping back. Navel gazing has become a most amenable companion to my after work grocery shopping on Saturday evenings.

But what to say by day? A humble stationer's clerk in Harvard Square's longtime establishment for pens, journals, paper clips, and such. I've been there since 1982, by night devoted choral singer and lover of books. In my mind, I'm in 10th grade, more than 45 years late, with German on Duolingo history. That's an independent study.

Literature, independent study. Film history on TCM, finance and investing with quicken, etcetera, choir year round and pe water aerobics a couple of times a week. It's a lot to fit in with a full time job, but it feels like a good life. The reason I'm shopping after work on Saturday is so I don't have to on the way home from church. The further reason is that my partner, also of 42 years, can't do it anymore.

Since he was disabled 20 years ago, he has been able and willing to shop and cook. But last year he had another stroke, apparently, so. It's been me on the shopping and cooking detail, also on his socks, brace, pants, and shoes. It's an interesting thing, a job that's only mine, and a strong incentive to keep an extremely short point of view. I keep a we notebook smaller than my hand for the needs and plans of the next week, and a quo vadis text agenda as a nightly diary.

It remains to be seen if I'll ever crack them open again, as the world is scarcely hungering for my memoirs. So, so boring, really. Nonetheless. So thank you for sharing your thoughts about the world, the laundry and everything. I'm really enjoying it.

John Dickerson
It is a gift that you asked me to hold these memories in my hand because it does me such honor. No special honor due to me, just the universal honor that one feels being the human standing so close to the light from the window into someone else's world, being put in touch with that human connection feels elemental. Many of you told me of your notebook keeping habit or sent me a photograph of your new field notes purchases inspired by the show a notebook habit you were starting. This was all a surprise, like aiming at a target, pulling the string, and instead of the arrow sailing to make a socket in the bulls eye, a man arrived with a freezing cold martini, one olive. Just what I needed, but not at all what I was expecting.

The reason to pay attention to inklings is that your hope in that nudge will be rewarded with something you werent expecting. So as I look back at that moment in the kitchen with Nan and the scramble and the puzzling over what inklings we follow and why I come on this answer three years later, the surprise in your response is part of the stuff I had. I guess some vague notion might be found in the enterprise of trying to make meaning of the notebook books. You have affirmed something large, the presence of grace in the world. Maybe I'm using that word incorrectly, but I'm reluctant to let go of it because I keep coming back to it.

In thinking about this in the religious sense, grace is God's love, kindness, forgiveness, which is bestowed on all of us. Since I believe in God, I see that grace everywhere in your responses. But faith and religion are not required to describe what I'm talking about. This feeling comes with other names, empathy, common humanity, community. I've experienced in your responses to my conversational bid, something I associate with illuminated windows of houses you pass on a country road at dusk.

I've mentioned this in this show before. It's a feeling that keeps coming back to me over these episodes. When I go on one of those drives, I feel a peanut cluster of emotions about the lives taking place through those windows. The runaway imagination I bring to apartment showings grabs ahold of me, and it gets going, and suddenly I see a teenager up in a bedroom practicing a guitar, a folded flag on the top of a bookshelf, a sudoku book with curled pages next to a favorite chair, the tv lighting the corner of the opposite wall as a game of some sort plays. I feel a sense of romance and possibility.

But most of all, I. I think I hope that whoever is in that house, that they are all right, that they are okay, and that they're happy in whatever that means. I don't know these people at all, but I feel some deep connection, and I hope in some small way that they have a good life, that they have peace, joy, and a sweetness and light in their lives. This feeling surprises me because it is without the cynicism, sourness, prickliness in the brain that I carry with me most of the time.

I should note that this feeling I'm trying to describe is called sonder. Coined by the writer John Koenig, it captures the emotional response to the realization that others have complicated lives that go on in their complexity, and with which we have nothing to do but which draw us, at least out of a pointed curiosity, because we recognize in ourselves the same complexity, romance, transition, and wobble in those other complex lives whose gravitational pull we feel. That you responded to this experiment suggests to me that there are others of you out there who have a default setting of grace forbearance allowance that leaves you open to this kind of thing, too. You'd have slammed the podcast shut immediately if you were not of that kind. I'm thinking the Venn diagram of navel gazing listeners and illuminated window romantics is quite overlapping.

That makes me happy, because I think you're out there making the world a more human place, and the world could use some assistance being a more human place. An act of creativity takes its fullest form in the space between the person who created it and the audience. Your notes have occupied that space. We write because we hope to commune, connect, understand, and in sharing your stories, you've shown me that this hope of writing can be rewarded in unexpected ways. You are a very companionable bunch out there.

You are, in a sense, the tool that helped me come to see what this examination means. You helped me escape solipsism's abyss. Thank you for your forbearance and your grace and patience. I hope you found something in our float together through these waters, too. There's a lot of undiscovered country in the pine box.

Old impressions shaped by new contexts, glaring blind spots, confessions, repentance, repair. So much work remaining on being the person I wish I were, and that the author of some entries hoped I would be. The search for inner congruence by way of outward contribution through this public conversation with past selves will continue, I hope. While I don't just hope, we're doing at least one more season. I'm not sure what it'll be about, but I'll be up here in the garret where the carpet is always orange, trying to figure that out.

Until we meet again. Keep those stories of grace coming.

That's it for this 9th and final episode of Navel season one. Or, as the optimists say, see you in season two. Navel gazing is produced by Shayna Roth. Alicia Montgomery is vice president of audio at Slate. Our theme music is by the band Plastic Mary.

Remember? Send us a note@navelgazingpodcastmail.com. dot and let us know what it's all meant to you. Offer your tiny little moments of the world or thoughts about what else we should explore. What color is your favorite carpet?

I'd love to hear from you. That's navelgazingpodcastmail.com. i'm John Dickerson. Talk to you next season.

Every single day. It's an absolute delight. I look forward to it absolutely every single day. Do you want some more? It must be magic.

It is magic being married to John.

Ryan
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Dahlia Lithwick
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John Dickerson's Navel Gazing: The Meaning Behind All This Navel Gazing

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1: Opening Thoughts

2: Reflections in the Kitchen

3: The Philosophy of Navel-Gazing

4: Conclusion and Reflections

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