Kate Bowler: I’m Kate Bowler, and this is Everything Happens. A listener named Maja left me a note last week that probably resonates with all of us right now. Hey Maja. She describes just the heaviness she feels right now. She said, quote, it was a new and potentially relieving idea to think of Lent as a season to unload by sadness and simply live it as an act of presence. Yes, it is a hard time to be a human in the world. So if you’re feeling the weight of this moment, there isn’t anything wrong with you. You’re probably just paying attention. The point is not to ignore it or bright-side it, but maybe live into what is actually happening and see who it makes us. Because we all face seasons of uncertainty, moments of undoing, and who are we then after everything happens? I think we want to be the kind of people who find wisdom, who extract the deepest possible truth. Or in the words of our incredible guest today, we all wanna make meaning of the events we live through the better and the sweet. So today, I’m going to be seeking to an expert in what happens next and the transitions that change us. Her name is Melinda French Gates, and of course she needs no introduction, but hey, I’ll do it anyway. Melinda is a philanthropist, businesswoman, and a lifelong global advocate for girls and women. Today, she leads Pivotal. It’s an organization that works to accelerate the pace of progress and advance women’s power and influence in the United States and around the world. And previously, she founded and co-chaired the Gates Foundation, where for more than two decades, she set the direction and priorities for the world’s largest philanthropy. Melinda is the author of bestselling books like The Moment of Lift and her latest, The Next Day. Melinda, it is such an honor to be speaking with you today. I have so been looking forward to this.
Melinda Gates: Oh, I’m so glad we could do this, Katie.
Kate: We share a deep love of the poet David White, and there was this poem What to Remember When Waking that struck you, so I wondered if we could start there, if you wouldn’t mind reading a little portion of it.
Melinda: What to Remember When Waking by David White. In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake, coming back to this life from the other, more secret, movable and frighteningly honest world where everything began, there’s a small opening into the new day which closes the moment you begin your plans.
Kate: That’s so good. It feels like the most poetic version of when we make plans, God laughs.
Melinda: Yes, exactly.
Kate: Just at any age, we look back at plans we made and we think, wow, we really had certainty for a moment there.
Melinda: I think there’s, well, there’s some plans you make that they, you’re like, whoa, that actually came true. But then I feel like there’s so many things that happen in life, And if you let them, they take you in a direction, a different direction than you expected, and they end up being so incredibly beautiful.
Kate: If we just give up on maybe some of that inflexibility. Because there’s so many kinds of transitions and you offer us a lot of different ways to think about the moments where you’re kind of just swept away on the terrible tidal wave of whatever happens to you and then these moments of real decision. So I wondered if we could start at the beginning with young Melinda. You had big ambitions, especially for a young woman in Texas. And ambition is not something that is often celebrated in women, but your parents didn’t just tolerate it, they really encouraged it. So what kind of belief did that plant in you?
Melinda: I was just an incredibly lucky child. I mean, to grow up in a loving family, my mom and dad, I had three siblings, an older sister and two younger brothers. And my parents told all of us often, you will be college going and you can go anywhere you want to go and that you can get into in the United States and we will pay for it. We will figure out how, and you know, we could all see that wasn’t gonna be easy for my parents. So just the fact that they constantly reminded us, you can go anywhere you want to go. That alone was a powerful statement. And then again, I also had a father, which was amazing, who he worked on the Apollo space missions. So talk about being on the cutting edge, right? But the most important thing he did, and I don’t even know if he knew he was doing it at the time exactly, but he often talked about the female mathematicians that he would bring onto his team on purpose, because he said his teams were better when they had female mathematicians. So I could see that, you know, women could achieve amazing things and I should.], My parents said, you should set your sights high.
Kate: That horizon is so hard to imagine for ourselves sometimes. And your dad, Ray, something he said, it really reminded me actually of something that Coach K sometimes says about being a coach. He said, maybe part of the goal of being a coach is that you can see greatness in your players that they might not fully recognize. And it sounds like your dad was just like that, like tremendously hopeful on your behalf.
Melinda: He was, and he helped us on our path. So for instance, my sister and me, you know, he could see that we were both good at math. And when the teacher at my high school brought in five Apple II computers to the high school at a very early time, you now, he went out and bought actually an Apple III computer for our home both to keep the books on. My parents were running a small real estate business by then to have the money to put us through college while my dad had his full-time career. But it was both to keep books on that computer and he taught my sister and me how to do that.,We knew the flows of money, what was coming in and out, but also so I could program. And that just made it all the more possible for me to see, oh, this is something I really enjoy even outside of the classroom, which ultimately led me to want to have a degree in computer science.
Kate: I think just for that one brief moment, we had exactly the same life. I had a dad who was obsessed with the idea that I would do something and maybe be a historian because he was a historian. And then he got me an Apple IIc. And it was all over. While you were forging the future, I was playing Oregon Trail mostly. I’m talking to you here from Duke University, and that’s the school you fell in love with. I wondered what drew you to Duke in the first.
Melinda: Quite honestly what drew me to Duke was a gleaming brand new at the time computer lab. It was 1982 and they had just gotten a big grant from IBM and so they had all these IBM personal computers and I was like, wow, they have a lab, they’re on the cutting edge, I want to go here. This is a place I could study the thing that I really want to study, which is computer science.
Kate: It’s not easy to find your way in a career path that is typically dominated by men. And there was really like a transition that you had to make into computer science here at Duke. I wonder what kind of belief and supports helped you believe that you could do it. Like you, you, you, could do when so often there’s moments where we’re just like, well, I guess maybe somebody else has got to figure it out.
Melinda: Yeah, I got to Duke and I was so excited about computer science. But then I got into my first freshman class in computer science and I have to admit the professor was so monotone and just sort of would drone on. And we were programming in a language that I had never programmed in before so I knew it was going to feel new, but just the way he explained things and there were no TAs to help us out, it really was like learning a new language and I felt like I was alone and having to learn it on my own. And so it was only in kind of leaning back on my supports like my dad. I knew my dad believed I could be good in computer science and when I needed to, I could lean back on old high school teacher and remember the things that she taught me. So I got through freshman year. And then by sophomore year, I stumbled into my programming buddy, who would continue to be my programming body, a guy named David for the rest of my time at Duke. And we programmed together. And the problem set would come out, we’d meet in the cafeteria, and both of us were just out of our minds, like no idea, either one of us, where we were gonna start on this thing. But we’d start talking it through and nerding out kind of figure out a path here, figure out a path there, and then go off and then come back together. And I didn’t even realize then that what I was forming was a team, it was a two-person team. And then later I programmed on teams, even in college. By the time I got to Microsoft, I was sort of used to leading in an all-male environment because I had had so much of that starting sophomore year of computer science when the young women would drop out after freshman year. And then I kind of had to just learn and feel my way through my leadership style then in a very male-dominated industry. But I knew I was better when I was on a team and I knew a team was better when I on it and I was good at leading teams. And that eventually carried me through even into my career when I had doubt.
Kate: I wonder if there was something there too, from like attachment theory about how in times of insecurity, we think we have got to step further out into risk and bravery, but actually we can lean back into our support systems. We lean back into our like webbing and then it gives us the security we need almost like to be more ourselves than if we were alone.
Melinda: Yeah, because I think others around us have a perspective on us that we sometimes lose about ourselves. I often feel like if I’m doubting myself or I’m anxious about something, I actually feel like I’m falling backwards. And what I’ve said to my kids and others and coach myself in my head is I have to lean forward into that network of support. It’s all there, but I have to push myself a little bit to cross over and to reach out to somebody, be it on text or be it a lot of times in person, then you can lean into that support. And I do think we need each other. Like human beings, we need one another. And we often like to think, oh, especially in the US, we’re this go-it-alone culture, this rugged individualism. Yes, I’m an individual. Yes, can be very independent. By and large, we need one another, and we’re better when we’re in community with others. We just sometimes forget it.
Kate: Oh man, I could not agree more. It’s one of the great gifts of this community around everything happens is when people experience like transitions or fragility or suffering, we’re changed, but not always, you know, stronger, better, faster than we were before. We’re just changed. And in those fissures, you can be so easy to imagine or a less lovely version than we were, when actually, we usually just figure out that we really just mostly need far more support than we imagined.
Melinda: I had a friend who, when I was going through one really difficult time in transition, just a few people knew, but this one female friend knew, she gave me this beautiful heart and it was completely imperfect. Like it had all these little cracks and holes and things in it. And she said, look, this might be your heart right now, but look how beautiful it is. And it’s always going to have in the future that wear and tear and look how beautiful it is. And it helped me realize, oh, yeah, there is not some like perfect molded heart or perfect being, like part of what makes us who we are are those cracks and fissures and those can be beautiful too.
Melinda: I was really struck by how much in your seasons of grief, like losing your friend, that you are really imagining yourself as part of this community of love, love for this friend, and constantly sort of seeing the brokenness as part of the great, terrible privilege of love.
Melinda: Yeah, it’s kind of part of the mystery, right? We had so many wonderful times together, but even hearing, you know, I knew how intense his wife, Emmy’s grief was and hearing her speak that out loud at the ceremony for his life and saying, look, this isn’t something I will ever get over. It will always be this hole for me, she said, but I also know it’s going to fill up with other joyful things and it won’t be as large as it is now. You could feel she was connecting to something larger than herself, right? And just to see the courage of doing that and the questioning and the openness and the curiosity, it just was a really, really beautiful thing. It made me glad that I actually grew up in some sort of faith tradition because I had that grounding already.
Kate: I have found that faith, feeling deeply loved by God, having a language to practice loving other people is like one of the most profound ways to feel both known and carried in the worst moments of my life.
Melinda: There’s a holding there, right? That you feel like, okay, I can lean into this or be held by this no matter what happens. Like, you know, we are all going to die one day. That is just the truth of this life. And I will say I often now find that certainly in connection with a deep, deep, deep friend, an intimate friend, right. I love the musical Les Miserables and one of the closing lines is, to love another person is to see the face of God. And I often think that is, and like the love of a parent and a child, you know, or a mom and an infant and a dad and an infant, that connection, that is love, right? That runs through the universe. So I often find it in the connection with a friend or a loved one, and I find it also in nature, right? Nature is so beautiful and mysterious, how you know, all these pieces came to be, you know? And so sometimes in moments of intense grief, I can often look at a sunset or, you, know, a gorgeous mountain that’s been there for absolutely centuries and think, okay, well, it gives you perspective. My little drama is a little drama. And yes, it’s very, very, very sad to me. But wow, even when I’m gone, that mountain’s still going to be there. I don’t know. There’s just something comforting, at least for me in that.
Kate: We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. Your love for your kids is so palpable. You describe those first moments where you realize like, oh my gosh, now my world has a single point of spinning and it’s my love of you. How did you, I guess, who did you become loving your kids so absurdly much?
Melinda: I can only speak to my own journey. It helped me reach to the better parts of myself constantly. And when I wouldn’t be in my best mode, boy, I didn’t like the pieces of me that came out. And like, we all have those pieces in us. We have, you know, goodness, and we have not great parts of ourselves. But when those other, the contrary pieces would come out, I was tired, I was short with a child, you know, because of something going on inside of me, boy, did I wanna work on those really fast and try and eliminate them as much as I could because I knew that wasn’t good parenting. But I think parenting calls you. It’s so difficult and it’s so intensely joyful, it calls you to be your best self. You know, patience is not a word I would use about myself at all. And my kids would tell you, I am not the most patient person in the world. Like I knew my calling was not to be a teacher. Like I just, I could not be a teacher. But boy, did I have to call on those reserves and try and be patient as a mom. Could I always achieve it? Definitely not. And so I talk about in this book, the next day, like also dropping some of that perfectionism about parenting. It wasn’t serving me, it wasn’t the kids well. When I finally learned the concept from the psychologist who writes about it, Dan Winnicott, that a good enough parent, it was like, oh, okay, I am a good-enough parent, you know, and that I knew I was.
Kate: Totally. Man, that good enough parent concept, that has been really helpful, frankly, for my faith too. I wrote a devotional book called Good Enough because it came out of a hilarious like, spiritually, good enough. Because good enough was better than optimization, perfection, the sort of one spectrum, I think, of the pressure placed on women in particular to then model this very Instagram, good, better, best. So I really like, I really liked your description of the kind of like, man, there’s like, there’s traction there, if you can just lower the bar to the right place.
Melinda: I have a really good friend who is a pastor and leads a bunch of different groups, and she’s in one of my spiritual groups, one of the things she often says is, do what you can, not what you can’t. So if you’ve got, okay, five minutes a day to meditate or pray, yes, I would love it to be an hour, but that’s just not realistic many days. So do what you can, don’t do not what you cant and feel good enough about that and then maybe the next day it’s 10 minutes and maybe the next it’s back to five, right? But at least I’m putting what I call drops in the bucket, right, and they do add up. You know, you keep putting a drop in a bucket, you know, over time, that bucket’s pretty full, right.
Kate: Yes, I totally agree. When you say that to there reminds me of Nicholas Kristof who has that same vision. Was it Nicholas Kristof who was one of the first people that helped kind of like inspire your curiosity about a certain kind of philanthropy? Am I remembering that right?
Melinda: We read an article that he had penned about diarrhea and rotavirus and killing so many children. And so he’s one of many, but he is one that, you know, kind of opened our minds to start thinking differently about, oh, maybe there’s something we could do about this as a foundation.
Kate: That requires a lot of courage to just say, well, in the face of the world’s deep dysfunction, we feel so helpless. But to get into that framework of curiosity, small action, and a lot partnership, that’s been, partnership has been, it sounds like you’re overarching model for how you imagine solving these problems.
Melinda: You can’t get anything done without being in partnership with somebody. You just can’t, you know? And look, when you’re trying to solve any problem, but these are big, intractable societal problems, whether it’s a social norm you’re tying to shift, like equality, or whether it is trying to solve a disease like malaria, which we were doing in the developing world. Wow, it takes so many partners on the ground and around the world. Any action that we take has an effect on other people. And you can decide that you wanna affect change as an individual in your community. And that can make a huge difference on a child’s life, on tutoring somebody, and or you can also make a contribution at a large scale by either driving the change or contributing to the change or you see a great partner doing amazing work that they’re trying to do and you support them, right? Either mentorship, coaching, or maybe dollars, right? There are lots of lots of ways to affect change in our world.
Kate: You’ve had a passion and a focus on the contributions of women and girls and wanting to make sure that resources when given out are equally distributed. I wondered if you could just tell me about Pivotal and this passion you have for supporting the wellness of girls and women worldwide.
Melinda: I believe that societies are healthier when women thrive. And when you get equality in a society, it just unlocks things for whole families. And I think for so long, the world has thought of it as zero sum game. Well, if the women rise, then the men will have to stop, or they’ll come down a little. No, both can rise together because the pie gets larger. You see it in many societies around the world, that when women start to get closer and closer to equality, children thrive, they’re better educated, the families end up being wealthier, new things are created. And yet we’ve really, as a world, under-invested in women’s issues. And so one of the things that I do, because I believe in it so much, is I invest in women, women-led businesses. women-led media, so there’s new stories told, more women in politics. Because I know and believe that girls can look up and when they see a role model, they can say, oh, I can be like her. I could be that politician or that CEO or that middle manager, that woman starting a business. But we just don’t have enough role models yet. We don’t societies where there are enough women who are equal to men. And yet, I do think we will be better off as a world when we get there.
Kate: We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. There’s some transitions that we want and then there’s some transitions that we don’t want. We find ourselves starting or maybe leaving a career, or starting or leaving a marriage. And these are not decisions that any of us take lightly. You’ve been very open about your deep love for your family and the life you built together, and really the shared work that you and your husband did together for so many years. But there’s a little and yet, that this still small voice that was telling you, this has to end. I found that especially moving because I know so many women who hear that voice, but they think, well, but I just, I could live like this forever. I could just lick up these crumbs, make soup with these bones kind of feeling. And it is very difficult, I imagine, to believe yourself enough to make a difficult transition.
Melinda: Yeah, I mean… That was not something I ever expected that I would need to do, nor wanted. But I think one of the most important things to know is the reason I wrote about it even in this book is this book, The Next Day, is about transitions. And look, it was public that we went through a divorce. And so I thought, well, it would be disingenuous to write a book and not at least include something in there. So what I wanted to include was my perspective on it and yet, because many families also go through this, I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. I don’t know if my journey will be helpful to anyone, but the piece I wrote about from my point of view was my inner voice. You know, I do spend time in quiet every day. You know when it speaks to you and there’s a whisper, you do need to listen. You may wanna keep pushing it away and I’ve definitely had times in my life where I’ve done that, but it’s important to listen to your inner voice because if you wanna stay true to who you are and what your values are, you do have to look at an honest assessment of the relationships around you and say, am I able to live my values in this relationship or not?
Kate: Not just, am I able to just survive this?
Melinda: Yeah, can I live out what I believe in, right? And if difficult things have happened and you’ve tried to repair many times, but the behavior that doesn’t change, then it’s not healthy. And so in my case, I needed to make a very, very, very difficult transition that I, you know, wasn’t anticipating, but was important to do. And I will say, look, There are women around the world and men who are stuck in marriages that they can’t leave for various reasons, financially or situationally, the way their country looks at it or their religion. So my heart goes out to them too, because not everyone gets to make that choice.
Kate: Not to be very, very David White today, but it did kind of remind me of this David White poem that I had included, actually, it was part of a wedding sermon I did last year. So I know it’s really supposed to be about love, but when I read your book, I also thought it was kind of a good description of deciding that you want to come back to yourself. And okay, here’s the stanzas. And if you wanted to drown, you could, but you don’t. Because finally, after all this struggle and all these years, you simply don’t want to anymore. You’ve simply had enough of drowning. And you want to live, and you want the love, and you will walk across any territory and any darkness, however fluid and however dangerous, to take the one hand you know belongs in yours.
Melinda: That’s beautiful.
Kate: Sometimes we kind of need to take our own hand.
Melinda: Be true to ourselves, right?
Kate: I think so. I really, really like your friends. You have these great descriptions of your friends, you are so into your friends and they’re very wonderfully wise and I hope bossy. You know, you’ve got this truth council. I wonder, tell me about these friends because these are the people that carry us when life goes off course.
Melinda: They are, and I’m lucky. I think, again, I think it’s because of my mom. My mom had just really strong female friends when I grew up in Dallas, both a small faith community of mothers raising children, then they supported one another in the specifics. I need somebody to take care of my child today because I got to take the other one to the doctor, but also praying for one another and staying true to their faith, and she had amazing walking friends who weren’t always necessarily of the same faith she was. So I’ve cultivated friendships over the years, but I talk about my truth council, which are the three women that I walk with every Monday morning that I’m in town or they’re in town. All three of them happen to be older than me, so their kids cross stages long before mine did, and I could hear about their angst. Oh, what do I do? Do I ground this child? Do I encourage this, how do I encourage the behavior that, you know, I’d like to see? But I, I learned from how they were parenting and navigating those difficult times, whether it was when the kids were smaller, when they were teenagers, or as they launched to college, like how much do you go see your son or daughter at college? Like, what’s the right amount? What’s not? So, and for, for me, if I want to be fully authentic and known, which I do by this group, I have to always show up with integrity. So let’s say I wasn’t my best self over the weekend with one of my kids. I lost my temper, right? Or, you know, I felt like that was the place to show up and say it because by naming it out loud, then I would make the change I needed to make, the behavior change, right. We can say it to ourselves, but not change our behavior. Like, oh, I regret that. But as I would think about going and being with that group, they were the ones that I could speak my truth to, even when it wasn’t pretty. And same, and vice versa. And so I write about one of them in the book, Emmy Nielsen, I talk about, as you said earlier, my friend, her husband, John’s death. And I do think, you know, we helped carry her, as I say, to the other side of her grief, right? And then when I went through difficult times in my life, unexpectedly, she’s carried me to the side of my grief, and that’s just what happens. You never know what the ebb and flow of life is gonna be, but boy have I needed those women at times and boy have they needed me.
Kate: That’s such a great image too, like being carried to the other side. That’s really lovely.
Melinda: Thank you.
Kate: I really love that you have people in front of you, people behind you, people to give you advice. You sought out advice when you turned 60 from friends to think about what we should carry forward in the transitions that we do and do not want. So, Melinda, will you give me some advice? I’m 44. I’m often, you know, I’ve had like chronic illness. I’ve had cancer, but all of us at some point get to these moments where we’ve lived a little. What advice would you give to someone like me, or specifically me, who’s still not really comfortable with having to make all these transitions?
Melinda: Keep going. We don’t have a choice. The transitions come, whether we want them or not, right? You’re gonna choose some and then other ones will happen to you. But I do think in that, what I call that clearing, that in between space, between when you make the transition and you start the next thing, it takes a ton of courage. But when you can sit in that space, in that clearing. there is so much growth to be had. And as long as you can have the perspective that remember when you get to the other side, there’s gonna be a lot of beauty or there’s going to be a new career and that still may be scary because you have to learn new things, but there is immense learning in that in-between space. And the more you practice staying in that in- between space, some spiritual teachers, as you know, even call it liminal space, the more you can practice being there, kind of the less uncomfortable it is when the big transitions come, right? And when the other ones come.
Kate: We’ll never be a liminality expert probably, but liminally tolerant.
Melinda: There you go.
Kate: Melinda, you’re so kind and agile in the way that you encourage us to think about our next days. I really appreciate everything you’ve said about the power of community and a faith and the persistent hopefulness that it requires to solve problems in teams. It has genuinely been such a joy to spend this time with you. Thank you so much.
Kate: Melinda has given us a glimpse into what it means to hold steady in the midst of profound transitions. The kind you choose, and then the kind that chooses you. She reminds us that there’s no secret shortcut through pain or change. There’s no five-step plan for being brave. Just the slow courage of listening to that still, small voice. Of listening to the ones who love you enough to tell you the truth, and walk beside you when the path disappears into fog. So, my dears, I thought maybe we could just like bless the transitions, the thises and the thats and all the things we maybe never intended. So hey, here goes. Blessed are you standing among the ruins of what was or the beginnings of what might yet be. In the transitions you hoped for and the ones you’ve endured. Blessed are you when the decision comes slowly, painfully, when the voice inside grows louder and will not be ignored. Blessed are those who trust that even when the path disappears, there is still ground beneath your feet. May you find the courage to go when it’s time, the grace to stay when you must, and the friends who will hold you either way. May we all just be a little more liminal space tolerant because it turns out that this is not the end of your story, it’s just the next day. All right, my darlings, if you do not mind, before I go, if there’s any chance you could give us a review on Spotify or Apple podcasts, it just makes a really big difference for how people find the show. It’s just a review is one of those things that makes it pop up and people go, oh, hey, I’d love to listen to that. Also, our team legitimately reads everything you send. So leave us a voicemail at 919-322-8731 or come find me online @katecbowler. And you can find all of our episodes on YouTube if you wanna watch it or share it with a friend. We will link it in our show notes. A big thank you to our funding partners, Lilly Endowment, Duke Endowment and Duke Divinity School, and to the team behind everything happening at Everything Happens. Jess Richie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Baiz Hoen, Gwen Heginbotham, Brenda Thompson, Iris Greene, Hailie Durrett, Anne Herring, Hope Anderson, Kristen Balzer, Elia Zario, Catherine Smith, and Megan Crunkleton. Thank you. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.
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