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Wise Habits Reminders

Navigating the Messy Parts of Life: Embracing Imperfection and Growth with Josh Radnor

May 13, 2025 Leave a Comment

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In this episode, Josh Radnor discusses the messy parts of life and embracing imperfection and growth. Josh Radnor explains how, even outward success, fame, acclaim, creative fulfillment isn’t enough to quiet the deeper battles within. He shares how real freedom comes not from achieving perfection, but from making peace with the messy, unfinished parts of ourselves. From navigating identity and public image to sitting in deep discomfort. Josh offers a powerful reminder that a meaningful life isn’t built on external measures. It’s shaped from the inside out.

Key Takeaways:

  • Discussion on the duality of human nature and the internal struggle between positive and negative traits.
  • The significance of thoughts and actions in shaping a meaningful life.
  • The role of time in personal growth and self-perception.
  • The complexities of self-image and public persona.
  • The importance of embracing imperfections and the “messy” aspects of life.
  • Reflection on the wisdom gained from aging and life experiences.
  • The negotiation between acceptance and action in facing life’s challenges.
  • Insights on meditation and the emotional challenges it can provoke.
  • The value of community and shared experiences in personal growth and healing.

Josh Radnor is an actor, writer, director, and musician. Recent television: Hunters (Amazon) opposite Al Pacino and Fleishman is in Trouble (F/X, Hulu.) He is best known for his leading role on CBS’ Emmy-winning How I Met Your Mother. Additional TV: Rise, Mercy Street, Centaurworld, Grey’s Anatomy, Six Feet Under. He wrote and directed two feature films (happythankyoumoreplease & Liberal Arts) both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, the former winning the 2010 Audience Award. Other film: Afternoon Delight (dir: Joey Soloway), Social Animals, 3 Birthdays, All Happy Families. Theater includes the world premiere of Itamar Moses’ The Ally (The Public Theater), Little Shop of Horrors (Kennedy Center), Richard Greenberg’s The Babylon Line (Lincoln Center), the Broadway production of Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Disgraced. He made his Broadway debut in The Graduateopposite Kathleen Turner. As a musician he made two albums with Aussie singer-songwriter Ben Lee as Radnor & Lee. Solo music: One More Then I’ll Let You Go, Eulogy: Volume 1 & Volume 2. You can find his popular Museletters over on Substack. 

Josh Radnor:  Website | Instagram

If you enjoyed this conversation with Josh Radnor, check out these other episodes:

A Soul Boom Discussion on Mental Health, Spirituality, and Connection with Rainn Wilson

Spiritual Journeys with Rainn Wilson & Reza Aslan

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Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer 00:01:17  We often imagine that once we have it, all the inner struggles will disappear. But as Josh Radnor reminds us today, even outward success, fame, acclaim, creative fulfillment isn’t enough to quiet the deeper battles within. In this conversation, Josh shares how real freedom comes not from achieving perfection, but from making peace with the messy, unfinished parts of ourselves. From navigating identity and public image to sitting in deep discomfort. Josh offers a powerful reminder that a meaningful life isn’t built on external measures. It’s shaped from the inside out. I’m Eric Zimmer. And this is the one you feed. Hi, Josh, welcome to the show.

Josh Radnor 00:02:02  Thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:03  I am really excited to have you on and talk with you about your new podcast, Substack. Your life as a musician and obviously your life as an actor. But before we get to that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:25  One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Josh Radnor 00:02:50  Yeah, it’s one of the greats. I mean, it’s a you built the entire show around it and I understand why. I think it’s about free will at some core level, but I also am very suspicious of people who say they’re all good. And I’m also suspicious of people who say someone is all bad. I think that we have worlds inside us. We have the whole world inside us. And so I just think it’s an honoring of the fact that there is that dark wolf, but it’s also an acknowledgement that where we put our attention is what we grow.

Josh Radnor 00:03:25  So I sometimes think about it like I have like 51% of like the light wolf in me and 49% like there is a slight majority of like the wolf of kindness and virtue and all that. But there’s this other part of me, and I think we’re in a shadow denying society. That’s why there’s so much blame and shame and accusation and finger pointing and scapegoating. So I think it’s a sign of great mental health to acknowledge the dark wolf inside you, to at least say it’s there, and then you might be much less trigger happy at pointing the finger at other people.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:58  Yeah. In one of your essays on Substack, you actually talk a little bit about this. You talk about internal family systems and Richard Schwartz. We’ve had Richard on the show to talk about internal family systems. And I think the thing when I hear the parable today, right, I’ve been reading it for a decade now, is that like, there’s not two wolves inside me. There’s a whole bunch of them, right? I mean, there’s a lot going on in there when I pay close attention.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:24  And but I think ultimately you sort of put your finger on it when you said it’s about where do I put my attention? And I think putting our loving attention on the parts of ourselves that might seem like the dark wolf, that’s the way you do it, right? You know.

Josh Radnor 00:04:40  Right? Right? Right. Yeah. I think Richard Schwartz really cracked something there. This kind of search for some sort of solitary identity feels like folly. Yeah, like you just have to kind of acknowledge that there’s, like, a chorus of voices, wounded parts of ourselves even, you know. Ancestors are, you know, higher kind of voices that are wiser than our maybe our current self. Like those are all in there too, and they’re all accessible. I think if we get quiet enough or skilled enough at kind of just asking to be contacted with them.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:08  Yeah. You’ve got a new podcast out, which is a rewatching of the show that I guess we would say made you famous, which is called how I Met Your Mother.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:18  Yeah. And in that show, there’s the character who’s, I don’t know, in his late 20s, early 30s. And there’s also the character as a 50 year old, sort of that narrating. Right. And I think what you just said there sort of ties to this idea that we can access wiser parts of ourselves. And one of the ways to do that, actually, I think, and lots of different traditions have talked about this, is to imagine your 50 year old self or your 70 year old self or your 80 year old self. So the show way back when was kind of on to an idea that I see recur in psychology and various indigenous traditions about trying to contact that part of you that’s actually already wise.

Josh Radnor 00:06:01  Yeah, yeah, it’s true. And it is something we’re unpacking on how we made your mother the podcast Craig Thomas and I are doing. My wife is a clinical psychologist, and one of the things she will sometimes ask patients to do that she’s told me that I think is so wonderful is if they’re tied in knots about something and really confused about an issue, she’ll say without thinking, what is your 85 year old self say? You know, and the 85 year old self is there.

Josh Radnor 00:06:26  It’s ready to communicate. Most of the time it’s this is not a big deal. Or don’t let’s not worry. Let’s not worry about that, you know? But I’ve asked Craig and Carter, the other co-creator, about this notion of an older, wiser narrator character looking back on his life. There’s that great Kierkegaard quote, life can only be understood backward, but it has to be lived forward. So you have this narrator, wiser voice who’s looking back, and he can be a little more lighthearted about things because he knows how things worked out. Whereas the character I was playing was much more stumbling through one foot in front of the other. You know, I asked them they were in their late 20s, early 30s when they were writing the show. I mean, it lasted for a decade, but like, it was a kind of chutzpah, you know, to say like, oh, no, we’re going to write this older US voice, this older, wiser voice. But they were also the age of the protagonists.

Josh Radnor 00:07:14  Yeah. And they said it was almost like a hope. It was like a hope that there was some voice out there that could be guiding and benevolent. I think ultimately, it’s a very sweet part of that show, that there’s this narrator that knew that he landed on his feet so he can tell all these embarrassing stories about himself.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:33  Absolutely. Yeah, I think that, again, that idea is that wisdom is actually not that complicated. Like, we can keep reading about it. And I’ve been making podcasts for a decade on the general ideas of what it means to live a good life. They’re not that complicated. The problem is that a we forget them constantly and b, we don’t know how to live them.

Josh Radnor 00:07:58  Right. Right. I mean, I think that you can almost recognize truth by its simplicity. If something is almost like overly complicated around systems or around, you know, minutia, it’s obscuring something. I think the reason fairy tales are so powerful and certain children’s stories are so powerful is because if it’s wise and true, perennially true, we get it intuitively.

Josh Radnor 00:08:20  We don’t have to do any calculations, you know, to get it. It’s just evident. But I agree with you that we have the kind of built in for getter. I always think of that movie memento where he had to tattoo, you know, he would have amnesia every day and he had to remind himself what happened. I feel like wisdom is like that. Like you have to look at the word like change or like, this too shall pass. Like like perennially wise sayings. Like, yeah, sometimes when you’re struggling and a friend says, you know, it won’t be like this forever. It’s like the simplest, most true thing you could ever say. But sometimes it comes to you as if it’s like Moses on the mountaintop. You know, it’s like it’s divine revelation. Like, oh, I won’t be feeling this way forever. That’s unbelievable. It’s like, I know that intellectually, but sometimes when we’re going through it, it’s tough to remember.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:04  Absolutely. I’ve talked about this on the show a bunch of times, and I’m bringing it up because you reference King Solomon in one of your Substack posts.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:12  But there’s something known as Solomon’s wisdom. And what it means is that King Solomon was really wise when it came to everybody else’s life, but apparently his own life not so much. And so it’s called Solomon’s paradox, right? And it means that idea that I could be really wise about your life or my friend’s life, but when it’s myself, I have a hard time seeing it. It’s just this paradox of being human.

Josh Radnor 00:09:40  Yeah. I mean, I think sometimes people. I’m not speaking about my wife here, by the way, but sometimes I think people in the helping professions often have a genius for seeing other people’s stuff. I don’t know if it’s easier, but it’s sometimes very difficult to apply your own guidance to yourself. I mean, I have sometimes, like a friend has reached out for advice and I like that. I think that’s one of the great things about friendship, is you’re all kind of trading off, being each other’s mentor and cheerleader and confidant. But when a friend comes to me and they’ll ask me some advice and I’ll, I’ll say something to them and then I’ll hear it back and I’ll go, I should do that.

Josh Radnor 00:10:16  That’s really that’s like, that’s really good. You know, sometimes we have to displace the advice to have it come back to us.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:23  Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about the idea of, well, actually, you and I did not bond over something that we should have bonded over first, which is that I live in Columbus, Ohio.

Josh Radnor 00:10:34  You live.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:34  There now? I grew up there. I live there now. I’m in Denver today. Okay. But I now live in Columbus, Ohio.

Josh Radnor 00:10:40  Yes. Wow. Whereabouts? Where do you live?

Eric Zimmer 00:10:42  I’m near Goodale and 315. Sort of Grandview.

Josh Radnor 00:10:45  Ish. Okay. Yeah. My sister lived in Grandview for a year. She’s back in Bexley, where I lived.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:49  Is that where.

Josh Radnor 00:10:49  You grew up? That’s where I grew up. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:51  Okay.

Josh Radnor 00:10:51  Yeah. Oh, no. She lived in Granville. Okay. That’s different. But Grandview. Yes, I know Grandview very well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, how cool is that where you grew up?

Eric Zimmer 00:11:00  It is? Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:00  I grew up in Worthington.

Josh Radnor 00:11:01  Oh, in Worthington. Okay. Cool. Yeah, I did theater with a lot of people from Worthington.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:05  Yeah. So I just. When I saw that, I thought that was cool. Oh, nice. Okay. Back to what I wanted to talk about next, which is identity. One of the things that I think you’ve talked publicly about this, both on the podcast and on your Substack, is that you got to be known really well and beloved by a whole lot of people for a particular character. Right. Talk to me about that experience and how it has been for you and how it has evolved over time.

Josh Radnor 00:11:35  God, it’s been 20 years of navigating that. Right. So I think it’s like it would take me a long time to unpack each phase. I guess no one prepares you certainly in drama school, for you’re going to be playing one role for nine years. Like, that’s not something they think you’re going to do a role for three months or like, you know, like do a check off play for, you know, four months.

Josh Radnor 00:11:57  So I had to figure it out on my own. And sometimes I did that rather inelegantly in other times I was able to have some more grace around it, but I just found it to be an incredibly strange, disorienting thing. I mean, first of all, your anonymity getting eroded and strangers knowing who you are when you don’t know who they are is a very strange, disorienting experience anyway. Famous, strange. Being visible is strange. People having ideas about you, projections about you. They read a quote of yours that was taken out of context. And then, I don’t know, they don’t like you or you remind them of someone like you. Feel a little bit in your more vulnerable moments, like you got a dartboard on your chest. You’re just walking through the world, and you feel like people are kind of sizing you up or having opinions about you, and some of them are often quite lovely, but that also feels suspect. Like you feel like these people don’t really know me. They know they have this idea of me.

Josh Radnor 00:12:47  I went through some crisis with it, and I used various forms of kind of healing, and and I was just on the hunt for something that felt more authentic in the midst of all that. And it drove me much deeper on a spiritual path, weirdly. I mean, not maybe not weirdly, but like, it’s understandable. And then I got off the show, and as an actor, I was only looking for roles that felt very far from the role that I had played. Anything that reminded me of the DNA of the part I wouldn’t do. But I also became a musician, and I’ve written and directed films, and so I was really just trying to diversify. But what I realized I was actually doing was running. I was running away from it. You know, I said in that Substack that you referenced that this character I played, Ted was a part of me, like in the ifs sense, like he is a part of me in that he was literally a part that I played.

Josh Radnor 00:13:38  But there’s also I can feel I revealed something to the world of myself through that character. I got married a little over a year ago, and my wife had never seen the show, and she said, look, I’m curious. And that was a good thing for us, for our relationship, that she had never seen the show. But she said, I’m curious about this time in your life that I missed. I want to see it. So I decided it was time to rewatch it and we just decided to formalize it. Craig and I are doing this rewatch and we’re having a great time talking about it, but there’s been something wonderful about having, much like the show itself, having this older, wiser perspective on it rather than being the person inside of it, but actually looking back on it and seeing, oh, I wasn’t half bad on that show. And the show itself is delightful and I’m so much kinder to myself watching it now. So I’m having like a very meta, very interesting experience re-engaging with the show.

Josh Radnor 00:14:30  But in terms of identity issues, it was both shattering and also opened up all these avenues of my life, for which I’m incredibly grateful.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:39  I love how you talk about it in such a nuanced way. And you referenced nuance in the beginning, right? We’re not all bad. We’re not all good. I think nuance is kind of the secret sauce to wisdom to a certain degree. But you talk about it in the sense like, imagine that you were in high school. We were all in high school, and 20 years later, all anybody ever wants to talk about is who you were in high school. Not anything you had done since all of that and how that might get to be tiresome or confusing. And yet, at the same time, you’re also recognizing this profound gift that you got, right? I mean, that changed the trajectory of your life in a positive way. And I like seeing you kind of come back and revisit it from a more holistic place. And I think the lesson for all of us is around identity.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:27  Yeah. And that identity is ideally, in my mind, fluid meaning I can play this part of me, I can play this part of me, I can, I can see this, I can see that. But we tend to get fixed in this idea of who we are. Yeah. You know, we just get locked into I am This Way. And as somebody who studies change and has written a book that will come out next year about change, what I know is that we are all capable of change. But if we believe we’re not, we’re really stuck.

Josh Radnor 00:15:58  Right? And it kind of goes back to what we were talking about before, like, I had an acting teacher at NYU named Ron Van Loo, and one of the first things he said to us was, you need to expand your definition of yourself. You’re here to expand your definition of yourself, that you’re not this thing, you’re all these things. And when you’re more things and when you know yourself to be more things, you can play more things truthfully, you can access more of yourself to play a wider array of characters in a larger sense.

Josh Radnor 00:16:27  Like my brother in law, Gideon Jacobs, I saw him in this one man show that he created last night, and it’s this blind preacher character, and it was really fascinating. But he’s obsessed with the second commandment in the Torah, which says, thou shalt not make any graven images. Right. And his whole thing, you know, going back to the Garden of Eden again, not speaking literally, but allegorically, this notion that humanity in its primordial state was unselfconscious and connected to all that was. There was no separation. And then there’s this bite of this apple, this kind of primordial wound, and suddenly it’s, oh, my God, I’m naked. Oh my God, you’re separate from me. Oh my God, God is elsewhere. It’s actually like a horror story, if you think about it from an existential point of view. Totally right. And his thing is that the commandment against images is actually quite profound, that what happened to Adam and Eve allegorically in the garden was that they suddenly got a self-image which is grievous to our psyche because we’re watching Ourselves.

Josh Radnor 00:17:33  And now image is everything, and it’s proliferated to the point where I even think about, like, the iPhone. You know, I mean, one he points out the apple, right? Like, we all have these devices in our in our pockets that are these apples with a bite out of them. And then the iPhone, the iMac, the iPad, the you know, there’s this kind of I, I, I, I and this recursive kind of loop of images images self images. What does it say about me? What does it say about me? And I am as hooked by this stuff as anyone. I’m not hovering over this as some sort of like angry prophet. I’m in the midst of this negotiation and as I think we all are with image and identity, I think that everyone is dealing with it on some level. It’s not just famous people. Everyone has some persona or a maybe a private self. And then there’s like a public self. I don’t like to create that much of a distinction between the two.

Josh Radnor 00:18:23  Like, I don’t want to have a persona, even though I’m going to be different with my wife than I am on a post on Instagram or something, but I also don’t want to feel like I have this Jekyll and Hyde split in myself. But I think identity is really tricky. And when you become famous and you become famous for a particular role, it just pours fertilizer all over the many things that can be troubling about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:45  Yeah. What you just shared about your brother in law is fascinating. I had never heard that take on the second commandment. I’m a longtime Zen practitioner. Right. And one of the things that we do in Zen is we’re trying to see through this illusion that we are this separate thing. Right. Right. So I’ve always seen the Garden of Eden story as like I’ve been able to see the parallel there like that separateness. But I never thought about the second commandment in images that we create.

Josh Radnor 00:19:14  Yeah. A friend recommended this book by a Sufi mystic. That’s all about music.

Josh Radnor 00:19:19  And in the first paragraph, he says, music is the only form of art that’s not idolatry, because there’s no form. It’s from a transcendent kind of realm. You can’t draw music, you know you can’t capture it. Yeah. You know, I love painting and dance and theater, obviously. I mean, I’m not an anti image person, but I think sometimes when we have an image of ourselves and we are constantly critiquing it and looking at it from all different angles, it takes up a lot of time and energy, but it’s also psychically quite draining when someone has a peak experience. One of the ways that one defines that is a loss of self. Absolutely right that you go away. And Georgiana, my wife has pointed out that like often after those peak experiences, we say I could die now, right? Like you’re resolved enough to the point where you feel like your life has achieved some sort of meaning, that you wouldn’t be haunted by regret, that you’ve seen through it in a Zen sense.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:18  Let’s change directions a little bit. There was a line that you used. I don’t know if it’s a line you’ve used before, or if you just tossed it off, and it’s during the how I Made Your Mother podcast, but you referred to how you view that show and you know your relationship with that character, and you use the phrase the mercy of time. And I just loved that. Did you just kind of toss that off?

Josh Radnor 00:20:43  I think maybe I’ve said that before. I don’t know if it’s like a catchphrase of mine. Yeah, yeah. But I do think that there is a merciful quality at a time. I mean, often we look at time as a bully or a grim reaper, kind of, you know, after us. But at the same time, if you’ve aged, say, and you have a different perspective on your life, if you have more forgiveness for your life or people in your life, if you find yourself less self-conscious, less obsessed with the opinion of other people, that’s all time doing its work.

Josh Radnor 00:21:17  If you’ve ever had grief, if you’ve ever had loss, relationships ending innumerable kinds of heartbreaks to feel not the same way you felt in the aftermath of that and the shrapnel of that. That is the mercy of time, that time. It is a healer in some profound way. So I don’t know. I’m glad I was able to say that. Yes, you can look at this as a goofy sitcom, but it also had some quite deep existential things it was chewing on at the same time.

Eric Zimmer  00:22:00  I think time is so interesting.  I’m here in Denver this week, spending time with my mother, who’s 80, who I spent the last decade of my life with her in Columbus with me, but we moved her out here about a year ago to be near my sister, and she’s in a senior community, so I have been there a lot this week, and you can’t be around old people that much without starting to think about time and the obvious downsides to it, the decaying body and the challenges that come with that.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:26  And I do think time is a healer. And I also think it’s necessary but not sufficient for certain types of healing. Right. Like I do think time will take the sting out of a lot of things, but I don’t think time necessarily gives wisdom, right? But I often look at myself and I think about. You know, I was a homeless heroin addict at 25. I’ve been on a path of recovery since and all this stuff I’ve done. And I look at myself and kind of where I’m at, and I sometimes think to myself how much of how I feel now is all that work that I put in and how much of it is just the fact that I’m, you know, much older now. Right. And time has sort of done its thing to a certain degree.

Josh Radnor 00:23:08  Yeah. Yeah. It’s a really interesting question. I also don’t think time confers wisdom. I mean, I think that you have to accept wisdom. It’s almost like it’s on offer. It’s almost like the library is there.

Josh Radnor 00:23:22  There’s free books Yes. With all the great wisdom, all the greatest stories, all the greatest. Everything. You can go there. You can go there. You can get a library card and you can read it. And I feel like wisdom is kind of like that. It’s floating out there. I think you have to volunteer for it. You have to kind of say, I would like to receive this. And then it almost like picks your antenna up in a different way, so you’re more attuned. We just met. But you strike me as someone like me who loves a good quote, who’s always on the hunt for some new thing that you can kind of throw in the the wisdom backpack and kind of carry it along with you, right? That’s always been really interesting to me. I also think when we’re younger and you’re interested or when you get the sense, okay, I understand that I’m not going to be young forever, like I’m going to age. And, you know, a lot of young people simply don’t believe this.

Josh Radnor 00:24:14  And it’s again, maybe that’s the mercy of youth. Is that you? You don’t know that you’re going to age. You think you’ll be the center of culture forever. And it’s like, no, you won’t. There’ll be another generation come along and your slang is not going to work anymore. It’s going to be like, okay, Boomer, everyone gets okay. Boomer. You know, so but I think if you’re looking because I was always scared of aging, but I always was like, well how do you do it. Well yeah. Like who are the people that I think are doing it? Well, I love this Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr, very much. Do you know Richard Rohr? Sure. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:48  I’ve had Richard on several times and visited him and.

Josh Radnor 00:24:51  Yeah, yeah, I listened to yours with Richard. I do remember that. Yeah. So I’ve gotten to spend some time with Richard, and I got to sit with Ram Dass a few times, and there are just these characters that I just say their bodies are betraying them, or Ram Dass is no longer with us.

Josh Radnor 00:25:04  But, you know, he had a stroke that really immobilized him in certain ways. And Richard’s had his health challenges. So the body stuff feels non-negotiable. I mean, you can try to keep the wheels on as long as you can, but there is a kind of sparkle in the eye of someone who Knows something. They’ve gotten to an age and they know something. And they’re not bitter about roads not taken and regrets. And they just seem to have called a truce with the world. You know, I think Richard calls it like, you know. I’ve heard it said like dropping the war with reality, right? Like I’m no longer at war with reality. And I want to be a person who ages with some grace. And I don’t just mean, you know, looking good. Although that would be terrific. But I really mean being the kind of person that a young person would look at and say they look like they know something, or they look like they’re doing it right, or I’d like to get advice from that person.

Josh Radnor 00:25:59  That person seems like they maybe know something.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:01  When I meet old people and interact with old people, it’s always instructive to me because I see like, okay, that’s where I want to go. And I see like, that’s definitely where I don’t want to go. Right. Yeah. And so, like, in the way that my partner’s mother when she had Alzheimer’s. That was a huge wake up call to us. Like, okay, health. Like we can’t prevent it. But there’s a lot of stuff we can do that’s going to make it less likely that we get Alzheimer’s or other things. Yeah. So I think about it in a health sense. I think about it in a sort of old people sort of start to fossilize. So like pushing myself towards new experiences, which gets harder, I think as you age, I just feel it already at 55. And then also, like you said, I think about it emotionally or spiritually. In that way, life is going to get hard from here in some ways.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:53  Like I know what’s coming, so I need to be training now to the best of my ability so that I’m able to be one of those people that is able to do it with a certain degree of grace, because I can see how easy it would be to not do it gracefully.

Josh Radnor 00:27:07  Yeah, it’s also like wisdom is on offer, but so is cynicism. Yeah. You know, that’s also like an option. You know, there’s again, these are wolves. Right. They’re all wolves. But I always thought it would be such a tragedy to live one of these lives, which I consider a gift. I mean, I’d rather I say in one of my songs, I’d rather be here than not be here. I always thought it would be such a tragedy to get to the end of it and be filled with resentment and bitterness and grievance and, you know, like, I want to get to a place where I am more forgiving, more compassionate, more generous. But, you know, I also don’t want to undersell that.

Josh Radnor 00:27:50  Life is tough, you know? Yeah. It puts up a real fight. You can make a very strong and compelling argument that the world is meaningless and that bad people triumph and good people suffer. And you could compile a lot of data around that. You could make as equally a compelling case about the opposite. Right. Again, these are all wolves like. But I always thought it’s so much more heartening, and it makes the universe for me, so much more inhabitable. To choose the latter? Yeah. To say I believe there’s meaning. I believe there’s a purpose to this thing. I believe that what undergirds this is something benevolent. You know, that doesn’t mean that death isn’t real. It doesn’t mean pain isn’t real. It doesn’t mean that, you know, we’re not going to struggle in myriad ways. But I just have to get my mind sharpened. And it’s a daily practice because I have to forget her. You know, I have that thing that I forget. But, you know, conversations like this help.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:47  Yeah. I think I’m a little bit more existentially turned in that I’m not a believer in any sort of ultimate meaning, but I don’t think that makes life meaningless. I just think it means we need to discover our own meaning and imbue it into our life. But I agree with you 100% about there are different ways to view the world. I mean, you know, the old way of calling it was optimism and pessimism. and that’s an oversimplification. Those are binaries. But there is a view that orients towards the goodness that is in the world, the kindness that is in the world, the beauty that is in the world, the connectivity that is in the world. And if both are true, which I think they are, and we’re making it up, we’re making up the meaning we want to give it, because that is what I think we are largely doing. Then a really good question is like, which is the.

Speaker 4 00:29:38  Most useful.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:39  View, right. Which view is going to be better for me and the people around me in this world? And, and for me, it’s the view that is not cynical.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:48  It’s not pollyannaish either. And that’s where I’d kind of like to take the conversation, because you have a great article on Substack that I really loved, because you you got into perhaps my most pressing question that I think about these days, and it’s this idea that, as you said earlier, dropping the war with reality makes a lot of sense, right? Because reality wins. And we also have a view of ourselves and the world that could be better. And those things sometimes are at odds with each other. And I think a lot about how do you know which of those levers to pull the I should change this lever, I should accept this lever. And I just love to hear you think through that question.

Josh Radnor 00:30:37  Okay, so I have written quite a bit about this in terms of we want to accept there’s a negotiation that has to take place between acceptance and action. Yes. Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:46  Exactly what.

Josh Radnor 00:30:47  I’m talking. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, the way I think through this is if I throw a temper tantrum about something in my life or something happening in politics or the world, you know, Anne Lamott, yeah, I think she has some great salty kind of wisdom.

Josh Radnor 00:31:06  And I just, I really like her quite a bit. But she says there’s three types of problems in the world. There’s me problems, you problems and God problems. She calls God problems. Wars, hurricanes, you know, natural disasters, things that are so outside of her ability to actually control and influence. And then you problems are obviously you problems and me problems or me problems. And she says she gets into suffering when she tries to fix God problems and new problems. Right. So that makes a lot of sense to me. That just clarifies things. For me. It’s a bit of a serenity prayer kind of breakdown, you know, what can I control? What can I not control? I try to avoid having temper tantrums around things as they are because like you said, reality wins. But I think we have a much better chance of at least getting called on to participate. If we start with acceptance like just a blanket acceptance like this is how it is right now. And then we look at what we might be able to change in effect and what we can’t.

Josh Radnor 00:32:10  And sometimes you’re going to, you know, try to twist some knobs and it’s not going to work. And other times something will move the needle. But I think starting with like a kind of radical acceptance, it takes me out of some pain. Right? Because the pain is in the resistance. It shouldn’t be this way. Yeah. And then you’re you’re really at war with reality and you’re really in a losing position. You’re just this spec shouting in the Grand Canyon or something for for something to be different.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:38  I love what you said there. The negotiation between acceptance and action. That’s really good because that’s what I think it is. I think often about one of the first guests on the show is a gentleman named Andrew Solomon, and he wrote a book called The Noonday Demon.

Josh Radnor 00:32:53  I read The Noonday Demon. He’s very brilliant. Andrew Solomon, he’s brilliant.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:56  Yeah. He wrote another book called Far From the Tree.

Speaker 4 00:33:00  I read that too.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:01  Yeah, yeah, an amazing book. But what stuck with me through all the years, and this is a decade ago that we first talked about this was he was talking about parents whose children are autistic.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:12  Yeah. And he talked about how hard it is for them because there are some group of people saying, you can change this, you can fix this. Some of that might be snake oil, some of it might be real, some of it. But you can do something. And then there’s the you can’t do anything about this. Right. And you accept it. And if you accept your child for the way they are, maybe that’s just an all around easier case. And what I love that he said is if you know you can’t change something, it’s easy to go about the business of accepting it. Yeah. If you know you can change something, it’s easy to go about the business of changing it. And most of us live in this very difficult middle part. But I think the way you just said it is a really elegant, almost poetic way of saying it’s the negotiation between acceptance and action and that that negotiation in certain situations never get settled. It’s not like you all reach an agreement and it’s done. You live in the negotiation?

Josh Radnor 00:34:11  I think so. And live in the question. But also. Yeah. I think nature is useful to kind of pay attention to. I mean, I lived in California where it was less visible, but I’m back on the East Coast and just watching the seasons happen and watching, you know, the flowers bloom and then fade away in the fall and the leaves fall off the trees, and then the barren and the snow and the and you know, a farmer knows that there’s a time to sow and a time to reap. I think in America especially, or in the West, we have this idea that we should always be growing. Growing, growing. Doing. Doing, doing. It’s almost like disobeying the laws of nature in some fundamental way, because there is a time for rest. I mean, true rest, you know, really gathering another round of information, not more energy. And I try to remember that this might not be a season of change.

Josh Radnor 00:35:06  This might be a season of acceptance. You know this. I didn’t grow up Christian, but a lot of my friends who grew up like in more evangelical circles, they always say, you know, I’m in a real season of doubt or this is a real season of abundance, you know? And I always liked that language. I always thought it was like useful language because it implies that it’s not forever. And again, that’s a mercy.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:43  We’ve referenced suffering a little bit. And you talk about discomfort. Is the doorway as the name of one of your Substack posts? And in it you did something where you put a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. And I was struck by that because I’ve taught this program for years called Wise Habits, and I use a lot of Calvin and Hobbes strips to teach, because I just think there’s so much wisdom in them. Are you also a fan.

Josh Radnor 00:36:08  A casual fan? I had stumbled across that. Happiness isn’t enough for me, I demand euphoria. I think that was exactly.

Josh Radnor 00:36:15  That was the one. Yeah, I stumbled across it and I just pulled it, and I had it in a file of things that kind of delighted me. It’s also something, you know, my friend Hal says about addicts. He says the only emotion acceptable to an addict is euphoria. He says, you know, it’s 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. Where’s my euphoria?

Eric Zimmer 00:36:33  You know? Yes. I’m a lot of years sober and I still laugh because I relate with that. And I love that Calvin cartoon because where it starts is him enjoying a nice day. He’s like, here I am enjoying this nice day. You know, and then he thinks, but I’m not euphoric. Right. And then the last frame says, I can’t remember whether he said I need to stop my mind while I’m still ahead or my mind is out to get me, or something along those lines of like, he’s able to see Knowing what I know about you and your taste, from reading your Substack and looking at a lot of the things you reference.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:08  Calvin and Hobbes, I think, is a deeply, deeply wise strip across the board, and I think it’s one of the more brilliant works of art in humanity, is that.

Josh Radnor 00:37:17  Bill Watterson.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:18  Watterson.

Josh Radnor 00:37:19  Yeah, I think he’s a Kenyon grad. I think he went to my college where I went, okay, there was a lore, kind of Kenyon lore that his senior year he drew cartoons all over the wall. He kind of did like his own Sistine Chapel of cartoons on the wall, and they painted over it. And it’s this kind of like lost masterpiece, like somewhere in a dorm at Kenyon or all these early cartoons.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:44  That’s amazing.

Josh Radnor 00:37:45  But I think he was a philosophy major, and that’s why he called it Calvin and Hobbes. And yeah, yeah, I don’t know, it just really it really struck me. I just thought it was it was a funny thing, you know, that human thing. You know, if a little is good, more is better. Yeah. Can I ask, when did you get sober?

Eric Zimmer 00:38:00  Well, I got sober from heroin in 1994.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:03  Okay. I stayed sober about eight years. Then I started to drink again. And I drank for about three years. Yeah. And then I’ve been sober from that for, like, 17 years. So the vast majority of my adult life has been in sobriety. Yeah. Which I’m very grateful for. In many ways. I’m grateful that. Like, when I start, I just kind of burn the house down pretty quick. And it’s pretty clear, like, okay, something needs to happen, right? Versus like the long goodbye kind of thing.

Josh Radnor 00:38:30  Yep yep yep. Absolutely.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:32  Speaking of Ohio and Bill Watterson, there’s a big cartoon library at OSU, and they have one of the biggest collections of Bill Watterson cartoons in the world. And so you can go visit a little bit of a shrine for me. We talked a little bit about this idea of negotiating acceptance and action. And I think that some of the things I pulled for that came from a post of yours about not minding what happens, which is a Krishnamurti quote.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:00  Yeah. And I wanted to talk about something in particular that you talk about in there, which is you on a Vipassana retreat. Was that just this last December or is it the December before that?

Josh Radnor 00:39:14  No, no, it was last December. Like six months ago. Okay. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:17  Yeah. You open to sort of sharing your experience?

Josh Radnor 00:39:20  Sure. Yeah. I mean, it was a real challenge for me. Like, it was. It was much more challenging. Have you ever done a vipassana?

Eric Zimmer 00:39:27  I have done long, silent retreats. Not a specific vipassana. Unless you consider insight meditation society like Jack Kornfield, Tara Brock.

Josh Radnor 00:39:36  How long are those? Like eight days or nine days?

Eric Zimmer 00:39:39  Yeah. 7 to 8. There’s some weekend ones. Yeah. I’ve mostly done Zen sessions, which are eight days.

Josh Radnor 00:39:46  Okay. Yeah. And that’s total silence.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:48  Total silence. And like you said, no books, you know? Yeah. I’m like, two days into it and I’m like, I’ll give you $100 for a cereal box to read.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:56  You know, like, give me a cereal box to read.

Josh Radnor 00:39:58  I know they had these instructions in the room about how you were supposed to clean your room when you left, and I read those like it was the Talmud or something. Like I was I went so deep on this thing in a fascinating way. It shows you what you’re addicted to in a broader sense, not just about in chemicals or or anything, but really about, like, I’m addicted to words. I’m addicted to information. I’m addicted to the news. I’m addicted to, you know, and I’m also addicted to talking. Like, truly just talking. It was a very fascinating experience and an experiment. It was what it felt like on my psyche. Yeah. And largely I was in an enormous amount of discomfort for for the majority of the time, I would say. But I felt incredibly unmoored and kind of confused about even not being able to say certain, like pleasantries, like in the line at the dining hall, like if you felt like you cut someone off.

Josh Radnor 00:40:56  You just want to say, oh, sorry. Were you here? Do you want to go? Like you couldn’t do any of the, like, little signifiers of we’re in a society and we’re sharing space. I just found it really challenging. I ended up having to talk to the teacher a few times because I was one night I was borderline almost having a panic attack, and then I found I enjoyed these talks and they were only about 4 or 5 minutes long, but I enjoyed being witnessed. The basics of like relational communication are very important to me. And when I was supposed to exist in silence without them, I felt deep grief. I can’t, I don’t know, it was so much harder than I thought it would be. And my meditation practice has been really wonky since I got back.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:43  Interesting.

Josh Radnor 00:41:44  My wife and I were at the Botanic Gardens this morning and we meditated, and it was so nice. And I, I was like, I really want to get back into a practice, but I think I had like a I wasn’t quite trauma, but it was definitely like something got provoked.

Josh Radnor 00:41:57  I had moments of fear. I had moments of grief. I know they say, you know, lots of stuff’s going to come up. But something about it I found very challenging. That said, by the end of it, you know, once you’re allowed to talk for the last day, like I felt like I had been paroled, like I was I was so excited. You know, I went on these long walks up and down this road every single day, like three times a day. I just didn’t know what to do with myself and I. And I saw my monkey mind really, really in action. Yeah. And I saw how I’m in a society. There’s another Krishnamurti quote. It’s no measure of health to be well adapted to a profoundly sick society. I don’t know if you’ve come across that one. Yeah, yeah. And I am somewhat adapted to this society. I mean, it’s the one I grew up in. It’s like I do fairly well navigating it. And then you take me out of that society, and I don’t have my whatever op eds to read or my books to read or my music to listen to.

Josh Radnor 00:42:54  And I realize, oh, I’m a little bit insane, actually. Like, my mind is so far from being quiet. Although I will say I had a couple of meditations where I had no body, no time. You know that that I did. I did taste that timeless realm. But the getting there, it was rough. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:15  They can be rough. I actually do okay with the silence in groups of people. I’m a little shy, so I actually find it sort of enjoyable to be in companionship and not have to figure out what to say.

Josh Radnor 00:43:28  Yeah. My wife is the same way. She’s done 2 or 3 of a personas, and she always appreciates not having to talk.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:34  Yeah, I like that part. And even when what I’ve learned is when the silence ends, I’ve learned to take myself away. Because it just is. It’s overwhelming to me all of a sudden. But I do like being with the people like that. I mean, it’s not that I want to be alone.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:48  I enjoy the community aspect. I think for me and you said in this post, I think you said that boredom and discomfort are the two emotions you most can’t tolerate. And I think that’s very much me too. And it’s the no reading that just kills me. Yeah. That’s probably the hardest for me because I can entertain myself pretty well with a book. I’ve gone on a couple with the spiritual teacher Adi Asante. I don’t know if you’re familiar with him.

Josh Radnor 00:44:13  Oh, yeah, I know I do. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:14  They do something interesting, which is they give you. It might be 2 or 3 paragraphs of his, and that’s all you’re allowed to read. So you do what you did with the cleaning instructions on the wall. Right. You’re like, I’m reading it. But for me, I descend deep into it, like, since it’s so little to read and I want to read so often, it becomes ultimately certainly a contemplative act, if not a meditative act.

Josh Radnor 00:44:41  Yeah. I also hilariously like I would make my bed as if it was going to be inspected by the military.

Josh Radnor 00:44:47  Like, I would just.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:48  Say anything.

Josh Radnor 00:44:49  You’re trying to give yourself any activity. There were certain days where I just unfolded and folded all my clothes. I didn’t even have that many clothes there, but I just was looking and and it also showed me how addicted I am to action and doing this. You know, I really I was constantly looking for something to actually do. That’s why these walks outside just became like my lifeline.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:12  That’s interesting. I was just thinking how funny it would be if we segue into a commercial for Vipassana retreats, how mad they would be about, like Josh Radnor says that.

Josh Radnor 00:45:23  Well, also, I mean, they’re free. And I loved the Goenka talks at night. You know, they have these pre-recorded talks from Goenka who were I think they were in the earlier mid 90s, these talks, and they’re fantastic and they’re really inspiring. And one of the things he says is we give you a taste of what it’s like to be a monk for ten days. Yeah.

Josh Radnor 00:45:45  We take away the world from you. We give you all your meals. All you’re here to do is be contemplative and sink into this place. My wife tries to remind me. She says, when you came home from that, you were euphoric. But like, two days later, I went into this, like, weird, kind of down depressive state that that didn’t lift for a while. So I’ve been struggling in some ways. I wrote that Substack piece to try to work through what that experience was for me, what it meant, and maybe I’m still working through it as I talk, even. I’m kind of like, oh yeah, I need to do some more processing of that. You know, it was incredibly rewarding, but it was also very hard. And when people say, would you go back? My answer right now is no. You know, I hear wonderful things about like insight and all that.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:30  But yeah, I don’t know if Addy Ashanti is still doing retreats. It turns out that those have been my favorite because they don’t feel like an endurance contest, right? You do have to be quiet.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:42  You can only read this thing, but it doesn’t feel like meditation battle and like you’re meditating for like ten hours a day. You know, he gives a couple talks. He actually does a guided meditation. There’s just a little bit more happening. You still meditate a lot, don’t get me wrong, but it just felt less arduous in the bad way. Not that some difficulty isn’t good, but too much difficulty as you’re reflecting can be too much. Well, we are at the end of our time for this. You and I are going to continue in a post-show conversation, and we’re going to talk about a Substack post that you wrote called Locked Doors. But I’m going to put a slightly different point on it. This conversation is for any of you who wrestle with wanting what you can’t have, which feels like a story of my life up to a certain point. Listeners, if you’d like access to that post-show conversation, ad free episodes, a special episode I do. And to be a supporter of the show, you can go to one.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:40  You feed join. And last thing I’ll say, Josh, if you want a way back into meditation, that feels nice. A friend of mine and one of the best meditation teachers I know, Henry Shukman, has an app called The Way, and it’s really good. It’s just very nice. He’s got a great English accent. It’s just very soothing and wonderful. So anyway, thank you, Josh, for joining us. I really appreciate it.

Josh Radnor 00:48:06  Absolutely. It was such a pleasure to talk to you.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:08  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:38  One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.

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