Thank You, But Peter Block's Not Finished
Episode 05 | Can A Man Ever Be Enough?
Joey and Haroon were going to frame this conversation with Peter Block around legacy, around dying and death, about what we leave behind. But Peter stopped us on the very first question.
This little story might explain why.
Just a few days before releasing this episode, Joey ran into Peter at the neighborhood pool. They sat together while Joey’s kids splashed in the water with their mom, giving them space to talk, a kind of post-script to the podcast.
Joey and Peter began talking about the recent death of one of Peter’s closest friends and the ways they hoped to honor this friend in the months ahead. Before they could go deep, though, Joey’s six-year-old son came barreling up, goggles on.
He’d never met Peter before, but without missing a beat, invited him into the pool. Peter stood up, smiled, and jumped right in. He swam the full length of the pool with Joey’s son, talking to him the whole way.
That moment might’ve been the reason Peter kicked our first question back: any conversation about death that doesn’t make room for the immediacy and wonder of life is missing the point. And that’s what this conversation is.
There are so many moments in this episode — like, when Peter admits “my humanity doesn’t explain my lack of humanity” — that we’d call it pure honey, the kind that burns as it cleans, that cuts even as it closes the wound.
Haroon’s being honest when he says he didn’t know Peter going into the episode. But he trusted Joey’s judgment, knew Joey would only invite great guests, but Haroon was still genuinely blown away by how stirring this conversation was.
You’ll hear him admit that, in the course of this fifth episode…
It’s a balm for the soul, an insight into a life well-lived, and most of all, perhaps, medicine for those of us who might feel like we’ve stopped, we’re stuck, we don’t know how to keep moving or, perhaps even, that the best is behind us.
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We’re Avenue M: Haroon Moghul (Sunday Schooled) and Joey Taylor (Bespoken Live), two Midwesterners exploring faith, meaning, parenting and so much more.
The Show Notes
Peter’s a long-time and innovative organizational development thinker, a citizen of Cincinnati, and an author. He’s the co-founder of Designed Learning, a training company that offers workshops designed to build the skills outlined in his books. Peter is part of the Common Good Alliance of Greater Cincinnati and was a member of his local neighborhood council.
His books include Activating the Common Good, Confronting Our Freedom, Flawless Consulting, Stewardship, The Answer to How Is Yes, Community, and The Abundant Community. His work is in the restoration of the common good and creating a world that reclaims our humanity from the onslaught of modernism. Peter’s honors and awards include the Organization Development Network’s 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award and its 2004 first-place Members’ Choice Award in recognition of his book Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used (1999) as the most influential book for Organizational Development practitioners over the past 40 years.
He is the recipient of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) Award for Distinguished Contributions and the Association for Quality and Participation President’s Award; he has also been named to Training Magazine’s HRD Hall of Fame. Here’s a link to Peter’s professional website.
Over the course of the episode, Peter references “The Vitality of Death: Essays in Existential Psychology and Philosophy” by Peter Koestenbaum and a video conversation, “The Vitality of Death,” between Peter Koestenbaum and Peter Block.
This episode is sponsored by Queen City Diwan, a new kind of travel company, which leads historical tours, immersive experiences, leadership retreats and religious pilgrimages. While this September’s Uzbekistan trip is booked, we’re excited to offer an ‘umrah (Oct 11 - 19), a remarkable tour of Morocco, Spain and Portugal (Nov 21 - 29)—and early next year, a trip to Andalusia just for college students (Jan 3 - 9). Learn more on our website!
Avenue M is produced by Bespoken Live with music by Zach Swelber, who plays in Circle It and Mosant.
Episode Transcript
(AI-Generated)
Peter: Tell me why death and dying matters to you.
Haroon: Oh, man. I wasn't expecting that we would start with the hardest possible question, but that's a good place to start. Well, it's interesting because if I had been born, I. I don't know, 20 or 30 years before when I was actually born, I don't know that I would actually be alive. I've had a lot of surgeries in my life. I've had a lot of medical problems. Some of those are from a doctor's point of view, pretty straightforward.
Go in there, do some surgery, fix it up, good as newish. Some of those are the kind of problems you need, years of different kinds of doctors to solve and different kind of routines and treatments. Wow. And I've actually ended up in a point, maybe I shouldn't say ended up, that's the wrong word but I've come to a place in my middle age where I'm actually pretty healthy.
But it's weird from my point of view, if you start your, maybe not from my point of view, maybe from everyone else's point of view, if you start your life feeling like you're not doing very well, and so when you are doing well, you're always thinking about the fact that it didn't have to be this way.
Peter: That's a beautiful statement. It didn't have to be this way.
Haroon: And it may not in years to come. So I gotta make the most of it. It
Peter: is this way, but it didn't have to be this way. Beautiful. Yeah. Yeah.
Joey: So I, I have this first question for you. Richard Levy says that every person has a question to which our lives are the answer. Mm-hmm. he also sometimes says that we're not gonna know the question until after we're dead.
But I just wondered, what do you think the question is that your life is the answer to?
Peter: Have I done enough?
I have the sense that I was born given an invoice. Now I can give you seven theories as to why I think that none of which explain anything. And I always felt that something more was required of me in the last 10 years, I've had the question for God, okay, you gave me this invoice that because I was given birth, something was, called forth.
Something was needed, you know, in a positive way. And I wanna know, have I done enough?
Joey: So how, how is your life answering that question
Peter: today? I felt responsible for improving and making better everything I've touched, other than those things of which I've been arrogant, selfish.
And, my humanity doesn't explain my lack of humanity, but I just always felt there was something more to do. And I, I finally find something I was good at that I cared about. And I was lucky. I found it in my mid twenties. I didn't start asking the question until I knew I could make a living.
' cause I've
Haroon: grew up broke. I find this fascinating 'cause I, I feel like I've not done enough and I don't think I ever have. But I guess I, I want to turn it back to you. You said in your twenties, what happened in your twenties?
Peter: I met a professor in the hallway as after I studied finance and engineering.
I wanted, just wanted to make a living. And I had taken a job with IBM to be a systems engineer and, uh, Fred Steele. Peter, did you know there's a field called organization development? No. I'd taken one course with him. He said, I think you might like it. And I said, Dr. Steele, I, I don't have any money.
I'm gonna make a living. He said, well, if you decide to apply and get in, you might get them to pay for you.
And I couldn't ignore that. And so I applied and all three schools let me in, and one school gave me the most money. We'll pay you tuition and we'll pay you enough to live on. It was $1,800 for, and I just couldn't say no. I said, I'll be there. I borrowed money from my uncle to get me to school, and I, I don't know, I, I give myself credit for saying yes to an, um, probable invitation.
Haroon: I was gonna say, so you, you were planning to pursue a career with IBM, which is a pretty big, solid company, and then you get a suggestion from a professor who, I mean, I'm sure you, he was a great professor and says, maybe you should look into this field, and then you just take the leap.
Peter: I did. He, he saw something in me and I trusted that, I really mean it.
And I jumped into the beginning of a field. There's something called organization development. They taught it at a few schools that began in the late sixties. I joined in the late fifties, and I just thought if somebody. Is going to believe in me, see me, and if Yale University will pay my way.
Plus living in expenses. How do you say? No, I couldn't. Part of me was say if nothing else, it'll make my mother happy. My father was dead at that time, but I don't know. I, I trusted something,
Haroon: So then where were you before this? Kansas. Oh, wow. Had you ever been to Connecticut?
Peter: I'd never been east of the Mississippi.
I'd been to Chicago once. I was born there in Kansas. I went to, got outta high school. Nobody was, I had no helicopters around me. Nobody even asked me where I was going to college, let alone manage my future. And I read somewhere that I. University of Kansas, if you get above a C average, they have to take you.
And so I say, that's where I'm going. So I went there.
Haroon: What did your mom say when you told her you're going to Yale?
Peter: Well, she's proud of me. Wanna tell her friends?
Joey: When I hear that story, Peter, I hear themes of trust of people believing in you. Yeah. I also know that a lot of your life is about this idea of freedom.
What does trust and others believing you have to do with freedom for you?
Peter: Exactly. I, I don't know. But the other thing is I like, I love the song. I wish I knew how to feel. Be free. We can talk about that later. But I always chose freedom. And I trusted my response to that. Choosing love.
Believing in love has been extremely difficult for me, especially feeling I could be loved. And part of the complicated neurotic side of me is to say, well, uh, there's nothing I can do to be loved enough, so I better keep trying. And so I just chose freedom and I felt, well, if nothing else, my life will be my own.
And it has been my own and a lot of it hasn't gone well. You I'm a human being, I know that my, I chose my life and I think there's something in me. I don't know why. I just had that trust. And I think over and over again when something occurred, once that, uh, sounded a bell in me, I said, yes, and I'm grateful, even though I, God has not answered my question, have I done enough? I, I have. And every time I went into therapy, during my life when I suffered, one theme was, Peter, why do you feel so responsible? it's from the nuance of interrupting everybody, every, anytime any other person speaks, I have a tendency to own the comma or the period.
Okay. I try, I work, it's hard, all right? But I, freedom just in myself have supported people's freedom. I grew up in the second World War I. The Holocaust was occurring when my, when I was five, six years old. Being a Jew was extremely difficult. And so it was something about freedom always also was a cultural call to me.
And I I've been neurotically attached.
Joey: The thing that I'm interested in is that when I called you to have this conversation, you said to me, Joey, don't treat me like a mentor. Don't treat me like a sage of some sort. And I know you're not super excited about the idea of passing the torch.
Um, why is that? So, why are those frames So repulsive for you?
Peter: Uh, it's more than I'm not done,
I don't even think I've started.
And so to be a mentor renders me useful and obsolete. A wisdom figure gone on, I'm not done. And passing the torch means that I'm no longer responsible. I'm no longer an agent of the future. It's time for me to turn it over to beautiful human beings like you. I'm not done. That's why I'm so cranky about it, and I don't try not to use swear words.
So that's one of my commitments for 2025 and six and seven. I'm happy to be your friend, but I, I don't know. people treat me. It's weird, every age of your life has its own compelling, troublesome stage. 21, 30, 40. Mid-career. 50. People are amazed. People talk all the time. I talked to this guy, he was over 80.
Not a good feeling. I'm, am I done? I got how old I am. It frightens me. I'm scared. I don't know. That's why I'm so cranky about being a mentor, you know, be a friend.
Joey: it's fascinating to me because one way to talk about that professor that you described in the opening story is exactly as a mentor, somebody who believes Yeah. But he,
Peter: he was a wake up call. But yes. And I can give you five or six moments where I discovered somebody that wrote a book or gave a talk or showed up and it called to me in the same way.
And I ended up pursuing them. So Tim Galway wrote The Inner Game of Tennis. I read it, I wrote him a letter. I said, what you're saying has nothing to do with tennis. You no longer believe in teaching, you believe in learning. And he teaches tennis without one stroke instruction. And guess what? He called me back and I almost passed out.
Barbara Townley said Peter, Tim Galway's on the phone.
And he said, hi Peter, let's talk. And so I just, for the next five years, I got the first licensed certified inner game of tennis instructor. So they were mentors, they're people that I had changed my life. Peter Kestenbaum, David White. Okay. Geal Therapy. John McKnight. Walter Brueggeman, and I, once I heard them speak, whisper.
I've been good at saying, okay, where are they? Who are they and how do I find them with reciprocity? And maybe that's why the mentor, if you wanna be mentor in both directions, I'm up for it. John, there's a guy named Edgar Conn who's something about Time Bank. He said he doesn't believe in charity, he believes in reciprocity.
And he believes that what we do is we co-produce the future with each other. And that feels right to me.
Haroon: I like that. Co-production.
Peter: Co-production. Exactly. Yeah. Makes us both agents. I'm not done yet. And that's what I did with these people. I've pursued and I did with Jack Steele, but all the rest I. Made sure that I gave them as much as I got, and I brought them into the corporate world, which I had access to.
And David White's a poet, Peter Kesner, Baum's an existential philosopher. And Tim Galway is a tennis instructor. Okay. Angela Arian was a anthropologist. And Walter Brugmann is a Old Testament scholar. And I said, are you any interested in finding a corporate audience? And they said yes. so I felt that I was giving as much as I was giving.
So
Haroon: part of me is still stuck on this transition from Kansas to Yale. I'm just gonna take it back 'cause I, I really wanna understand this right. When you get there, like, what's going through your head? I'm,
Peter: I'm terrified. I.
I went there and I was looking for a place to live, the person to help me find a place to live, she said, Peter, I have a room I'd like to rent. Are you interested? Yes. And I, you know, and then I, I realized once I got into it than in graduate school, it was different than you. this was a industrial administration degree, master's degree.
Most people were older than I was, and they weren't scholarly, they were practical.
Haroon: How old were you then?
Peter: 21. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, they were 26, 28, 32. And they'd gone back to school to get a degree in industrial administration, industrial management. And it wasn't even the field I was interested, you know, but there was a guy named Chris Arris there who was inventing organization development
I don't know. I, it was hard, lonely. The woman I had been dating in college called me and said, Peter, either we get married or we're done.
And I said, I don't know if I could make a living, Peter. We get married or we're done. I said, on my way to New Haven, I thought, God, there's one woman in the world who loves me. This is it. I said, okay, let's get married. so we did. And so, you know, a year at the end of that first semester we got married and she moved back because the other thing that was painful, I was just terribly lonely and I just hungered for love care, things that weren't available in my family at the moment, once my father died when I was 15.
My uncles were godsend to me, but I was just, we've been into my bones forever. And so that made that work. She moved, we got married and you know, by the time I left Yale, she was pregnant. I had a 1955 Chevy. I tried to find a, a, a job in Kansas and I couldn't, the only job I could find was Exxon was interested in organization development in their research company.
They offered me a job I got two job offers. One was for 6,500 a year, the other was for 8,300 a year. That made life simple. I'll take the 83.
Haroon: Where was that? Like where was Exxon
Peter: New Jersey, Exxon Research and Engineering. They had a wild guy who ran their HR department, will Maloney, and he knew about OD organization development.
He hired me even though he didn't have anything for me to do.
Haroon: why do you think he hired you then?
Peter: He believed in the field and I had a great recommendation from Chris Arris, my teacher,
Haroon: who was inventing the field. What is organization development
Peter: exactly? Nothing has changed. Okay. 60, 63 years later,
Haroon: some things have changed.
Peter: I know. But yeah, you know, it, it, it is a democratization and the humanization of workplaces, but it's still curious. Interesting. Nobody in my family knew what it was. My daughter called me from college, said, dad, I finally figured out what you do. And I said, really? She said, yeah, we had a professor of, uh, I forget she was design or something that broke us into small groups.
And I said, that's what my dad does. He breaks people into small groups. But, you know, organization development was an attempt to, uh, support relationship and humanity in a workplace. So is that what you did at Exxon? That's what I've done every day since I went to graduate school.
Joey: I love the path, autobiographical path.
We're kind of going, I want to push pause for just a second though. 'cause you said you talked about loneliness. I've heard you talk about loneliness quite a bit. I think in some ways that's a, a shared sentiment. I think a lot of the people who are in kind of our, our group of folks would share with you.
I have two questions for you about loneliness. The first one is, is there something wrong with, with feeling lonely? And secondly, beautiful, Anna, what does that loneliness look like and feel like for you?
Peter: So when I was 40, I was about to run a workshop on the inner game stuff called the Inner Game of Writing.
' cause I didn't know how to do the inner game of tennis in a conference room. And on my way a guy was giving a speech and I thought, let me sit down and rest. And he told me, if you feel lonely, if you feel you don't belong anywhere, if you feel anxious, there's nothing wrong with you. It means you're a human being.
Existential philosophy, German, uh. jew survivor and I thought, oh my God, there's nothing wrong with me. This means I'm human. 'cause I'm alienated, lonely, edgy shit. Sorry. I couldn't resist a time. So at the end of the talk I was so blown away. I walked to the front and I said that, Dr. Kestenbaum, where do you live?
He says, San Jose, California. He's a professor at San Jose State. Can I come and see you? He said, yes. And then I went off to my workshop on the inner game of writing and drawing and all I did was pray that he would not come in my room and see how shallow I am. And we start, and guess what? He walks in the room.
Luckily I was mid-sentence, so I had to finish it. He sits down and does my inner game of writing, inner game of drawing little exercises people did. And I said, thank you for coming, doctor. He said, Peter, this was amazing. Thank you. I learned so much.
You know, you're terrified and you do it anyway. So that was, you know, then it took me years to know what he was talking about. It takes years. You get the insight. You say yes to know what it's organization development, whether it's a yoga, tennis teacher, whether it's a existential philosopher , but you know, there's something there.
I'm grateful that I had the will to seek people out once I heard the sentence that changed my life.
Haroon: wanna understand that. I think it's the, like the analytic part of my brain is that you're talking about these very, I guess at least professionally, very different types of people, right?
Like tennis instructor, and then there's Exxon, you know, ostensibly those are not that similar and do different things. what do you give to them and what do you get from them? And I, I don't know, maybe I'll just, I know there's a lot of different types of people, but,
Peter: You ask yourself what are you good at, it takes a long time to answer that question.
And I discovered that I could translate, I could take ideas from unusual places and bring them into practical moments. And I still, for all those years, until I needed to make a living. I started a business 19 69, 26 years old. I left Exxon and my partner and I, Tony got a call from a marketing firm, Harshi Rotman.
Druck on Madison Avenue, New York City. Okay. He's from Bock, Minnesota. I'm from Kansas. Okay. We have lunch. We go to this. He said, you guys, you know, I talked to this teacher you had at Yale and he says, you guys are good at this field of organization development. We wanna start a division. Well, you do it for us.
And when I'm looking out over Madison Avenue, he's a PR guy's, got roosters all over the room and uh, Tony said, well, let us think about it. So Tony and I walk outta there and we go back to the place we had lunch. And
one of us said, you know, he really thinks we can start a business. Organizational development and arrogant why would we do it for him? Suppose he is right? And so it was affirming. And so we went home and said, we're gonna, so I started 8 26 or seven a year later, I, and so we started a business and uh, I started consulting.
It was a radical edge thing, but we knew how to frame it. We invented team building. You know, we were, we were good at what we did. So we ran training sessions. They realized that as sensitive as people became running tea groups sixties, uh, they couldn't bring it to work. So we worked both for Exxon. We said, well, let's bring it to work and do team building.
So we were one of the early people that says we're gonna train teams to focus on their relationship with each other in service of whether they're what Exxon does for a living. And it worked. And so that got me started. And then after that I was kinda on my own. I started to think, well, maybe, uh, my way of thinking was useful.
And so I went, when I found Fritz Pearls, when I found Peter Kestenbaum or David White or Tim Galway, and it drew me, I thought, well, how do I bring this into the work world, my clients? And I thought, Hmm, maybe I'll just bring them in and pay attention. And so I went to my clients and I said to this guy, I'd like you to meet.
Would you mind spending three days with Peter Kesel? Who is he? Well, he is a philosopher of businesses, his field, and each of these people. I said, are you interested in working in the corporate world? Hell yes. And so I. I did, I brought Peter into, uh, a RA services, spent three days, asked my client contact, how'd it go?
He says It went great, except he's too supportive. And he started working in business. He gave his future to philosophy and business, and I supported him. I gave him access, and he was great. They loved, you know, he, he spent the rest of his life. He quit being a university professor and became a business philosopher.
Tim Galway, same thing. Tim said, what do you do? Oh, I consult. He said, really? I said, are you interested? He said, hell yes. So I brought him to Scott Paper and, uh, they were doing a sales thing. I said, why don't you give Tim as your be your keynote speaker, we'll design a sales conference for you on the inner game of selling.
And he ran a tennis tournament. but he said, his whole point was you're not there to compete. You're not there to win. You're there to listen to the party yourself that realizes the future you wanna inhabit as a tennis player in you. You need to discover by listening to the ball, listening to the racket, listening to your hand.
And I will never give you an instruction in a game of drawing. Draw and see what's happening while you draw so we did a tennis tournament and he said, if you win, you're out.
If you lose, you advance. Now what's your choice to win or to play the best tennis you know how to play. And the people who chose winning were out of the tournament. And the people who chose the experience of discovering what kind of tennis they could play lost, advanced. In that structure of that tournament, he inverted the traditional thinking about what's the point.
Now all of this helped me deal with my, you know, I was still just as lonely, but I found a place where I belonged. Going back to your question, joy.
Joey: Yeah. I would love to hear Harun talk about this for a second. 'cause there's a, there's a, a guy named Henry Nen who is, I've not met him, but he is a big influence on me and my thinking.
And he says that community only comes through a shared confession of brokenness. And he's talking for him. It's specifically about loneliness even. Yes. And, um, beautiful. Say that again. Community can only come through a shared confession of our brokenness. And I,
Peter: I made a living off
Joey: of that.
Peter: I knew how to translate that into something useful to practical people.
Joey: Yeah.
Peter: Beautiful. I agree.
Joey: You think that's hogwash? Say something about that.
Haroon: No, no. I, I mean I'm honestly, this is intriguing to me 'cause, so my parents are immigrants from Pakistan and I think when you live between different cultures and within different cultures, I mean, one for me it's obviously, it, it forces you to be very attentive, but it also makes you realize that a lot of things people take for granted cannot be taken for granted.
So I was, I was thinking two things. So the first is you mentioned team building. Uh, I'll just say, 'cause I don't wanna get myself into any more trouble than I need to be in, uh, a lot of people don't know how to work in teams and some of that is cultural, right? Like whether or not you were raised. To understand kind of an ethos of collaboration and, and what that means.
Right? And I'm not saying that in a judgmental way, just simply in a descriptive way, but also I think the idea of loneliness to me is, I, I mean, I think sometimes I feel it very keenly, and yet I don't feel it. I think, Peter, what I loved about what you said is that I don't feel it in a way that pierces or that disappoints or that makes me feel like I'm lacking.
I, I simply see it as, you know, there I have an interior life that I don't necessarily have to or need to share. And I don't mean like I'm, I'm, I'm afraid to share but like, nobody ever promised me that every part of me would be reflected in the world around me, right? That's just kind of how it is.
But I feel that even as my life is really full and I don't know if that's how a lot of people. Go through life. That, that, I mean, you're describing a life and I, I'd love to hear this. That is incredibly full. I mean, you're meeting all these fascinating people. You're changing how companies, institutions, people from all different walks of life think about themselves.
I mean, even just helping people to work in teams has to do something for their sense of how they relate to other people. And then you're telling me at the same time that you feel, you felt really lonely and I'm want to know, did that drive the work you did or just coexisted with the work you did?
Peter: I think because of my ISIS and loneliness team building was enormously appealing to and I found a connection to the work. And the work has always been and even with all the mistakes I've made, failures, it's been enormously rewarding. ' cause I found a way to. Work on my own woundedness in a way that was useful to the world.
And every therapist is working on their, is driven to therapy or healing or minister or isolation or whatever you guys do. Our own woundedness is a source of what we do. I think that's just the way it is. It's, and I've tried to understand, it's not necessarily neurotic. You know, Peter taught me the difference between existential guilt and neurotic guilt.
And he said neurotic guilt is when you think you're, you feel guilty 'cause you haven't pleased others. Existential guilt is when you feel guilty 'cause you haven't listened to yourself. And I found that extremely useful and I know what you're talking about. You've always listened also to yourself. but the culture is so designed for competition.
It's designed for a militaristic culture, and your family may have come from something quite different, but the American instinct is towards competition that's number more visible than in this moment. We're having a moment where we think, uh, cooperation is a problem to be solved. And so I think this is true work has given me the gift of knowing that what I did mattered.
And that has assuaged a lot of the neurotic guilt. now, when it comes to personal lives, women, family, neurotic guilt is my cup of tea.
Someday I hope I please them enough, but. I don't see it. And that's just me. So I think what you say is very powerful. Both are true, and I've been lucky in my career to find the two of you. And mostly my work has been to make accessible, uh, people being vulnerable with each other.
It's all I do. It's all I ever did. That was team building, sensitivity training, six conversations, 10 books, was trying to honor the vulnerability we have and see that as a way of being together. So I only ask people to be vulnerable. I'm not interested in what's working. I'm not interested in your story.
You can explain your life any way you want, and it's all I. Fiction, useful fiction. I was a wandering Jew as my story for the first 60 years of my life, and you want evidence of, how many weeks do you have? And it was just a story. And our work is to help people reconstruct a story that's more useful in this moment.
Joey: I want to hear this story. The first time you heard that Nina Simone's song in 1968.
Tell me the story.
Peter: Well,
it was extremely hopeful. This mid and early sixties were extremely liberating, and I, it woke me up. I was in my twenties music, the place, I just, I couldn't believe it. And then I was working with a Soundview Frogs Deck Community Metal Hospital. Consulted with him once a month. King died, was killed. And the next day I went to work with them and they were mostly African Americans, and we sat in silence.
I didn't know what I had to say. And that night, Dick Walton, a friend of ours, was in town and we'd scheduled to go to the, I think it was the Village Vanguard and. York City. I was living in New Jersey. So we go there and the world is stunned and Nina Simone was the, and we sat there and there was only 20 people in the room.
'cause most people weren't going anywhere because of King's death. And she's saying, I wish I knew. I would feel to be free.
I wish I could fly like a bird in the sky. And she sang it for 20 minutes. He on and on and on. And I don't know if something in me just was overwhelmed by her naming through that song, what I had been seeking, longing from, escaping from all through. And I just walked outta that room with that song became my anthem.
I wish you could know what it meant to be me. I wish I could break all these chains binding me. I wish I could fly like a bird in the sky. All the things I have to say. And it's just crystallized something in that song and that black singer singing as an anthem to King's assassination, that song has meant the world to me. I decided to play it on the piano and I never taken a lesson. And every night when my kids went to bed, I had songs of the sixties in front of me and I go, okay, that's middle C. And I put down C on the keys. That's D. Okay. C is 1, 3, 5, starting at c.
C-D-E-F-G-A-B. And I, I, night by night, I learned every chord in that song. I didn't know what chords were.
I didn't know what C was. I didn't know what a flat was or a minor. And for six months I memorized that so I can sit down now and play. I wish I knew how it'd feel to be free without looking at music. And after that, I took me it was an anthem for the moment, and then it made, became my life.
Haroon: Do you know there's, Something you said there. It, it really. I'd say it struck a chord, but I still, I don't know what a chord is. I don't, I don't know what any of those things are. Um, but I like music.
Uh, I dunno if music likes me, but there's this line by Rumi, the wound is where the light enters you. And you said something there about how the wound, I don't know if it's fair to say, drove the work that you did or, or pushed you in the direction it didn't.
And I'm wondering, and this is actually Peter and Joey, this is for both of you. Is that what causes us to transcend ourselves and be better than we might be? Is is it the wound? Is it, is it the place where we fall short?
Peter: The answer is yes. It doesn't call us, but it does call us.
It invites us. The answer is yes,
Joey: Joey,
Haroon: what's the wound?
Joey: I think that's true. You know, I don't I definitely think the wound has the capacity to connect us to something greater. I think that's cer that's certainly true. For me, at least when I'm aware of my own mortality precarity, call it what you want, that presents the opportunity for me to relate to others with compassion, with grace even with a level of need.
Maybe that's the mutuality that you're talking about, Peter. So I think, I think that is true. I think the larger transcendent piece, sometimes that's harder for me to kind of make that, that, that switch too. I. But the mutuality piece I think is definitely there through the wound.
Peter: I think we each have our own frame, but the wound is central and accepting the wound is central and it is an invitation.
It's not all there is I have to at some point confront myself with my gifts. Deficiencies are easy ' cause they don't demand anything of me. Here's your problem, Peter. I know you need to work on it, Peter. I know I do. What's for dinner Peter, you have this gift. You have a capacity to give language and words to things that are leave me the fuck alone. I just feel it's hard for me when one of the questions we use to use our vulnerability to connect is to say, what's the courage required of you now?
Yeah.
Joey: Yeah.
Peter: And for me to answer that question means I'll have to do something about that. And then one of the questions I had that a friend of mine, Damon asked me in a small group to answer the question I was asking them. And he said, Peter, what's the cur? And I said, well, it's for me to give up my gypsy story and become a full member, citizen activist in Cincinnati, where I have to be accountable for my mistakes. If gypsy's not accountable, you come to town, you do your thing, and if it didn't work, you don't go back to that town. It's not complicated. And so I do think that my vulnerability was activated and I said, well, I'm not sure I have a thick enough skin to become public and where I live.
Like I haven't places that I've been invited to. And once I said that I, I had to do it. So I allowed and started giving talks and stuff in Cincinnati.
Haroon: How long have you been here, by the way?
Peter: 25 years.
Haroon: What brought you here first,
Peter: Kathy? I fell in love.
took a long time to make up my mind. I decided I just didn't wanna live without it. Complicated, ridiculous. Foolish as it was
Haroon: brutal. Are you talking about Cincinnati or something else?
Peter: Me and Kathy. You and Kathy. No, Cincinnati's fine. Cincinnati's fine. That brought, that brought me here and I thought that's why I was here.
And you know, as I hear three or four years, I realized that my gypsy story, I don't belong anywhere. It was a lie.
Joey: I have somebody who I would call my mentor And at the beginning of Lent, he said that he's been doing this gratitude practice.
But the gratitude practice has kind of turned on its head. So instead of it being something that he is grateful for, every single day he writes about somebody who is grateful for him. And, um,
Haroon: I,
Joey: I tried to do this and it's, it's been in incredibly, like, emotional, like a, a motive for me. And I think that's the being confronted with your own value, your own giftedness, people believing you.
Mm-hmm. That's the, that's the thread that I'm really picking up from what we're talking about here. Um, be, yeah. And it feels a little self-congratulatory at first, which there's some, like, some maybe a little bit of shame in, but, but after you get into the flow of it, it does really open you up because there are people who, who are deeply grateful for each of us.
Yeah.
Peter: That's brutal. Yeah. And I think what I learned from Peter Kestenbaum was he wrote a book called The Vitality of Death.
And he said, if we didn't know we were gonna die, our life would mean nothing.
And I think when you, the brutality of you doing that practice joy, so what are people grateful to me about? And don't be distracted about arrogance and, but say, wow, what's the burden that puts on me to live into my future? Suppose that's a better description of you than all the things you're grateful for.
Joey: Yeah.
Peter: I'm not interested whether you won the lottery. I'm interested in you being the lottery. Wow. Let me outta here. I think that's where you're flirting with and I think death gives me an urgency. I. Pay attention to that. And that's why I, I think it's a wonderful gift. And I've been a part of my life.
My father and I got called home from school when I was 14 or 15. I didn't know why I would have to go home. And, uh, my mother walked into the room and said, your father died last night and he was living in another city and changed everything. I still haven't recovered from that moment. And, uh, all the source of love and care for me that I knew went with him And so I think death is a gift. And I have been with people who are dying. And the older you get, the more people there are. I remember talking to Neil and he was in the hospital and we talk a couple times a week. He'd been a long time friend of mine for years. I said, Neil, it sounds to me like you're done.
He said, yes, I am Peter. And I said, I have a feeling that you won't last through tomorrow. He said, I don't think I will either. And I said, Neil, what a great friend you are. Thank you very much. What a pleasure it is to be with you at this moment. Thank you for the gift of talking to me. And he said, you're welcome Peter.
You've been a great friend also. Goodnight.
And I felt, what a beautiful moment that was. To say goodbye to Neil and not get caught up in the tragedy of his death, the beauty of his death.
I don't know. It gives me a comfort. I don't see it as a problem to be solved. and I think you're talking about death and dying is, is a welcome inquiry. What it means to be alive. And Peter always said, you know, when your friends die, life comes to an end. But yours doesn't.
And when I asked Peter, who was 95 this year, Kestenbaum my philosopher for him, I did a video with him about his dying. 'cause he wrote a book, the Vitality of Death. And I said, what the hell, Peter, you've been welcoming death all your life, and now you're 95 years old. And he said, I, I am experienced.
He said, my birth and my death mean nothing. That I am a spirit that existed long before I was born. And will exist long after I'm dead. What do you do with that? What, again? And so it's a wonderful domain, but it has to do with living. I also once heard that the gods in Greece lived forever. They were immortal. Right. Well, the problem was if you're gonna live forever, there's no reason to do anything today. You wanna go see a movie?
Yeah. Let's go see it. In 15 years. And they needed us human beings in our mortality to give meaning to their existence. That's why they played around with us. That's why they came to Earth is 'cause they missed the experience of life, meaning something. And I just, I, I. I get that, that's why I'm stubborn about being done.
I'll be done soon enough. And, uh, it's painful. The painful is the loss of those who are gone and then so be it. Thank God I knew them and thank God I was a gift to them, Joey.
Joey: Yeah. Yeah. I
Peter: realized that the sustaining relationships for me were based on profound reciprocity and anybody that wants to do something for me, thank you.
But that's sustainable.
Joey: Yeah, I hear you. I think the thing for me, like connecting with the loneliness piece is that as you age, as death comes closer, I. It feels like in some ways loneliness takes on a, a little bit different hue, a little bit, maybe deeper hue as you're losing people who you've spent, spent those mutual relationships with.
Um, mm-hmm. Uh, one more question. I think maybe we, maybe we all take a second and answer it and then let's say goodbye. Is there a moment that meant the most to you in this, in this conversation?
Peter: Well, I think hearing the two of you, I thinking, talking about how you came here as an outsider kind of had to be bilingual and, uh, Joey, your willingness to find your own words for what we're talking about, your integrity your. Neurotic curiosity. I always welcome.
And it, you know, it's just a, that's just a gift for you to find meaning and what I represent, who I am.
I also kind of felt maybe I've told those stories enough.
You know that it's a version of myself when I talk about Tim and Peter, these people Angelus, Meg Wheatley, and maybe I should let go of those stories. It's having anything to do with who I am right now. anyway, it just occurs to me. So tell me, what struck the two of you?
What touched you? What gift you got from this? Our being together? What were your moments?
Joey: It's meaningful for me to have you two talk to each other because you're, you're both meaningful for me in different kind of spheres of life up to this point. And so there's something for me that feels more coherent now that you two have talked. So that's what struck me, I think the most.
Peter: Could you name or give a little bit of color to the coherence?
Joey: I was trying to be like, not self-interested, but I think the thing for me is that how's that going? Not great. Not great. Um, I think the thing for me is that I, I'm leaving this conversation thinking that you all both have the, the capacity to understand me more. I think that's what it's about.
Peter: No, no, that's beautiful. That is not self-interest. So your fear of self-interest is your defense against, finish the sentence the way you want. Nothing self-interest about you, Joey. Yeah, nothing. Now, are you selfish? Of course you are. Are you greedy? Of course you are. But it's, that just comes along with you.
That's not how you show up. It's an apple. Anyway, thank you. And I think what, when you said that Haru and I are help you be more coherent as pieces of your life overlapping.
Haroon: Yeah, Peter. Um, it's funny 'cause we haven't actually ever met, this is the first time we've talked, but you definitely hit something and I just want to share that. Uh, I grew up about an hour, uh, north of Yale. And the first time I took college classes, was at Yale. It was a high school program.
It was my first chance to be out of the house. South Asian parents told them there were classes at Yale. I didn't even have to tell 'em what the classes were, they would've sent me if it was the other side of the world. It was my first experience of something outside of small town, farm town, Connecticut.
And I didn't know it at the time, but I was hungry for more. And I think that's why I went, and Yale blew me away. I'd never seen anything like it. And I think simultaneously what blew me away was that this was literally an hour away from me. And, uh, I got rejected by Yale when it came time to apply to college.
And, uh, Yale University Press later commissioned a book for me. Uh, and then they rejected that book, uh, and it ended up publishing it elsewhere. It's fine. I, I'm, I promise I'm not, I'm not bitter. But the reason I'm sharing that is, you know, I. In moving here I moved away from what I knew and what I knew was the East coast DC New York.
I worked in big cities and kind of the so-called coastal bubbles and whatnot. And it was a, it was a difficult transition in some ways. you know, I've, I've become kind of a teacher since I've found myself here and, and sort of felt myself falling into the role of a mentor. And I think part of the reason why I embrace that is, you know, given the larger political environment to someone who's Muslim and South Asian by ancestry, who has to ask himself what would it mean to fly out of, and then try to fly back into my own country in this environment for whom those questions, you know, I, I might've thought would be temporary, have come back, you know, with greater effect.
So I think there's a part of me definitely that feels like some of this is out of my control, but there's another part of me that in, in listening to you, made me realize that perhaps I had a little bit too wittingly yielded my agency and allowed myself to fall into the role of being a mentor without feeling like, and maybe it's middle age and you know, the, just the craziness of where I am right now.
And you get so busy in the day to day, every day minutia that you forget that there is a larger arc to everything. And, uh, it's a good reminder that, um, none of us has really done and maybe. When we leave, that's when we are done. But for now, we're not
Peter: leave or die.
Haroon: Yeah. That's the mark that we're done.
And until then
Peter: we're not. I know. That's beautiful. Do you teach or something that uc or something?
Haroon: No, no. I, I teach in, I teach at Sunday school. I've got about 40 students and, um, I lead historical tours, building tours for college students. Uh, you know, and I love teaching. I've always loved teaching. But
Peter: see, the teaching is beautiful. Has nothing to do with being a mentor. You're there to confront them with their capacity and finish the sentence any way you want. And if you can help them discover their agency in that room, their connection to God, or connection to whatever else they're teaching, and maybe someday we'll figure it out.
Haroon: Amen.
Peter: Amen. Amen. That's right.