Love for life means going outside before you reach for your phone

The card, Erik reads it [practice, purpose, method]

Practice. I do something every day that makes me feel alive, even when the weather is bad. I notice what's beautiful on my way to places: the light, the buildings, the people, the weather. Purpose. I know what makes me feel alive. Method. When I feel down, I go outside before I reach for my phone.

Open, Erik [the cabin, minus forty, then the screens]

I grew up half the year at a cabin near the Finnish border. No electricity, barely any running water. We fish, we smoke the fish, we grow potatoes. One winter in Luleå it's minus forty and when I open the door there are ice crystals hanging in the air. I'm a kid who wants to touch everything.

Then, around eight, three things happen close together. My grandpa dies. My parents sit us down at the kitchen table and say they're divorcing. My dad and sister move to Stockholm and I stay with my mom. I don't know how to feel any of it, so I decide not to. And when you decide not to feel, you also stop noticing. The cabin stops being fun. I stop going outside. For the next seven or eight years I'm in my room with a screen, and if you ask me I'll tell you there's nothing worth seeing where I live.

Nina, first question [detachment and the body]

Erik asks: I'm describing a kid who shut down to avoid pain and lost his appetite for the world as a side effect. You see adults do this. What does it look like in someone's body when they've been indoors, in the head, for years?

[Nina answers. Follow-up: What's the first thing you'd have that person do? Not think. Do.]

Erik, the turn [Jehovah's Witnesses, look up, festivals]

I'm fifteen, alone at home, playing an online game. There's a knock. Two Jehovah's Witnesses with a Bible. The woman points at the sky and says: don't you think this world is too beautiful to have been created by chance? I look up. The clouds, the sun, the apple tree. And I say: I think it's beautiful precisely because it happened by chance.

I close the door and I have a thought I can't shake. Why am I in a dark room doing virtual quests when that's outside?

That summer I decide to stop hiding. Over the next years I go to festivals, sleep on floors and in tents, dance in the rain to bands I've never heard of. And I learn the thing that this whole chapter is about: every adventure has an uncomfortable part, and getting through the uncomfortable part is what makes it mean something.

Nina, second question [awe starts with ugh, Montserrat]

Erik asks: We climbed Montserrat in the rain with the wrong shoes, everyone else was turning back, and at the top it started snowing. I have a line in the book that awe always starts with ugh. You take people into cold water, into breathwork, into things that are uncomfortable on purpose. Why does the discomfort seem to be part of it?

[Nina answers from breathwork and her own practices. Follow-up: Is there a way to get the aliveness without the discomfort, or is that the whole point?]

Erik, the correction [adventure anywhere, too sensitive, the trip with no plan]

For a long time I thought love for life meant travel. Big trips. And I told myself I was too sensitive for crowds, so between trips I stayed home. A friend called me out at a party: you always leave early, you don't know how to have fun anymore. I got defensive and said I was planning an interrail trip. She said, can I come? She didn't believe in plans. Venice at two in the morning with no room. Paris, four hours of walking at night, fined on a bus. I learned I could be lost, tired and confused and still find my way.

But the bigger correction came later. I can be an explorer anywhere. The light on the buildings on the way to work. Rain on my skin. A street in my own city I've never walked down. Adventure is where I put my attention, and the phone is where my attention goes when I don't decide.

Erik, what this gives you [the method is the whole thing]

If you take one thing from this: the method line. When I feel down, I go outside before I reach for my phone. Not instead of. Before. Ten minutes. Then the phone if you still want it. In my experience you mostly don't.

Close [question, next video]

What's the thing outside your door that you've stopped seeing? Tell us in the comments. Next video: love for others, and why I gave back my school laptop on day fourteen. Book link below, pre-orders until October 18.