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So, we all have bad seasons in life.

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And I had one in 2013.

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My marriage had just ended,

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and I was humiliated
by that failed commitment.

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My kids had left home for college
or were leaving.

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I grew up mostly
in the conservative movement,

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but conservatism had changed,

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so I lost a lot of those friends, too.

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And so what I did is,
I lived alone in an apartment,

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and I just worked.

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If you opened the kitchen drawers
where there should have been utensils,

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there were Post-it notes.

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If you opened the other drawers
where there should have been plates,

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I had envelopes.

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I had work friends, weekday friends,
but I didn't have weekend friends.

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And so my weekends
were these long, howling silences.

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And I was lonely.

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And loneliness, unexpectedly,
came to me in the form of --

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it felt like fear,
a burning in my stomach.

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And it felt a little like drunkenness,

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just making bad decisions,
just fluidity, lack of solidity.

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And the painful part of that moment
was the awareness

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that the emptiness in my apartment
was just reflective of the emptiness

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in myself,

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and that I had fallen for some of the lies
that our culture tells us.

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The first lie is that
career success is fulfilling.

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I've had a fair bit of career success,

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and I've found that it helps me avoid
the shame I would feel

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if I felt myself a failure,

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but it hasn't given me any positive good.

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The second lie is I can make myself happy,

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that if I just win one more victory,

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lose 15 pounds, do a little more yoga,

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I'll get happy.

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And that's the lie of self-sufficiency.

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But as anybody
on their deathbed will tell you,

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the things that make people happy
is the deep relationships of life,

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the losing of self-sufficiency.

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The third lie is the lie
of the meritocracy.

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The message of the meritocracy
is you are what you accomplish.

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The myth of the meritocracy
is you can earn dignity

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by attaching yourself
to prestigious brands.

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The emotion of the meritocracy
is conditional love;

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you can earn your way to love.

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The anthropology of the meritocracy
is you're not a soul to be purified,

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you're a set of skills to be maximized.

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And the evil of the meritocracy

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is that people who've achieved
a little more than others

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are actually worth
a little more than others.

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And so the wages of sin are sin.

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And my sins were the sins of omission--

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not reaching out,
failing to show up for my friends,

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evasion, avoiding conflict.

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And the weird thing was
that as I was falling into the valley --

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it was a valley of disconnection --

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a lot of other people
were doing that, too.

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And that's sort of
the secret to my career;

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a lot of the things that happen to me

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are always happening
to a lot of other people.

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I'm a very average person
with above average communication skills.

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(Laughter)

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And so I was detached.

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And at the same time,
a lot of other people were detached

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and isolated and fragmented
from each other.

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Thirty-five percent of Americans
over 45 are chronically lonely.

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Only eight percent of Americans
report having meaningful conversation

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with their neighbors.

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Only 32 percent of Americans
say they trust their neighbors

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and only 18 percent of millennials.

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The fastest-growing
political party is unaffiliated.

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The fastest-growing religious
movement is unaffiliated.

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Depression rates are rising,
mental health problems are rising.

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The suicide rate has risen
30 percent since 1999.

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For teen suicides
over the last several years,

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the suicide rate has risen by 70 percent.

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Forty-five thousand Americans
kill themselves every year,

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72,000 die from opioid addictions,

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life expectancy is falling, not rising.

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So what I mean to tell you,
I flew out here to say

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that we have an economic crisis,
we have environmental crisis,

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we have a political crisis.

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We also have a social
and relational crisis;

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we're in the valley.

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We're fragmented from each other,

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we've got cascades of lies
coming out of Washington ...

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We're in the valley.

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And so I've spent the last five years --

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how do you get out of a valley?

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The Greeks used to say,
"You suffer your way to wisdom."

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And from that dark period where I started,
I've had a few realizations.

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The first is, freedom sucks.

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Economic freedom is OK,
political freedom is great,

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social freedom sucks.

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The unrooted man is the adrift man.

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The unrooted man is the unremembered man,
because he's uncommitted to things.

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Freedom is not an ocean
you want to swim in,

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it's a river you want to get across,

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so you can commit and plant yourself
on the other side.

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The second thing I learned

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is that when you have
one of those bad moments in life,

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you can either be broken,

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or you can be broken open.

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And we all know people who are broken.

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They've endured some pain
or grief, they get smaller,

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they get angrier, resentful,
they lash out.

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As the saying is,

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"Pain that is not transformed
gets transmitted."

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But other people are broken open.

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Suffering's great power
is that it's an interruption of life.

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It reminds you you're not the person
you thought you were.

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The theologian Paul Tillich said

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what suffering does is it carves through
what you thought was the floor

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of the basement of your soul,

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and it carves through that,
revealing a cavity below,

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and it carves through that,
revealing a cavity below.

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You realize there are depths of yourself
you never anticipated,

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and only spiritual and relational food
will fill those depths.

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And when you get down there,
you get out of the head of the ego

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and you get into the heart,

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the desiring heart,

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the idea that what we really yearn for
is longing and love for another,

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the kind of thing that Louis de Bernières
described in his book,

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"Captain Corelli's Mandolin."

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He had an old guy talking to his daughter

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about his relationship with his late wife,

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and the old guy says,

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"Love itself is whatever is leftover
when being in love is burned away.

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And this is both an art
and a fortunate accident.

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Your mother and I had it.

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We had roots that grew
towards each other underground,

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and when all the pretty blossoms
had fallen from our branches,

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we discovered that we are
one tree and not two."

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That's what the heart yearns for.

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The second thing
you discover is your soul.

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Now, I don't ask you to believe in God
or not believe in God,

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but I do ask you to believe
that there's a piece of you

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that has no shape, size, color or weight,

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but that gives you
infinite dignity and value.

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Rich and successful people
don't have more of this

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than less successful people.

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Slavery is wrong because
it's an obliteration of another soul.

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Rape is not just an attack
on a bunch of physical molecules,

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it's an attempt to insult
another person's soul.

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And what the soul does
is it yearns for righteousness.

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The heart yearns for fusion with another,
the soul yearns for righteousness.

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And that led to my third realization,
which I borrowed from Einstein.

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"The problem you have
is not going to be solved

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at the level of consciousness
on which you created it.

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You have to expand
to a different level of consciousness."

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So what do you do?

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Well, the first thing you do
is you throw yourself on your friends

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and you have deeper conversations
that you ever had before.

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But the second thing you do,

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you have to go out alone
into the wilderness.

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You go out into that place
where there's nobody there to perform,

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and the ego has nothing to do,
and it crumbles,

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and only then are you capable
of being loved.

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I have a friend who said
that when her daughter was born,

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she realized that she loved her
more than evolution required.

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(Laughter)

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And I've always loved that.

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(Applause)

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Because it talks about the peace
that's at the deep of ourself,

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our inexplicable care for one another.

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And when you touch that spot,
you're ready to be rescued.

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The hard thing about
when you're in the valley

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is that you can't climb out;

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somebody has to reach in and pull you out.

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It happened to me.

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I got, luckily, invited over to a house
by a couple named Kathy and David,

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and they were --

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They had a kid in the DC
public school, his name's Santi.

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Santi had a friend
who needed a place to stay

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because his mom had some health issues.

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And then that kid had a friend
and that kid had a friend.

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When I went to their house six years ago,

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I walk in the door, there's like
25 around the kitchen table,

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a whole bunch sleeping
downstairs in the basement.

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I reach out to introduce myself to a kid,

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and he says, "We don't really
shake hands here.

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We just hug here."

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And I'm not the huggiest guy
on the face of the earth,

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but I've been going back to that home
every Thursday night when I'm in town,

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and just hugging all those kids.

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They demand intimacy.

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They demand that you behave in a way
where you're showing all the way up.

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And they teach you a new way to live,

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which is the cure
for all the ills of our culture

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which is a way of direct --
really putting relationship first,

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not just as a word, but as a reality.

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And the beautiful thing is,
these communities are everywhere.

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I started something at the Aspen Institute
called "Weave: The Social Fabric."

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This is our logo here.

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And we plop into a place and we find
weavers anywhere, everywhere.

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We find people like Asiaha Butler,
who grew up in --

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who lived in Chicago, in Englewood,
in a tough neighborhood.

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And she was about to move
because it was so dangerous,

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and she looked across the street
and she saw two little girls

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playing in an empty lot
with broken bottles,

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and she turned to her husband
and she said, "We're not leaving.

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We're not going to be just another family
that abandoned that."

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And she Googled "volunteer in Englewood,"
and now she runs R.A.G.E.,

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the big community organization there.

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Some of these people
have had tough valleys.

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I met a woman named Sarah in Ohio
who came home from an antiquing trip

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and found that her husband
had killed himself and their two kids.

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She now runs a free pharmacy,
she volunteers in the community,

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she helps women cope
with violence, she teaches.

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She told me, "I grew from this
experience because I was angry.

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I was going to fight back against
what he tried to do to me

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by making a difference in the world.

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See, he didn't kill me.

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My response to him is,

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'Whatever you meant to do to me,
screw you, you're not going to do it.'"

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These weavers are not living
an individualistic life,

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they're living a relationist life,
they have a different set of values.

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They have moral motivations.

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They have vocational certitude,
they have planted themselves down.

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I met a guy in Youngstown, Ohio,

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who just held up a sign
in the town square,

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"Defend Youngstown."

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They have radical mutuality,

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and they are geniuses at relationship.

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There's a woman named Mary Gordon

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who runs something
called Roots of Empathy.

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And what they do is they take
a bunch of kids, an eighth grade class,

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they put a mom and an infant,

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and then the students have to guess
what the infant is thinking,

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to teach empathy.

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There was one kid in a class
who was bigger than the rest

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because he'd been held back,
been through the foster care system,

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seen his mom get killed.

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And he wanted to hold the baby.

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And the mom was nervous
because he looked big and scary.

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But she let this kid,
Darren, hold the baby.

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He held it, and he was great with it.

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He gave the baby back and started
asking questions about parenthood.

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And his final question was,

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"If nobody has ever loved you,
do you think you can be a good father?"

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And so what Roots of Empathy does

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is they reach down and they grab
people out of the valley.

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And that's what weavers are doing.

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Some of them switch jobs.

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Some of them stay in their same jobs.

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But one thing is,
they have an intensity to them.

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I read this --

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E.O. Wilson wrote a great book
called "Naturalist," about his childhood.

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When he was seven,
his parents were divorcing.

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And they sent him
to Paradise Beach in North Florida.

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And he'd never seen the ocean before.

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And he'd never seen a jellyfish before.

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He wrote, "The creature was astonishing.
It existed beyond my imagination."

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He was sitting on the dock one day

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and he saw a stingray
float beneath his feet.

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And at that moment, a naturalist was born
in the awe and wonder.

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And he makes this observation:

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that when you're a child,

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you see animals at twice the size
as you do as an adult.

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And that has always impressed me,

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because what we want as kids
is that moral intensity,

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to be totally given ourselves
over to something

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and to find that level of vocation.

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And when you are around these weavers,

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they see other people
at twice the size as normal people.

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They see deeper into them.

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And what they see is joy.

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On the first mountain of our life,
when we're shooting for our career,

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we shoot for happiness.

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And happiness is good,
it's the expansion of self.

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You win a victory,

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you get a promotion,
your team wins the Super Bowl,

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you're happy.

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Joy is not the expansion of self,
it's the dissolving of self.

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It's the moment when the skin barrier
disappears between a mother and her child,

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it's the moment when a naturalist
feels just free in nature.

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It's the moment where you're so lost
in your work or a cause,

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you have totally self-forgotten.

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And joy is a better thing
to aim for than happiness.

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I collect passages of joy
of people when they lose it.

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One of my favorite is from Zadie Smith.

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In 1999, she was in a London nightclub,

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looking for her friends,
wondering where her handbag was.

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And suddenly, as she writes,

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"... a rail-thin man with enormous eyes
reached across a sea of bodies

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for my hand.

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He kept asking me the same thing
over and over, 'Are you feeling it?'

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My ridiculous heels were killing me,
I was terrified that I might die,

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yet I felt simultaneously
overwhelmed with delight

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that 'Can I Kick it?'
should happen to be playing

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on this precise moment
in the history of the world

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on the sound system,

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and it was now morphing
into 'Teen Spirit.'

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I took the man's hand,
the top of my head blew away,

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we danced, we danced,
we gave ourselves up to joy."

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And so what I'm trying to describe
is two different life mindsets.

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The first mountain mindset, which is about
individual happiness and career success.

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And it's a good mindset,
I have nothing against it.

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But we're in a national valley,

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because we don't have
the other mindset to balance it.

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We no longer feel good
about ourselves as a people,

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we've lost our defining
faith in our future,

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we don't see each other deeply,
we don't treat each other as well.

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And we need a lot of changes.

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We need an economic change
and environmental change.

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But we also need a cultural
and relational revolution.

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We need to name the language
of a recovered society.

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And to me, the weavers
have found that language.

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My theory of social change
is that society changes

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when a small group of people
find a better way to live,

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and the rest of us copy them.

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And these weavers have found
a better way to live.

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And you don't have to theorize about it.

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They are out there as community builders
all around the country.

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We just have to shift our lives a little,

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so we can say, "I'm a weaver,
we're a weaver."

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And if we do that,

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the hole inside ourselves gets filled,

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but more important,
the social unity gets repaired.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)