What marks your path?
What books and places and relations have been your WayMarkers?
with A. A. Kostas
A walk with Chris McCandless, C.S. Lewis, Robert Pirsig, Thomas Merton, D.T. Suzuki & a Christian mystic
What are your Way-Markers?
…noticing is what shifts the path.
👇 scroll down for links to the books Kostas discusses
Andrea Hiott has a conversation with A.A. Kostas, a Singapore-based lawyer and writer behind the Substack Waymarkers, blending poetry, fiction, and essays. They discuss how moving through different places shaped his writing and his interest in avoiding simplistic binaries through discernment—first identifying what kind of decision is in front of you—using hiking metaphors of many paths versus a narrow ridge, or the ridge versus ‘anything goes’.
Kostas cites Into the Wild as a cautionary waymarker about seeking truth without rejecting human connection, and describes a Cradle Mountain hike where his wife had to find her own route.
They explore how technology reinforces binary thinking, why poetry and music hold meanings beneath prose, and the value of humility from engaging Western and Eastern traditions (including Merton and Suzuki). Mentioning various waymakers from C.S. Lewis to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenace to The Gentle Art of Tramping and the Cloud of Unknowing, Andrea and Alex explore what it means to be a writer, why noticing what we are moving through is key, the potentials of care and uncomfortable attention, the importance of embodied presence, and Alex’s experience of fatherhood as immediate responsibility and obligation where love grows and churns the soil.
“...Nature becomes your teacher, and from her you will learn what is beautiful and who you are and what is your special quest in life and whither you should go...
You live on manna vouchsafed to you daily, miraculously. You stretch out arms for hidden gifts, you yearn towards the moonbeams and the stars, you listen with new ears to bird's songs and the murmurs of trees and streams....
From day to day you keep your log, your day-book of the soul, and you may think at first that it is a mere record of travel and of facts; but something else will be entering into it, poetry, the new poetry of your life, and it will be evident to a seeing eye that you are gradually becoming an artist in life, you are learning the gentle art of tramping, and it is giving you an artist's joy in creation.” ― Stephen Graham
00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
02:21 Becoming a Writer
03:51 Growing Up Everywhere
05:15 What Is Way Markers
07:12 Pilgrimage and Substack
10:29 Into the Wild Lessons
14:29 Beyond Binary Thinking
18:49 Cradle Mountain Metaphor
22:36 Discernment and Ridge Lines
25:20 Tech Shapes Our Minds
27:00 Why Braid Genres
31:04 Music and Poetry Under Language
34:12 Law as Applied Philosophy
37:41 Zen Meets Catholic Mysticism
43:00 Humility and Unknowing
46:48 Craving Oneness Safely
48:19 Mystical Moments Explained
50:20 Flow State With Meaning
51:00 Desire Points to God
52:25 You Cant Conjure Awe
56:14 Care In Writing
58:36 Audience Capture Trap
59:27 Pamphlets Off The Internet
01:02:40 Love Is Uncomfortable
01:17:58 Fellow Travelers And Faith
01:24:28 Humor Holds Paradox
01:28:34 Fatherhood And Obligation
01:32:18 Closing Reflections
Sign up for Waymarkers
Books:
The Gentle Art of Tramping by Stephen Graham:
full pdf available here from Project Guttenberg
—
The Cloud of Unknowing by a mystic of the 14th century:
full electronic scan of the book available here
—
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig:
full book on Internet Archive or as pdf
—
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
link to a pdf version here
—
Alex also mentions this review of the book
Room for Good Things to Run Wild by Josh Nadeau, in which he discusses dealing with alcoholism
Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott
Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.
Please rate and review with love.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Here's the cleaned-up transcript with minimal changes — fixing typos, unclear transcriptions, punctuation, and a few obvious errors (like "Philippine" → "Philippines", "Krakau" → "Krakauer", "KRA Hour" → "Krakauer", "auto" → "Art of" in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, etc.):
A. Kostas on Love and Philosophy
Alex Kostas: [00:00:00] Then in 2024, my wife and I quit our jobs. We're both lawyers. We quit our jobs, got rid of our house, got rid of our car, put everything on hold, and put our life into two suitcases and went, uh, on a kind of spiritual journey, pilgrimage through India and Nepal, Japan and the Philippines.
As soon as the baby comes into the world, I now have a responsibility for that baby. And the weird thing is, unlike every other area of life, I cannot really put that responsibility onto anyone else.
Part of what gives — part of the soil, say, for love to grow in — is a sense of responsibility and obligation. Um, even though obligation sounds like an unromantic, very unsexy word, that sense that actually I do owe — I have taken on the responsibility — we've brought this child into the world.
That actually you can't experience joy and happiness without sharing it with other people.
Poetry to me is the most basic level of language where you can really drill [00:01:00] things down to a few words and somehow in that kind of very quantum physics way, pack a whole bunch of — almost like a universe — into a poem, because there actually is so much left unsaid that allows, in a good poem, the amount that's left unsaid allows the reader of the poem to kind of read into it their own experiences and understanding without fully destroying them.
That craving, I think, to be fully connected to the universe and to nature around us and to everything else that we see that we get only glimpses of — I don't know where that comes from. I think it comes from something very, very long ago where maybe we lost something along the way as a species.
But if this exists within me, this concept that I have, this strong desire that I've kind of experienced flashes of from time to time, which is to be fully at one with everything around me — you know, um, that means — maybe taking a logical leap there — but that must mean that there was a time when that was possible. [00:02:00] There is a time when that is possible.
Anything that kind of tries to divide your soul, spirit, mind, emotions from the physicality of your flesh — it's just unhealthy. It just never leads to a good place.
Andrea Hiott: Hello everyone. This is Andrea Hiott. Welcome back, or welcome if it's your first time. This is Love and Philosophy Beyond Dichotomy. Today is, uh, one of those conversations that's about love of reading and writing and creativity. It's with a person named Alex Kostas, who is a writer. He's also a lawyer — if you've ever studied law or you know a lawyer, you know you have to be very philosophical to do that profession. Alex is a great writer. He's going to have a book coming out soon.
And a lot of his themes have to do with pilgrimage and walking and moving. And if you know me and my talk about all the neuroscience and the hippocampus, I'm constantly thinking about thinking as a way that we move through the world, walking as a kind of thinking and so on. And so [00:03:00] Alex and his pilgrimage ideas really connect to me, and he reminds me here in this conversation of some books I read back when I was younger, when I was working at bookshops in Seattle, like Elliott Bay, or in the East Village in New York. Alex is going to tell us about his wanderings and wonderings around the world and how his family ended up in Singapore, which is where he's at now, working as a lawyer.
We talk about walking, about freedom, about simplicity, about contemplation and how that's related to love. We talk about responsibility, what it means. Alex is a new father and we end up getting to that, which is always a beautiful thing to talk about and fill into. Discernment — that's a word that comes up a lot here. It's an important word for Alex and his writing and work. It's funny because I was recently driving through Virginia and I stopped at someone's house who happened to be a writer who had written about hitchhiking across the country in the '60s.
So this theme of pilgrimage, of [00:04:00] wandering, of wondering, of moving through landscapes in different ways — be that physical, mental, virtual even — is really a theme that has been even more present in my life these last weeks. So I'm really happy to share this conversation with you and to introduce you to Alex if you don't know him already, and his wonderful Substack called Way Markers.
If you think about it: as we move through the world, as we move through life, we have these markers — sometimes those are physical, sometimes those are books, sometimes those are poems, sometimes those are songs, uh, relationships. What are your way markers? It's interesting to think about. And some of these books we talk about here have been way markers for both of us. I'm really thankful he brought those books up. One of them is called The Cloud of Unknowing, from the 14th century, and then The Gentle Art of Tramping is from the 1920s — 1926. And we're going to put both of those books in the show notes for you — the whole full PDF.
If you want to read them after you hear us talk [00:05:00] about them a little bit here, just go to the Substack or the YouTube video and they should be there for you to read, because they are available online.
And the reason I met him is because I have a Substack called Waymaking, which is my nerdy philosophical neuroscience kind of writings. Somehow we both have very similar themes about what many of you, if you listen all the time, hear me talk about as holding paradox, or holding tension, and how that opens us up into a constellation of thinking without having to reject the either/or.
So actually Alex is writing a lot about similar themes and we do talk about that here, and, uh, that's how we met. Someone in the community noticed that we had these similar themes and put us in contact. So I love that. I love when things like that happen. Some of the conversations we have here do end up coming from this community of people who introduce us, or who introduce themselves sometimes even to us.
So this is one of those. We do talk about care — that's kind of the theme of [00:06:00] this season. Not sentimental care, but what it takes to really care about the life you're living and care about the ones and the people around you, and think of your communications, your creativity, your conversations as signs of what you care for, and what that really means in the ways that we make the world and where we put our attention, and what responsibility means.
I did write down a quote or two from this book, The Gentle Art of Tramping. And by the way, tramping is like tramping through the world — like walking through the world. It's just an old term from the '20s. But I did write down a quote that I want to share with you from that book.
Here it goes: The less you carry, the more you will see. The less you spend, the more you will experience. On the road, the weak and strong points of character are revealed. You stretch out your arms for hidden gifts, you yearn towards the moonbeams and the stars. You listen with new ears to birdsong and the murmurs of trees and [00:07:00] streams.
So I thought that was a nice quote to go into this conversation together, and also just for your day. Hope you have some of those moonbeams or murmurs of trees or birdsong. And also maybe just go explore — go 10 minutes out of your usual route, see what you find, open to new possibilities. Or just read a book that you might not think you would normally read, or go read a poem if you don't normally read poems.
Do something just a little off the beaten path and see how that feels, see if it opens you to something new. Or just listen to this conversation, which is probably a little off the beaten path. And I hope you enjoy it. I'm really happy to have met Alex and I'm looking forward to his novel.
Check out the show notes for links to his Substack and to all the other things I've mentioned here. Go to our Substack, Love and Philosophy, for links to the books. All right. Bye.
Okay. Well, hi, [00:08:00] Alex. Thanks for being on Love and Philosophy. It's great to meet you.
Alex Kostas: Good to be here too. I'm really looking forward to this.
Andrea Hiott: And you're in Singapore, right?
Alex Kostas: I am right now in Singapore. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: I want to hear how you got there, but first I want to hear how you became a writer. Or do you even think of yourself as a writer?
Alex Kostas: I think I do. I mean, it's always a hard thing. Um, in this day and age where everyone can technically be a writer, um, there's no real barrier for entry. I haven't done much, um, formal study of writing in some senses. I haven't got an MFA or anything like that. Um, as part of my, uh, university studies, I did take some courses in writing, especially in poetry and in creative writing. Um, but those were all undergraduate studies and not related to my profession.
Um, though my profession is law, so I guess I am technically reading and writing all day — just a very different kind of writing. Um. In terms of when did I first think of myself as a [00:09:00] writer? I can't remember a time when I wasn't — like, I'm one of those annoying kids who was always writing something in a journal. I'm one of those kids who, you know, you read a book and then you make your own kid version of it and claim it as your own. So my mom has somewhere buried in one of her boxes my original creation, which definitely isn't by C.S. Lewis, which is The Tiger, the Wizard and the Door, which is very different from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Um, so I think I was always doing stuff like that.
Andrea Hiott: That's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. I guess — yeah, I can identify with that. And where were you growing up? Because it's hard to tell, really, with your — you've been to many places — your accent.
Alex Kostas: Accent. I was on a call the other day and someone said, "You have the most non-accent I've ever heard." And I was like, yeah. Um. So I was born in Canada and we moved around a lot as a family. I lived in lots of different cities in Canada, um, but my dad's Australian and my mom's English, so I had this really weird accent. I actually got sent to speech therapy. We were living in a very small Canadian town at the time [00:10:00] and they'd never met anyone from — not from that Canadian town. And I got sent to speech therapy because my accent was really weird. It was this Australian-English hybrid and I was pronouncing words differently, obviously. And so they sent me to speech therapy and eventually the speech therapist realized I didn't have a speech problem — I just had parents from a different place.
Um, uh, yeah, but then — yeah, so my mom's English, we used to go back to the UK a lot, and then, uh, I did all my university and initial kind of professional working life in Australia. So my wife's Australian. Um, and then I did lots and lots of travel and living abroad. And now I currently live in Singapore. So there you go.
Andrea Hiott: But you work somewhere in other countries too. So you're very modern in a way.
Alex Kostas: Yeah, I'm lucky to, uh, make the most of kind of, you know, the world we live in, which is very easy to pick up and move around.
Andrea Hiott: Well, speaking of moving around — Way Markers is how I [00:11:00] found you, because someone read you and me, and I have this Love and Philosophy project we all do, but then I have this little thing called Waymaking. And so Way Markers is your Substack, and I have Waymaking, and we were both writing about similar themes relative to kind of beyond binary or something like this.
But I also then really found, once this person introduced me to you, that you're writing beautiful poetry, fiction, nonfiction, a lot of different things. You're creating these kind of beautiful books. I mean, how would you describe what you're doing to people, or what Way Markers is?
Alex Kostas: Yeah, that's a good question. Um, well, maybe I'll back up a little bit. So I decided to start Way Markers — I'd always been interested in creative writing, blah, blah, blah. You get involved in these different scenes. So I was involved in the kind of poetry scene in Melbourne, Australia, in the kind of 2014 to 2020, the pre-COVID years. Melbourne had extreme COVID lockdowns. So that kind of is a very natural [00:12:00] break where things really stopped. Um, and I interned at poetry magazines. You know, you're in this scene and it's a particular scene — you can imagine, you know, anarchist poets and all that stuff, right? Um. And I won't make too much fun of it.
Andrea Hiott: Definitely can. I think I've seen a bit of that in New York, uh, like a decade before you or something.
Alex Kostas: Right. Melbourne is — Melbourne wants to be the New York of Australia. So if you understand Australia: Sydney wants to be LA, Melbourne wants to be New York. Okay. And obviously isn't quite that, but it tries.
Uh, but then I kind of — I don't know — life got busy. I maybe got a little bit burnt out from the scene and I was writing stuff that was really just writing for the sake of writing, which — nothing wrong with that, like art for the sake of art — but it didn't necessarily fully reflect the entirety of who I am and what I am interested in.
Uh, then in 2024, my wife and I quit our jobs. We're both lawyers. We quit our jobs, got rid of our house, got rid of our car, put everything on hold, [00:13:00] and put our life into two suitcases and went, uh, on a kind of spiritual journey, pilgrimage through India and Nepal, Japan and the Philippines. So that was a really interesting time. That went for about eight months.
Andrea Hiott: That's really interesting. Sorry, we have to pause there for a minute. Maybe we can come back to it, if you want. But yeah, it was a fascinating time and a lot came out of that.
Alex Kostas: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: How wonderful to have a fellow way marker — or way-making partner — that's very special.
Alex Kostas: Wayfarer.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah.
Alex Kostas: Yeah, totally right. So we are very aligned in that way, which is amazing. And in that time, I discovered Substack. I'd never heard of Substack, didn't know what it was. So that's 2024. And we were using it just purely as a way to send like a newsletter to friends and family about what we were doing — that's all we used it for. And it was a different one — it was private. No one could find it unless we invited them. So it was very much just using it as a newsletter. But then obviously I found this whole world and I was like, this is [00:14:00] amazing. This is like a whole way of communicating your writing.
And it really got me excited about writing again, because I had all these journals filled with things I was writing but hadn't done anything with. And then out of that came this idea of like, there's things I want to talk about and things I want to write about that probably skew more on the philosophical, metaphysical, the religious, spiritual side of things, but are hopefully accessible to somebody who's maybe just exploring that. So not necessarily just pushing my own ideas of "this is the only way to think about things," but here's what I found helpful. And I was writing a novel at the time — we could talk about that too. And in that novel, the novel itself is a pilgrimage journey.
And it felt like where we were — on a literal kind of pilgrimage in a spiritual sense — I was writing a novel about a character on a pilgrimage in a different way. And then the point being: if you've ever done pilgrimages, or even if you've done through-hikes or big hikes, right? You've got — though sometimes you can feel a bit lost along the way — [00:15:00] there are often certain points where there is a literal way marker that points you physically in the direction to go. And just having that sense that a lot of things — whether it was books or films or pieces of art or music — that I felt like, oh, actually when you start looking back over your life, these things were like way markers in terms of pointing you towards kind of more and different and higher things.
Um, yeah. So I think that's where the idea of Way Markers came out — like, can I share reflections on things that I have found to be way markers for me, but also create my own way markers, things that will hopefully be that to other people.
Andrea Hiott: That's really beautiful. Yeah. When you look back, what comes to mind as these kind of signs or cairns — I mean, you actually put a lot of pictures of different sorts of way markers within the work. Is there — even if we go back to the little kid who was being C.S. Lewis in a way — do you have a few kind of consistent [00:16:00] markers that maybe even change as you continue on your journey?
Alex Kostas: Yeah, definitely. I mean, yeah, there's definitely a few. The Narnia books are obviously a big one, but then — have you ever seen the film Into the Wild?
Andrea Hiott: And the book.
Alex Kostas: And the book? Yeah. So the book is written by — uh, oh, what's his name? That's bad.
Andrea Hiott: Krakauer, I think.
Alex Kostas: Krakauer. Yeah. So the book's written by Krakauer, and the book is much less novelistic. It's much more nonfiction and an exploration of what really happened to Chris McCandless. Whereas the film takes it and makes it more novelistic, right. It's kind of like a story.
Andrea Hiott: Or even poetic.
Alex Kostas: Yeah, it's very well done. It's digestive and emotional. Yeah. And it's separated into chapters and it's well done. Um, and a great soundtrack — great Eddie Vedder soundtrack. Uh, that is a film that I think — whatever point, I was a kind of early teens, mid-teens when I watched it — and just [00:17:00] captivated me, because I think that tapped into that very youthful urge to run away and explore and get out into nature and experience what is truth and all that. Like, it's a very — there's some kind of yearning in a lot of people for that, right? Which explains a lot of why people do what they do — particularly a youthful kind of thing, right? Like, I want to get away into nature. And I've always been someone who likes being in nature, being outdoors, doing hikes and camping and things like that.
But what I like about Into the Wild is that it's quite cautionary, and if you actually watch it all the way through and think about it and dwell on how it ends — spoilers to anyone who doesn't know — it's not a happy ending. And it's actually quite a tragic ending. And buried in that tragic ending, this kernel of — you know, in his last days, which they found in his diary — um, Chris McCandless's kind of realization that being a lone wolf and being out by himself in the middle of nowhere actually [00:18:00] kind of destroys any meaning of his life. That actually you can't experience joy and happiness without sharing it with other people.
And so to me, that's one of those ones that you can take as a way marker on one hand to say, get out, explore life, don't stay safe, don't conform to society — don't conform to materialistic society, especially — get out and seek truth and seek beauty, which is true. But kind of temper your youthful enthusiasm and maybe your own ego and your sense of "I can do this all by myself." Um, you know, the value of other people, and the value of other people as way markers. Because if you watch the film, the recurring theme is there's all these people who are trying to help him and trying to be to him what maybe he didn't get from his own family, but he rejects it ultimately, because he just wants to be by himself. Which is actually kind of a cautionary tale if you think about it. So that's a classic one for me that I often come back to. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Uh, I love that movie, that story, for [00:19:00] many reasons too, but also I think it's really interesting what you brought up there. The learning that we can do — because I think a lot of us do have that feeling of almost wanting to get away. And you think of it as being alone, to get away from whatever is constraining you, especially if you feel like you don't really fit in with what's around you. And you think there might be another world where you feel more normal or natural, which is often the case, right? We have to find where we fill that. But, um, yeah, holding that can be so hard when you're young. Like you feel like you need to go extreme. But how to hold that — cautionary, that's the word you used — I think that's really such an important thing to be able to learn, is how to hold that tension in a way.
And I feel that in your work, when you're writing about the binary kind of stuff a bit. Is that something you've learned over time through these kind of way markers, do you think — the one you just expressed — or being able to be in a place that's a little uncomfortable but still explore the edges?
Alex Kostas: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: And be cautionary? [00:20:00]
Alex Kostas: Yeah. Well, it's like — right. I mean, I think it's maybe less from stuff I've read, but just even personal experiences I've had. I mean, I — and I guess, you know, you have your personal experiences, you realize that the world does not fit into neat categories. You realize that things are much more — like, in real life things are much more complicated than you ever thought.
Um, especially — the thing is, like, I always think the first thing is to get out there and actually do stuff, because you're never gonna learn any of this by sitting by yourself and reading books and watching films. You do actually have to get out into the world. You do have to —
Andrea Hiott: Which can't just mean going right out your door and talking to people —
Alex Kostas: Exactly.
Andrea Hiott: By the way. But yeah.
Alex Kostas: It doesn't mean traveling overseas. It's just getting out there. Just —
Andrea Hiott: Put yourself into situations and talk to people. Yeah.
Alex Kostas: Totally. Get out there. Do something a little bit outside your comfort zone — whether it's, you know, um, talk to people, walk around, whatever it is. Some kind of thing that fits into the loose category of adventure. Get out. But once you're out there, then you realize, yes, all these preconceived notions I had kind of don't quite perfectly map to the real world. People are much more complicated. The world is much more complicated. The world is much more [00:21:00] strange and metaphysically difficult to comprehend, right? So you get out there and you realize that. And I'm now — I think I'm now just coming into the age where I feel capable of writing the kinds of things I do. I think if I tried earlier, it would've been shallower and more trite. And probably as I get older, I'll think the same of what I'm writing now. But, um, that sense of like, okay, things are not as neat as, say, the internet would have you believe.
Um, and any thing that comes up in your life, people are gonna say, well, it's either this or it's that, and it's just as simple as that. Or there's gonna be other people saying, oh, nothing matters, you can just do whatever you want, nobody should tell you what to do, the choices are infinite. And you kind of go through real life crises and — you know, everyone has their share of crises or difficult things that they go through, scenarios they didn't expect — and you realize that it's kind of both and neither of those things. That in some situations there is a clear right choice and you have to make it. It's the hard [00:22:00] choice that you have to make. Some situations there is no right way and you've just gotta pick one and you've gotta roll with the punches. Like, there is a binary in a sense, but the binary is at a much higher meta level, which is like — some things are quite simple and some things are quite complicated, and you have to understand which part of the trail you're on.
And I think that's what I wrote about in that article you were referring to, which is like, it's not a question of always applying one framework to every situation. It's first a higher-level question of discerning: okay, what kind of decision is actually in front of me? Because people try to — and the world tries to, and even our own brains try to — set up false binaries all the time, because it's easier to have a binary to say it's either this or it's that. But often there's more than two choices. Um, and so you have to kind of do that first step of saying, whoa, what actually am I deciding here? Right. So I think that goes to what you're saying.
Andrea Hiott: Definitely. And there are a lot of [00:23:00] overlaps — I'm thinking about something I think you write where you're on maybe an ice sheet or something, I don't know, where you're looking at kind of the top of the mountain and you're realizing there are, you know, a million different paths you could take, right? But you're gonna end up at the same peak in a way. But not really, too — I mean, because this is something I write about too, about there being many paths up the same mountain. It's a recurring theme that people think about. And each path you take is gonna be a different experience. So you're gonna have a different experience of that landscape, but you're sharing the landscape.
So I think there's something very hard when we're young where we feel like we have to be really extreme, or maybe we wanna be famous so everyone will like us — you know, we're gonna be a famous writer, and there's one path to do that, and it can be very emotional or whatever. And I guess what books and philosophy and living, being alive, having kids, whatever might come — you start to realize exactly what you just said. I like to think of it as trying to constellate — I mean, this is a little bit too [00:24:00] philosophical — but thinking of it more like constellations of possibilities instead of always either/or. So you can always see an opposite to wherever you are, but there are always all these other options. I don't know if that makes any sense to you. And also, am I remembering that image right? Of something? Yeah. Okay.
Alex Kostas: Yeah, so I took that image from — I've had this actual experience. So on our honeymoon, I promised my wife an overseas vacation and we got married during COVID as it happened. So we literally couldn't leave Australia, um, because of COVID — my flights and everything. So I took her to Tasmania, which technically counts as an overseas vacation because Tasmania's an island off Australia, so I technically win that one. Yeah, yeah. But, uh, Tasmania is full of amazing nature and hiking. You should go if you haven't gone. Um, half the island is national park — it's incredible. Uh, and so one thing we did on honeymoon is we hiked Cradle Mountain, which is this incredible place to hike. Um, and it's the middle of summer, so it's like the middle of summer in Australia, which is the opposite to the Northern Hemisphere. But we get to the top and it is [00:25:00] covered in snow and ice, because Tasmania is kind of wild even in summertime — all the weather comes from Antarctica, so you just can never predict what you get. So snow and ice up there. We go to the very top and the trail just ends. It's what's called a Felsenmeer, which is basically where snow and ice have retreated and left like a rock field. And these rocks were quite big — they're like boulders. Um, and there's just no path anymore. So you know you're trying to get to the peak — that's the goal.
And then my wife, who's slightly less confident than I am, was like, oh, where do we go? And I was like, oh, just follow my footprints in the snow, because I'm gonna go first and you can follow them. But obviously the problem was I'm much taller and have much longer legs, um, and feel much more confident. So I'm striding along and I look back and she's completely freaked out, gripping the boulders. And she's like, I can't follow your way anymore — I'm gonna have to figure out my own way. And so that inspired what I think I wrote about in that essay, which is that point that you get to certain parts, certain situations, certain parts of the [00:26:00] trail, certain parts of the journey — and now I'm speaking more metaphorically — but in your life, you have to understand that sometimes there won't be a model to follow. You can kind of mimic someone else's journey or someone else's life to an extent. You can both aim for the same place, and even if you're kind of traveling that way together — say me and my wife in a literal sense, we're traveling together, but in our lives we're both hopefully traveling generally in the same direction, otherwise that would get very difficult — but we can't always go the same way. We can't make the same cognitive leaps, we can't feel the same emotions. So you can hopefully align on, okay, we're actually both trying to get to that peak. But we might have to take slightly different ways to get there. And no one way is going to be the right way. No one way is going to be the same way.
Now, the danger is that I think in this kind of postmodern world that we live in now, where we've kind of stripped away a lot of set [00:27:00] narratives and meanings and become very individualized, you then apply that framework to every single decision. And I don't think that's actually helpful either, because then you're just completely solipsistic, completely individualized and atomized, and you have no community. So I don't think that's what I'm saying. But I think there are times and seasons, or situations, where you do have to figure it out for yourself. And you can't just coast on someone else's trail. So yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And also realizing we are sharing the landscape. I think sometimes we go overboard and think, oh, it's all a hallucination, or it's all a completely different landscape that everyone's in. And actually that misses the kind of beauty of the fact that we are here to share the different ways we're seeing the same landscape, which, yes, it's not exactly the same for you or me, but that's the beauty of what we can share together. Or, you know, all of us — whoever we are, writing books or whatever we do — in any conversation we have, we give this gift in a way. Yeah, I think that's a really important thing. You use the word discernment, I think.
Alex Kostas: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Which kind of [00:28:00] points to this. Yeah. What do you mean by that word, do you think?
Alex Kostas: I try to use discernment as that high-level thing of like, before you even make the decision or make a choice, think about what the choice is. Right? So don't just get fooled that every choice is a fork in the road — even pick A or B. Not every choice is that. But also don't get fooled that every choice is like, oh, it's an infinite landscape that we're all sharing and I can just go whatever way I want.
Because I think — I use the counter-example of if you're on a very thin ridge line — I've been on hikes where you kind of have these hikes where you're on a very thin ridge line and you gotta stay on the ridge line. Obviously the ridge line eventually leads you to the peak. Um, and it's kind of tricky because you're delicately balancing on this ridge line. And if you've got friends saying, oh, it doesn't matter, anyone can go any way — but all the other ways are down, which is not up — it's kind of not true that you can just go whatever way you want, because you won't get to the thing that you're aiming for. You will just go down into the nice pleasant valleys and, you know, everyone can do their own thing, but that's not actually gonna get you where you're going. So, um, that's probably [00:29:00] where I think the discernment comes in, is like, actually — is this a choice where all paths will genuinely lead me to the same place ultimately, I've just gotta find my way? Or is this a situation where everyone's saying, it doesn't matter, just do whatever you want — and I think, actually no, that won't get me any closer to my ultimate goal. Right. Whatever that goal is. So.
Andrea Hiott: I think that speaks to the embodied aspect of it too. I mean, coming from philosophy and neuroscience, I have to think through those lenses. Because we are different, literally spatiotemporal bodies — we might even see what's possible in a different way. So the goals that you see might not be goals for other people, but that's why you can't necessarily take those other paths. Or you have to — I call it holding the paradox — being able to discern in that way, um, but still make a choice and not necessarily think you have to only stick to that choice.
So this is a really hard idea that we're all trying to maybe figure out now. And it seems to be [00:30:00] coming even more important as you write about too, in terms of the way our technology kind of tries to rut us even more into this more binary, uh, mindset. I don't know if you want to talk about that a little bit. And I'm also interested in just the way that — you know, I said at the beginning how you're doing so many things: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, photography I think even, and art — and I wonder if that is also a way of, um, keeping this mindset in play, this kind of way of keeping these many different paths or something like that.
I just wanna put those two things out. You can take either one of them.
Alex Kostas: Yeah, no, I can touch on both of them. I think, yeah, definitely — the point about our technology. Our technology that we all are using — we're using it right now — is literally built on binary systems. That's how computers work, right? So it's a series of logic gates that go zero-one, yes or no. That's how everything works. I think that does have downstream effects in some way, which is — we can see it in the way [00:31:00] things have become more polarized. We can see it in the way things are fed to us, um, different forms of information, how we can live in kind of alternative reality universes depending on our algorithms. All that stuff, to me, I think is downstream from the fact that we've built technologies and a way of thinking and economic models — whatever you wanna say — which are kind of built off black and white binary systems, where everyone can say, we know the world isn't actually as simple as that, and yet we kind of build systems off it because it's easier.
So I think that definitely has negative effects. You have to kind of be mindful of it, and guard against the way things can seem too simplistically binary — just to stop and think. It could be that that decision or choice in front of you is literally binary, and you shouldn't just pretend that's not possible. But that's one of many ways that you can make that decision. It's like — you look at different indigenous cultures. It's not that they didn't have the concept of black and white binaries, but many indigenous cultures [00:32:00] um, kind of outside of Western rationality, Western Enlightenment, thought of different ways of thinking, right? And so it's not that we go completely against the concept of binary thinking, that it just doesn't exist, but it's knowing that it's one of maybe a constellation of ways that things can work. So that's that side of things.
In terms of, yeah, my approach — I've always been, uh, uninterested in getting pigeonholed into one kind of writing. So that's just me. Um, and so when I started Way Markers, I thought, huh, I get to decide what this is. And I'm going to purposely — I call it braiding — I'm braiding three threads. I'm braiding the thread of fiction with the thread of poetry with the thread of essays and ideas. Um, and is it possible to have a journal that does all three and people still want to read it? At the moment the answer is yes. Um, which is nice. Um, it keeps it interesting for me because it's just different formats. And also I think it [00:33:00] escapes something that I sometimes — I'm gonna use an Australian word — something that I whinge about a lot. I don't know if this translates — the Australian concept of whinging is very useful, which is kind of just moaning and complaining without doing anything.
Um, it's very easy now — we have centuries of great literature and works of art behind us, and we can get this kind of recursive spiral where we spend our time debating, reviewing, re-examining great works of the past, which is obviously important, and yet nobody's creating anything new on top of those great works. You know, that idea of standing on the shoulders of giants — you actually still have to build something new off those shoulders, not just constantly re-examine the nature of the giant and what is the specific aspect of this giant that makes it so much better than the other giant, and so on and so forth.
So with the poetry and fiction, it feels like — I like reading poetry. I [00:34:00] like reading fiction. I could just talk all day about the poetry and fiction that I like to read. Or I could try creating some of my own that obviously builds off things I like to read, but hopefully is in some way creating something new. So yeah, I think that is part of the practice for me — like, don't just get stuck in a reviewer's spiral, but actually try to contribute and move things further.
And then I think that's the application of the ideas that I'm often — my essays are just things that I've been thinking about. And by writing about them and fine-tuning them, I actually make them clearer for myself. But then applying those ideas — one, in my own embodied life, but I'm not a vlogger, so no one gets to see that — and then in fiction and poetry, there are chances to apply those ideas in different ways that maybe touches someone a different way. I don't know for you how much poetry or fiction you read, but for me, a really good poem can really change the way you think or see the world. [00:35:00] Um, there's a kind of — to me, a good poem has a spiritual aspect to it. And then fiction — I mean, I think we are inherently storytelling creatures. So a good story, you know, it kind of gets into your bloodstream. It gives a narrative structure to things that, for whatever reason, our brains do like. They like causation: and therefore that happened, and therefore this happened. Right. And so I think sometimes that's a better way to communicate than just a nonfiction essay that says, here are some things I'm thinking. So yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Poetry is very important. I actually often read poems on this show, kind of at the end usually, or something. And, uh, yeah, I was also a young poet in New York, so it's very important. I think it's a very different opening of what the body is and what you can be and feel. I almost feel like right now poetry is [00:36:00] almost the most important thing. At least — I don't know. We need that. But yeah, it's interesting what you said about the binary too. I think that's very important to understand — contrast is real. It's not that you say there isn't binary or there isn't contrast. But also, you know, it's that both/and, either/or at the same time kind of thing. Yeah. That's what I feel like is very hard. And poetry can do that without having to put it in those words, which is why it's so wonderful. You can sort of feel it. And I think music too. You seem to be very inspired by music. I think music can also open and hold that space in a way that's — um, you know, I can't really put into words right now. Does that make sense to you?
Alex Kostas: Yeah, totally. Well, because music also — I mean, music operates on a level beneath language, right? Like, it's rhythmic and it works off vibrations, which our bodies are full of. Literally our hearts are beating and blood is pumping, things are moving. So we definitely see that — um, how music can [00:37:00] touch something that language is never able to perfectly encapsulate. Like, for me, if you were building it, it's like — if music is that kind of foundational — it's math, um, put into — so math, which is obviously our universe can be really understood through math to an extent. And that's true. And music is a form of math that operates kind of pre-language. Poetry to me is the most basic level of language where you can really drill things down to a few words and somehow in that kind of very quantum physics way, pack a whole bunch of — almost like a universe — into a poem, because there actually is so much left unsaid that allows, in a good poem, the amount that's left unsaid allows the reader of the poem to kind of read into it their own experiences and understanding without fully destroying them. Meaning like — the worst poems are just like abstract art to me, where I'm like, you can interpret it any way, it's just sound, and therefore it kind of doesn't have great use. But a really good poem finds that tension — but without being ridiculously didactic and telling you exactly what to think — acts as a kind of framework or [00:38:00] trellis for a plant to grow up. The plant still grows, so the reader still experiences the poem in their own way and invests it with their own meaning to an extent, but the poet is still setting some boundaries for us.
And then obviously fiction and nonfiction kind of build off that. But I agree with you that that musicality — sorry, I'm gonna ramble on — but that reminds me too of a really good piece of writing advice. It's C.S. Lewis who talks about — or was it C.S. Lewis? — about reading what you've written out loud. Because ultimately most people, when you read something, you actually are hearing a voice in your head, and the music of that language does make a difference to how you experience it. Which again comes back to the point of how important rhythm and music is. Right. Which is a funny thing — like, why should it make a difference what symbols on a screen or a page sound like in my head? But still, that is how we experience language and how we experience the world, which [00:39:00] is pretty interesting.
Andrea Hiott: That's a great point. I even read philosophy papers out loud, because I find — first of all, you just notice things differently, because it's almost like, you know how when you write something it looks different after you've sent it to someone?
Alex Kostas: Yep. Every Substack essay I publish —
Andrea Hiott: And then it's completely — you're like, oh, I completely missed all these things. Yeah, yeah. It's just reading it out loud can do that too. But also — yeah, it's different. But, um. I wonder if you ever studied philosophy or read philosophy in any of these journeys of yours, or do you think of yourself as philosophical in a way? Because there are a lot of philosophical questions here. I mean, I can see why someone put us in touch, you know?
Alex Kostas: Yeah. I think — I mean, I think in an amateur way. I think any kind of serious thinking you do, you end up brushing against philosophy, right? Um, so a lot of my philosophy came by way of kind of religious background, but I've always been interested in philosophy and reading philosophical work — to the extent that I'm mentally capable. I have my little pet theory, which is that [00:40:00] in at least common law countries — so countries where the law develops by courts making decisions, so not like a Napoleonic system, which is fully codified, but so the US is one system, Canada, Australia, um, the UK, obviously Singapore too — because these are countries where the law develops over time based on judges, and judges obviously end up being influenced by the culture around them, et cetera. I think being a lawyer in those countries and studying law, you end up — it's essentially applied philosophy, because ultimately you go back to first principles every time. So you can often — I have this in terms of what I do — you can often reason your way to a legal position that is, I'll say, 90% accurate in that country by kind of going to first principles and reasoning your way through kind of philosophical methods towards a certain answer about what should happen in society. So law ends up being an applied philosophy [00:41:00] in that way, which is probably why I enjoyed studying it. Um, but yeah, I think going on that journey through India and Nepal, Japan and then the Philippines led me to read and engage more with kind of Eastern philosophy, which is also very different to my own cultural background. So I think that's also been interesting in the last few years and I've kind of continued reading things from a very different school. Right. So.
Andrea Hiott: You also ask these very big questions. I, you know — I think of Descartes even, with the, you know, about God and does God exist. I mean, and also, um, Thomas Merton for example, maybe, or St. Augustine, because you write about love and what is unselfish love. These are pretty big questions that I think a lot of people ask. I mean, they are sort of part of our life, even if we don't think of them philosophically. Do you think your writing, your exploring, has helped you — in the way we were talking about [00:42:00] before — come to a way of addressing or asking those questions without necessarily answering them the way that would be kind of from the past, this way or that way only.
Alex Kostas: Yeah. Yeah, I definitely think so. I think it's made me — say, yeah, Merton. Um, in Japan I visited D.T. Suzuki's museum.
Andrea Hiott: Oh wow.
Alex Kostas: And so Merton and Suzuki. Lucky. Yeah. It's worth going to. Very worth going to. I mean, even just as a physical place, it's extremely — without getting too mystical — it's extremely potent a place. Mm-hmm. You feel it.
Andrea Hiott: I can definitely — I know what you mean. Yeah.
Alex Kostas: I've had experiences — I mean, I one time stayed at a, um, a strange little — actually it's a convent, I suppose. I dunno. It's a strange little place outside of Darmstadt in Germany, um, which had a similar, um, feeling to it. That was probably slightly different. Anyway.
So this place — so Suzuki, for those who don't know who are listening in: Suzuki and Merton had lots of [00:43:00] dialogues. So Suzuki was probably, for his time, the kind of preeminent, uh, scholar of Zen Buddhism for the West. So he was very good at kind of translating Zen Buddhism — which really, um, found its maturity in Japan — for kind of western audiences. And he was quite the celebrity of his day, which I hadn't realized — extremely popular and lived to a very old age. And then we've got Merton, who was a Catholic priest, but a very interesting thinker, kind of very liberal thinker for his time, especially for being within the Catholic Church at that time. Um, and very interested in — so the book Zen and the Birds of Appetite is a kind of dialogue between the ideas of Zen Buddhism and Catholicism, and specifically Catholic mysticism, which Merton was very familiar with, and how closely they kind of come and maybe touch at some points [00:44:00] and maybe don't touch at certain points. It's worth reading. I really enjoyed it. I don't pretend to be, uh, a philosopher or have any formal study, and yet I found it absorbing and interesting, so I think anyone could read it and find something there. Um.
Where were we? So yeah, I think those kind of things open you up to this idea that, okay, my particular view of the world — that you're born and raised with, which all of us have — is not necessarily wrong, but it is just one window into kind of understanding people, the universe, cosmos, whatever you wanna call it. Um, and so seeing, reading those kind of books where there's a conversation happening from maybe a tradition you're more used to, and then leading you towards maybe things that you're not so used to, but seeing where they touch and don't touch — does help you kind of think of different ways to ask different questions and maybe leads you to some answers.
Like, I think for me, at the moment where I sit, I think I see [00:45:00] Zen Buddhism and even Taoism as very helpful in terms of how to live your life. I just — I think they are, I think that's undeniable. I think they arrive at some conclusions about the universe and our place in it that I don't know that I agree with, and I don't see necessarily the benefit of following that all the way to its conclusions, um, for myself. But that's also obviously knowing that you're biased towards the things that you know and that maybe fit with your culture best. But it's certainly helpful here in Singapore, where most people are Buddhist, right. Um, at least culturally. So yeah.
So I think that's right. I think you allow yourself to be open to engaging with other things without being completely like — um, slapping a "coexist" bumper sticker on your car and saying everything's equal, everything's exactly the same. Um. You can see people who are much more invested in these [00:46:00] discussions, maybe than you are, actually engaging in these things and following along those arguments, and seeing how they hit you and kind of where they change the way that you think. Um, which I think is helpful, I think is healthy.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Kind of that mountain image that we brought up before seems pertinent here — you can sort of think of it as trying to, you know, you see the goal a little differently, but we're sharing this, and there are different ways to get there, and we have to find our way.
And also, I think with — at least for me, the Taoist or the Buddhist — having come up in a very Christian household, that was a really beautiful contrast for me in a way that did sort of open into a more constellatory way, more constellations, because it kind of helped me hold — you know, there's something about those, and even the writings that you were speaking of, where you can — there's a poetic kind of feeling to it, you know, they're not necessarily able to express it with the words, but the Tao, the Way, or whatever — you can fill that place where you can hold a lot of tensions without [00:47:00] losing, uh, the rigor, which is I think what you were speaking to before of what poetry can do.
I think that's one reason I want more scientists to read poetry — or I think it's very helpful as a scientist to read poetry, because you can start to understand that you can be much more precise and rigorous at the same time that you actually open the space of possibilities. It's a very hard thing to do. But I do feel that a bit with these kind of readings, like Taoism and Buddhism. I wonder if that speaks a little bit to what you're thinking of.
Alex Kostas: Yeah, totally. I think it brings a bit of humility to you, right? Because I think we naturally gravitate towards feeling like we understand everything. Um, and so you kind of —
Andrea Hiott: Safety too, right?
Alex Kostas: Yeah, safety.
Andrea Hiott: But I think it's, you know, the right way up the mountain, and so you can go —
Alex Kostas: Totally.
Andrea Hiott: And most people will tell you, hey, this is the way I walked and it's the best way. Do what I say.
Alex Kostas: Yeah. And that's, you know — these are the communities, these are the families we grew up in. And not that that's wrong per se, but there has to be some element of [00:48:00] humility, of realizing, well, probably each one of us probably doesn't have the whole answer. That would be unusual and surprising.
It's even like — so I read The Cloud of Unknowing last year when I was in Korea, funnily enough. And it was very foggy while I was there, so it felt very pertinent. There were clouds everywhere. Um, I mean, The Cloud of Unknowing — the concept of God is basically completely unknowable, that you basically — I mean, The Cloud of Unknowing is, is it 14th century? It's a very old English text, um, by an unknown monk writing to a junior monk about what does it mean to fully engage with and understand God. And basically this monk is like, you can't do it, because God is infinite. So there's no point trying to imagine a physical person God. Um, but actually experience the joy of being under this kind of cloud of unknowing — that actually, I mean, part of the argument would be, if you actually could experience God in his fullness, you would be completely obliterated.
And [00:49:00] it's funny — you take that concept, which I think basically makes sense once you kind of start thinking about God and how it works. Um, but then the kind of Buddhist concept of God is essentially — almost, the cause of God is an infinite light versus God is an infinite void, kind of. I mean, I think Merton makes his point in Zen and the Birds of Appetite like — is there any real, uh, practical difference if God is kind of the absolute emptiness of nothing before all creation begins and all creation ends, or God is this infinite, powerful light that you can't ever fully comprehend? To us there's not practically much difference in terms of my experience of God. Maybe we experience aspects of God in different ways, but, um, experience God through the universe in different ways, but in terms of God in its totality and his totality, you know? And so I think those things are helpful, right?
Like — like you say, from a — even from a scientist's point of view, that [00:50:00] humility. Well, any of our points of view, I mean — we all, I think, live in a very scientific, or scientism, age, right? Where everyone kind of thinks — most people in Western countries think through the frame of science. This is how we've been raised. That's the triumph of science, right? Which is not necessarily a bad thing, it just does give you a certain framework on the world. Um, and so that humility of realizing, well, not everything can be fully explained by science in the way that we think of it — which is fully replicable, fully kind of verified experiments that produce the exact same thing every time — um, there's a humility in that, which I agree. I think if there were more of that in the sciences, that would maybe lead us to a — not clearer place, actually, in a way it wouldn't be clearer, but in a maybe more realistic and, um, accurate place in terms of what the world is like.
Which is — yeah, it's like, I mean, you've probably read it — Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a great book for that. I mean, that's great. [00:51:00] Yeah. People have certain hangups with it. But in general, the idea of someone from the academy kind of finding the failings of science, uh, in terms of being able to fully explain our experience of the universe — and then having a huge mental crash as a result — but, uh, it's a helpful book in that way, I think, to kind of go through that journey, especially for people like me who aren't in the academy and don't have a scientific background. So as a layperson, again, kind of going on that journey through very rational and logical ways of thinking in terms of the western sense of logic, but seeing where there is a limit to that, and that you have to have some degree of humility when you approach these things. Yeah, I think there is a lot of utility in doing that.
Andrea Hiott: It's interesting with your law background — I wonder how that's been changing lately, but that would take us down another path. But I'm thinking of Chris McCandless again — there's something I feel like I want to get into a little bit, of how we [00:52:00] crave to feel that feeling of light or of, um, oneness with everything, or sort of dissolving even. That can come with all these things we've been talking about — music, poetry, philosophy, even science actually, when you have that moment in the lab, you know, where something clicks. These kinds of moments seem to do something very important to us. And I wonder about, in your own life or how you think about this — and how that too can be, you know, back to that cautionary thing — because, I'm thinking of Chris McCandless, in those moments where he — or where we feel that — he has found love in a sense. He loves himself, or he loves the world, or he feels kind of part of something. I think there's something about that that we're all craving and finding in all these things we're talking about too. But that can also be dangerous, or — like, we need that logical side too. I don't know if this is making [00:53:00] sense to you, or you've felt this in your own work and life with all these things you're juggling.
Alex Kostas: Totally. Well, I think you're touching on something I'm kind of working through at the moment. Like, I've got an essay that I'll share in the next, I don't know, few months on Substack, which is this concept of — yeah, that you have these kinds of more mystical moments, I guess, where you have a sense of connection to the universe. Or — maybe since I've — I mean, my son is now eight months old, so I think you have a kid and then you are maybe more opened up on even an emotional level to some of those feelings.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Alex Kostas: Um, but this idea of like — yeah, that craving, I think, to be fully connected to the universe and to nature around us and to everything else that we see, that we get only glimpses of — I don't know where that comes from. I think it comes from something very, very long ago where maybe we lost something along the way as a species. [00:54:00] Um, maybe that's the trade-off for being the species that, for whatever reason, has the most capacity for certain forms of higher thinking or — you know, I'm not a biologist, but we clearly have some capacity that the other creatures we share the planet with don't seem to have, right? Whatever that may be — the tool making, language, et cetera. And the trade-off for that seems to be that kind of desire, that craving — for lack of a better word — kind of mystical connection, where you are in sync with — this is a problem, you end up sounding very New Age when you go into this stuff. But I think —
Andrea Hiott: It's very hard to talk about.
Alex Kostas: It's hard to talk about without going into that language. But you have that sense where — whatever it is — you're in the lab and something clicks. I think again, um, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — he talks about how does it happen that one day I'm trying to solve a problem, I think through every possible solution, I can't get it. The next morning I'm brushing my teeth and the solution pops into my head. So where does it come from? Because it didn't come from me consciously. And then this gets into the whole problem of consciousness, but we won't touch that. [00:55:00] But that idea that somehow there can be a moment where you just jive with something — whether it's music, and something just hits you in a certain way, but then maybe a year later the same music wouldn't hit the same way. Why is that? Same music. Mm-hmm. Um, uh, you know, and then religious experiences, spiritual experiences —
Andrea Hiott: Um, or even just riding the motorcycle too. I mean, you know, there's that — where you're one with this kind of machine and this landscape. People have this with surfing, or many different things — hiking even.
Alex Kostas: Yeah. That flow state.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Mm-hmm. But it's not — it's flow, but it's also — it's not flow like you're just clicking on the internet, because that can happen too. I mean, there's a meaning and a kind of presence of your body with it. You're not just —
Alex Kostas: Yeah, yeah. No, you're right. I've never thought of flow state as happening on the internet, but you're right. Yeah. So that idea that when you're actually in the midst of doing something, and body and mind and emotions and soul seem to all somehow click, um, and that oneness with things around you. [00:56:00] So in terms of for me — I mean, where I'm kind of working through with that — is that idea that if there exists within me — this becomes a version of C.S. Lewis's more apologetic arguments — but if this exists within me, this concept that I have, this strong desire that I've kind of experienced flashes of from time to time, which is to be fully at one with everything around me — you know, um, that means — maybe taking a logical leap there — but that must mean that there was a time when that was possible. There is a time when that is possible. Um, and so then what does that logically lead you to?
Um, for me — maybe showing my own biases from my background — that shows me that there is a desire and a possibility of having a kind of personal experience of the living world around us, um, which requires I think some other person on the other side of that. Um, so for me that would — I would call [00:57:00] that God. I would say that there would be some way to experience a personal relationship with the universe, uh, through having a personal relationship with God. And that would then encompass having a more clearer and soulful connection to everything around us and the people around us.
Um, so I think that leads us somewhere. It obviously doesn't give us all the answers. And the hard thing with this stuff is that it does become very personal, which gets very tricky to replicate for other people, because also you — I don't think you can conjure these experiences. So I think when people, whatever religious or spiritual practice you try — if it tries to conjure these experiences by whatever means, whatever, meditation, music — I've experienced it all. You go along to meditation practices, they try to conjure it in different ways. You go along to a church that uses certain music. I mean, you can try to conjure it. I just don't think that actually works very often. And if it does, it kind of becomes a little bit of [00:58:00] a cheap trick. So the difficulty is how do you live your life knowing that those experiences may come and go, not necessarily always at your choosing, um, and yet taking with you each time the awareness of what those implications are. Right. Um, so this might be too mystical for your podcast, but anyway, that's kind of where I'm at.
Andrea Hiott: I would be quite mystical here. People often ask me if I'm a mystic, whatever that means. I don't even know what that word means. But no, I think it's really important to try to talk about this stuff. And what you're saying is actually a very, very important point. And it's something — it's very hard to put into words, but how can we all understand that we are going to find that connection with what's around us differently? Literally, because we're different — spatiotemporal parts of a shared, ongoing something. Right? Instead of trying to think, oh, they got there through meditation, so that should be my way.
Alex Kostas: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Because you, you know — to come to your way markers or way making — there's a kind of compass that you sort of are as a body. [00:59:00] And you get to a point where you can be comfortable with yourself as a body and not comparing yourself to everything. And then you can sort of, what is it, align and kind of move with that. But you need help from everyone else. So I think an important word is — you know, love of course, but also care. Uh, you tend to write — I — you seem to write with a lot of care, and you actually make these kinds of objects that you actually send to people. You do a lot of extra — it seems, through this — what I'm trying to get at here — this kind of, um, noticing, being present, and being precise but also open, which is a very hard thing to do, and we help each other do it. I don't know if that makes sense to you — that word care, and actually what that means when you're writing or when you're making these objects, and how that might relate to how we can help each other fill into this — whatever we wanna call it, mystical, whatever it is — because you said maybe we lost it, but maybe we're not separate from life, and maybe life is kind of that, and we're finding [01:00:00] another way to know it or notice it. Right. Maybe that's the top of the mountain. That actually is never a top because it's forever. Since we're going into the mystical realm?
Alex Kostas: Totally. Yeah. We're going into the mystical — let's dive in. I mean, I agree with you on that point that — I mean, you never actually fully reach the top. Um, I don't think you ever get there, but it's a series of peaks, and the point is to kind of — it's more like —
Andrea Hiott: A fractal kind of something —
Alex Kostas: That — yeah, you keep going. I think the problem with the fractal and all these things is that it can lead people to despondency or nihilism, which is like, well, nothing matters, you're just gonna keep climbing, so what's the point? Uh, you know, it's very Sisyphean, which is like, well, if I have to keep rolling this boulder, I might as well just stop rolling the boulder.
Andrea Hiott: It's just — it's not always climbing, I guess. But yeah. I think that's an important point. It's incredibly meaningful and becomes more meaningful. And because it's meaningful, you're co-creating it and extending it.
Alex Kostas: Yes. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And never quite kind of reaching its culmination, and enjoying that, while also realizing that you are gonna achieve new [01:01:00] levels of maturity, insight — all of that stuff does actually come. Like, I don't buy into this idea that if everyone's always seeking all the time and you never fully find the culmination, there's no actual progress. I don't think that's true. So.
But back to your point about care. I mean, I was reflecting on this the other day with some writers that I meet up with here in Singapore. And the point being — I think all of us had this in common — was that we all actually, when we're writing, are thinking about either a specific person or people who we were writing this to. It changes depending on what you're writing, which I think then brings in the care. Because I think if I'm writing to somebody, it's because I care enough about them to write. Now, I mean, I'm not writing horrible, angry screeds — so I suppose if you were doing that kind of writing, you would technically also have someone in mind — but I don't mean that. But everything I write, I do have a person or people in mind that I either have known or I've met or I've interacted with to some extent. And even they might not ever know that it's written for them, but I know. So I think that then tempers any desire when you're writing — which I think is [01:02:00] partly an immature desire that you learn over time, and it's kind of a lazy desire too — just to go, blah, here's all my thoughts and here's as strongly as I feel them, and here's whatever, without thinking how that person would receive it and whether they would even understand what you're saying, and whether that overly emotive language would actually turn someone off from what you're trying to say. Right. Um, in my own life, I often have to learn that lesson in real life, especially with my wife. Uh, she's very helpful at telling me when my language is overly emotive for what I'm trying to communicate. So, uh, thank God for my wife. But when you're writing, you have the opportunity to not just kind of blast it out. You can take your time and shape it, which is a benefit of the written word over just the verbal word. Um, so yeah.
So I think there is care behind what I do, which is what I'm trying to do — which is to make something that does communicate an idea or a [01:03:00] point or a thought. So it doesn't just kind of reduce it to, oh, everything's the same, but does it in a way that's caring and loving to the people reading it, so that it doesn't unnecessarily push some away by either being too overly academic or too complicated, but also too shallow or too emotive, and that leaves itself open to a degree to people who have a different viewpoint on life than I do. Because of course there are many people out there. And I think too — also, I'm not interested in playing to the choir. I think you could very easily find your tribe of people who think the same way as you, and then play to them. And then two things happen. One, you cut yourself off from learning and communicating with other people. But two, I think there is that sense of audience capture, where you end up — oh, people really liked this one, oh, I'll write more in that theme — and then before you know it, you've become even someone that you probably not even truly are, like, not someone who really is you. Um, so I'm not interested in that and I've seen that happen to [01:04:00] people. You know, people who you've kind of, over the years, read and enjoy what they're writing. And it kind of veers towards the most extreme version of themselves. Um, which feels like — instead of it becoming a maturing that opens up into complexity — it becomes a kind of weird inverted version of that.
Um, and then — yeah, that bleeds into — I mean, what happened with, uh, the — so I send little pamphlets that I print and hand-bind and send out all over the world to people who are paid subscribers to Way Markers. In complete transparency, that happened because some people took out paid subscriptions who I did not know. And being very Canadian, I felt very guilty about taking their money. And I was like, ah, how do I — what do I do? I need to give you something as a gift. Like, I mean, this is — don't take my advice on this. Whoever's listening — I felt like, I'm just giving you nothing. None of my stuff is paywalled. I just — you can read my stuff for free. Why would you send me money? [01:05:00] Um. And maybe that's part of that era I grew up in of first publishing writing, where you publish for very little or for free in journals that, you know, didn't make any money. So that idea of monetizing my writing felt weird. So then I was like, what can I do? Well, actually the benefit of living in Singapore — Singapore is like the world's transport hub, so postage from here is very cheap anywhere in the world, doesn't matter where you are. Um, and so postage is actually very inexpensive. So I thought, actually I can print out things that I've written, make little pamphlets, and, you know, take the time to fold them and put them together, and I can send them out to anyone who wants, um, wants that. And that also jives, I think, generally with my interest in logging off the internet as much as I possibly can. But, um, yeah.
Andrea Hiott: What you just said is really, uh, important to me because this idea of care — I think sometimes we think of it as sort of sweet and sentimental, which of course it can be, but it's also a kind of tension. [01:06:00] Like that tension you felt, that someone's giving you money, right? They're supporting you, and you feel like there's a tension there. I think that's a precious thing, actually — a hard thing, but similar to what we were talking about before of discernment or something. There's something about like — I think of care as that, that sort of space that we try to run away from maybe sometimes because it's so hard, or we try to immediately solve. And I think that is a precious thing, right? And, at the same time, I also kind of grew up with that — don't, you know, you don't want to sell out or something, or you write for the writing, and. Um. And that can be very hard in this world that we're in now too, of how to keep it real, and what you were talking about where we take the kind of vector that's gonna make us famous, so to speak. Why even questioning what that is, and is fame actually healthy, and why are we structuring worlds around certain kinds of things like that. I mean, all of that to me is what I'm kind of thinking about as care, and it feels a bit tense to me. But I wonder if that makes any sense to you at all — this notion of caring, but also it not necessarily being always comfortable.
Alex Kostas: Yeah, well that's right. Same as love, right? Love isn't just nice feelings. And so yeah, I mean, I think if you take that idea that care is a form of attention, attention is a form of devotion and, and prayer — uh, attention can be deeply uncomfortable when someone [01:07:00] you care about is doing something crazy or destructive, and you still pay them attention and you don't just kind of leap in to fix the situation, um, or solve what you think should happen. Um, which is another constant topic in our household. Because I think that very stereotypical masculine-feminine side of a relationship — where the instinct for me is always to jump in and just like, what's the problem? I'll fix it. Um, which is not actually caring 90% of the time. It's just a desire to [01:08:00] solve the problem, as opposed to giving space to the person and loving them.
So. Yeah, I think that's right. I think you have to be willing, if you're interested in loving people and caring for people and paying them attention, to find that uncomfortable and tense, because you can't solve things for other people. You can't do things for other people. You can help to the extent that they wish to be helped. You can make suggestions. You can model behavior. I mean, I think a lot of that — you know, it's funny, we're very comfortable with telling people what we think they should do and not that interested in just living that way ourselves and realizing that people will pick up on the way we act.
I mean, I think you would have this, and I have this — people I know, often people older than me who I admire, not because they dole out great advice, but just because of the way they live their lives. And so we see that, we know that. But then the difficulty is actually to be that ourselves, as opposed to becoming, you know, a fountain of wisdom. So yeah, I think that's right. I think there is [01:09:00] discomfort in care and love. Um, but it's worth it. Like, I think it's worth it. That's kind of the juice of life, right? Like otherwise — that whole point of people talking about a frictionless life doesn't make any sense — that's part of that friction. Like you have to find it kind of agonizing sometimes. And out of that agony sometimes comes ecstasy. That really joyous feeling of being in love with someone or caring for someone. And love doesn't just mean romantic, obviously, but just that loving care for somebody. Um, sometimes it's agonizing, right?
Andrea Hiott: We seem to think that's wrong or something. But being able to let that be what it is, and not necessarily try to solve it all the time — is what you're saying. That can be very hard, but so rich. I think it does open us maybe to more of that feeling of being connected. And yeah, there's some connection there. Uh, even with the way we've been talking about exploring and sort of going to our edges — I think [01:10:00] doing that with the kind of care and discernment and caution is a kind of tension. But then at the same time, it's opening what's possible for you and for others. And I guess what I'm also trying to get at is that — back to that Chris McCandless thing — we're not just alone here. We don't do this just for ourselves, even though it can feel like that. The point is actually caring for others and being cared for, letting ourselves be cared for, which can be even harder.
Alex Kostas: Yeah, totally. Totally. And that thing of like, you know, you actually get more out of anything you experience when you do it with another person, even if that other person is sometimes quite frustrating and annoying and gets on your nerves. Like, I think it's another one of my favorite way marker books, um, is called The Gentle Art of Tramping. And it's written by —
Andrea Hiott: Oh yeah.
Alex Kostas: It's written by Stephen Graham. So Stephen Graham was a bit of a bizarre guy. He was like English aristocracy of the lower sort. He writes [01:11:00] in the kind of early 1900s up to the kind of interwar period. He does huge kind of crazy treks and tramping through Russia. He has kind of amazing books on Russia, uh, America, the Canadian Rockies in that era where people basically have no equipment and then go off and live in the wild for months, making it up as they go along. Anyway —
Andrea Hiott: Jumping on trains and all this —
Alex Kostas: Yeah. Jumping on trains. Just doing stuff that you're like, people wouldn't do that now. We have all this incredible technology and equipment, and, you know, he's doing it with like boots that are falling apart and — mm-hmm — anyway. The Gentle Art of Tramping is fantastic. I recommend it. It's a little bit of a summation of the things he's learned from a life of tramping, but he points out that thing of like — even if you are tramping along with somebody who's the most egotistical person you've ever met, and you also are very egotistical — you know, let other people be a mirror to you and all that — even if you're doing that, you're gonna get a benefit out of it, because things are gonna get shaken up, revealed. Now you don't have to be that person's best friend for your whole life. There's a point to which being around people like that isn't healthy, but these encounters — discern again, discernment, right? [01:12:00] Yeah. But these encounters, these times with people, these shared experiences with people, even if they're not your favorite people in the world — there is something that's gonna come out of that. I think he uses a word which is, you know, his archaic language — something like something healthful will come out of that. Like, something that is good for your health. Um. Something will get clarified, even if part of the clarification is I can see all the foibles and failings of that person, and that actually makes me realize my own foibles and failings, you know. Um, and I can see where that person is hurting and the things that they haven't been given, whatever it is. So I definitely subscribe to that in theory. The reality of that is obviously much harder to live in, but I'm working on that myself. Um, but to find that place of like actually enjoying connection and relationship with our fellow human beings, um, for their sake and, and for caring for them, and realizing actually — without it being totally self-obsessed — it does end up benefiting you, because that's kind of what [01:13:00] we need, and for some reason we're built for that connection, right.
Andrea Hiott: It's a beautiful way to say it. And it touches something I've had to go through, you know, just when you go through these sorts of experiences that can be difficult, with, you know, tense situations. Doing what — kind of taking them in the way we've been talking about here, even when they're really hard, and even when you have to just let that go. Cause you don't need to cultivate every kind of relationship, you know, forever. But you do realize that the landscape has changed and there are new possibilities, even if that's just that you now know you can kind of sit with that tension and handle it and still get back to the place of care. There's something incredibly powerful about that, in this way that we've been talking about landscape.
And you've brought up some really wonderful books. I just wanna thank you for that. Ones I haven't thought of in a while, and it's interesting how many of them have to do with walking through landscapes or hiking or moving in some way — on the motorcycle or whatever. [01:14:00] Yeah, yeah. And I'm also really drawn to those kinds of books. Before we go, I wanna hear — how does all this movement, you know, what do you think about all that? Because for me, it's so important. I have to walk every day, and walking and moving — it's part of, you know, what I study with the hippocampus and stuff. So I wonder about movement for you, and I'm also thinking of that other story I love of yours about like loving a stranger or something, where you're literally just kind of sitting on the street and you see a guy smoking a cigarette on his break from being a janitor or whatever, just like a normal person like any of us. And you feel this like love for him. I've felt that too, and it feels connected to me to some way that — of moving through the world, or almost like being able for a minute to feel like you are in the body of another person, or you are connected in that way. So I just wanna put all that out there. You can take it wherever you want, but.
Alex Kostas: Yeah. Yeah. You're good at these — you set up these really big things and I'm doing my best to keep up with you. But, um, yeah, so on that example — so that's a real story. I was in the Philippines. I'm [01:15:00] sitting watching a real person. You know, that's the thing — I think the danger of the internet — I mean, I guess the TV to a degree before that, but the real danger of the internet where we are today — is that it fools you into thinking it's no different, like being physically present in the same room as a person is no different than say what we're doing now. Actually, unfortunately there is a difference, and we can never fully transcend that. I mean, thank God, but we aren't — despite what our, um, technological masters would like us to do.
Andrea Hiott: I don't want to either. I mean —
Alex Kostas: No, I don't want to either. I think, yeah — the whole point is the body. In a way, that's what's so wonderful.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Alex Kostas: Yeah. But we can't, and so — we are bodies. And actually even in that — like, say, if you look at it from a theological point of view, which is, I'm interested in the kind of clear shift I've seen over the last 10 years of people really taking time to write and think about the fact that anything that kind of tries to [01:16:00] divide your soul, spirit, mind, emotions from the physicality of your flesh — it's just unhealthy. It just never leads to a good place. Um, and it leads you to all sorts of kind of strange results.
Um, so yeah — so that example: I mean, I'm sitting in a real city, in a real place, and across the road from me is another real guy. And I don't think I would have that same feeling of love for him if I saw him on a, I don't know, a YouTube video or something, like, I just wouldn't — because I'm not in the same place. Whereas when two people are occupying the same space and time with our real bodies — this is where we are. We're not — we're limited to these little pockets of space and time. So we are here and now with these people. Um, and even if you do subscribe to some idea of, you know, there is some spiritual-soul aspect to our bodies and we're in these bodies only for a time — we can't transcend that right now. So [01:17:00] you have to find a way to live with that now. Um, as opposed to imagining that one day your soul — whatever religion you subscribe to — your soul is gonna leave your body behind and go somewhere else. That's fine, I think. If you believe that, you believe that. But that doesn't solve for the present day. What are you gonna do now with the life that you have now? Um, and I do think it's very embodied. So I think, you know, a book I read recently — I think a review will go up this week or next week at a different publication — it's called Room for Good Things to Run Wild. And it's by a Canadian writer called Josh Nadeau. And he talks about discovering that for himself. He went through kind of a crisis in his own life — both a faith crisis, but also like a career and life crisis, um, and an addiction crisis. And realizing he'd always carried with him this idea that his body was bad and his mind and spirit were good. Um. But actually that doesn't make any sense, because I'm not just one [01:18:00] or the other. I'm both. And so how do I kind of find a redemption of both of those things?
And for him, a lot of that — when you read the book — it's the kind of book I would recommend to any kind of lost young man, basically. Um, much more than I would recommend anything by Dr. Peterson. Um, but, uh, that idea — instead of fighting lobsters, this book was much more useful, because this book was all about like, okay, actually how do I find a way to enjoy my body and not hate my body? Especially in the context of addiction, right? Where you feel like your own body's craving something that you know is bad for you. Um. He finds his way through that in various ways, but it's just like enjoying being on a bicycle and just cycling around the city, enjoying learning how to boulder and being really bad at bouldering and accepting that he's really bad at it and he's gonna have to kind of discipline his body into a new way. Um, you know, even the way he talks about — in a really beautiful way — just spending physical time with his wife, not in a sexual way, but just [01:19:00] being with his wife, being together and being present, just one-on-one, walking around together. Um, so I think it's things like that where I think we have to be careful — maybe you and I are more this way, where we work and think in this very mind space. Like, I sit here at my computer and I do my job and it's all mind. And then I, for a hobby, I read and I write — it's all still can be quite disembodied. Um, and realizing that the body and what we do in our bodies and how we use our bodies and how we treat our bodies and how our bodies interact with other bodies in other parts of the world and nature — it's probably just as important. Um, and, you know, other spiritual practices seem to have figured that out. Other cultures seem to have got that balance better than sometimes our own cultures. Um, but for our own part, kind of finding ways to bring that, you know, mind-body-soul harmony. [01:20:00] Again, I sound New Age whenever I speak, but you know what I mean.
Andrea Hiott: I know what you mean. And it's also very scientific actually now, and philosophical. Yes. Because cognition — if we use that word — is actually bodily. I mean, you're not stuck in your head. Your central nervous system is through your whole body. You know, you have neurons in your stomach, for goodness sake. I mean, we are actually thinking bodies. We've just learned that we're stuck in our head, and it feels like that because we're so sensually connected, uh, to our head. But you can also live into — you know, you can fill into your body. You can start to feel your body as, you know, a thinking being, because it is. And there's plenty of science and philosophy talking about that. And there's no hard boundary between you and everything you're moving through and with — your relationships, the books, all those cities you've been through — all that's kind of participating in the making of your cognition. That's what's happening. But that's not the story we are told.
And I guess that's why I brought up that movement of going through the world, because [01:21:00] there is a kind of agency in that — as you did, as Chris did — of getting out of where you are and, you know, awakening to your body in different places. And in so doing, kind of awakening to different ways of being alive, like, you know. And maybe developing a way to even feel the love that's kind of there — in the sense you brought up, that maybe we lost it, maybe we didn't lose it, but we're learning how to fill into it.
Um, but there is a kind of thing I want to address before we go, which — because you've brought up your wife a lot, and I'm also like, we have people who help us do this and it's so important. That book you just mentioned sounds awesome, by the way. I can't wait to read your review. Um, but I think a lot of younger people — or even us, maybe, I don't know about you — but when I was younger, there's a kind of loneliness to this at first, right? To get back to that. And you have — this is not — we have to learn how to be able to fill into all these things we're talking about. Um, I think that relates to the pilgrimage [01:22:00] too, and to the walking and to — I'm not sure how to hold all that right now, but I just wanna bring it up a little bit, because the discernment — maybe you've even written that somewhere — can feel lonely at first.
Alex Kostas: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: And I just wanna mark that, right, for people who might be at a different point right now. And you do kind of continue through that, right? Or have you had any experience of that?
Alex Kostas: Yeah. Well, I think you do. And I think the danger is it becomes an individualistic journey. So I think, you know, because it feels that way, and it is — it feels that way because I think it does start that way. So to be fair to anyone who feels like, oh, I'm trying to seek whatever it is, truth, you know, about how to pursue truth and meaning in my life, and it just feels lonely — to an extent it will never not feel lonely, because it is only you who can seek it for yourself. So you have to be a little bit aware of that. Um, for me, I think — um, I've found — I mean, you, you — the thing to do is always to keep in that tension again, which is that you are actually always seeking fellow travelers. So [01:23:00] you have to be open. Fellow travelers could look different than how you would like them to look. Um, that you could find them initially quite grating and annoying, or they could be quite challenging. Like, I've had people in my life who either I've known for a long time or only known briefly, who kind of piss you off because they say things that you don't like to hear, or the way they say it, or sometimes it's just a little bit of, um, you know, like a culture gap. Like, say, especially when you're in countries that are different cultures than your own — people will say things in a way or express things in a way that are challenging just to grasp. But then once you push yourself to move through that and try to understand what they're saying. Um, so I definitely think that.
So I think holding that tension — this concept that on one hand, yes, you are always only responsible for you, so you have to discover what it is for yourself — but you also have to constantly be, um, seeking people who can help you. Whether they're at the same point as you, whether they're ahead of you, whether they're [01:24:00] behind you, whether it's hard to tell where you both are, but you're trying to seek fellow travelers. Um. Uh, I think that helps. I mean, for me, I've been lucky — yes, my wife, my life partner, you know, we've been together for a very long time. We met very young. We got to experience a lot of that traveling together, because we were both still young enough to still be seeking and being very open. I think when you're young — whilst you have that instinct towards immaturely blasting out your opinions — I think you also actually have more of a thin skin and are more permeable to different things. Whereas over time we tend to kind of build up layers and think that we know very well, thank you, what all the arguments are, and I've already made my decision. So I think we were lucky in that way. But that doesn't have to be the case for everyone. You can meet anybody at any point, and if you're both willing to move beyond the kind of outer layers of your shells — of, you know, your hard views on the world — that can take place at any time.
And I've definitely seen that. Other [01:25:00] people I know who've kind of met people who they really just vibe with really well at the, you know, end decades of their life. And so you just kind of can't predict that one. Um, for me, I will say I found a lot of it in religious communities, just by nature of religious communities. Um, not every religious community obviously, but some religious communities have people in them who are seeking these things, because that kind of is the telos of religion — in an ideal world, people are seeking answers. Now, not every religious community does that, but most of the people, not every person, but most of the people I've met in my life and travels around the world have some interest in some kind of spirituality and religion. And therefore you have that in common. Um, and that sometimes means going along to religious communities that you find weird or scary or strange and you don't understand. I sometimes think about this — I say this to people — it's like I've gone along to things where [01:26:00] ultimately I've met a person in that community who I really feel like there's something there. There's some connection and we're kind of talking. And part of the ticket for entry is I go along to the — whatever it is — the service, the ceremony — that doesn't really do anything for me, but it's part of being part of that community, to respect that that's what is important to this community.
Ultimately, you do learn things and you do get shaped and formed by things in a way that maybe you don't even expect. But you don't have to — you know, that idea that you have to 100% agree with everything that that thing is about before you go along — I think ultimately closes off so many doors. As opposed to being open to things that I don't necessarily know if I agree with, or that seem to kind of cut against what I think, but actually there's still some kernel in there that I'm interested in and I'm gonna figure out what that is. So that's my [01:27:00] two cents on that, what I've found helpful in my own life.
Andrea Hiott: I think that's also true in other communities, like philosophy for example. Sure. Or different kinds of science. I mean, we also tend to, you know, you can just find your group and then you say everything they say and you do everything they do so that you're part of the group. But this is kind of part of what we've been talking about too — just being able to understand that sometimes your paths are gonna resonate, and yet everyone's coming with a completely different history, right? Trajectory. And that's what's interesting. So when you resonate, that's wonderful, but you don't need to resonate all the time with all of it. I really like what you say there.
Also, as you were talking, I was thinking we're also kind of in a conversation with ourselves. You know, you do come into realizing that you're alive in a place that feels a bit lonely, but as a body communicating with itself, you can also do this with yourself, right? I mean, you can also care for yourself in the way that we've been saying, and notice that the relationships you're having with others and the way you're talking to your friends or your wife or even the person that annoys you is [01:28:00] contributing, right, to the way you're gonna also communicate with yourself.
Um, that just sort of came to me as you were talking. But I don't know. Is there anything before we go — I was thinking, one thing I did wanna raise is you're quite funny too. I don't know if humor helps you with any of this. I just kind of wanted to raise that. And you also start — you know, some of your fiction is really interesting, like, what is that one line about the stroller? Like, nobody suspects a man with a stroller, I think, or something like that.
Alex Kostas: Nobody suspects the father with a stroller.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Great. That's — I stayed for this, uh, fiction piece that you wrote, that I will recommend to everyone — "Conspirator." Oh, thank you.
Alex Kostas: "Conspirator." Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, before we go — first, just humor, you know, what does that bring up for you? Um, and then, yeah, I'll have one more question, but.
Alex Kostas: I don't know if humor is important. I mean, I like humor. I think humor can deal with some of that tension, right? Like, I think humor is a tension diffuser, um, at times. [01:29:00] Um, I actually think most of the people I know — these people who I talk about, people who I respect, who seem to have — everyone's gonna figure it out — who seem to have some degree of maturity, have kind of found a way of life, a tower of life, if we wanna use that language, that gives them — when you're with them, you sense their kind of peace and oneness with things. And I, I assume — I've had the benefit of meeting a handful of people like that. Right. They tend to be quite funny. Uh, I don't know if you notice that. I think because they're not afraid to laugh at themselves. Mm-hmm. Um, they're not afraid to laugh at the world, because the world is quite funny. Um, the absurdity of things, how things don't make sense, that life is joyful even when it's not always easy. Um, so yeah, I don't know. I think humor does — I mean, I think humor is a mark of intelligence, but some of the people I'm thinking about, they're [01:30:00] not intelligent in the way we would measure it. I'm thinking of a guy I know in Nepal — we spent two weeks with him. Um, and he's a hilarious guy, but he's not trying to be funny, like he's not doing an act. He just is. He laughs at things, he finds things funny, he is very joyous.
Andrea Hiott: Mm. Boy, that's good. I think there's a real connection between this joy, this bubbling kind of life, and this absurdity too, in a way. And that's kind of almost ecstasy, right? There's a kind of strangeness to the world — it is funny and it is joyful.
Alex Kostas: Yeah. And it — yeah — holding the paradox. I think if you're gonna live in the paradox, you're gonna have to acknowledge that that's quite funny from time to time, right?
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And it opens the space, right? To be able to look at it from a humorous angle too — that does help you notice the glacier again, or whatever.
Alex Kostas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so I think that's right. So I think also — I mean, "Conspirator" as an example — I was noticing, being a new father, things that were funny about [01:31:00] being a new father, but then I mean — I'm not a humor writer, like, strictly humor — but I think it kind of diffuses through the short story, the serial fiction I did, which was like, what if a new father was also having to deal with a spy situation, and there's, you know, conspiracies and things happening around him — how would that look? And there would be humor inherent in that. Um, and there would be awkwardness and difficulties inherent in that. Um, so I think that's right. I think humor is one way we kind of — it's a different lens to look at things that are in tension. So.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And it helps with that tension. I think it helps us kind of move it around, almost musically — kind of play the tension, you know?
Alex Kostas: Yeah, yeah, you're right. It's like a way of harmonizing with tension, because it's like — it's the same thing but in a different key.
Andrea Hiott: Which is what you do in that piece a bit too, I think. Writing is a bit like that, you know? You're kind of moving the tension around to keep the — the reader, the story — you know, that engagement is really interesting. [01:32:00] Writing is really an interesting craft of that in a way.
Alex Kostas: Yeah, definitely.
Andrea Hiott: Well, I just, uh — before we go, anything you wanna say to anyone, or any experience of love or whatever that, you know, you wanna share — which I know is a heavy question, but I just always put it out there if anything comes relative to all of this, or anything at all. It doesn't have to be necessarily about that.
Alex Kostas: Yeah, no, I will share this. I mean, this is gonna — it's hard to talk about love without sounding cliché because, you know, the horrible thing —
Andrea Hiott: That's the point of all this. We have to try.
Alex Kostas: I know, but the other horrible thing about getting older is how all the clichés are coming true. And you're like, this sucks. I was always the guy who was like, that's so clichéd, and then you experience the clichés.
Andrea Hiott: I think that's a good sign in a way.
Alex Kostas: Yeah, I know it is.
Andrea Hiott: There's a reason clichés are clichés.
Alex Kostas: Yeah. But okay — for me, I say this to a lot of people. My son is now eight months old, and you have the experience of being a new father — baby is born, and you're — I was in the delivery room, and people, all my male friends [01:33:00] who don't have kids yet, like, oh, how did it feel, what was your emotion at that time? For me, it's interesting — it's not that I didn't have the feeling of, wow, this is a baby that now I — you know, I love, of course you do. But what I found interesting was kind of identifying what was actually going on in me, which was that sense of — and this kind of connects to everything we're talking about in terms of interpersonal relationships — I had a responsibility instantly from the moment that baby was born that I didn't have before. Because I wasn't the one carrying the baby. As soon as the baby comes into the world, I now have a responsibility for that baby. And the weird thing is, unlike every other area of life, I cannot really put that responsibility onto anyone else. I can't defer it — in anything else in life you kind of always can find somewhere to offload some kind of responsibility. Um, and I can't with this one. And so there is love — obviously there's affection, and the affection grows the more you get to know the baby. But instantly there's responsibility. Like, [01:34:00] no one's gonna help me and my wife care for this child and keep it alive. It's just down to us. That's it. No one else, no other safety net. There's like — our situation is not like there are other people waiting in the wings to come and take care of the baby. It's just me and my wife, and particularly we're here on our own — we don't have family in Singapore. So maybe that was heightened. But finding that beautiful as opposed to finding it daunting — that actually if we take ownership for the care of other people — now that's specific to your own child, obviously, but then extending that out in a kind of web of responsibility — that part of what gives, part of the soil, say for love to grow in, is a sense of responsibility and obligation. Um, even though obligation sounds like an unromantic, very unsexy word, that sense that actually I do owe — I have taken on the responsibility — we've brought this child into the world. I owe him so much to kind of, you know. Keep him alive, but keep him healthy, keep him happy, um, keep him well. So that was an insight for [01:35:00] me. It's specific to kids, but it doesn't really just stay with kids, right. Like, it's anyone that you — I think if you have a sense of love for someone, it's also kind of maybe, um, analyzing or discerning where the kind of responsibility and obligation is that you may owe them. Not in a heavy, moralistic, legalistic way, but in a joyful way — that actually obligation is a joyful thing, as a place for love to grow.
Andrea Hiott: That's very beautiful. Really. Yeah. And also you talked about soil a bit, because we've been talking about movement and going everywhere, but also there's this rooted — this growing — right, that's also happening. That is care too. And that — and letting people care for you, and caring for others, and that tension. I guess that's kind of the tension I was talking about too. Parenting is like a very beautiful, difficult example of it, right? Where you — the way you described it, I have never really heard anyone describe it exactly like that before, where it's [01:36:00] kind of noticing that you're locked into life in a way. And that's a beautiful thing, even though it's tense or hard, something like that. Yeah, exactly.
Alex Kostas: Right.
Andrea Hiott: Even when you make something, right — you're doing that in a way. You're locking yourself into the world in a sense. Yeah. So yeah, thanks for that. That was just very beautiful and I've really enjoyed talking to you. I love your work. I'm so glad — whatever listener out there introduced us, thank you so much. I can't wait to read more, so keep going.
Alex Kostas: Thanks, Andrea. Really appreciate it.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it was fun. See you later.
Alex Kostas: Cool. See ya.
Andrea Hiott: Mm-hmm. Okay, folks. Thanks for making it all the way to the end. Since we mentioned poetry here, I couldn't not read a poem at the end, and this one is from Rumi, R-U-M-I. And, uh, I'm not sure which translation it is, but it's one that came to mind, and it's called "O You Who've Gone on Pilgrimage." Sorry, my throat's a little [01:37:00] scratchy — it's been a long day. Okay, here's a poem from Rumi.
Oh, you who've gone on pilgrimage, Where are you? Where, oh where? Here. Here is the beloved. Oh come now, come. Oh, come. Your friend, he is your neighbor. He is next to your wall. You, erring in the desert — What air of love is this? If you'd see the beloved's form Without any form, You are the house, the master. You are the Kaaba. You. Where is a bunch of roses If you would be this garden? Where one soul's pearly essence When you're the sea of God? That's true, and yet your troubles May turn to treasures rich. How sad that you yourself veil The treasure that is yours.
And that's the end of the poem. So don't veil the treasure that is yours today, okay? It is a treasure. Um, also, thanks for supporting the show, and [01:38:00] sign up on the Substack if you want more information. And, uh, I also have a book coming out about the navigational approach to mind — it's called Holding Paradox. I sure would love to hear what you think about it. And another book will come out soon from HarperOne that I'm very excited about, and it's about being alive. So I can't wait to share those with you all, and I really hope you'll let me know what you think about them. Okay. Bye.