Making Sense - Sam Harris - #249 — Distance & Arrival

David White is a poet, essayist, and writer. He is also the author of the book, Consolations, and the poetry collection, Constellations. In this episode, we talk about the difference between being a tourist and a pilgrim, and how they are different from each other. And we read from a poem he wrote in preparation of his trip to Santiago de Compostela, which is a place of great beauty and great meaning for him, and why it's important to remember that we all have what we need to go there. We also talk about what it really means to be a "pilgrim," and how the word " pilgrim" is often used to describe a person who travels to a place or a place that is important to them, and what it means to travel to something that is not only important, but also important for them to go to. This episode is brought to you by Sam Harris' excellent podcast, Making Sense, wherever you get your podcasts. The first season of my podcast with Ricky Gervais, Absolutely Mental, has dropped, and 11 episodes are available at AbsolutelyMental.org. As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast, so there are 8 new ones available here on the podcast so they can get a free account. No questions asked. I love you, listener! and thank you for letting me know what you think of the podcast. . Sam Harris - The Making Sense Podcast. Make sure to check out the podcast and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, wherever else you re listening to this podcast might be listening to something you might be interested in learning more about what we're doing in the making sense of things like that. If you like what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter! - And if you can t afford it, become a supporter of us, become one of our sponsors, and spread the word about us on your friends, and share the podcast on your social media platforms. We don t run a podcast. It helps us out there, and we re making it everywhere. Thank you. - Sam Harris, thank you! Timestamps: 1) 2) 3) What's a good day in the life of a Pilgrim? 4) 5) How do you feel about it? 6) What does it mean to travel?

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:08.860 This is Sam Harris.

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00:00:52.280 Okay, the briefest of housekeeping's here.

00:01:05.220 Just want to announce that the first season of my podcast with Ricky Gervais,

00:01:10.620 Absolutely Mental, has dropped,

00:01:13.000 and 11 episodes are available at absolutelymental.com.

00:01:18.520 The first three of those episodes we released here on the podcast,

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00:01:50.820 Okay.

00:01:53.580 Today I'm speaking with David White.

00:01:56.700 David is a poet, and he's been on the podcast before.

00:02:01.920 Truly wonderful voice, who's been producing more and more content for us

00:02:05.640 over at Waking Up.

00:02:07.260 His poems and short essays and extemporaneous reflections

00:02:13.560 are slowly accruing over there, and it's really wonderful.

00:02:18.940 And here is the next installment.

00:02:21.380 We discuss a few more of his short essays from his book, Consolations.

00:02:26.540 When I'm speaking with David, I feel like I'm speaking with my alter ego in some ways.

00:02:31.960 He is so different from me, but there's so many places where we converge.

00:02:35.800 Anyway, it's always great fun to speak with him.

00:02:39.420 And now I bring you David White.

00:02:48.260 I am back with David White.

00:02:50.420 David, thanks for joining me again.

00:02:52.600 It's a pleasure.

00:02:54.840 So we have many more things to talk about,

00:02:59.200 taking the roadmap you have set out in your wonderful book, Constellations.

00:03:05.020 The audio of which is slowly making its way into the Waking Up app.

00:03:12.540 And so we have, to remind people, this is your book of essentially prose poems or short essays

00:03:18.940 focused on specific words.

00:03:21.800 And we'll do a few more of those words today.

00:03:23.940 But you also sent a poem through.

00:03:27.000 Do you want to read that?

00:03:27.920 This is a piece I wrote in a deep kind of reverie last week.

00:03:33.760 I'm building on an original book of poems called Pilgrim.

00:03:38.020 Many of those poems took the image of a journey to a place that we set for ourselves.

00:03:45.000 And especially, it took the form of going to Santiago de Compostela,

00:03:51.160 which is such a fashionable pilgrimage right now,

00:03:54.840 and still a heartfelt and sincere one across northern Spain.

00:03:58.440 So this is called For the Road to Santiago.

00:04:01.880 We all have that experience of,

00:04:04.520 the wonderful experience actually, of packing for a new trip.

00:04:08.060 But there's something about going to a place of ultimate meaning for us,

00:04:14.600 which is represented by Santiago,

00:04:16.800 where I feel we already have what we need.

00:04:21.560 So this was written out of that experience.

00:04:24.340 Very short poem.

00:04:25.160 For the Road to Santiago,

00:04:29.040 don't make new declarations about what to bring and what to leave behind.

00:04:37.360 Don't make new declarations about what to bring and what to leave behind.

00:04:42.960 Bring what you have.

00:04:44.340 Bring what you have.

00:04:46.260 You were always going that way anyway.

00:04:48.760 You were always going there all along.

00:04:52.520 I like that a lot.

00:04:53.720 So, the distinction between being a tourist and a pilgrim is always fascinating.

00:05:02.560 On the surface, if you are moving your body from one place to another,

00:05:08.660 you go into some foreign country because you want to go,

00:05:12.420 or even some sacred place because you want to go,

00:05:14.960 this distinction is really just in the mind of the traveler.

00:05:20.400 But it's a pretty profound one.

00:05:23.740 Exactly.

00:05:24.580 And there were always, you know, in the chronicles of pilgrims,

00:05:28.700 there were always those who were just out for a holiday and a laugh, you know,

00:05:33.320 and just to get away to, especially in feudal times where your life was so hedged in,

00:05:38.740 you know, by your responsibilities to those above you.

00:05:41.260 So, going off on pilgrimage was an enormous part of medieval life in England, you know,

00:05:49.060 and all across the continent.

00:05:51.140 But we're usually both, you know, we're a pilgrim who gets caught up in the delights of tourism along the way.

00:06:00.720 And, you know, we're creatures of remembering and forgetting.

00:06:07.220 And you could say that the tourism is a form of temporary forgetting.

00:06:13.740 It begins in delight, a bit like opening the internet in the morning.

00:06:17.980 It begins in delight.

00:06:18.860 That's short-lived.

00:06:22.500 Yes.

00:06:22.900 I am a creature of forgetting because I've forgotten that it ever began in delight at this point.

00:06:28.900 Yes.

00:06:30.120 Well, I mean, part of the dynamic of the internet is human beings are so desperate for news,

00:06:36.960 for a voice from the other side that's somehow going to change their present.

00:06:43.820 And that setting off into the internet on the morning is the same call that every human being feels

00:06:51.280 towards all the great pilgrimage sites that have lived in our different human cultures,

00:06:56.540 whether it's Mecca or Kyoto or Varanasi, or if you're an Elvis fan, it's Graceland, you know.

00:07:04.100 Something happened there that was extraordinary that you are going to touch

00:07:11.400 and you are going to actually incarnate it in your own life.

00:07:16.720 So it's this very ancient and everyday dynamic in human life that over there is just slightly

00:07:25.000 more important than here where I'm standing.

00:07:28.160 And I'm going to make a journey out of here to there.

00:07:32.860 And something extraordinary is going to happen along the way.

00:07:38.160 And almost always something more extraordinary than I'm prepared for.

00:07:44.100 I always say that no one really survives a real conversation with something other than themselves.

00:07:51.700 And no one survives a real pilgrimage, if you're sincere.

00:07:56.460 The person who arrives is never the person who began in the first place.

00:08:01.260 Yeah, that might be the crucial distinction.

00:08:05.400 I think when you are on pilgrimage, the goal to be changed by the trip is always explicit, right?

00:08:15.600 It's not just that you're interested or you just want to, you've heard some place is great.

00:08:20.560 It's an inner process that you're focused on.

00:08:24.440 There's a lovely little piece in the Irish tradition written by an Irish monastic.

00:08:29.140 You can imagine a pilgrimage from Ireland to Rome in the 6th or 7th or 8th century was quite

00:08:36.420 perilous, yeah, and quite extraordinary.

00:08:39.000 But it's just a few lines, but he says, to go to Rome, to go to Rome, great the journey,

00:08:45.360 little the gain.

00:08:47.180 If you do not take him with you, you will not find him there.

00:08:52.320 To go to Rome, great the journey, little the gain.

00:08:55.960 If you do not take him with you, you will not find him there.

00:09:00.260 Of course, that's the image of Christ in the Christian tradition.

00:09:03.760 But whatever the name you have for the great calling in your life, if you don't stay within

00:09:12.420 the gravitational well and invitational pull of that calling, you will end up as a mere tourist.

00:09:20.780 But I think there's a lot of self-forgiveness necessary in every pilgrimage, just as there

00:09:26.080 is in every life, of forgiving yourself for all of your parallel peregrinations, you could

00:09:37.340 say.

00:09:37.660 All the hours you wasted, which in the end you find are all the great stories, so you

00:09:46.080 didn't waste a minute along the way when you finally arrived there.

00:09:52.140 That's a point that I think we'll return to in discussing some of these words.

00:09:57.220 But I actually have a question about the poem.

00:09:59.420 This line, don't make new declarations about what to bring and what to leave behind.

00:10:04.680 What were you thinking in terms of new declarations?

00:10:08.800 This has to do with the essential way that we hold the conversation of life and on any

00:10:16.860 journey, the way we hold that exchange between those we meet along the way and the landscapes

00:10:23.580 we meet along the way and the events we meet along the way, both joyous and traumatic.

00:10:29.400 So there's a way, no matter your outward circumstances, that you hold the conversation of your existence.

00:10:38.980 And in that essay, Destiny, I'm looking at the way that this word, which seems fated, actually,

00:10:49.900 can be an understanding of the depth by which we hold that conversation.

00:10:57.680 So I always think that every human being lives out their destiny no matter what they do.

00:11:05.580 But you can live out your destiny through distance and exile and through never consummating your

00:11:13.080 desires.

00:11:14.500 Or you can live it out at a deeper level and your life is completely transformed because of

00:11:22.380 the depth of attention and intentionality that you bring to the conversation.

00:11:28.120 It's still your essential nature.

00:11:30.520 It's just that you are inhabiting it in a fuller way.

00:11:34.460 I mean, that's exactly what your app is all about, is inviting people into these deeper states,

00:11:43.660 conversational states, I would say, while not leaving the essential foundations of the way

00:11:50.220 you're made.

00:11:50.880 Well, let's listen to Destiny and discuss.

00:11:58.620 Destiny.

00:12:00.840 Destiny always has a possessor.

00:12:05.160 As in my destiny, or your destiny, or her destiny. 0.57

00:12:09.660 It gives a sense of something we cannot avoid or something waiting for us.

00:12:13.280 It is a word of story, book, or mythic dimension.

00:12:20.740 Destiny is hardly used in everyday conversation.

00:12:24.660 It is a word that invites belief or disbelief.

00:12:27.360 We reject the ordering of events by some fated, unseen force.

00:12:33.620 Or we agree that there seems to be a greater hand than our own, working at the edges of even

00:12:38.880 the most average life.

00:12:40.100 But speaking of destiny, not only grants us a sense of our own possibilities, but gives us an intimation of our flaws.

00:12:48.880 We sense, along with Shakespeare, that what is unresolved or unspoken in a human character might overwhelm the better parts of ourselves.

00:13:00.380 When we choose between these two poles of mythic triumph or fated failure, we may miss the everyday conversational essence of destiny.

00:13:13.940 Our future influenced by the very way we hold the conversation of life itself, never mind any actions we might take or neglect to take.

00:13:26.520 Two people, simply by looking at the future in radically different ways, have completely different futures from one another awaiting them,

00:13:37.860 no matter their immediate course of action.

00:13:40.320 Even the same course of action, coming from a different way of shaping the conversation, will result in a different outcome.

00:13:50.520 We are shaped by our shaping of the world, and are shaped again in turn.

00:13:57.340 The way we face the world alters the face that we see in the world.

00:14:03.560 The way we face the world alters the face that we see in that world.

00:14:10.320 Strangely, every person always lives out their destiny, no matter what they do, according to the way they shape the conversation.

00:14:21.600 But that destiny may be lived out on the level of consummation or of complete frustration, through experiencing a homecoming or a distant sense of constant exile,

00:14:37.220 or more likely some gradation along the spectrum that lies between, it is still our destiny, our life.

00:14:47.140 But the sense of satisfaction involved, and the possibility of fulfilling its promise may depend more upon a brave participation,

00:14:59.140 a willingness to hazard ourselves in a very difficult world, a certain form of wild generosity with our gifts,

00:15:09.100 a familiarity with our own depth, our own discovered, surprising breadth, and always a long-practiced and robust vulnerability,

00:15:20.800 equal to what any future may offer.

00:15:24.440 Our destiny is fated, not only by great powers beyond our beckoning horizon, but by the very way we shape and hold the everyday conversations of a familiar life.

00:15:41.640 The idea of destiny, as you point out, is, first, it's a term we don't use very often.

00:16:11.620 Nor do we use fate very often, nor do we use fate very often.

00:16:14.500 These are kind of unfashionable ideas, although in another mode I think people believe or want to believe that the things in their lives happen for a reason,

00:16:26.140 that there's not a lot of accident.

00:16:30.020 But it is interesting to consider this question of whether things in our lives could have been otherwise.

00:16:38.680 I mean, we live with this sense of the possible.

00:16:42.880 We're given a choice between various options in every moment, really, and it always seems coherent to ask,

00:16:50.960 well, what would life be like had I taken a different path?

00:16:55.880 But it's at least possible that what actually happens is the only thing that could have happened.

00:17:03.320 I mean, in any case, the counterfactual, the notion of possibility is simply a thought that's occurring to us

00:17:11.180 as we travel down whatever path we've actually taken.

00:17:15.220 How do you think about this in terms of your own life?

00:17:17.320 I do feel it is possible to miss a tide in your life.

00:17:24.340 And there are great lines by the great German Port Rilke, you know, where he's looking out at the garden in the autumn as things are dying away.

00:17:33.100 And he says, he says, no more things will happen.

00:17:37.180 And even the thing, and it's about having Mr. Tide in his life.

00:17:42.480 And he says, no more things will happen.

00:17:45.120 And even the things that do happen will cheat you.

00:17:49.060 Even you, my God, and you are the one who draws him daily deeper into your depths.

00:17:54.880 The sense, I do remember, for instance, coming to the end of years of hard work towards a particular goal,

00:18:04.240 which was a degree in marine zoology, which was no easy feat for me.

00:18:09.460 I was always an artist.

00:18:11.180 I was always more artistically inclined, more literally inclined.

00:18:15.800 But when I was 14 or 15, I saw this extraordinary figure, Jacques Cousteau, sailing across our little television set.

00:18:23.680 And so I conceived a notion to follow the life of the dolphin aboard the good ship Calypso.

00:18:32.100 And so I put myself into the salt mines of biology, chemistry, and physics.

00:18:37.040 But as I was coming towards my final examinations, it was a time of a terrible bust in the life sciences.

00:18:45.440 There were no jobs.

00:18:46.260 There were no jobs anywhere.

00:18:47.160 And I decided instead of facing up to extreme heartbreak and disappointment in not getting any jobs,

00:19:00.660 I wouldn't apply for any at all.

00:19:03.160 So this is turning away and away from your original joy, you know, the original place you've set yourself.

00:19:11.580 You're turning away from Santiago because the disappointment you intuit, you know, is just too strong.

00:19:20.580 And, but I went to see, I went to see my girlfriend at that time.

00:19:26.200 I lived on the northern side of Snowdonia, and she lived on the southern side.

00:19:30.500 We didn't see each other very much.

00:19:32.480 And she lived in a remote valley on a farm at the top of a wonderful place called Coombe Pennant.

00:19:39.780 And it's famous for its witchcraft, actually.

00:19:42.440 And Alistair Crowley used to call up the devil in a tower at the bottom.

00:19:45.940 And I'd always, I'd hitchhike right and be dropped off.

00:19:48.560 I would whistle as I went past this ruined tower where all of this necromancer used to take place and walk up to the farm.

00:19:56.520 Well, I arrived this time.

00:19:57.740 I'd just done all my examinations.

00:19:59.920 I'd made this very serious young man's vow not to apply for any jobs because I didn't want to be existentially disappointed, you know.

00:20:08.740 And I didn't want to be sifting plankton in a station in the outer Hebrides either.

00:20:15.580 I wanted that original blue water image.

00:20:19.240 Well, I got to the farm, and it was a communal farm, so lots of people lived there.

00:20:26.460 I knocked on the door, and I could tell there was no one in just from the echo, you know.

00:20:30.380 But I was miles from anywhere.

00:20:32.020 There was a storm coming in off the Irish Sea behind me, and halfway up the mountain there.

00:20:37.080 So I let myself in, as you do when you're a student, you know.

00:20:39.700 And I was like Goldilocks in the house of the three bears.

00:20:44.700 There was no one there.

00:20:46.680 And I said, well, I'll get a fire going for them.

00:20:48.600 When they come back, it was quite cold, you know.

00:20:50.220 So I got a fire going, and then I said, well, I'll make a cup of tea.

00:20:52.780 And if they turn up, they'll have a cup of tea already made, you know.

00:20:55.400 So I made a tea.

00:20:56.520 I can tell you, David, that in the film version of this, you are promptly cannibalized by witches.

00:21:01.680 Well, I tell you, something even more extraordinary happened, because I fell asleep in the chair,

00:21:08.880 and literally at midnight, there was a knock on the door.

00:21:12.640 And I said, wait a minute.

00:21:13.820 If someone's knocking on the door, it means they don't live here either, you know.

00:21:18.720 And I tell you, this farm is remote.

00:21:21.040 It's halfway up the mountainside with the wind blowing and the rain blowing.

00:21:24.420 And I opened the door, and there is this slightly disheveled figure having walked up the same track that I walked up.

00:21:33.040 And he's looking for someone else who lives in the house who also isn't there.

00:21:37.660 And I said, well, I don't live here, but come in, sit by the fire and serve a cup of tea, you know.

00:21:42.980 And we sat down.

00:21:47.200 And as you do with a complete stranger, I said, I started asking him what he did in his life.

00:21:54.760 He had this wonderful leather bag that was filled with papers, I noticed, because he opened it and put it down at the side, you know.

00:22:01.580 And it didn't quite fit with his attire.

00:22:03.880 He looked like this wonderful pilgrim figure.

00:22:06.640 But here were all of these papers.

00:22:09.220 I said, what's your work, by the way?

00:22:11.780 He said, oh, I walk around doing audits of wild wood in England and Wales.

00:22:20.360 And I audit, you know, the carrying capacity of these old woodlands and trees.

00:22:25.640 And I basically get the opportunity of spending a lot of time in these wild places, counting everything and then putting it together as to how healthy the system is.

00:22:35.680 And I looked at him with my mouth open because it was a representation, in a way, of what I wanted in my life.

00:22:45.080 And I said, how did you get work like that?

00:22:48.580 And of course, I was asking myself, why have you given up on your own dream?

00:22:56.320 Although I wouldn't have consciously known I was asking myself that.

00:22:59.960 But that's what I was doing.

00:23:01.540 Why have you got off the road to your Santiago?

00:23:04.520 And he said, do you really want to know?

00:23:07.160 I said, yes. 0.85

00:23:08.600 He said, I was a drug addict in North London, and I wanted to kill myself. 0.64

00:23:14.800 And I looked at him.

00:23:15.860 I said, really?

00:23:17.260 He said, that's where I started.

00:23:19.620 I was in a flat with other drug addicts.

00:23:22.060 We all mistrusted and hated each other.

00:23:24.420 We were all stealing from one another.

00:23:25.640 The addiction was the greatest thing of all.

00:23:28.760 One rainy day when I was in there by myself, I tried to throw myself out of the window.

00:23:35.000 But it was an old-fashioned sash window, which I had to lift up.

00:23:40.700 And I was so weak at the time that I got halfway out with my head in this flower box that was in ruins outside.

00:23:49.180 And the sash window came down on the back of my shoulders, you know.

00:23:53.940 And I was so weak, I couldn't get out of there.

00:23:56.960 I was staring into this flower box.

00:24:00.700 But there was a little drip from the roof above falling into one corner of the flower box and this little stream going through this tiny landscape.

00:24:12.780 And, of course, I had nowhere to go, no friends.

00:24:16.660 I started working my hands in this ground, you know, and remoulding it all.

00:24:23.060 And I must have been there 45 minutes or an hour before one of my flatmates came in and helped me get out.

00:24:30.040 But in that time, as my hands were working in that ground, I knew what I was supposed to do.

00:24:36.640 And the hardest thing I ever did in the years that followed was walk past my dealer, literally outside the block of flats where we lived, and knock on a friend's door and ask him to take me in.

00:24:49.660 And I got taken in, I started doing landscaping, just in a physical way, laboring.

00:24:56.420 I went to night school, then I got a degree, and then I got a master's.

00:25:01.640 Now you see me here.

00:25:04.400 So I do believe, you know, that he could have been wedged in that window and not come to ground.

00:25:11.740 And he would have lived out his destiny from the distance of longing through the misery of his addiction to things that represented where he wanted to go on a temporary basis through drug experiences, you know, which can be remarkable in themselves.

00:25:30.020 But sustaining them is another discipline.

00:25:32.040 But also, I do believe that I could have been sat in front of that fire and not asked him that question.

00:25:43.700 And my life, I would have still lived the same life on the way to Santiago, but I would have lived it out through distance and longing and maybe a parallel kind of admiration through reading.

00:25:59.900 But perhaps not through consummation, yeah.

00:26:04.400 So it's, I mean, I suppose that's what you speak about, Sam, when you talk about volition as opposed to willpower.

00:26:13.960 That there's a way of coming into your body, coming into your voice, coming into your speech, in which you have a completely different future than if you didn't do that.

00:26:31.580 It just strikes me as fundamentally mysterious.

00:26:36.320 I mean, if you pay attention, the mystery never recedes.

00:26:41.100 And again, we're always confronted with simply what happens, right?

00:26:47.500 The thought that does occur to you, the memory that does arise, the intention that actually becomes effective that leads to action.

00:26:55.580 It's like we're driving a car, but we're not looking through the windshield at the future.

00:27:01.520 We're looking in the rearview mirror at what's already passed.

00:27:06.020 And in some ways, we have more control over the past than the future.

00:27:12.940 At least we can change what the past means to us in a way that's decisive.

00:27:18.400 And the future is, we really don't know what's going to happen next.

00:27:23.000 You know, in this conversation, we have a plan, we have a roadmap.

00:27:26.940 You know, I know the words we want to talk about.

00:27:28.760 But, you know, thus far, we've talked about very little that has been planned.

00:27:35.000 And so it's all just unfolding.

00:27:37.640 But when you look at your life, it seems like...

00:27:41.320 Actually, I think you made this point in one of your essays in Consolations, I believe.

00:27:45.540 It could have been a poem.

00:27:46.540 But isn't there an image of you standing at the back of a boat looking at the wake rather than looking forward?

00:27:55.100 Yes, yes, yes.

00:27:56.600 And, yeah, it's like we're always in the presence of the wake we're leaving in the world.

00:28:04.880 But it's not to say that it's entirely passive.

00:28:07.760 I mean, you have a line in this essay, Destiny, that we are shaped by our shaping of the world.

00:28:15.600 Yes.

00:28:15.980 In acting on your environment, you are now creating an environment that is acting back on you, and sometimes in incredibly powerful ways that determine everything.

00:28:27.700 Yeah, we have all of these inherited qualities, but we can bring them together in a way which is a kind of catalytic to new possibilities.

00:28:38.180 I have one... The only poem that I ever wrote under commission was one commissioned by the Boeing company for the 777 aeroplane after I'd worked with their top leadership.

00:28:51.140 And they'd just launched the plane, and they'd won an aerospace trophy, the Collier trophy, and they wanted a poem at the celebratory dinner.

00:29:00.940 Yeah. Well, I said to the executive who'd been sent to request it, I said, poets don't do very well under these circumstances, I said, but I'll have a go at it.

00:29:12.540 And, you know, I suddenly had this really powerful physical sense of all of the time I'd spent on aeroplanes, you know, in my life of nonstop traveling.

00:29:26.080 And the remarkable and biblical scenes you often see out of the window are looking down, you know, over the Mississippi Delta, shining like a national guitar, as Paul Simon said, all of these remarkable scenes.

00:29:41.820 And yet, it's equally remarkable how often people have the shutters down, and they're watching something really unremarkable on that little screen in front of them, you know.

00:29:56.420 You've hit upon one of my pet peeves here, the fact, admittedly it's been a long time since I've been on an airplane, we're still under the shadow of COVID here,

00:30:04.580 but the idea that people would prefer to spend five or ten hours in a dark tube watching their screens when, certainly under conditions of daylight,

00:30:19.140 there is a better view of Earth than they have ever seen in any other circumstance unfolding outside that window, it's, yeah, I find that very frustrating.

00:30:29.280 Exactly. So, I've often thought that that dynamic is actually because people can't really understand the invisible forces that are holding them in place.

00:30:39.640 So, part of the dynamic, it's not the whole dynamic, but part of the dynamic is, I'm actually not here.

00:30:45.700 I'm not traveling at 500 miles per hour, 36,000 feet above the ground with no visible means of support, yeah.

00:30:53.820 But every now and again, as the airplane drops down, especially as you're coming into land through layers of humidity and temperature,

00:31:04.720 you'll often see this solid white line suddenly form around the wing.

00:31:12.540 And when you look at that solid white line, you realize that the forces that are holding you in place are actually as solid as concrete.

00:31:20.280 But they're actually made up of a conversation between the shape of the wing and the velocity of the air around the wing itself, yeah.

00:31:31.540 If you only have the wing, you'll just travel like a missile, you know, and hit your, sorry, if you only have velocity, yeah,

00:31:40.160 you'll just hit your destination like a target, yeah.

00:31:44.020 If you only have the wing, you'll stall without the velocity, but you put the two together, and you can travel thousands of miles.

00:31:51.540 Now, the interesting thing is, that shape has been there since the beginning of time as a potential for human beings.

00:31:59.800 The shape of that wing, I forget the technical term for it, but all aerospace engineers know it, yeah.

00:32:05.800 And airfoil, I think.

00:32:07.060 Yes, and, but it was only 120 years ago that those two qualities were brought together.

00:32:15.540 So this is the piece I wrote, and it's about, it's about holding the conversation at a deeper level so you can travel further, travel to places you never imagined.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - May 14, 2021

#249 — Distance & Arrival

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