This TED Talk features poet David White, recorded live at TED 2017.

The youthful perspective on the future, the present perspective on the future,

and the future mature perspective on the future.

I'd like to try and bring all those three tenses together in one

identity tonight. And you could say that the poet in many ways looks at what I call the conversational

nature of reality. And you ask yourself, what is the conversational nature of reality?

The conversational nature of reality is the fact that whatever you desire of the world,

whatever you desire of your partner in a marriage or love relationship,

whatever you desire of your children,

whatever you desire of the people who work for you or with you or your world

will not happen exactly as you would like it to happen.

But equally, whatever the world desires of us, whatever our partner, our child, our colleague,

our industry, our future demands of us will also not happen.

And what actually happens is this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you.

And this frontier of actual meeting between what we call a self and what we call the world

is the only place actually where things are real.

But it's quite astonishing how little time we spend at this conversational frontier

and not abstracted away from it in one strategy or another. I was coming through immigration, which is quite a dramatic

border at the moment into the U.S. last year. And you get off an international flight across the Atlantic.

You're not in the best place. You're not at your most spiritually mature,

you're quite impatient with the rest of humanity, in fact.

So that when you get up to immigration

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