Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Habib.

Welcome to the last episode of 2022, featuring one of everybody's favorite guests, I've been told many times,

Michael Lipson, who appeared back on episode 139.

He's a meditation teacher and therapist and author, and his new book, B,

An Alphabet of Astonishment, has just come out. It's a deep and lovely series of contemplative vignettes

on gratitude and being human. I wanted to just talk about part of what this podcast means to me in the beginning here,

and the dance of gratitude and anxiety.

Whenever I do this podcast, I'm reaching out to strangers.

So I don't know if you've thought about that as a listener.

I actually didn't really think about it until recently when I was thinking, isn't this weird a little bit?

I'll reach out to strangers very often. This is just a cold call. I like someone's work and efforts

and who they are in the world. And so I send them an email. When you hear me talking

with someone, most of the time, you're hearing our first conversation ever. I mean, I am, of course,

familiar with what they've done. I try to read everything. A guest has written or listen to their music,

see their movies, read interviews with them, listen to their podcasts and so on.

So I have been walking with them in a way beforehand. But the meeting is a meeting with a stranger.

It's new. And that meeting comes from the overcoming of anxiety and the focusing

on gratitude, the focusing on how grateful I am for what they do and who they are in the world

with us. There's the intent to openly meet another person, another human being, that overtakes the anxiety.

This podcast is a record of strangers meeting.

And you walk with us in that way too.

You're hearing two strangers speak, and you yourself then get to walk with us to create way too. You're hearing two strangers speak and you yourself then get to walk

...