“When we see a show, the memory of that show gets pinned to that space where the show took place. What if, instead, we could pin the memory of a show to your home, to your car, to your office? What if that space is forever changed because of a phone call that you took, or a video that you saw, or a delivery that you got?” This is the premise, Artistic Director Evan Neiden explains, upon which the pioneering remote theatrical experiences of Candle House Collective are based.
Evan, together with creative collaborators Joel Meyers and Olivia Behr, talk to the voidspace about the development of Candle House’s work, the worlds within worlds of their new experience, Lennox Mutual, and how performing this kind of intimate, responsive work is more terrifying than playing to a full house at Harry Potter.
voidspace:
Evan, Joel and Olivia, welcome to the voidspace. Thank you so much for joining me here. I really appreciate it. To start off, I’d love to hear who each of you are, and what you do as Candle House Collective.
Evan Neiden:
My name is Evan Neiden. I’m the Founder and Artistic Director of Candle House Collective, as well as one of three creators of Lennox Mutual. I’ve been creating immersive theatre for about eight years, a good portion of which has been for Candle House. For Candle House alone, I’ve created over 20 remote interactive experiences that helped to pioneer the genre.
Joel Meyers:
My name is Joel Meyers. I was brought into Candle House as a performer, in previous piece called CLAWS, and then we started working on Lennox Mutual.
Evan Neiden:
This lovely beast, Lennox Mutual. Joel is also our systems architect.
Joel Meyers:
Oh, yes. I do the back-end, behind the scenes.
voidspace:
Just the tiny job of making the whole thing run…
Olivia Behr:
I’m Olivia; you can call me Liv Behr. I’m a friend of, and now collaborator with, Candle House Collective. I joined as a performer and writer on this project, Lennox Mutual. My background’s in traditional and musical theatre. I am also a writer and I studied literature as well.
voidspace:
To give us a beginning of an overview, tell us what Candle House does. I know you specialise in remote interactive experiences. Tell me a bit more about that.
Evan Neiden:
Since 2018, we’ve been creating remote interactive theatrical pieces for small audiences – typically, audiences of one at a time. We’ve made over 20 experiences spanning comedy to horror to drama to docuseries and so on. Everything from a psychological thriller about a kid with a doppelganger in his closet (which is where Joel joined us) to putting a participant on the phone with a prisoner on death row in Texas 24 hours before lethal injection, to a comedy farce about a caseworker for an extradimensional Bureau responsible for shepherding people from one life to the next.
CHC began in 2018 with an alternate reality experience called lastcandlearx: a five-month long continuous experience for 50 participants over five months, in which each participant’s actions changed the story for the entire group. That kicked off further experiments in the remote space.
Up until then, all that really seemed to exist in the remote theatre space were slight bits of remote engagement surrounding in person pieces. Even traditional proscenium shows were trying out in-world emails that could serve as your ticket. But what if one’s experience could be here, in the safety of one’s own home? What if, rather than remote engagement just being an accessory, the main show space could be your living space, your sanctuary? When we see a show, the memory of that show is pinned to that space where the show took place. What if, instead, we could pin the memory of a show to your home, to your car, to your office? What if that space is forever changed because of a phone call?
voidspace:
We’ll come into Lennox Mutual in more detail later, but I’m just thinking back to my own experience of that first call and how you very definitely ask people to talk about the space that they’re in, and to start that process of pinning the piece to that space. Is that something that’s common to all your work?
Evan Neiden:
We make a point in every Candle House experience to train the participant not only in how to engage with the show, but that they can engage with it in the first place. The accessibility of our work allows for people who may not have a tonne of experience with interactive art or immersive theatre (or even theatre in general) to try it out. We can’t start fully in the imaginative space of the show because they’re not going to be there with us. Not because they can’t, but because there’s no reason why they should be. It’s not their job. It’s our job, as in any good theatre piece, to induct them into the world of the show.
In CLAWS, that was an hour long, one act show, where you were sent an audio orientation guide in the world of the show beforehand, which trained you to be a “helpline representative.” In a Candle House experience, you’re never playing a character. You’re always yourself, but sometimes you’re given circumstances or additional context.
The orientation for CLAWS instructed participants to begin their show by asking “How can I help you?” Then, they were on their own. But that phrase alone is an induction. You’re buying in, you’re consenting to the rules of the world, and after that it’s a lot easier to engage because you’re not behind anymore. You’re right there with us.
voidspace:
For me, the induction is always key to whether an immersive or interactive experience is going to succeed or fail. In person you have so many tools you can use. You can use darkness, you can use haze, you can use music. There’s a lot that in-person induction can do. What’s the process been over the years of working out how to make that work in a fully remote experience?
Evan Neiden:
Onboarding is critical. It tells you, as a participant, whether or not you should bother with the rest of an experience. It is so easy to disengage; to just let go for a second, but that’s all it takes to leave your participant behind. You have to keep a point of contact every step of the way, and it must be comfortable, familiar, and something participant and performer can keep for the rest of the experience. That point of contact gets established in the onboarding.
In terms of Lennox Mutual, the onboarding went through a lot of different iterations, but the one we have now, the way one’s first session starts, is really central to continuation of the experience. I think Joel and Olivia can speak a little more to that.
voidspace:
Joel and Olivia, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how that initial worldbuilding works, particularly in relation to Lennox Mutual.
Joel Meyers:
Lennox Mutual is, on the face of it, a customer service phone tree, but there are worlds within, which is all I will say. Part of that engagement as a participant is changing your own space to fit the show. Those first moments of Lennox Mutual are central to that idea of you are constructing this space with us. That act of co-creation is important for the rest of the show.
Liv Behr:
Thinking about the importance of initiation in immersive pieces, and building a sense of comfort and familiarity: From the beginning, Lennox Mutual roots you very firmly in your space. An important part of Lennox Mutual is the denying of nothing, which is different from traditional theatre, which suspends disbelief to a certain extent. In order for us to deny nothing, we can’t deny that this is a new encounter. It’s over the phone, it’s odd for a lot of people. And so, we use the fact that the role of the customer service representative is a social script that a lot of people recognise and are very comfortable with, in the realm of stranger-to-stranger engagement. So that’s our wedge into your world, in a way that feels safe.
voidspace:
You’re taking something that’s grounded in reality and then gradually twisting it to 45 degrees, so that it becomes something else. Tell me a little more about how interactivity functions in your work.
Liv Behr:
You said that one of the reasons you created voidspace is because you wanted to have a venue where these different forms can talk to one another. You mentioned interactive fiction, gaming, live art, VR, all different kinds of forms. Lennox Mutual is a collageof a lot of different kinds of interactive engagement. We borrow from text adventure, ARG. There are aspects of psychotherapy, the customer service call form, tabletop games, meditation. All of these forms play into the experience in their own ways.
Joel Meyers:
It helps us create a collective experience, with a choose-your-own-adventure structure to the show. As you go through Lennox Mutual, you learn what the different corners of the experience are, and you will stumble upon doors that you didn’t know were there when you started. We see long-time participants of the show, who have their favourite corners and then branch out. But people tend to come back to whatever form of interactivity that is most comforting to them, which was part of our design process. Lennox Mutual is designed to give people different modes of engagement to choose from. There’s always something to push you and something to hold your hand, as you go through the experience.
voidspace:
That’s interesting. Thinking about the design and about pacing, given that you’re catering for different audience tastes. How do you go about structuring that?
Liv Behr:
There’s a well-known interactive fiction piece called Howling Dogs, which starts with a paragraph that the reader inhabits and comes back to. Gradually, as you leave and return to it, parts of the text change. We do something similar with Lennox Mutual, using the structure of the customer service phone tree. We organise all of these different genres through a customer service main menu that seems the same every time but hides gradual changes. You inhabit the main menu in a similar way to how you inhabit that one paragraph of the room in Howling Dogs.
Evan Neiden:
It’s worth mentioning one difference between Lennox Mutal and Howling Dogs: the advantage of live performance is that things change:sometimes based on your actions, sometimes based on what the representative thinks of you. Your relationship with Lennox Mutual grows over time, and so does its understanding of you, which is why every time you call back, you pick up where you left off. But it’s not just that. As the company starts to get to know you, things start to be curated more and more specifically to you.
voidspace:
You must have a hell of a spreadsheet back there.
Evan Neiden:
Who knows?
voidspace:
For me, the magic of live experience and of interactive performance is the fact that it can be reactive to the energy in the room. An interactive performer can judge the and unspoken communication from participants, and adjust their performance accordingly. How do you make those judgments in a remote, voice-only space, where you have far fewer cues to rely on than you would in an in-person experience?
Liv Behr:
Voices betray far more than we’d like.
Evan Neiden:
We’ve been at this a long time as Candle House and even just on Lennox Mutual. The workshop for Lennox Mutual has been running for almost two years, and we released the production phase on January 5 of this year. Body language may be an easier tell, but once you have worked out someone’s vocal tics and affectations, the way someone approaches an experience, or the way their voice changes, when you say one thing versus another, it tells you a great deal about a person. And our actors are specifically trained, both in our rehearsal process and just through the baptism by fire that is doing this experience. Each participant gives you their own masterclass in behaviour. So, before too long, those tics become recognisable.
The most critical part of understanding how to approach this sort of interaction, is knowing that people will always surprise you, that you can never be 100% sure. I think with body language there’s more of an established lexicon, so we think we’re 100% sure. But that can lead to misunderstandings, it can lead to mistakes. The nice thing about the voice is there is just enough uncertainty to keep you, both as performer and as participant, present, to keep question marks in your head. What exactly is it that this person is really saying to me? I can’t see them. I don’t have that to lean on. So, I really need to engage, which is how we get to a radical degree of honesty and vulnerability.
voidspace:
I think that’s very true. I suppose it strips away a lot of the unconscious biases that we may have as well, around appearances.
You perform Lennox Mutual mainly stateside, but some of your time slots also fit with European time zones. Are there any differences you’ve noticed in terms of locationality, culture or modes of engagement in different places?
Evan Neiden:
I think regionality factors less into it than differences between certain demographics. But again, people are always going to surprise you. At this point, in our shared zeitgeist, the image of a customer service line is so universal and weirdly pervasive that people engage with it in the same way. We start from a common language, and then people can sink into a singularity that is their own solo participation. But I think that happens over time.
Liv Behr:
In my experience, I’d say the biggest distinction is less region and more time of day. Who has the availability in the mornings, afternoons versus evenings. But if I had to point out a specific regional difference, I’d say the most skeptical and game-jacking participants are from America.
Evan Neiden:
Those are some of our favourite participants! There’s the question of how we protect against game-jackers. The answer is that we don’t want to protect against them.
Joel Meyers:
I think not every strategy is rewarded, necessarily, but every strategy is invited, in Lennox Mutual.
voidspace:
I was going to ask if you’ve had any game-jacking, or just behaviour that is totally off script.
Liv Behr:
We have a lot of people who try a lot of bizarre things, especially at the beginning. Like we said before, at first there’s the induction into the world, and that teaches you a little bit of how to engage enough to be comfortable and honest. But when people really start opening up to us and trying to figure out the different languages, the different codes of how to engage, I think drawing back to the personalities of every individual, they’re very different. And you learn a lot about someone based on the tactics they try. They’re so vast, the tactics people try.
Joel Meyers:
It’s also interesting to see the Reddit community that there is around Lennox Mutual. It’s given to you in a link at the end of each session that you have with Lennox Mutual. You don’t have to engage with it, but it’s there if you want. And it’s interesting to see the different kinds of people, the different kinds of contributions there are. There are people who have whole threads about figuring out how to “dial an extension.” There are people who use it as a journal entry, giving an account of each of their calls. People are pretty good about blocking out spoilers, but people also use the Reddit to discuss as a community whatever each call brought up for them.
It’s so interesting to see all those different kinds of participants come together and work with each other on digesting the experience.
voidspace:
Why did you choose Reddit as the place to site your fan community?
Evan Neiden:
Reddit is a last vestige of the oldest form of social media: the forum. I think what’s nice about a forum is that it encourages dialogue, but it’s still in print, in a way. It’s not like instant messaging. Itinvites more complete ideas, detailed discussion, and mutual understanding. A forum like Reddit encourages you to write more, and to explain more, and be more mindful of how you’re using your words, because you’re taking up more space. Because of that, if you take a look at the Reddit, a decent amount of participants are really thoughtful with their responses and contributions, with their dialogue with each other.
A lot of what’s discussed on the Reddit is very sensitive. People are willing to get vulnerable. I think that’s because Reddit can be one of the most anonymous social media sites out there, and because you are writing in a way that feels more complete.
voidspace:
I wonder if the type of show that Lennox Mutual is also attracts a particularly thoughtful and introspective kind of person. One question that comes up a lot in this space is the extent to which a participant community like that can fundamentally begin to change the nature of the experience itself. Is that something you’d say applies in the case of Lennox Mutual?
Joel Meyers:
We’ve been running this experience for almost two years now, and we just opened it to the public in January. It has evolved quite a bit from its initial conception, primarily based on our experience doing it for participants in workshop. In a very real way, everyone who is in that workshop is a co-author of the experience. Because it would not exist in its present form without that year of trying things, having people try to break things and seeing what we liked having broken, seeing what we didn’t. In one sense it has been created by the community, and in the production version of the show it still is. The community is still a part of it.
The other people who are doing the show around you are not absent from your experience of Lennox Mutual. I think that’s a very important part of it is it’s not a solo experience. Obviously, it’s you alone with the phone. But as Liv said earlier, we deny nothing. The show is not there to deny that there are other people doing this with you, that there is a community there, and that is very intentionally been baked into the foundation of what Lennox Mutual is.
voidspace:
When you’re thinking about an experience like this, is it almost possible to bake in how you want people’s relationships with each other to be? Do you want it to be competitive, do you want it to be collaborative?
Evan Neiden:
I think in some cases, a one-on-one experience can feel competitive, depending on how the show is structured. It can feel like you’re racing for the door.
For us, the idea was always to make it collaborative. As Joel and Liv have said, our original audiences are co-authors of the experience, and their time with us. The original experience was a pay-what-you-can thing that might as well have had a sign on it that said to participants: “Please wreck this!” And they did. And it was glorious. But we wanted to make something inherently collaborative, something that means that you’re not competing with anyone, that means that it benefits you to talk to people on the Reddit; to get every individual person following a discovery that someone just made, and maybe diving a little deeper into it, building on what people give you.
Just because one person gets something doesn’t mean someone else can’t. Although there are things in the shows that only one person ever may hear, ever in the entire run, and that might then disappear. But if that happens, it’s probably not because the person who heard that thing “won,” but because it was something created for them, or curated for them.
voidspace:
That’s amazing. What a gift. Lennox Mutual seems to carry a tension between the content that’s unsettling and stuff that’s going to put you into a more receptive state. And then,you’re inviting people to be open and vulnerable, to trust the experience to hold that.
How do you take care, during the creation of the experience, to honour and maintain that trust?
Joel Meyers:
There are narratives in Lennox Mutual. It is not just an aesthetic experience. There is story, there is a progression to it. As we were writing it, we would come across participants who seemed to be stalling even when there were options available. And we’d scratch our heads, wondering whether we not pushing them in the “right direction” to do what we thought they’d want to do. And it wasn’t that they were lost, it was that they chose to stay where they were. I talked earlier about there are different corners in Lennox Mutual. There are some corners that some people gravitate towards, and they choose to use their 20 minutes on the phone, at least part of it, to spend time in their favourite corner.
Our average participant does a call once a week. It becomes part of their schedule. It was definitely a surprise to us to find people who spend half of their call doing something that takes them in circles. But that’s because that is what they need from that time, and that has influenced our approach. There are unsettling aspects of Lennox Mutual that we want to be there, but that seeing that response from participants pushed us more toward a sense of also providing a theatre of care. There are elements of psychotherapy, to round out the experience and give people spaces to go, and spaces to just be. We’ve really tried to balance those two spaces.
Liv Behr:
When I think about this piece and how it targets the psyche, I think about how, generally speaking we have transitioned from a manually labouring to a mentally labouring society, about the neoliberal psychopolitics that have accompanied that shift, that have created a daily life where a lot of us are being mentally targeted through ads, platforms, and the way data that we produce through our engagement with those platforms and those ads is harnessed. Not to say that this is inherently bad: it’s just kind of a natural optimisation of the system that already existed, for intentions that were not sinister. But there’s so much information that people generally are very overwhelmed. And the way to survive in the online spaces, at least for me, is to curate very intentionally the kind of content I’m coming into contact with. I still have agency as an individual and I feel empowered online because I have the ultimate say over what I come in contact with, despite the multitudes of possibilities.
Bringing that into Lennox Mutual, as a response to and reflection of that existing reality: we definitely want to shake and wake people with the uncanny stuff, because there is a habit that you can fall into of just tuning out all of the buzzing, when it’s hard to kind of keep your focus on what you want and desire for yourself. When there is so much possibility in information that is pleasant, overwhelming, but above all just very stimulating, that it’s easy to switch off, to tune it out. So there’s an aspect where we want to shake and wake people up from that tuned out state. Some people need that.
Then there is the aspect of care. I know every writer on this project, all the performers and even the characters scripted into the project have different objectives, have different ideas of how they’d like to engage with the participant and where they like to push the participant. The thing I really love about this project is the aspects of it that are meditative and healing and pulling back from the noise of everyday life. But the only time to get people to those places is if they want to go there or if they need to go there, which they will end up going to, because the system of Lennox Mutual has such possibility that it allows the desire of the participant to naturally emerge. Like Joel said, participants know where to go to find what they need. Sometimes we give them what they want. Sometimes we give them what we think they need.
voidspace:
What is the challenge that you are proudest of overcoming on this project?
Joel Meyers:
My background is very much not in immersive experiences. I come from the world of scripted theatre, scripted film, television. So, exploring this medium is such a gift and such a challenge. If you’re writing a scripted conversation and you have no idea what one half of the conversation is going to be, that’s the challenge in this type of work. You can think of all the different things you think participants will say, and they’ll never say any of those things. That’s a huge challenge, but it’s also such a gift, because the work becomes something greater than the sum of its parts. This is not a project that ever could have been planned. It happened completely by accident.
It’s funny, part of Lennox Mutual came out of a little workshop that Candle House did called The Hearth, that asked participants to write a five-minute experience. I often joke to Evan and Olivia: “Are we done? Is The Hearth over?” Here we are two years later, and we’re still doing it. But experiencing something like this, coming out of sitting in a zoom room together for two years is such a joy and such an interesting experience. It’s not an experience I ever thought I would have.
Liv Behr:
I think the thing I’m most proud of is continuing to have the courage to show up and not only write Lennox Mutual, but do the calls as a performer and artist, because it’s really scary. I told Evan yesterday that I was terrified still, I’m one of the performers who has been doing this the longest. It’s such an intimate way of seeing someone and being seen. That is inherent to the arts and my background in traditional theatre, but this medium requires different skills, to do that at a much more intimate level. And the reward is fantastic, and it also is terrifying. So, I’m most proud of my courage to just do it at all.
Joel Meyers:
Part of my day job is to be in the cast of Harry Potter on Broadway for 1600 people. And sometimes I’ll have a Lennox Mutual show at night after a Harry Potter show. I’m much more nervous for the Lennox Mutual one-on-one show than I am for the three-and-a-half-hour epic that is Harry Potter. Because Lennox Mutual is such a vulnerable space to go as a performer. And you never know what you’re going to get. There’s always a moment of anxiety before you pick up the phone. The phone is its own source of anxiety in our culture anyway. I come from a generation that never talks on the phone. So, to hit ‘call’ to someone you don’t know, when you’re playing x number of characters, and you’re trying to give them a good experience, it’s a really scary thing. You have to overcome that fear, both in the writer’s room and in the performer room.
Evan Neiden:
Lennox Mutual could only could have happened by mistake. This behemoth of a project came out of a five-minute experience from The Hearth combined with a totally unrelated concept I was working on called that just happened to be called Lennox Mutual. And it kept growing. It kept growing, it kept changing. And every week we checked in, and there was more to it. There were more ideas, there was more generation, and we made the decision to give it an audience within the first month, when it was an infinitesimally small fraction of what it is now.
That alchemy of circumstances led to something that just would not stop growing. And now here we are with this thing that, had we set out to do it, I don’t think it ever would have gotten done, purely because it’s not possible. A project like this has no business existing, but exist it does. We’re all very glad it does, because I think it’s one of the best mistakes we’ve all ever made.
Lennox Mutual was so different too, from anything else I’ve made. I created a five month long alternate reality experience for 50 people, and one would think that would prepare me for durational storytelling, and things like this. But it’s different when you’re starting from a square one for each participant. You’re taking elements of that long-form arc, but making it a distinct track for each person while still acknowledging the presence of everyone else in the space. The balancing act is unreal. I think it’s the culmination of all the work that Candle House has done, and a lot of the work that the three of us have done artistically over the years, both within and without Candle House.
The biggest challenge for me as an artistic director, however, is just trying to figure out how to explain to people what this is. Confusion and intrigue is where immersive theatre lives. The only reason our corner of the industry exists at all is curiosity. Is that people see something different and think it looks interesting and give it a shot. Inspiring an audience is not instant. It takes time. With this project in particular, as it came into form, we realised we were all going to have to be pretty patient, because we were playing a much longer game than we thought.
voidspace:
So much of that resonates with me, particularly the best things being the things that you could never have consciously planned to happen.
What does the future hold for this project? I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like March is enough time, and I want to get those calls in.
Joel Meyers:
Well, there’s nothing left but time.
Evan Neiden:
No, the run is not ending in March. You’re our first announcement of that, I guess, but no, the run is very much not ending in March. It’s our initial batch of tickets. However, you know this is an experience that takes time. It happens in instalments. So, to those reading: there’s no time like the present to get started.
voidspace:
What advice do you have to aspiring creators in this field? Whatever this field is.
Joel Meyers:
I think it’s something that you have to be thrown into headfirst, as I was. Not even taking a dive, you have to be thrown in. Traditional media isn’t going anywhere. Those things will still exist. We are in a moment of cultural shift around what kinds of entertainment people want, and I think that there is a bit of a wariness right now around some of the more established but also static forms of live entertainment.
There’s a lot of interest in Candle House’s type of storytelling and =performance where you, the participant, are the co-author. I think we live in the social media age. Everyone wants to be the star of their own story. And something like Lennox Mutual is very much a place where I think that there is a lot of depth, beyond what something like social media offers. But it is going to push you out of your comfort zone, from the comfort of your own home, which is really unique.
There’s a big conversation right now about accessibility of theatre and who can afford to come to New York City or Chicago and go to Hamilton. Well, here’s live theatre that you can do from wherever you are. I think that’s a big part of the future and what people are looking for=. And I think that these kinds of experiences are only going to increase and gain popularity, because of how accessible they are.
Evan Neiden:
Now more than ever, people crave individual experience. You see it in audience behaviour, in bigger audiences, at concerts, at shows. I think it was always headed this way. But the pandemic accelerated it because many of us got very used to all of our entertainment being on-demand, all of our entertainment being curated just for us. TikTok took off and streaming services quadrupled in volume. People got very used to their entertainment being fully on demand for them, fully curated just for them. Now, when people are in big rooms with a lot of people watching a show, they feel too distant, they feel like they have no agency over what’s going on. And I think that’s a source of some of the different behaviour that we see now: people on their phones, people talking, people holding up signs that block fellow concert goers, or rushing the stage, or screaming out at the artist at times that maybe they wouldn’t have beforehand.
I think in traditional proscenium entertainment the distance can feel too great now in many cases. People want more alternatives: one day they might choose a proscenium show, another day they might do a show where they can get closer to things, another day they might do a show where they don’t leave their house and all of the attention is on them. All of those things can exist together. I think sometimes the conversation, especially in the immersive space, turns towards the question of whether all theatre is heading towards an immersive model. Is traditional theatre dying? I think that’s the wrong conversation to have. One doesn’t have to die for the other to live.
voidspace:
It’s not Highlander, is it?
Evan Neiden:
It’s not. People are craving variety, more choices that they can make, and catering to individual experience is more in demand than ever. So, as far as it’s monetarily feasible (because starting out, it’s often not), I urge new creators to embrace intimacy and closeness. And whether the space you’re in is physical or on the phone, it’s still a space you’re in together.
Embrace intimacy, and embrace the individuality of your participants, because that’s something that people are going to crave more and more and more. And if you can provide that for someone, I think you learn a lot of the lessons that theatre teaches us, in a faster and more holistic way, because it’s so immediate, because you are in the space with one other person and they’re responding to you. It’s live ammo. They’re responding to you immediately and with no barrier. Embrace that.
Liv Behr:
I would implore my younger self, and other artists who are trying to do this work, to just listen to the voices in your head and believe them. Just sit and listen to them. Even if you need to run away from yourself and find other things, or find yourself through running away, just keep rooting it in the personal and valuing the personal, because the universal is encapsulated in the specific. And if you just keep denying your impulses, denying what you think, what you believe, denying your perspective, in search of some other thing that you think is greater, you’re going to lose the only in you have to the rest of the world. I think creating a space of sacredness around that and respecting that and listening is super important.
Evan Neiden:
One last thing: Don’t take everything so seriously. Sometimes things are really funny or really ridiculous. It gets easier if you smile.