This is the 10% Happier Podcast.

I'm Dan Harris.

Hey, gang, I've always been really intrigued by the Buddhist notion of the eight worldly wins.

They include praise and blame, success and failure, joy and sorrow, and most relevant for this conversation, gain and loss.

The idea is that if we learn to relate to these various two-sided coins as being like the wind or part of nature, we can develop more equanimity vis-a-vis life's inevitable ups and downs, vexations and vicissitudes,

the full catastrophe. Today we're going to talk specifically about the unstoppable flow of gain

and loss, the upside and downside of impermanence, and how to deal with this process more effectively.

My guest is not actually a Dharma teacher, but instead a Pulitzer Prize winning writer,

who I've actually been a fan of for a very long time.

She really is, in my opinion, one of the best writers drawing breath on the planet currently.

So it was very cool to meet her.

Catherine Schultz is a staff writer at the New Yorker who has a new

book called Lost and Found, a memoir, which is really about her processing a huge loss in her

personal life and then a huge gain, and then also musing in a very compelling way, about how to

live in a world where this happiness and pain inevitably commingle.

In other words, how to live with contradiction.

In this conversation, we talk about how humans experience grief, a gift that you can give to anybody who's grieving,

why she loves the clichés that remind us to enjoy the moment,

even though they are cliches. Her broad understanding of the term loss, a category that, as she

points out, can include both loved ones and your car keys. How the key word in lost and found is

and, and why she says life is a perpetual and machine.

And we also talk about some of the insights she has gained from being in a long-term romantic

...