Recently, on Season Two of The Story of Us: From Cosmic Dawn to the Depths of Being, I had the privilege to spend and afternoon with Calvin Schwartz, author of several books and host of the We The Species podcast. Calvin’s story is fascinating and now in his 80’s, Calvin has interviewed over 700 guests for his show.
Something Calvin said really stuck with me. Not because it was shocking, but because it was so plainly and quietly true that I felt a little embarrassed I hadn’t said it first. He described the human spirit as an antenna, already installed and already working. He said that most of us simply never bother to unfurl it. We’re too busy. Life is too noisy. The world is too loud. We constantly find ourselves… “somewhere other then where our feet are at the moment.”
I’ve been thinking about that ever since. And the longer I sit with it, the more I think the real question isn’t whether the signal is out there. It’s whether I’ve been showing up fully prepared to receive it.
An Honest Admission
I’ll say it aloud. That thing that’s probably true for a lot of us:
I believe in something.
I’m just not always sure I behave like I do. There’s a version of me that is genuinely open and curious, still, paying attention to the texture of an average day. But also, there’s another version of me that gets completely swallowed whole by the calendar, by the layered responsibilities, by the mostly false sense of urgency that is shouting loudly in my face and insisting it matters.
That second version doesn’t have a lot of room for mystery or awe. He’s not necessarily bad. Just overwhelmed and crowded out by the world, mindlessly scrolling Instagram reels until he looks up and two hours have been wasted away in the “simulation”.
Spiritual awareness isn’t something you find. It’s something you make room for. And most days, I don’t make enough room. My guess is that you don’t either.
What We’ve Traded Away
I sometimes think about how humans used to move through this world. Slowly, mostly. With long stretches of nothing-in-particular between one thing and the next. That empty spaces: the long walk, the fields of grass, the lazy day alongside the flowing river, the star-studded night sky that stretched into eternity. That was the open space where meaning lived for humans. It was where the “inexplicable” could actually find a 5-bar signal.
We’ve filled all of that empty space now. Every gap, every pause, every moment of potential stillness has something ready to rush in and snatch it up. A phone notification. A breaking news flash. A reflex to grab the phone that happens before we’ve even decided to reach for it. We’ve become virtuosos of distraction, and we’ve dressed it up as productivity, as staying informed, as being connected.
Hogwash.
But I wonder sometimes what we’re actually avoiding. Because silence has weight to it, doesn’t it? It asks things of you. It’s much easier to stay busy than to raise your antenna and sit with yourself long enough for the real questions to surface. Questions that may scare us a little or stir up some deeply embedded emotion.
The Questions That Don’t Go Away
- Who am I really? Not my adapted self, but my true self.
- Why am I here?
- What’s my purpose?
- What does all of this really mean?
- what is this whole astonishing thing called life?
These questions are as ancient as humanity. And they aren’t problems to be solved. They’re conditions to be lived in. The people I find most alive, most genuinely present, are the ones like Calvin who haven’t stopped asking the deeper questions. Not because they’re lost. Not because they gave up. But, because they understand that the asking itself is the damn whole point. That’s not resignation. It’s a kind of reverence. A willingness to stay in the wonder of not-knowing rather than sprinting toward a final conclusion.
I started our podcast because I wanted to hear how other people carry that wonder through their lives. Episode after episode, the throughline is the same:
The people who have lived most fully are the ones who stayed curious, stayed open, and — here’s the part I keep coming back to — stayed a little bit quiet. Quiet enough to hear something other than their own internal monologue.
A Porch, A Few Cold Beers, and a Question I Never Forgot
I remember a conversation from college. Two guys, some unreasonably late hour of the night, a few cold beers on the sagging front porch of a crappy house we had rented for the school year. The kind of night where the world gets just quiet enough that the questions you’ve been outrunning finally catch up to you.
I asked my roommate why he was Catholic. It was a question about how my peers came to find religious identity that had been sitting in the back of my adolescence for years — patient, unanswered, not quite ready to be spoken out loud. He thought about it for a second and then said what I already knew he’d say: his parents were Catholic. And their parents before them. And theirs before that. A long, unbroken chain of inherited belief stretching back into the dark.
I didn’t argue. I sipped my beer and changed the subject. But that answer has followed me for decades. Not because it was wrong (because isn’t there something beautiful about a faith that has been passed down through generations like a hand-stitched quilt?) But because I knew, sitting on that porch on that Summer night, that it was not an answer I could or would ever give. I didn’t want to believe something because I was told to. I wanted to believe something because it was true. Or at least because it felt like it might be to me.
So I started looking. Quietly, very privately, without any announcement or arrival. I’ve moved through the great traditions of human spiritual thought — Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism (and the countless sects, spinoffs and branches that grew from each one, born from some small but crucial difference in how the followers understood the message that arrived from their god through their prophet). I’ve looked for the thread that connects them. I’ve looked for the one thing that resonates so deeply it leaves no room for doubt.
I haven’t found it yet. And I’m starting to suspect I won’t. Not because the truth isn’t there, but because maybe I’m not built for certainty. Maybe I’m built for the search itself.
Scientists can trace the origins of the universe back to a single, unimaginable moment we call “The Big Bang”, the first breath of everything. But even they go quiet at the edge of that question. Because something cannot come from nothing. That’s the brick wall at the end of the corridor, and it stops physicist and philosopher alike. Maybe that’s where God lives, not in the answered questions, but in the one that can’t be answered. Maybe there’s more room for God and science to coexist than either camp is willing to admit.
I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know. When people ask me what I believe, I shake my head and say exactly that.
But I don’t not believe either.
That’s the key point. I live somewhere in the luminous middle, not in faith, not in doubt, but in awe. In the stubborn, wide-eyed refusal to hoist my antenna and not look away from a universe that is more strange and more beautiful than anything any of us could have invented.
The Buddhists say we all suffer, and that shared suffering should unite us. I’d add this: we have all stood at the edge of the same unanswerable question. Where did we come from? Where are we going? What is the meaning of any of this? No tradition has a monopoly on the asking. No culture gets to claim the corner on wonder. That question is as old as fire, old as the first human who looked up at the night sky and felt something crack open in their chest. It belongs to all of us equally.
That’s what this project is, at its core.
Not an attempt to answer.
An attempt to explore, together, with honesty and without pretense, what it means to be fully alive and unapologetically uncertain and still somehow full of hope. Remaining open and curious to receiving the signal that brings meaning to your life. Making time for moments of stillness that may just bring clarity and comfort.
A Small Invitation
I’m not going to tell you to meditate, or to go find religion, or to do any thing in particular really. I’m barely qualified to tell myself what to do. But I am going to say this:
Somewhere in your day today there is a gap. A moment between one thing and the next. A few seconds of potential stillness that will almost certainly get filled with something automatic and forgettable.
What if you just left it empty? What if you unfurled your antenna? What if you let the quiet be quiet, just long enough to feel what’s actually there?
The antenna, as I understand it, doesn’t need to be installed. It doesn’t need a paid subscription. You were born with it. It’s factory installed in human DNA. It just needs a little space to breathe. And if something comes through – a nudge, a glimpse of knowing, some small moment that feels larger than it should be — maybe don’t scroll past it. Maybe let it sit with you for a while.
Mystery, I’m starting to think, isn’t something to solve. It’s something to live inside of. And the good news, if you want to call it that, is there’s room for all of us in there.
The signal was never the problem.
We just kept walking into rooms
with no windows
and wondering why we couldn’t get any reception.
This reflection grew out of a conversation with Calvin Schwartz — author, podcaster, and one of the more quietly extraordinary people I’ve had the pleasure of sitting across from.
You can watch the full episode below or follow along on our YouTube channel for bite sized clips and hot takes shorts of all our conversations.
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