Latest / Beautifully Complex / 269: Reclaiming Community: Climate, Parenting, and Social Connections, with Bill Weir

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269: Reclaiming Community: Climate, Parenting, and Social Connections, with Bill Weir · Beautifully Complex

0:03
To become a parent of a neurodivergent kid, you have to mourn the ideal
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kid that maybe you thought you were going to raise. You know, you
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can bounce between the different stages, and there's days where you're going to be
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angry and there's days when you're going to be bargaining. But the people that
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can at least get to acceptance of that doesn't mean surrender, doesn't mean I'm
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giving up, but acceptance that this is the hand that I've been dealt.
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Now what's next. Welcome to the Beautifully Complex podcast, where I share insights
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and strategies on parenting neurodivergent kids, straight from the trenches. I'm your host,
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Penny Williams. I'm a parenting coach, author and mindset mama, honored
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to guide you on the journey of raising your atypical kid. Let's get started.
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Welcome back, friends. I am crazy excited today to have Bill Weir
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with me to talk about out all things happiness and resilience and parenting and some
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of the lessons that he has learned in his travels and investigations for ABC News
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and CNN. I want to first introduce him though, for anybody who has
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not had the pleasure of seeing Bill yet. Bill is a veteran anchor,
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writer, producer, and host who came to CNN in twenty thirteen after a
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decade of award winning journalism at ABC News. In twenty nineteen, he was
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named the network's first Chief Climate Correspondent, drawing on his experience creating and hosting
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the primetime CNN original series The Wonder List with Bill we Are, which is
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one of my favorite documentary series. His first book, Life as We Know
1:49
It, can be published by Chronicle Prism and available now. Thank you so
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very much for giving us a little bit of your time. Schedule is busy?
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Anything you want to add to that? What else do we need to
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know about Bill Weir? Oh, let's see. You covered it pretty well.
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I like, you know, hiking slow walks on the beach, friends
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who aren't afraid to cry, you know, turn offs are smokers in war
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sounds pretty good. Yeah, No, you covered it, and thank you
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for your kind words. I'm so glad you found the Wonderlist out there and
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the panopoly of choices. Yeah yeah, I think we have a shared propensity
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for awe and wonder Okay, And I think that's what really Drew me In
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is just you've been to so many places that can teach us so many lessons
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about humanity, and places that a lot of us don't have the pleasure of
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traveling too. Exactly. Yeah, if you had to pick maybe one thing
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that you learned about being human from traveling, from investigations that you've done,
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what would you choose. I think most people would be shocked to know the
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shared humanity that transcends cultures and languages. And you know, at our core,
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we're all human beings, Homo Safeians, for better or worse. And
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you know, the person walk in the other direction, you're passing on the
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street, whether I'm in Beijing or you know, Brooklyn, is so similar
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to mine. You know, concerns about the kids, concerns about the job
3:31
and security, and what about dad and your aging parents. You know,
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everybody has all of this mixed up in them. And so I wish I
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could share my passport and my expense account with everybody. I think we'd have
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a much different foreign policy or view of ourselves in the world. And ultimately
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that you know, and this comes up as a pretty big theme in my
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latest work, is that we're just made of stories. You know that the
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stuff we take for granted in our lives as per in it as mountains,
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the borders, or the flags, or the maps, or the currencies,
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or religious denominations, political parties, all of these are just stories we agreep
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on in the moment, and they're under constant revision. And we lived through
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periods where those revisions come fast and furious, like the first few months of
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my little boy's life. He was born at the height of the pandemic in
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twenty twenty, and so I use my kids as sort of living, breathing
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units of time measurement. My daughter inspired the Wonder List when I realized she
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was We have the same birthday, Olivia and I. We were born almost
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to the same hour, you know, and so it's a special And on
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her eleventh birthday, I did the math and realized, Wow, she's going
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to turn my age in the near twenty fifty. And I had been covering
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climate for a lot and that's a very sort of read letter year. And
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when you think about, you know, by the time my little boys are
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ready for a mortgage, these projections are expected, you know, And so
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they influenced my work as well. But I what I bring back to them,
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and whether it's practical advice on how to live, where to live,
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how to build shelter, and all of your pyramidve needs. Is that sense
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of shared humanity and that ultimately your health, wealth and happiness depends on a
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planet imbalance and an immediate ecosystem in balance, which includes your neighbors and the
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people who have a different yard sign than you across the street during an election
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year, you know, and connecting around each other and nature. These days
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now when things are relatively calm, I think is just the best way to
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heal our environments around ourselves, but then our interior environments too. And you
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know, the people that I met on the Wonder List, the healthiest,
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happiest, from the Blue zones of Greece to you know, Bhuton or whatever,
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we really had the strongest trust and ties with each other and the nature,
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the seasons, the rhythms of the planet around them. And it's so
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easy for us to cut ourselves off from that in the modern age. Yeah,
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yeah, I think, especially in the United States, Yeah, for
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sure, don't have as much community as we used to. And I think
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that is really a sad thing. I think we need that community. It
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sounds like in all the places that you've been, that community is kind of
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that constant. It's everything that determines happiness and resilience. Yeah, I mean
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we've sort of conflated ease and frictionless existence through our phones and our devices with
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happiness, or in a sense, that's not why we evolve. You know,
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we are at our peak as the human machine out in nature, moving
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our bodies with ten other like minded folks doing a task, seeing the results
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of that, and virtual all the million virtual likes in the world from strangers
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are never going to fill that up, you know. And yeah, like
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you go to a place like I talk about in the book. But one
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of the first wonder lists we shot, actually the very first we shot,
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was it the Blue Zone, these pockets of longevity around the world, and
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this was an ickory of Greece, this Greek island, and you go there
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thinking it's going to be this silver bullet that they're eating some sort of you
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know, herb or something that extends their life. And it's really a buckshot
7:15
of a lot of lifestyle nudges movement throughout the day, but key among them
7:19
is it's a kind of place for if you don't show up at church,
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someone's gonna come knocking on your door, you know. Or it's the kind
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of place where an emergency you can hand your baby to a dozen options,
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you know. And as we built, you know, I don't see these.
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Once you become a new old dad and you live on this beat,
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you see the same world a very different way. But now when you look
7:44
at like suburbs and folks you know, to get away from each other,
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get away from sort of the dense community and sprawl out in these segregated,
7:53
sprawled suburbs. Then we set up a story that, well, it's not
7:57
safe for mom to live in the city, to move her to the suburbs.
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But once you get to the suburbs, there's no place for her to
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walk and hang out with friends, and there's she can't drive, and so
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you know, it's all of these decisions get added up in ways that can
8:11
bring us tighter together or drive us apart. And I think after the pandemic
8:16
closed down some cities, people are sort of thinking about, Wow, the
8:20
Europeans have it pretty figured out with these piazzas where people get together and commune
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and all different ages mingle together and shared third spaces and maybe building around cars
8:31
wasn't the best healthyest idea, you know, And so you know, it's
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an interesting time. Yeah, And for this audience, in particular appearance of
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neurodivergent kids, it's often a very isolating existence because we have a different parenting
8:50
journey, our kids have a different way of moving through the world. And
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so what we need more than anything, I think is community, yes,
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yeah, and sometimes we really struggled to find that community. Do you have
9:03
any insights on advice and how do we connect with each other in this day
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and age in a meaningful way? Yes, So that I really is now
9:16
a life's work is to trying to figure that out, because I'm coming from
9:18
the place as really a gypsy loaner, and I have a very unique upbringing
9:24
in that I'm from Milwaukee. Originally my dad was a cop and my mom
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was a secretary, and they split up when I was a baby, and
9:31
my mom became a very zealous evangelical Pentecostal Christian and announced one morning at breakfast
9:39
when I was like nine years old that she'd had a dream from God and
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God wants to leave Milwaukee and go so she could go become a televangelist in
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the Bible Belt and moved to Texas, and she put me on the phone
9:48
with my dad to like negotiate out of joint custody for very straight But we
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moved. The dreams kept coming, and I went to seventeen different schools in
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six states before I left for college, and m'd spend my summers with my
10:03
dad, who is this atheist outdoorsman, you know, and hiking in the
10:07
woods. And it was this pendulum between these two very different world views.
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And my mom, you know, her family did not embrace her faith and
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did not convert the way she had hoped, and so she just split.
10:20
And so I was raised with the notion that family is optional and community is
10:24
temporary. And because she was just like, Okay, this church it's not
10:30
lining up with my views. I think we're going to Fort Worth. And
10:33
she, you know, it was like a new life was just a U
10:35
haul rental away. She shot it through the lens of her spirituality or her
10:39
faith. I think it's just a uniquely American sense of you know, reinvention.
10:46
But at least it instilled me with that sense of like, if you're
10:48
bored, you could always move. And I never appreciated the cost of that
10:54
until honestly, my first marriage came apart, And in reflection, one of
11:00
the reasons it did is that I'd come back from these fabulous wonder List shoots
11:03
where I was filling up on other communities like you know, Iceland or New
11:07
Zealand, and I got home with my daughter, only child, and my
11:13
wife. I just wanted to go out to this little lake house we had
11:16
and you know, hang out with them and not build a community, not
11:20
lead into a congregation of whatever it is, whether it's at a church or
11:24
a club or you know, a nature gathering whatever. I rejected that,
11:28
and I threw my mom's you know, faith, the baby out with the
11:33
bathwater in terms of a congregation where you gather together with folks at least around
11:37
ideas that are better use. So the closest thing that I get to it
11:39
is concerts, right or when you're surrounded by people who know the same lyrics,
11:45
it moves you in that fundamental way. And so I write in my
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book, you know, and this is written as letters to my kids,
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both as sort of apologies, a guide and rallying cries to them, but
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also this in Lessons Learned and that I grew up thinking that a rolling stone
12:03
gathering no moss was cool, you know, But it turns out that moss
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is a really good indicator of a healthy environment. And we all need to
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be mossier and we need to be more connected. And my stepmother, who
12:15
was sort of my you know, archvillain as a little boy, is now
12:20
much closer to my family than my actual mother, you know, who took
12:22
me on the road and we're estrange. But my step mom, after my
12:28
dad died, she became a model, like a role model for this for
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what I am hoping my son and daughter emulate. In that she was living
12:35
in Colorado. It was too hot for her, too much land to manage,
12:39
so she just sold this little heart scrabble farm they had and picked out
12:45
the Oregon coast because she'd been there and loved it. Visited several different towns
12:50
in the temperate zone. She wanted a temperature between this range right, sounds
12:54
good and how far from the coast should she be, and you know,
12:58
tested the towns based on politi and just social vibe, and picked out this
13:01
little town, settled in, knocked on every door. It's like, Hi,
13:05
I just moved in, having a housewarming, you want to come.
13:07
Everybody came, And then they're the kind of you know, retirees who are
13:13
like, if there's something happens to us up here, we got to be
13:16
prepared, Like who's got the generator, who's got the chainsaw? And they
13:18
have a plan, They have a resiliency plan around their community, which is
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I just think the key I think for this for the communities of the future,
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at least, I hope. So, yeah, putting yourself out there
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to connect. Yeah, you know, it's amazing to me as a person
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with social anxiety that somebody would walk around and knock on doors and introduce themselves.
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And I had a somewhat similar upbringing and that I went to countless schools
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as a child, we moved all the time, and it kind of did
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the opposite for me. It made me retreat into myself and stop connecting for
13:54
a long time, which of course wasn't healthy or good or the way that
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really any of us want it to be. But you know, I think
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that illustrates that we all have a different experience under similar circumstances. We're all,
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you know, human beings, and we have a lot of similarities,
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but we also have differences, and we have to, I think, embrace
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those differences. You know, she's not out there knocking on only certain doors
14:22
that match, you know, her interests or people she thinks might you know,
14:28
be aligned with her. Thinking yeah, she's just saying, hey,
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welcome everyone. I'm open to everyone. I think is so magical. It
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is, and it's so easy to lose sight of, and I get surprised.
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I'm lucky enough to travel a lot for work, and I'll go down,
14:45
you know, to do stories in southern Louisiana or the premium Basin in
14:48
Texas, and I'll go in with a preconceived notion of like, there's probably
14:52
not a lot of viewers here, or you know whatever, and be surprised.
14:58
You know, when a cargo stuck in the mud and somebody's like Bill,
15:01
you know, immediately embraces you. And you know, communities that I
15:07
grew up in somewhere, you know, people who run for the city council.
15:11
It's nonpartisan because if the sewer line breaks, you know, poop is
15:18
nonpartisan. If it's filling into the streets, like you got to work together
15:22
just to run a civic society, and we forget how often that really works
15:26
every day. You know. We do the stories about it breaking down and
15:28
people being super angry at each other, and that is a valid concern these
15:33
days. But I think, you know, whether it is connecting with other
15:39
neuro divergent parents who want to find a hiking trail that works for their kids,
15:43
you know, and work on tree planting or mangrove you know, clean
15:48
up or whatever. You know, can use that shared sense of wonder about
15:52
whatever's in your backyard, the closest wonder you have. You know. I
15:56
sound like like a gradual dad. Put down the phone, I go outside,
16:03
But I really do believe I was. I had this amazing experience.
16:07
I had a back injury a couple months ago, and I'm like, I
16:11
got to get a massage to work on this kink in my back. I
16:14
just booked whatever was the closest place in the neighborhood. It was a day
16:18
spa kind of place, and I go in and this therapist who's working on
16:22
me is black guy, maybe twenty two twenty three years old, and was
16:26
really good, and I'm like, Wow, this is really helping me,
16:30
you know. He goes, oh, thank you. I've just started in
16:32
this job. I was a professional video gamer, and I'm like, wow,
16:36
well, good for you getting into a tactile world of physically helping people
16:41
instead of living in a virtual universe. And I started making fun of like,
16:45
you know, I refuse to go into a world where we're taking virtual
16:48
hikes, you know, with our headsets on. And he was laughing at
16:51
me, and I realized that he and then we began arguing over from his
16:55
point of view, why should I have to worry about a world that's out
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of a battle And that's when I can create my own outdoors with virtual reality?
17:03
You know, that's that was his safe space, that's his happy space.
17:07
He grew up not reading books, but he's living in these game universes,
17:11
right, And so how do we connect with those kids too, you
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know, yeah, and get them used to the idea that their health and
17:17
wealth and happiness depends on the outdoors. You know, my kid is buried
17:29
into VR as well. And I think part of it is that he can
17:33
create a universe, or he can choose people to be around there that are
17:38
supportive and open and willing to interact with someone who's different, willing to maybe
17:45
work with him if he mises a social cue or you know, things like
17:48
that. And so I get why kids go into these virtual worlds totally,
17:56
but then how do we get them to balance? Did this messuse tell you
18:02
why he was stepping outside? I mean, I'm sure he's still a gamer.
18:07
He you know. The life changing moment for him was he went to
18:11
do a tournament on Twitch I believe is the website or you know where there
18:15
where people basically pay to watch kids play, right, And he was expecting
18:22
it to be a huge crowd and like four people showed up and he was
18:25
crushed by it, you know, and it humiliated. And what it shows
18:29
to me is and it took me a while to get there to think this
18:33
way about social media interaction. I was addicted to Twitter and you know,
18:37
either being combative or performative or whatever, but none of it worked. You
18:41
know, is that we have devalued that human contact. It's so much easier
18:47
to cancel on somebody's party when you don't have to look him in the eye.
18:51
You know, it's so much easier to avoid all the tough stuff of
18:55
being human, and humans can be a pain in the tush, you know.
18:59
And I'm as much of a loner as anybody and we've created this golden
19:03
age of isolation when I don't have to look a person in the eye to
19:07
get a five star meal delivered outside my door, you know, in the
19:11
big city, or to reconnect with a high school friend, you know,
19:15
over texting before I fall asleep. That's not reconnecting, you know. Reconnecting
19:19
is hugging and sitting around a fire or you know, moving a couch.
19:25
You know. So I have to force myself out of that comfort trap,
19:30
you know, because it's really seductive too. And my daughter, you know,
19:34
I write about my biggest regret. I structure my book around Maslow's hierarchy
19:40
of needs, the idea that the stuff at the bottom food, air,
19:44
temperature, you know, shelter the bottom two layers I just took for granted
19:48
as a kid. Now that with the more severe climate we can anymore.
19:52
But by addressing those primary needs together, I argue that you can fill your
19:57
love and esteem needs or higher up in the pyramid. And so the early
20:02
part of the book is addressed a river my little Boy, around the basics
20:06
of like where to Live, and the latter chapters to and I, Love
20:10
and Esteam needs are to my daughter and I talk about One of my biggest
20:11
regrets was giving her an iPhone at age ten and teaching her how to use
20:15
Instagram. I was a tech reporter at ABC Needs at the time. I
20:18
just profiled Kevin Sistrom, who founded Instagram, sold it for a billion dollars,
20:23
just come back, you know, from the inside, tour this place.
20:29
And she was Olivia Borne on my birthday. I also got my first
20:33
I Pod that day, so you know, when she turned ten, it
20:37
was like all right, an apple, you know, moment for us to
20:40
go get you in phone just and again. I you know, we didn't
20:42
know any better, right, And I thought I was giving her a tool
20:45
to help fill her safety needs, you know, at the bottom of the
20:48
pyramid, to connect with us, maybe hold her Taylor Swift collection. But
20:53
didn't realize we were giving her this anxiety machine, you know, as she
20:57
tried to fill her love and esteam needs in an impossible space and without you
21:03
know, equipping her with this. It's on me. You know. The
21:07
story of Icarus, people talk about a little boy who flies too close to
21:11
the sun. I see it as a story as a boy who died trying
21:15
to impress his dad. That whole flight was his dad's idea to it was
21:19
a prison break plan, and he told his kid, don't fly too high
21:23
or the wings will melt, or don't fly too low, they'll get wet.
21:26
But if you're a dad, you're going to take your kid off,
21:30
jump off a tower. At least give him a parachute. And I didn't
21:33
give Olivia a parachute and any kind of training. I was too busy becoming
21:37
addicted to Twitter and you know, in that space as a reporter. And
21:41
so I hope that now that people are talking about the anxious generation, you
21:48
know, and the lessons we've learned from those things, I definitely will be
21:52
very different around River. I have a second chance with my little boy,
21:56
and Olivia, who's now twenty, we've had to work. You know,
22:00
she's been through that generation that really struggled with this and had to think about
22:06
mental health in ways that I never imagine she would when I when she was
22:10
ten years old and we started that. Yeah, and what I would say
22:14
to you is you were doing the best you knew how to do at that
22:17
time, right, totally didn't know learning out And we can have all of
22:21
this regret and guilt as parents, but doesn't serve us. And you know,
22:25
in my journey as a parent, I leaned heavily on that quote I
22:30
believe from my Angelou that says, when you know better, you do better,
22:33
right, And so I'm able to give myself grace because i know that
22:38
at any given moment, I'm doing the best that I can for my kids.
22:42
And that's what we have to lean on, I think as human beings,
22:47
understanding that everyone is doing the best that they can given their circumstances at
22:53
that moment in that environment. Totally. And then the big breakthrough is giving
22:59
that great to your parents, you know, and realized that they were doing
23:04
the best. Yeah. So absolutely. But one of the things that came
23:11
up in the in my research into Abraham Maslow, who inspired a lot of
23:15
the structure of this book, you know, sort of a giant in psychology,
23:21
came up with the idea of humanism at a time when there was just
23:22
sort of behaviorists and psychotherapists. But he he studied, did field work on
23:30
a really an abundant blackfoot reservation in Canada and went there with this sort of
23:37
idea about cultural relativism. You know that you shouldn't judge a cannibal for his
23:42
not that the Blackfoot were cannibals, but you shouldn't judge any indigenous people's behaviors
23:48
because that's all they know, that's the story they grew up with, that's
23:51
what they live. And then he went and lived on this reservation. He
23:52
goes, No, there are people just like us, and there's great people
23:55
here, way more better than the ones I know in Brooklyn. And it
24:00
this whole relativity thing, like we're people, we're human, we're messy,
24:02
we're all over the place, and that's okay. But what he observed there,
24:06
and then what he observed later when he a bunch of his family moved
24:08
in with him in Brooklyn, is that the American parenting sort of nuclear family,
24:15
the child is way too dependent just on mom and dad, and so
24:18
when that relationship sort of phrase, there's nowhere there to catch it. And
24:23
whereas communities that he had seen where you're able to hand the baby around and
24:27
there's a lot of love right there, to where if you have a falling
24:32
out with mom, you know there's there's an auntie and a host of other
24:36
folks there to pick you up. And his remedy was like for that sort
24:40
of codependency is a lot more sleepovers, you know, a lot more summer
24:45
camp away ye for the kids, both to foster independence and that sense of
24:49
community as well. So my little boy's turning, he just turned four and
24:53
is now like we're trying to and he's an only child, you know,
24:57
so is really concerned about, you know, being so social and stuff connection.
25:03
But I think the really the pandemic sort of, I don't know,
25:07
your perspective made us forget how to be human with each other sometimes, you
25:11
know, and made it tougher to socialize. I made us so much more
25:15
anxious, I think. And you know, when our nervous system is triggered
25:18
by anxiety, we don't have as much access to our thinking brain, our
25:23
cognitive our reason, our rationality, and so you know, we sort of
25:29
retreated into ourselves because we had to to be safe. But then I think
25:33
that became more normal, and you add that layer of anxiety on top of
25:38
that, and we're just not functioning in the same ways that we were.
25:44
We're kind of having to relearn it. I think in a lot of ways.
25:48
You know, I mentioned earlier, I have anxiety and social anxiety.
25:51
And for me, you know, I was doing pretty well before the pandemic.
25:52
The best I had done, you know, all my life. I
25:56
was not caring as much about what other people thought. After I turn at
26:00
a certain age, right, and things were really sort of getting to a
26:03
really manageable place, right, And then the pandemic happened, And once we
26:08
were going out again, I was like, huh, you know, I
26:11
don't really want to. It doesn't really feel as good as it used to
26:15
it, right, And I had to get back in that pattern. I
26:18
can just see our younger kids, our teens and young adults are really struggling
26:23
with that, just like their normal was rocked. Yeah, and now they're
26:30
trying to rebuild some semblance of whatever normal looks like, which is just this
26:34
concept that doesn't really exist anyway, right, right, right, Yeah.
26:40
And I've seen studies about the fear to congregate, you know, to hang
26:44
out at a mall the way I cruised the mall, right I was a
26:47
kid. Whatever the watering hole is, you know, whatever options you have,
26:52
if there's now some sort of hesitancy to even go there and create smaller
26:56
and smaller circles around you. Yeah, I want to touch real quick before
27:03
we close on something that you have mentioned more than once in our conversation,
27:07
which is basically the stories that we tell ourselves or we tell others about things
27:12
that happen. I do a lot of work with parents on mindset because acceptance
27:18
of the fact that we have a kid who struggles more than other kids might
27:22
or in different ways is really powerful and really important if we're going to be
27:26
able to help our kids to have success and joy for whatever that looks like
27:32
for them as an adult. And part of the work that I had to
27:36
do on myself before I even recognize that it was the work that we all
27:41
should be doing, really was on the stories that I was telling myself about
27:45
things that happened at a very victim mindset. And so, you know,
27:49
why did this happen to my kid? Why is this my parenting journey right?
27:55
Why do these people not understand my kid? And I re lies through
28:00
a lot of research, a lot of podcast listening that I was choosing that
28:07
story. I had that choice, I had that power. And so when
28:11
you mentioned it now a few times, you know, it sticks in my
28:17
brain because it's something that I focus a lot on. And anything else that
28:19
you want to kind of share about just sort of taking ownership. I think
28:25
of those stories that we're telling ourselves, how do we do that and how
28:30
does that really benefit us. One person that came across that helped me,
28:36
along with Maslow, just frame how I think about this stuff is Elizabeth Koobler
28:41
Ross, who is best known for the Five Stages of Grief, but her
28:47
biography is stunning. She's just girl from Switzerland who witnessed death at a very
28:52
young age, in both in beautiful ways and sort of horrible ways where it
28:56
was shrouded and shame and secrecy and armed her. She defied her with father's
29:02
wishes to become a doctor, and when she started practicing at the end of
29:03
the sixties in Chicago, ninety five percent of doctors did not tell their patients
29:10
they had cancer, and it wasn't until they were really advanced that they would
29:12
tell somebody that they were terminal. And it was just this dirty word,
29:17
but everybody in the hospital knew who was terminal, and so the clergy urged
29:19
her and she started wanted to practice medicine, drifted to psychiatry and psychology and
29:26
she said, well, ask them if I can interview them after you tell
29:30
them the news, and they all said yes, and so she interviewed hundreds
29:33
of people and that's where she saw them cycling through these the five stages of
29:37
denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And I was working
29:42
on a climate special at the time and sitting with somebody who said, look,
29:47
if we do everything the scientists tell us, the world is going to
29:49
change. We're going to see a lot more turbines, a lot more solar
29:52
farms. You know, things will be built differently, and if we do
29:56
nothing, well, things will be very, very different for much more destructive
30:00
reasons. And then you realize, well, you have to grieve what was
30:04
lost that you know, if once you accept that the Goldilocks planet that we
30:08
grew up on is gone, then becomes like a road trip through the five
30:12
stages, and you go through big stretches of denial depending on the politics of
30:17
where you're going, or in Charleston they're bargaining by building a seawall, and
30:22
Miami they're bargaining by raising the streets. But until you get to acceptance,
30:26
like, okay, the physics of what this problem are unfolding and it's coming,
30:30
So what's next? You know? My dad would say two things when
30:33
I complained, good thing, you're tough, and so what's next? Yes,
30:37
that was horrible that happened to you, So what's next? Right?
30:40
And so I imagine of a neurodivergent kid. You have to mourn the ideal
30:45
kid that maybe you thought you were going to raise, right and the sooner
30:49
you can cycle through that. But Koobler Ross was very careful to say it's
30:53
nonlinear. You know, you can bounce between the different stages. And there's
30:56
days where you're going to be angry and there's days when you're going to be
31:00
bargaining. But the people, whether you've just been through a wildfire or a
31:03
hurricane, or nine to eleven or a horrible diagnosis, the people that can
31:08
at least get to acceptance of doesn't mean surrender, doesn't mean I'm giving up,
31:15
but acceptance that this is the hand that I've been dealt. Now what's
31:19
next? And that keeps me saying, because I can get as dark and
31:22
cynical as anybody if I think too much, if I focus too much on
31:26
the enormity of these global problems and stuff. But if I think locally and
31:30
I think about what can I do if I get up out of this chair
31:33
and go talk to somebody, or what can my kid do this weekend that's
31:37
going to make the world half a percentage more resilient, you know, it
31:41
gets me out of that love that Yeah, acceptance doesn't mean surrender. To
31:45
write that one down. That is so good. Yeah, yeah, Well,
31:52
Bill, it has been such a pleasure to talk with you, and
31:55
I'm so appreciative. Thank you, Penny. You just sharing with the world
31:59
that you know in general all your your journalist, but you also are a
32:02
storyteller and you're sharing all these insights that you get to gather to help us
32:09
to create a better place for ourselves, for our kids, for generations to
32:15
come, and I'm just so appreciative of that work. I want everyone to
32:22
make sure that they check out your new book, which is Life as we
32:25
know it can be, and also anything else that we've we've mentioned. Resources
32:31
we've mentioned are going to be linked up in the show notes for this episode
32:36
and they are at PARENTINGADHD and Autism dot Com Slash two sixty nine for episode
32:43
two hundred and sixty nine. And I hope everyone takes good care and I
32:49
will see you next time. Thanks again, thanks for joining me on the
32:53
Beautifully Complex podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and share,
32:59
and don't forget to check out my online courses and parent coaching at Parenting ADHD
33:05
and Autism dot com and at The Behavior Revolution dot com