Pico Iyer | The Search for Paradise Within Yourself

Srini: Pico, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Pico Iyer: I'm really happy to be here. Thank you.

Srini: Oh, it is my pleasure to have you here. You have a new book out The Half Known Life in Search of Paradise. And I have known about your work for quite some time. I read your other book, the Art of Stillness, and absolutely loved it.

Having dug into your body of work, I wanted to start by asking what I think is a very sort of relevant question given the nature of your work. And that is what spiritual or religious beliefs were you raised with and how did those end up impacting the choices that you have made with both your life and

Pico Iyer: your career?

I love that question. I'm not sure if any of this applies to you, but I was born to Hindu parents. Both my parents are from India. Yes, likewise. I guess that part. But I was born and grew up in England, so all the schools I went to were Anglican. And I've lived for 35 years in deeply Buddhist, Japan.

I've been traveling with his delma for 48 years. So I've learned a little bit about Buddhism and then at one point spent four years trying to educate myself on Islam. So I'm a sort of typical global creature, insofar as I've never actually given myself entirely to one tradition, but I feel I've been lucky enough to learn from many of them.

. And so in terms of my life now, I go back and forth between always spending the autumn in Japan because I. Buddhism is a great teaching about impermanence and suffering and even death. And the beauty of the Japanese autumn is you have blazing blue skies, 70 degree cloudless skies, even in the middle of November.

And all around this festival of reds and gold that are turning leaves even though the days are getting shorter and darker. So it's a sort of emblem of what they say in Japan that life is about joyful participation in a land of sorrows. How do you make the most of the fact and nothing? . And then in the spring I come back here to California, which I know you know well.

. And I spend my time often with a group of Benedictine monks in Big Surn. Of course Big Sur is already this radiant place, and in the Easter time, I'm learning about light and resurrection and all those things. So I've always been bad about giving myself entirely to a single circle or c. But I've always been glad that I haven't posed off opportunities and that I'm eager to take wisdom from anyone being

Srini: raised by Hindu parents in another country.

One thing I always wonder is how your parents retained a sense of culture and integrated the culture while also allowing you to experience the culture that you grew up in. One thing that I have often thought about is about how things get passed on from generation to generation. Like my sister is married to Bengali guy, but we're from South India, and I keep thinking about their son and what language he's going to speak.

And I think to myself if I don't marry an Indian girl, probably the first thing to go will be language. So I wonder, how do you, how did your parents retain and instill cultural traditions, but also allow you to experience your own in the country that you grew?

Pico Iyer: Yes. Such a good question.

And actually I think I'm very different for many Diaspora Indians, as it were insofar as my parents were theosophists. So although they were born into Hinduism, theoe is about steeping oneself in all the traditions of the world. And beyond that, they were both philosophers. And my f mother explicitly was a professor of comparative religions, so she knew everything about Judaism and Islam and Buddhism and Christianity.

And the other curious aspect maybe of my parents as a generational thing is that they grew up in British India. So my father, as came from South India, my mother from North India, and the only language they had in common was English. All their education was at the hands of Christian or Catholic nuns and teacher.

And they know the Bible inside out. They had to learn all that stuff growing up in India. So I didn't grow up in a very Hindu household except that my parents were both vegetarians and they didn't drink by choice. But I didn't get so much of Hinduism. But what I did get was that, my parents were friends with the Dalai Lama and my mother could answer every question about the Old Testament I might ever have.

And they knew about all the other traditions and. Although my first name is Sadar, the name of the Buddha, and my second name Pico, comes from Pico del Moran, who was a Catholic heretic in the Renaissance who went from Plato and all the great religious traditions. So in some ways there was a different kind of challenge from what so many of my Indian friends in England or the United States.

As you said, trying to bridge languages and trying to bridge religions because in my parents' case, they only spoke English. I never heard another language growing up, and they were already really at home in every religious tradition. So I never had that conflict. If it, if that's what it is between say, Hinduism and the cultures of the worst.

Yeah. They thought of England as a kind of suburb of Bombay. .

Srini: Something that I often find when I talk to people like you and many of the people that have been on the show is they were exposed to, this kind of teaching, whether it's self-improvement or spirituality at an early age.

And yet I always wonder at that age, what your perception and your experience with this kind of knowledge as versus now when you look back in retrospect with age. I'm an avid surfer, which you may have known as I didn't, I found was that, I saw surfing as a spiritual experience, but I see kids in the water and I always wonder, I was like, do kids just, do they see the spiritual aspect of this or are they just playing?

How is your understanding of the things that your parents have taught you about both spirituality and religion and the experiences you've had of course changed with age?

Pico Iyer: So you're absolutely right and of. All the time I was growing up, I didn't realize what it had is to have Tibetan Buddhist monks in my living room and all these amazing books around the wall, and probably was running in the opposite direction until life caught up with me.

Which I suppose is the way it, as you said, it often happens and I remember when I was young, I really felt I'm gonna make my own destiny and I'm going to create it utterly. Separate from my family and my schooling and everything I grew up with and didn't have any need for religion and really felt I knew it all.

And one thing I've enjoyed about getting older is to find, I don't know, a thing, and that life has much richer and more interesting plans for me than I ever could have had for life. And that as we all find in the midst of loss and challenge and everything that life brings to. We turn for guidance and sustenance.

One of the interesting things that happened in my life was that when I was in my twenties, I was living in New York City and I was really leading the life I might have dreamed of as a teenage boy. I had a great job with Time Magazine and an apartment on Park Avenue and really interesting colleagues, and I was covering world affairs so I could travel all around the world, even on my holiday.

And I thought the challenge with this very rich and interesting life is I could become hostage to it and I could wake up one day and realize I'm 70 years old and I'm close to death, and I've never lived and I've never explored other options. So while I was in my twenties, having enjoyed that life for four years, I decided to move to what I thought would be the opposite or the compliment life, which was a year in temple in Kyoto.

And I arrived in the temple with all the ideas I'd had from Midtown Manhattan. And of course, temple was very different from what I imagined. It didn't mean just sitting on a wooden platform under the full moon, meditating , composing iku. It meant scrubbing floors and shov, shoveling leaves, and really hard work.

So my year in the temple only lasted a week, but I then ended up in another, basically empty single room on the back streets of Kyoto. No telephone, no toilet of my. Nothing really. And I thought whatever happens here is going to be different from what I experienced in Manhattan. And the two things I should say here, it sounds like a tidy kind of parable, is that 34 years later, I still live in a two room apartment near Kyoto.

And one way or another I found a life I was seeking in my twenties. So my intuition. To go and lead a simpler, pure life was exactly correct, but just as you say, I was too young to understand that and to find that life. In my twenties, I made the first move to come to Kyoto. I left the temple and now my life is probably as monastic as the life I had imagined then, even though I have a wonderful Japanese wife in the same room.

The other thing that was interesting was after seeking out wisdom on the furthest corners of the earth, everywhere from Kyoto to ti. I came back to my family home here in California. The house burnt down and I lost every last thing I had in the world in the forest fire. And so for many months I was sleeping on a friend's floor.

And another friend came in one day and he saw me there and he said, look, you can do better than this floor. And he told me about a quiet place. Four hours up the. Where for just $30 a night, I would have a bed of my own and beautiful ocean views and females a day and access to hot showers. And I thought this has to be better than sleeping on the floor.

So I got in my car and I drove up the coast to Big Sur, California, which of course is already a radiant place where all the calendars fall away, and you're already in this kind of transcendent. And I went into this Benedictine monastery, and it was the last place I wanted to go because I'd had 15 years of anger con schooling where we had to go to chapel every morning and chapel every evening.

I'd had all the hymns and crosses I ever could want in a lifetime. So it was not the place I would naturally go to, but as soon as I stepped into that silence, all my anxieties, all myself fell. And so now I've been going back to that place. I've stayed there more than a hundred times over the last 32 years.

And I'm always amused in retrospect how I went to the other side of the world in the hope of staying in a monastery in go to Japan. I lasted a week. I ended up living almost as much as I can in Japan, but I found the monastery of me, my dreams just up the road in California, in again a Catholic. From the tradition that I thought I was running away from.

So again, it was a reminder that life has better plans for us than we have for it. Yeah. Is,

Srini: that quote the what you just said, life has better plans for us than we have for, it really struck me because, I, I think that, and maybe this is a very western thing, from an early age, we start asking kids, what do you want to be when you grow up?

And we start making plans. And to your point, those things never turn out the way we think they will. If there's anything that I've learned from the life I've lived, it's turned out nothing like I thought it would. And in many ways that's been a blessing. But what is it about human beings? Makes them want to try to control what is inherently uncontrollable, particularly when it comes to making plans for the life.

Like we sit down at the beginning of the new year, we set all these goals. We, we write on all these journals we sign up for workshops, and yet there's this sort of serendipity that happens and we resist that so

Pico Iyer: much. Yeah, no, you I think it's in the nature, it's, it makes sense for every human being when young to chart out a course and when young we do assume we're in control and that things can go very much the way we want them to be.

And that's, I think, not a terrible thing. I remember, I grew up in the age before GPS is, so any day if I wanted to go to the airport, I'd get out a map and I'd work out exactly which roads to take to get to the. And almost certainly I would get lost, but the illusion of control and the illusion of knowledge and the thought I imagined I had a sense of how to get to the airport actually helped me then compared with if I were just starting blind.

It's just as a writer, I will often make a plan and I will often make an outline for a book, even though deep inside me, I hope, and I'm confident that as soon as I begin doing. The outline will be overturned and the book will take on a life of its own. And our lives take on a life of their own, as it were.

So I don't think there's anything inherently bad about wanting to make a plan, but as you said, the older one gets, the more one sees that one's plans a secondary to the way that life is going to work out. In my recent book that you mentioned, the half Learned. I have a lot about driving around different countries, whether it's Iran or Sri Lanka or North Korea.

And in almost every chapter I'm in the passenger seat. And that's not an accidental detail cuz I realize I'm in the passenger seat in life. When I was 20, I was convinced I was in the driver's seat and I could map out the trajectory of my life. And now I realize I'm at the mercy of forest fires and viruses and also as you were suggesting, wonderful, unexpected.

And so I'm happy, really to give myself over to life more and more knowing that whatever it comes up with will will interestingly challenge me. Yeah.

Srini: And speaking of trajectories, I just, from I'm talking to you, I don't get the sense that you were raised with sort of the stereotypical Indian child, narrative of Dr.

Lawyer, engineer as the trajectory to a good life. A stable life. And, I. Realized the value of that. Of course, in, in retrospect because as I've discovered with age and my parents really didn't have much of a choice because in the time they grew up in, and probably very much similar to your parents, like their sort of outcomes in life were fairly binary.

It was either poverty or stability. So for you, knowing that you're going to pursue this life as a writer, which is inherently uncertain, where nothing is guaranteed in anything is possible. What was your parents' narrative about making your

Pico Iyer: way in the. I'm really grateful to my parents because they share, I think the characteristic of many Indian and perhaps Asian parents.

Education was very important to them. And I realize now they spent a large percentage of their salary making sure that I could go to very good schools. So they made that investment. They weren't thinking in. Medicine, business or law. But I think secretly because they were both academics, they were hoping that I would become a professor.

And so I was determined at an early age I would never become a professor and never become a foster . And then, I think you are too young, but they will come a moment when you look in the mirror and you see your father. And you order at a restaurant and you'll hear your mother and you'll suddenly realize, whatever I thought I was doing in my life, I can't run away from my blood and my d n a.

And so here all these years later, it seems like my interests are fairly philosophical. I was a professor for three months, a couple of years ago, and probably I've become exactly the person my parents would hope for, but through a very zigzagging course, but I'm they were never concerned.

Material wealth, but I think they were very concerned within a wealth, which already is a nice thing to be the beneficiary of.

Srini: Yeah, no it's funny you say that because my dad is a professor and he had a lot of ways I realized what do I do when I just speak to audiences, when I do the show and to some degree I'm a teacher.

Pico Iyer: Yes. Same thing. Exactly. Yeah. I love that.

Srini: So you had mentioned not belonging to any one religion and kind of steeping yourself in multiple traditions. I had Gregory Roberts, the guy who wrote Chanam here, and I was asking him about the difference between religion in spirituality.

And the thing that struck me so much about what he said was that religion has bankers and lawyers, spirituality. And so in a lot of ways I wonder, you've been exposed to all these traditions, yet at the same time, so many sources of conflict in the world are often the byproduct of religion.

For example, in India and Pakistan, Kashmere, which I know you wrote about in the book. Couple of questions come from this. One, why is that, why do we have these sort of sources of conflict as a byproduct of religion? Two, what do we do about it? And three what are the commonalities that you have found between each of these traditions that you have steeped

Pico Iyer: yourself in?

Yeah I think I'll probably concentrate on the first two of those three questions and as yeah. I almost conclude my book with a line from the very wise Franciscan father Richard. Who says as priest, he says, remember, the point of life is not to be spiritual. It's to be human. And as and as I said before I've spent 48 years regularly talking and traveling with His Holiness.

And I'm always impressed many things about him. But one of them is that he's one of the most revered religious presences on the planet. And yet he brought out a book a few years ago called Beyond Religion. And as everybody. He always stresses science, and the word that he emphasized over and over again is secular, precisely because, as you said, he's had a front seat view on all the ways in which religion can tear us up and can divide us, even though each religion hopes to bring us together.

And I think he knows that really what brings us. Our human experience, our human hearts, something that lies beyond doctrine and text and the explanations religion gives to the world. And that's why I think the in some ways he speaks to his own community as a religious leader, but he's really speaking to the rest of the world as a human being.

And he's always stressing that he has the same sorrows and worries and irritations sometimes as all the rest of us. And I think one of the beautiful things about the Dai. His, for example, he did delivered a long series of lectures on the Christian Gospels to a Christian community, and tears came to his eyes when he was describing some of the parables of Jesus.

He's called himself a defender of Islam. He turns to rabbis for guidance about how to sustain a culture outside its original territory. So yeah, I spent a lot of time going to Jerusalem for. And it dramatizes exactly what you're saying because on the one hand, the great city of faith is a city of conflict, not just between the three great Monotheisms, Islam, Christianity and Judaism actually within them because you know the sin Muslims at all often where the sheer Muslims and the after Orthodox Jews are angry with their secular brothers.

And when you go. One of the holiest places in Christendom, the Church of the Holy Settle, there are six Christian orders sharing the same space, sleeping under the same roof, and if one of them steps an inch over the other's territory, they start hitting each other with brooms. So it's a perfect reflection of what I think we see, as you said, in cashmere everywhere, especially right now in the world, which is more connected than ever before and more divided never before.

The problem with religion is the problem with any ideology, which is I think my way is the only way and I think I know better or I know different from than you. And that religion can so easily become a matter of dividing us into us versus them rather into what his holiness that lama cause towe.

And yet the other, and yet none of us wants to be. World of spirit and an inner life, and so I was not a Christian or Jew or a Muslim. When I go to Jerusalem, I'm moved almost to tears by something in that place, which has deep prisma as people have. And there's a magnetism about Jerusalem that has me every morning in the pre-do dark walking to the church of the Holy Ska, even though I'm not a Christian, and sitting in one little Rocky chapel in one side, in front of a.

Campbell and feeling just deeply moved and cleansed by it in ways I can't begin to explain. But I feel this is a holy place, and what humans do with holiness is not so exalted usual usually, but that doesn't diminish the power and the sanctity of the holy, just as with natural beauty all around us.

Humans often make a great mess of nature, that nonetheless nature takes us out of ourselves and moves us in very mysterious. People often talk about being spiritual and not religious, and sometimes I think there's a case for being religious but not spiritual. In other words, religion does offer things, and when I go up to spend time with my monks, I'm reminded of the value of community, which is one thing religion gives us.

I'm reminded of the value of tradition that walking in the same footsteps as people in their order have been doing a thousand. And I'm reminded of the importance of faith because in their remote home, they're often cut off from the world by winter storms for seven months on end. They have no revenue.

All the monks are being helicoptered out. And the more things go wrong, the more they're convinced that things will go right in the end. So I do think that religious organizations have a lot to offer us, but for those who are not drawn to religion, Still religious places can move us in surprising ways.

When you asked about the commonalities, I think everything essential is shared between All Tomato Ians, and it's only their elaborate footnotes and sometimes that hets that try to create divisions and make barriers, but insofar as they're all trying to urge us to a sense of kindness, for example, and a sense of responsibility.

That speaks to every human, which is why the Dai Lama often will say, my religion is kindness. And he never wants somebody in the west to become a Buddhist. In fact, he comes to California and tells people from this tradition, please don't become a Buddhist, and please don't denigrate your own tradition.

But any of you, whether you have a belief or not, is capable of looking after the people around you. And that's the really important thing. I love the way that he sometimes says, Religion is like tea, which is something that adds flavor and savor to life. It's a wonderful luxury if you have it. But the real water without which we can't live is just basic human kindness.

That's the non-negotiable part. It's po. Everything is yours for the tasting. All the exotic fruits and fresh salads from the market table, all the perfectly sliced piag and tender lamb chops, fire roasted and seasoned with rock salt, and every buttery slice of file. Mion. So unbelievably tender, you'll wonder is it on your fork or in your dreams?

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Srini: Yeah. Yeah. It makes me wonder so many things about this despite that you have somebody like the Dalai Lama, talking about, his religion is kindness, yet, we have war, we have conflict. Over religion often. And is there any solution to this? Like, why is it that the rest of the world doesn't think like this?

And I think that the thing that struck me most about the section on Jerusalem was when you mentioned the sign that says, no explanations inside the church, please.

Pico Iyer: Thank you. Thank you. That's the central sentence in that chapter and in the entire book. And that's why I called that book The Half Known.

Because again, the older I've, when I was young, I assumed I could explain everything or find an answer to everything. And again, the older I've gotten, the more I see everything important in our life lies far beyond our explanations. When you fall in love, when you are moved by a sunset, when a forest fire suddenly wipes you out, when a virus suddenly forces you to stay at.

We can't really explain any of that. And yet it's what the main force that's shaping most of our days and explanations are almost like little boxes we play, we place on this tidal flood, have nothing to do with anything and can't begin to explain the flood or to stop it in its flow. So that's, yes, that's the shortcoming of religion, I think is if it's trying to put a box on it.

Or if it's trying to give a reason for something who's only paralyzed and the fact that it exists far beyond the reach of reason. So you're absolutely right. And in terms of the divisions of the world, my thoughts, especially in this book is our only hope is to realize we don't know very much that we're not in the right and that therefore we have to learn from almost everybody.

And the al. Many people would see as a great figure of wisdom. He travels the world as a student, not a teacher. And I know because I'm by his side for every minute of the eight hours of his working day, year, after year, and he'll will come down in the elevator to a crowded lobby. And a lot of people are there because they've heard that Dar la is in town and they're all pressing around him to get blessings or advice or just to touch his.

A little six year old boy will come up to him with an offering and tell him something, and that Dai Lama will listen to that six year old boy as if he's listening to a Buddha. And of course, not caring whether that boy is Christian or Muslim or nothing at all. And that's why the other central figure in this book for me is the Cian monk.

Thomas Merton who spent 27 years in his monastery Gethsemane in Kentucky. And then finally he got a chance to go to Asia and he had three wonderful conversations with the Dai Lama and the Buddhist monk and the Catholic monk instantly recognized one another, his brothers and shared techniques about meditation and everything else, the way an NFL player meeting another NFL player would.

And then Merton went to Sri Lanka and he had his great moment of realization in front of two Buddha Buddhist statues and the Catholic monk for 27 years felt he'd come to all his, all the understanding he needed in front of two Buddhist statues, and then he died four days later. But in both cases, these are people who don't believe that they know everything or that their way is the only way.

I think one of the reasons why the world is ever more divided now is that it's so easy to surround ourselves with people who think like us and feel like us and maybe who look like us and to form tribes which don't want to have anything to do with the rest of the world. And I think the only solution is understand that the person on the other side of the street or the fence knows at least as much as you Yeah.

There's something that

Srini: I was just contemplating yesterday as I was journaling, and it's this idea of what I don't remember who came up with the phrase, the unexamined life. You may probably, because you might have read more books about this kinda stuff than I have. But then I remember thinking, okay, we have an unexamined life and then you have an unexamined life.

And I, my conclusion was that the unexamined life leads to a lack of self-awareness, but the. Examined life leads to an abundance of anxiety, which I think is very common in sort of personal development circles and, people who are looking for self-improvement. We often turn outward for answers as opposed to inward until we hit appointed diminishing returns.

But we don't even recognize that we have reached that point of diminishing returns. Why do

Pico Iyer: you think that? I love that phrase, the over examined life. And I absolutely agree with you. I remember when the pandemic broke out, my friend who is theor of this Benedictine monastery in big, sent round a message to everybody and he just said remember, the best cure for anxiety is taking care of others in.

Don't in this instance, don't live in your head. Don't dwell on the many things you have to be anxious about. Reach out to somebody else because that person is in need. And again, these are all cliches, but they're cliches cuz they're true. When you are asking before about what, what cuts across our divisions when we're walking down the street and we some see somebody full on the.

Many of us will reach out to help her. And we're not asking if she's Jewish or Muslim or Christian or Buddhist. We're just responding to her in a human level. And I think that speaks for the deepest part of us that sometimes mind compromises by starting to create these divisions. And I think it's a mind that makes the divisions that we're generally trying to escape.

So I think the over examined life, as you say, is is really. I want to get away from, again, during the pandemic, the Darma was saying, as he always does, difficulty is non-negotiable. As from the Buddhist point of view, all of us suffer if we're lucky old age, and all of us suffer sickness and every one of us suffers death.

So given all that suffering is the basis of life, let's not compound the suffering our. And he always points out that suffering is not the same as unhappiness. That, for example, the difficulty in the financial loss is the anxiety of the pandemic. Everybody on the planet was engaging with that, but some people during the pandemic was seeing that even as it was making things impossible, it was making things possible.

Even as it was closing many doors, it was opening doors, and I think most. By living differently during the pandemic, we began to think differently and now making lives much closer to the ones they always had. So it's it's a long way of saying, I absolutely agree with you that our inner resources are the only ones that we have to turn to that when suddenly a loved one is in the icu.

All the books you've read, all the money you've earned, the resume you've accumulated, none of that's really going to help. Only thing that. The person in the bed and yourself is whatever inner savings account inner resources you've developed. But at the same time, I don't think those are resources of the mind and of examination or of explanation.

And I do think they have to do much more with, of course, the soul or spirit or those indefinable things that you gradually cultivate often just through experience and sometimes suffering and sometimes. Understanding that an argument with reality is one you'll always lose, in other words during the pandemic, not being angry that things aren't turning out the way you wanted, but to be reminded, to be humble.

This is, most things in life are not going to turn out the way we want it, but that doesn't mean that life is unfair or difficult. And it was interesting for me because going back and. All the way through the pandemic. I was going every few weeks flying back and forth between here in California and Japan.

So this very young culture and a very old culture, and throughout the pandemic, Japan really was living exactly as normal. All the kids were going to school, trains were crowded, everybody was masked, and is still masked to this day. And I think it was because that's an old culture that for 1400 years has been.

Viruses and earthquakes and fires and plagues and they know that's the nature of life. So they weren't surprised when the new obstacle came along and they calmly dealt with it. And , the Japanese government said, this is a state of emergency. But at the same time, life continued as normal as if flight is always a state of emergency.

But there was no, none of my friends there seemed disrupted or upset about the pandemic. And then I would fly into LAX and I would encounter great panic and rage and anxiety. And so it was a very strong reminder first on a cultural level and on an individual level, life is always going to throw us challenges, and as you said, perfectly, the only resources we have are inner ones, but they don't have to do with the examination.

Srini: It, you mentioned a loved one in the icu and I've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people like yourself, people who've lost parents and one thing I have always realized from talking to these people reading all these books is that, something as painful as losing a parent.

No book will help me ever understand that until I experience it. And I remember somebody who was looking at translating our content into another language, had heard a couple of episodes, and she said, you must be the most self-actualized person in the world. I was like, that's hilarious. The reason I do this work is because I'm probably the least self-actualized person in the world.

Speaking of escaping reality, you say in the book that our one task is to make friends with reality. I could imagine them whispering, which is to say, with impermanence and suffering and death, the unrest you feel will always have more to do with you than with what's around you. And then you go on to say, the notion of external paradise is one of the main illusions and projections we have to sweep aside as we might ascend mandala.

It made me wonder one, speaking of loss, you had this moment in your life where a fire, takes away everything. And I've heard two sort of versions of this story. One is basically that you are suddenly free of all the things that you own. And so now you're truly free. But of course, you've also lost things that you can never regain.

For example, things like photographs, right? Which can never be, retake. Like I, I remember losing a camera once or I lost a sim. And I remember telling my friend, I was like, I don't care if we lose the camera or the sim card. What I care is that I lost the pictures cuz those I can't get back.

Pico Iyer: Yes. So I think in my case it was much more difficult for my parents when we lost the family home because they were in their sixties. And especially for my mother, as you say, losing every trace of her past, every photograph, every memento, every letter she'd received from my father was devastating. And I don't think at the age of 60 it was.

For her to recover for me in my early thirties, then it was much more the possible liberation that you mentioned, that suddenly I've been given a blank sheet and I can start afresh and create my life much more along lines that I'd always had, as you said. When it came to replacing my things, I realized I didn't need 90% of the books and our clothes and furniture I'd a.

I'd lost all my notes and my next three potential books were gone. But I realized now I'm, I have to write without notes, which is much deeper. I'll have to write from my heart, from memory, from imagination. I lacked a physical home but of course my true home, which is my mother, my wife to be, the books I love, the songs that go through my head.

I hadn't lost all of. But also losing the physical home in California made me think the place where I really feel at home is Japan. And so actually in the absence of a house here in California, why don't I move to a two room apartment in Japan? So in so many ways, the forest fire woke me up and did in fact allow me to live the way I'd always told myself to live.

And I loved what you said about books because. Books can't teach you about anything. They can't teach you about dealing with loss and grief. As you were saying. They can't teach you about parenting. They can't teach you about calling in love. They can't teach you really about finding an answer.

They're a deep question, which is, hence please no explanations in the church. The church can speak to us, but the explanations.

Srini: I think there's one other thing that you know, really struck me as this idea of external paradise, and you actually say, it was a feature of paradise that it to be observed laws that the outsider couldn't fathom any place of angels as Bali initially seemed to be, has to contain darker sides too.

Not to mention serpents as monk. Thomas knew that paradise inherits in no place, but only in the mind One brings to it and. There's this sort of notion of paradise as being, somewhere on a beautiful beach. If you think about the way we advertise, vacation, travel, it's come to paradise, is, we're always looking for a sense of paradise.

I

Pico Iyer: think we are. And I think as we grow older, our sense of paradise is refined a little, but you're right. If you go into a travel agency, every place is presenting itself as a shangrila or paradise. And you mentioned Bali. Actually, I remember now as we're speaking, I first went to Bali in my twenties while I was living in New York City, and I got into plane and it took this long series of flights and I arrived in the dark and I went to this little cottage.

And when I woke up in the morning, a young guy with a beautiful smile came and brought me fresh mangoes and cup of pot of strong. On the terrace of my cottage and there were kids playing all around with these angel faces. And 45 seconds walk down this palm shaded lane with this golden beach. I was paying $2 a night for the cottage.

I thought, I am in heaven. This is the world it was meant to be. And then a few hours later, of course, night fell and I began to hear the dissonant eerie clanging sound of ga gammalin orchestras and wild. Were barking and those boys with beautiful smiles performing a dance in which they were stabbing themselves in reenacting a legendary battle between black magic and white.

And the little girls with angel faces were performing a dance while they were in a trance. And I realized I didn't have a clue what was going on, and that indeed Eden is the place with a serpent inside it. And that. Something much stronger was happening around me than I could get a grasp on. And in those days, the little lanes of Bali were full of shacks, selling masks.

And as I walked past sea shacks that there were masks of guards and masks and demons and mythical birds, they were all much too spooky for me to purchase. But finally, I found this a little mask that was yellow and red and green. Depicted an owl. I thought this looks very innocuous. So I bought it and I took it back to New York City and as soon as I arrived back in my apartment, I put it on the wall, and one second later, I had to take it off the wall and put it away where I'd never see it again.

There was something so powerful about that mask that I realized I'd taken in much more what I knew what to do with that I, and that you can't take something outta Bali. Especially if you don't understand all the meanings that, that it carries. And so it was a very good lesson. Of course, the other thing about paradise is when we arrive at the Paradise it's not a paradise to the local most often.

And Paradise is a projection that put on places. And so in this book, as you said, when I began thinking about what paradise is, I. I only trust the paradise that exists in the middle of real life and in the face of death. And this was a book that came out of the pandemic when all of us were in this great state of uncertainty.

And I was thinking, how can I find harm and contentment when life is going to bring us so many challenges and when we never know what's going to happen tomorrow or even tonight. And so I did, as you saw, go mostly to war zones or places of conflict and. If there is a paradise I can trust, it'll be one that I find in the middle of turmoil that I've outgrown.

The notion that Tahiti or the Sial is paradise. I've been to those lovely places and if they were paradise, I would be the serpent in the garden. , I would be, what would I be bringing to beautiful places other than corruption. Mortals than perfection? Don't go together. And as long as we're living in our flawed human world, I don't think we.

Dream of finding perfection and actually rather than dreaming of perfection, which gets in the way of our accepting what's around us, how can we find everything we need? In reality, where I live in Japan, you step into a temple in Kyoto, often written on the ground. At the entrance is the simple slogan, look beneath your feet.

In other words, this is this. The best paradise you're going to find right here, right now, and dreaming of other places is only going to keep you away from appreciating what's here. The other thing that you find in the Kyoto Temples is there's one temple, very famous for a rock garden with 15 rocks, and you can't see all of them from the same for many single angle.

So for three centuries, people have been trying to figure out what it means, but just around the corner of that garden is a little stone water. And there's one Japanese character on all four sides and a hole in the middle. And if you put those four characters together with the hole it reads,

what I have is all I need. In other words, the way to excel your self paradise is wishing things were otherwise or saying if only I had. A Mercedes only I had this new iPhone 17 in my life would be better. Actually what you have right now is the paradise you need to discover. Wow.

Srini: It's funny when you mentioned the idea of, it's not paradise to a local.

I lived in Costa Rica for six months and like most people I thought it would be paradise and I. I had a much better time when I went there for vacation three years later than I did when I was living there, because when I was living there, it felt like anything but paradise, everything took forever.

Yeah, there's no sense of urgency. I remember going into a cell phone store. The girl sells me a cell phone, and after she finishes the entire transaction, she says, oh, we don't have any SIM cards. I'm like, you sell cell phones? How do you not have sim cards? ? She's my boss forgot to order some.

And then, our local restaurant says we're out of rice. I'm like, rice is one of your main staples. How are you out of rice? That would be like going to an Indian restaurant and having them say they're out of rice. They're like, oh, the guy who brings the rice didn't show up today, . I was like, oh my God.

This is anything but paradise.

Pico Iyer: Perfect example. And the other thing I wouldn't be surprised if you found was that when you turn to the Costa Ricans, they said, oh yeah, we know what paradise is in Santa Monica, , which New York and where things work well and there's always rice in the restaurants.

And they would have some justification for saying that. Yeah.

Srini: There's one thing, and this is probably my favorite wine in the entire boat. You say in this vision of an afterlife, the fact of things passing was not a cause for grief so much as a summons to a. All the light or beauty we could find, we had to find right now.

The fact that nothing lasts is the reason why everything matters. And I just loved that last line so much. It, can you expand what you mean by that?

Pico Iyer: Again, Rinni, thank you. You've now, that's the other most important line in the book, apart from the explanations one, and in fact, My agent had wanted me to title the book.

The fact that nothing lasts is the reason that everything matters cuz she said this is exactly what the whole thing is about. So thank you again for picking out exactly the heart of it. And it's so nice of you to read these sentences cuz in some cases I've forgotten I wrote them, but I still agree with them amazingly.

So again, I was writing this during the pandemic, staying with my mother who is 88 years old and entering the last few months of her. And as I was sitting with my mother, as her only child, and she was grow close to death, I was still trying to think, how can we find everything we need in the midst of this difficulty?

And one of the beauties of the pandemic for me was it was the season of taking nothing for granted. And it was easy to be agitated, and of course everybody was anxious, but every day I woke up and I was so grateful as I wouldn't be right now as the pandemic is easing again. I take things for granted a bit and I.

When I wake up, I can get into the car and drive across town to talk to you and enjoy a nice meal and get on a plane to Japan two weeks from now. And for those months we weren't able to enjoy much of what we got used to. And it, I think in many ways, again, it was a good thing. When I lost everything in the fire, I was actually stuck in the middle of the fire for three hours holding my mother's.

While a man with a hose was standing in the middle of the road keeping the flames at bay. And so at the end of that evening, of course I was shocked and I was sad to lose everything I had in the world. And I was so grateful I hadn't lost my life. And I thought either I can dwell on everything I've lost, or I can dwell on the almost miraculous fact that here I still am, and the most important things which are inside me are still alive.

And so with the pandemic, I think every day it was possible to wake up. Yeah, I am, I'm still here. I'm relatively healthy. So is my wife. My mother's still alive. And life is really precarious and there's no guarantee that any of us would make it through the day. So for me, that was a reason to cherish the day and to cherish the hour.

And not to assume that I have an infinite number of hours cuz I don't, and no does any human being. And it's a simple thing, but I think at any moment, Speaks to what you were saying earlier about inner resources. I have a choice to be frustrated about the many things I don't have or to be so glad of the many things I do have.

And I think if I turn my attention towards that gladness, my life will go much better. The people around me will be much happier to see me than if I'm in a state of frustration. And the beauty of that is none of that has to do with external circumstances. It's entirely. Within me and it's within my control by and large cause I'm relatively healthy.

And so again, almost we have the choice as we are sitting here on this day in California, do we choose to look at it as hell or do we choose to look at it as paradise? And how we make that choice almost going to determine everything.

Srini: I have two final questions for you. You have. An author and a writer long before the age of the internet and social media.

And I think it, it's apparent in the way you write because I think there's depth to the way that you both speak and write, that I don't see as very common in the modern world. And so I wonder, as a writer, like what have you noticed about how sort of the profession has changed with the internet or better and worse?

Pico Iyer: It's changed of course, as everything has very dramatically, and I think my mandate to myself is that writing has to claim the inner world. It has to find those parts of experience and feeling that a camera or multimedia device can't catch better. I remember when I began writing about, let's say Cuba or Tibet in the 1980s, I thought none of my friends is likely to go to these places.

None of them could even see live images of. I went and gathered all the sight and sounds and smells of those places to bring back to people who would never see Cuba ro Tibet. Now, every single reader of one of my books can see online or on her TV screen, more of Cuba, RO Tibet than I could ever see. If I go to those places, I have to inter memory and silent and inwardness and all those things that she couldn't get on the screen.

And the other part of it, Perfectly singled out is attention span. And of course, we're living in a world in which every minute is cut into a thousand bites now, or texts or tweets or whatever it is. And so I try very hard just as you intuited to stretch the attention span because I feel we're only as happy as we are absorbed.

In other words, I would much rather have one three hour conversation with a friend than 63 minute conversations around water. I'm most happy when I completely lose myself in a film or in a concert or in an intimate moment with somebody. That's when I am freed of myself and I have my greatest moments.

And so I actually think these quick fixes don't really satisfy us, of course, anymore than junk food does. And that at some level what we're craving to use words that you employed. Is depth or continuity or attention. And so I'm, I worked very hard to try to envelop the reader and not to entertain or divert her so much, but even through long sentences to stretch her attention span.

Because I think at some level that's what she really wants. She wants to be engaged in a deep conversation. And that's exactly why a podcast such as this, that people love podcasts cuz they can. Humans talk for a long time with great attention and as you said before we came on air, neither of us can see each other now because if we had our cameras on, we would be distracted.

But as it is, it's just listening to the voices for a long time, and I think that's the richest luxury life has to offer. Wow.

Srini: I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews and mistake create. What do you think it's that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Pico Iyer: I think every, this is probably the worst answer. I think everybody is unmistakable and there's no question that everyone is unique. And again, I would say no explanations, please. In the church, it doesn't matter where it comes from. If you and I and everybody who listens to this conversation with the walk to Times Square or Pixar or the Taj Mahal tomorrow, every one of us would be different.

And that's the way it should be cuz of our experience, our passions, our blood. So everybody is unmistakable and the only mistake is assume you're not special or not unique or everybody else. Cause we have so much in. But we'll never be entirely alike.

Srini: Beautiful. This has been absolutely breathtaking and poetic insightful and thought-provoking as I thought it would be.

I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom, and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your work, the book, and everything else that you're up to?

Pico Iyer: Again, thank you so much for inviting me and for having a podcast that invites such.

Which conversations And thank you for reading my book so carefully and extracting all those sentences. Probably the best way to find out about my book, the Half Known Life is through the website of my publisher, Riverhead. I do have website pico i journey.com. I think the books are the best way to, to talk to me or to find out who I am.

You mentioned The Art of Stillness, which is a very nice small book that some people have enjoyed. And I hope the half. Give more information than I could myself.

Srini: Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.