158: Naomi Shihab Nye: The Life Changing Benefits of Paying Attention (Best of NSE)
May 30, 2024
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Award-winning poet Naomi Shihab Nye emphasizes the life-changing benefits of paying attention, offering wisdom for living through poetry. She explores the power of questions, kindness, and cultural diversity, promoting empathy and human connection. Nye's moving poems reflect moments of beauty and humanity, reminding us to cherish small wonders in life.
Paying attention enriches our lives, fostering joy and understanding even in the face of historic pain and tragedy.
Writing cultivates wisdom and insight, prompting new discoveries and personal growth.
Deep dives
Importance of Paying Attention
Paying attention is emphasized by diverse guests, from scientists to poets, as a key practice for human flourishing. The value of simple attentiveness is highlighted by poet Naomi Shahabnai, who shares how being present and observant enriches our lives, fostering joy and understanding even in the face of historic pain and tragedy.
Practice Leads to Insight
Writing as a practice is praised for its ability to cultivate wisdom and insight by poet Naomi Shahabnai. Through regular engagement and ritual, creative breakthroughs often emerge unexpectedly during the act of simply beginning the work, prompting new discoveries and personal growth.
Role of Curiosity and Remembrance
Naomi Shahabnai reflects on her childhood curiosity and nostalgia, emphasizing the importance of being attentive and inquisitive from a young age. Exploring memories, ideas, and experiences, she underscores the richness of our internal worlds and the beauty found in reminiscence and everyday observations.
Celebrating Diversity and Shared Humanity
The narrative at Gate A4 in the Albuquerque airport illustrates the transformative power of kindness and cultural connections. In a moment of shared powdered sugar, laughter, and camaraderie, diverse individuals bond over homemade cookies, embodying the beauty and unity that can emerge when people engage with empathy, openness, and a willingness to connect across differences.
On this show, we often host guests whose work is in scientific or concrete fields, such as psychology or sociology, which rely on experiments and research to come to helpful conclusions. But such conversations sometimes fall short of the wonder and beauty we experience in everyday life, and for such subjects, we turn to the poets.
In this episode, award-winning poet Naomi Shihab Nye corroborates what researchers have confirmed—the benefits of paying attention. She shares abundant wisdom for living a good life through the lens of poetry. Her work has a quality that the best poetry has, that of paying rapt attention to small moments, making meaning and hope out of everyday wonders.
Amazon Affiliate Disclosure: Tokens Media, LLC is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
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