On being is brought to you by the John Templeton Foundation, harnessing the power of the sciences

to explore the deepest and most perplexing questions facing humankind. Learn about the latest

discoveries in the study of hope and optimism, intellectual humility, and free will at Templeton.org.

The one and only Pico Eier is an esteemed explorer of inner life for himself and in 21st century

society. He's a journalist, novelist, and travel writer who lives in Japan but used to retreat

many times each year until the pandemic intervened to a remote Benedictine hermitage.

And here's why he told me he wanted to draw out the writer Elizabeth Gilbert for this newest

episode in our Future of Hope series. He said, one of the things that so moves and inspires me

about Liz Gilbert is that she retains such brightness and optimism in the face of the many

losses she so unflinchingly describes. When I spoke to her for a small library in Colorado last July,

she seemed so at home with being alone, so cheerful and undistracted by the lockdown,

even though she is usually such a gregarious and sociable being. How much is her sense of hope

based not on a confidence in happy endings but just the conviction that something makes sense,

even if not a sense that we can grasp. In the conversation that follows, Pico's questions and

Liz's answers are all the more poignant given that both of them suffered deep losses amidst our

protracted pandemic realities. Liz's life partner Reya died of cancer and Pico's beloved mother

passed away just before we were first set to record this interview. We're back in the realm of

the small and also the way that the body can teach us things that the mind could never grasp

or would make overcomplicated. And I think all of us have found during this pandemic we have

much less control over the external world and we imagine it's been a very good humbling for me,

but we have much more control over how we respond to it. And if there is one thing that I,

if I had the chance to do it over again, could have done differently, would have been to

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