Sometimes [gratefulness] helps us to really navigate challenging waters, and also take a stand for what isn’t working in the world and in our lives. It’s better able to inform us to know what we want to stand up against when we know what we’re standing for – and what we’re standing in – as our deep values. ~ Kristi Nelson
In this conversation, Luke and Kristi explore the unifying fact of our mortality; serious illness as a teacher; opportunities to deepen connection and compassion in social justice work; practices to orient and reorient ourselves to gratefulness; love as a transformative force, and much more. The podcast, ‘Movers, Shakers & Social Changers’ was launched this year by Luke Bache from Sweden, with the intention to speak to people who are remembering our innate way of being, compassion, interdependence, and presence. You can hear the episode with Kristi above, and more of Luke’s interviews can be found on Apple Music and Spotify.
Transcript
Luke Bache:
Hi, my name’s Luke Bache, and welcome to Movers Shakers and Social Changers. In this podcast, I speak to people who have had a profound impact on many people’s lives, including my own. These are people who I consider pioneers in their respective fields, and who I truly believe are stepping into this new story of interconnectivity, compassion and presence. Today, I am thrilled and humbled to be talking to Kristi Nelson. Kristi is currently the Executive Director of the Network for Grateful Living, where you can find beautiful quotes, meditations, articles online at gratefulness.org.
Kristi has spent virtually her entire adult life working in the fields of social justice and social impact. In her early 30s, she was diagnosed with stage-4 cancer, and due to this and her spending many months getting treatment in hospital rooms, the question arose of, what if this is what my life looks like? Due to this question and others arising, it allowed her deep wisdom, compassion and gratitude for every moment to shine through. So she’s been really living this way since, and I’m so, so excited that she’s written this down in a book called Wake Up Grateful: The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted. That’s what we really talk about in this pod, and it really, really touched my heart. So I’m so thrilled to share it, I hope you enjoy.
Kristi Nelson:
How will I live all of my moments not knowing anything about my future, how long I have to live, whether it’s days, weeks, months or years? How will I live into this day, and where am I directed to orient myself when I take nothing for granted? What’s left?
It’s nice to see you.
LB:
Yeah, likewise. So, I guess before I set the context, I will actually just say that, where are you in the States?
KN:
You’re wondering where I am? I’m in Massachusetts.
LB:
Okay, great. I’m in Sweden and before we started this conversation now, we just took a moment to breathe together and connect. Just to say that even if we are physically distant, just doing that, I feel much more connected.
KN:
It’s so true.
LB:
So thanks for that reminder to slow down, my excited parts were ready to just jump in and hog the conversation. So the context I would like to set, I guess in the context of what’s going on in the world, that for me, over the last few months, we’ve gone from a place of a lot of fear and uncertainty, and then my perception is it’s a lot of clarity has started to emerge of things that need to change. I think this is maybe potentially best represented in the Black Lives Matter movement and all the protests, and the things I’ve read that have actually already started to change, like decommissioning for the police, etcetera, etcetera.
So within your life, from what I understand about you, in the ’80s, you spent a lot of time working for social justice, environmental issues, Peace Development Fund. I’m sure I heard that you tied yourself to a nuclear bomb.
KN:
We chained ourselves to them. There was…, Anti-nuclear activism was really big when I was coming of age in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and so I was involved in a bunch of efforts that were that. And civil disobedience was something that I had grown up with, so it was a comfortable way for me of taking a stand.
LB:
So within that, I’m wondering how you went from potentially marrying that movement with a spiritual social change, that both can coexist. I think it’s important that we can stand in not condoning things, but potentially try not to condemn someone in the condoning. Does that make sense?
KN:
Yeah.
LB:
Yeah, I think that’s where I’d like to start. Just how you went from the ’80s through your potential movements, civic disobedience, environmental issues, to maybe realizing that a more spiritual, maybe heartfelt element was needed, and how that is emerging within you today.
KN:
So let me just take a moment, because that’s such a big, beautiful deep starting space for the conversation. What I experienced when I was growing up, so in the ’70s and ’80s I would say, so in my late teens and 20s, and social justice has always been really important to me and always important in my family, and I engaged in social justice work from a place of feeling both “othered” and “othering” of other people. So for me, as a woman, as a young person, I had a lot … It was really important work for me to come to terms with how oppression was both systematized, how it was expressed, and how it was internalized for me.
Then also, how I was a perpetrator of oppressive tendencies in the world, to try to take responsibility for that. And doing a lot of work around class privilege, I was really looking at class issues, which in the United States, compared to Sweden, are rampant divisions, and how power is often allocated in our country. And I did work on race and gender and a lot of looking at oppression, which was really important to me. And in that, came to a deeper place of connectedness with other people, with myself, and wanting to feel into the humanity of what was underneath so much of the struggle. How people who were often, a lot of the people who were working at, for instance, nuclear power facilities or who I was othering – they were doing their jobs.
It was an economic issue often, and so coming to a deeper understanding and engaging in a lot of listening project work. So trying to really listen into, as an environmentalist, what was happening inside the loggers who were cutting down trees. To try to engage in those conversations. What was happening inside the people who were really scared of women entering the workforce and taking jobs, so these men who were scared of what felt like their economic security and livelihood and everything. Trying to open up a larger wellspring of compassion in myself. So I think it started to shift and I started being involved in those kinds of conversations, and then through the ’80s, my work was food justice and environmental justice and peace and justice and racial justice and gender justice work.
And I still feel like I’m doing that work, which is really important. As a distinction, it’s the place inside myself from which I am doing the work, feels different. And how the work might look in the world looks different. Yet, the felt sense of what matters to me and what my core driving values and ethics are, those feel similarly situated. They feel grounded, they feel old inside of me, inside my family, my principles and beliefs. And you know, I had my own cancer journey, where I faced death when I was very young, so in my early 30’s, and feel like it really changed how I wanted to approach that work coming out of that experience. Not knowing whether or not I would live another week, month, year, how was I going to approach being a force for good in the world and being a force for social change in the world with the awareness of impermanence so embedded in my body and so embedded in my awareness?
That one thing that unites all of us is our mortality, our fleetingness, the not-knowing, the uncertainty with which we live, and the fact that death is going to be our ultimate experience for all of us. We don’t know when, we don’t know how, but it’s being alive now and valuing aliveness and knowing that we’re all going to die is a very commonly held powerful experience, and united me to a lot of people in my experience of facing death and it changed how I wanted to express my action for social change in the world.
LB:
In that reflection of impermanence, was it a heart opening process that brought forth your desire to still act in the world, but to act from a different place? I’m wondering what it was within that illness, that lesson, that life moment.
KN:
Beautiful question. There was a heart opening for me, and I think part of that was, I was many months in a hospital room, really weeks and weeks, and so I was 32 years old and at that age, there’s a vitality that would seem to really argue with being confined to a room like a large closet and tethered to intravenous’ and really being subjected to a lot of surgeries and procedures and diagnostic efforts to try to figure out what was going on. So it was a really intense period of time from a vibrancy, I was living in New York City, I was a runner, I was doing yoga, I was meditating. I had this vital outer life, and that experience of the forced retreat, the dharma experience of being …
It was my reluctant teacher, I was the reluctant student of this experience of being now isolated, very much alone, often in isolation because of my susceptibility to contagion and things. So being in this little room, and all of a sudden, the people in the world who I was interfacing with were people who were coming to draw my blood, people who were coming to bring me food, people who were cleaning my room and taking the trash away, people who were checking my vital signs every single day, many times a day, and doctors who were coming in and residents and people coming in the mornings.
I really had to reckon with, what if this is my whole reality the rest of my life? What if I die here? What if I never emerge from this experience? That just gives me goosebumps head to toe. The recognition that we don’t get to be in control of the locus, the environment for our impact, but we get to be in control of how we situate ourselves as having a capacity for impact, even in the smallest universe we occupy. When the context shrinks to such a small space, then what expands? So the heart expands, for me, my sense of love and sisterhood and shared humanity with all of these people just blew open and they became the world that I could impact, and it was through love – it was literally only through love and compassion and a generosity of spirit towards people who were working minimum wage jobs and taking care of me. I think I recognized the potency that I had and that we all have in every moment to embody and express love, and that that could help change the world.
LB:
Yeah. I want to just feel into that a moment before asking you another question.
KN:
Please, thank you.
LB:
Within that moment, as you said, when you realized the lack of control that we all have in what happens to us, but I guess we can choose our response somehow, and was it a conscious choice going forth that you thought, “If I get through this, I will commit my life to grateful living.” Or was it that you had been forced into this situation that it removed the boundaries, or it removed the barriers of what I believe we already are anyway, if that makes sense? Do you feel that it was an and/or, can I say that? Was it both? Do you feel what I’m trying to say?
KN:
I think I do. What was awakened in me, so it was an awakening, it wasn’t a conscious choice, what was awakened in me was the recognition of how will I … In the question, so here’s the guiding question for me was, how will I live all of my moments not knowing anything about my future, how long I have to live, whether it’s days, weeks, months or years? How will I live into this day, and where am I directed to orient myself when I take nothing for granted? What’s left? So when you take nothing for granted, then all of a sudden there’s this strange experience of both noticing everything, so nothing taken for granted means you’re alive and awake and alert to the awareness of everything, and then also that all of it can go in any split second?
So what really matters? What’s beyond the everything that you’re noticing, that can also take place in a small hospital room or in the vastness of the beauty of nature or in a city full of beautiful faces walking down the street, when you meet eyes and you just melt into a shared humanity? When you take nothing for granted, it’s so enlivening of our interconnectedness and our sense of belonging to the world and each other, and at the exact same time, and I’ve really never quite said this before, but at the exact same time, it strips everything away and locates the importance of what remains for me right in the heart of the matter. The heart space and what lives on, which for me is only love, becomes of the most pivotal importance.
So then how do you live when you know those things are true? One, you’re completely awake to the extraordinary-ness of the world and life. Two, you’re absolutely in contact with, all of that can go in a heartbeat, and what remains is really I think just what we do from love, what we offer of love, how we embody love, move from love. So in that, it was that kind of place of, “Wow. Awake, awake. Wow, wow, wow.” And also, it can all go. So what’s left?
LB:
How have you managed? I’m not sure managed is the right word, but how have you …
KN:
It’s a great word, actually. It’s actually a great word.
LB:
How have you managed to continue living that? Because I haven’t been through a defining life/death potential moment like that, and I have, however, had some moments where I’ve said, “Okay, I’m going to continue to live like this.” Then life happens and busy-ness happens, and then I’m back, I’m back in my habits and I’m back in the trance. So I’m wondering how you, how have you managed to continue to hold that container?
KN:
It’s such a great question, and all I can say is it is the most humbling practice. I am such an imperfect practitioner, and yet I’m a committed practitioner. So I think having studied various spiritual disciplines in my life, having studied mindfulness for many years and yoga and various ways of being, I think those ways of being anchor us as commitments and we return again and again to the principles which underlie those things. It is such a messy journey, I am the first to be honest that I struggle so much with remembering. For me, sometimes also, remembering what matters isn’t always this most elegant relaxed easy way of being. Sometimes that same awareness of my mortality and how fleeting everything is and how precious everything is inspires a sense of urgency in me, a sense of intensity that can also be the antithesis of what serves me in certain ways.
So that I wake up early and I want to just get everything out of every moment of every day. I can drive myself and people crazy, because I’m so wanting to soak in everything and everything matters. When we don’t take a future for granted, it does truncate everything and brings everything into the now. That’s both a beautiful place to live, but it doesn’t always inspire in me the sense of calm that you see embodied in a lot of people who say “the power of now” and “be here now,” and I have this picture of somebody sitting in lotus position. For me, it makes me want to be engaged and alive and healing relationships that need healing and doing things that need doing.
So I think where I want to go back to is, though it’s not easy, none of these commitments, none of these awarenesses, when we awaken in any way to truth, to maintain that remembering, reorienting ourselves over and over again, it takes practice and it’s messy and it’s human. Being human without a practice and without those anchoring reminders of what matters is really messy. For me, there’s also this human, what we call the great fullness of life is everything. That everything is included and everything belongs. When you live inside that truth and you live with your eyes wide open and your heart wide open, you see what is challenging and difficult and goes against the grain, also what you might have believed to be true or wished to be true, and yet you hold space for it.
Like what Jon Kabat-Zinn calls the “full catastrophe.” The full catastrophe of life, how do we engage with all of that? I think giving ourselves permission to work with “what is” in whatever ways we can, so sober seeing, eyes wide open, heart wide open, being fully present for whatever is true is not always easy, but it’s always worth it. There’s a lot of returning again and again to remembering. “Oh, yes. Life matters so much and it’s precious and it’s fleeting, and how does that reground me in what matters?” Because now I’m off on some story or I’m off in some priority that’s not real to my heart, so how do we have those anchoring practices, reminders, principles? Life is a gift. What are you doing with that gift right now, Kristi? That question always lands me back into my heart and helps me reorient.
LB:
I guess within that, so if I’m going to put in the word gratitude and grateful living, I have done various gratitude practices and I have seen certain benefits for example, thinking of things I’ve been grateful for, I’m really feeling the felt sense of gratitude come into my body. That has been a wonderful process, a wonderful tool, and I think from my understanding, it really does start to change the baseline of one’s physiology.
KN:
Yes.
LB:
And I also feel that I’ve seen the word or the use of gratitude often associated with the word should, and whenever I hear the word should, I think of someone’s inner critic and the judges around, “Oh, but I should, I should feel grateful, but I should feel grateful for this.” So I’m wondering how gratefulness, as you said, the gratefulness, how it can encompass when we are just going through a rough time? How we can have a grateful lens for our inner experience without it being judgmental that it should be something other than it is, because …
KN:
Absolutely. It’s such a good question, I don’t mean to cut you off. Were you going … Okay. What I hear you asking is what a lot of people are interested in, which is gratitude feels good. So we all … When you get something you want or you make something happen that you want to have happen, gratitude’s a great feeling. We love also inspiring it in other people, and yet it’s super fleeting. Gratitude evaporates as quickly as the rose dies on the vine or the sun goes behind a cloud, or the meal that we were so craving and making for somebody turns out to be a flop or whatever. It’s like those kinds of things.
I think gratefulness lives at a much deeper level. I think that’s really key, and part of … In writing the book, I really identified what I think are some key principles based on Brother David Steindl-Rast’s teachings about gratefulness and grateful living. Really the first one is that life is the gift. Life itself being the gift. If we orient to that, and this moment being the gift, not what’s happening being the gift, but “Oh, I’m here. I’m alive. Life right now is a gift.” Then every time we can be present to that gift in the moment, like every time we can receive our lives gratefully in any way, we’re aware that we’re always receiving.
It’s not whether the sun is out or we get the gift we want or the meal turns out the way that we want or we feel the way that we want, it’s that being alive is actually the underlying gift in all things. When we take that for granted, that’s when we suffer the most. Because we want things to be different, and circumstances to be different, and we lose sight in some ways of the fact that we’re here, and even if it’s hard, within all moments of life, there are opportunities, which is what Brother David really talks about a lot. Every moment is offering us opportunities, and those opportunities are in really intense difficulties. We’re really dealing with a lot of difficulties right now in the world, and in our country, I think we’re dealing with them in spades. It’s just an incredible voluminous breathtaking surge right now of things that feel really challenging.
So I think doing that process of stopping, looking before we act like, “What is the opportunity? What can I learn right now, even if it’s really hard? What am I called to do from my heart? Where am I called to act?” So being in that relationship where it’s not reactive, but it’s actually responsive to what’s available in the moment. Sometimes I go back to that hotel room, the hospital room where I was, a very small hotel room, a very strange one, the hospitality of the hospital, and what was available to me then? What was the opportunity? I think I was, without having known anything about grateful living, I was in really difficult circumstances and arriving to the conclusion, what is possible for me right now? If this is my life and this is all that my life ever is, what’s the opportunity? Who can I love? Because that was important, that became really important to me, who am I able to love? What am I able to learn? What can I surrender to in some way, so that I’m not in resistance all the time? What am I meant to know here? What’s opening, what’s cracking open?
So there’s always, in those things, all of those things are to be grateful for. They’re not the typical things, the gratitude, we think of what inspires gratitude. But if we can find those places where in any circumstance we’re able to cultivate a grateful orientation to the fact that life is this underlying significant gift, we can remember that, we can reconnect to that, to that sacred place that’s true, that we know to be true, and then look for the opportunities, then we’ll always find that place where gratefulness can be alive in us no matter what we’re dealing with. Sometimes it helps us really navigate challenging waters, and also take a stand for what isn’t working in the world and in our lives. It’s better able to inform us to know what we want to stand up against when we know what we’re standing for and what we’re standing in as our deep values.
LB:
I love that. It sounds somewhat like a chicken and egg thing, but when we ask those questions, it allows that inner spaciousness to emerge. When that inner spaciousness emerges, I’m guessing it allows the questions to be fully heard. As you said, like a response to actually be grounded in, a sense of, “What do I want to learn?”
KN:
Yeah. I think that’s where possibility emerges is out of spaciousness. Contraction and how we typically live our lives doesn’t generate a whole lot of sense of possibility or new ideas or solutions, creativity emerges out of spaciousness, and yet we’re a culture, especially here, I think so loathe to embrace spaciousness. It’s really challenging. And that urgency that I was citing, can be both personal and systemic urgency. They’re so reinforced. Everything has to happen now and we’re past due and you should be here in your life and you should be here in your life, and you should be grateful and you should …
LB:
It’s suffocating, isn’t it?
KN:
Excuse me, what? Complicating?
LB:
It’s suffocating just you saying that, my breath is like a weight coming down on me.
KN:
I think that’s a great contrast – suffocation versus spaciousness. Just right now, thinking about George Floyd and what is suffocating, that just comes to mind and heart and grief. But how are we being suffocated? How are other people being suffocated by life right now? I think is a really powerful question, and what’s our place in bringing that sense of spaciousness and possibility to the world that can make for a different future, a better future, a just future, a loving future, a safe future? I think approaching those questions from that place, that space offers a spaciousness to act, not just react, and to act from powerful new solutions that the world really needs, that the heart is going to help generate those powerful new visions and ideas and remedies for what we’re suffering from so much in this world, which is so much. We’re suffering so much right now.
LB:
Yeah. I really resonate with that, finding that different place to act from, a different place to act from.
KN:
Yeah, and acting is important. It’s not about just … The action is really important, doing, the doing that we’re called to do, but sourcing that from a place that’s actually … I call it the long haul of loving the world. Sustainable in the face of the long haul of loving the world, and loving our sisters and brothers. Being over 60 now, it’s hard to even fathom that I have gotten to 60! I never imagined in my wildest dreams, and trying to honor all the experience that’s allowed me to be here right now and say, “How does that inform how I want to live this life in whatever days remain?” The great unknown, the great mystery of what remains for any of us at any moment. That question really guides me.
LB:
Yeah. In your book, you’ve spoken about so many questions that my … That different parts in there like, “I would love to think through that question, I’d love to think through that question.” I’m presuming in your book, you have some I guess guidelines and questions that one can bring into one’s life?
KN:
I do. The book was … Thank you for asking. The book was quite the journey. Writing this book – it’s my first book and will likely be my last book. It was so hard to write. I had all the shoulds, I should I be grateful, I should be grateful. It was a really deeply challenging practice to write a book, and to finish a book. My mother died while I was writing the book, and that was a deep grief and it really tested everything about grateful living for me really in a way. To go through six months in hospice with her and go through the end of her life, and then after her life, and the whole time trying to write this book. To accept that was what my reality was, there was pushing back against it.
But the book, I digress, the book was designed to really help be a practical guide, as well as a philosophical guide. So my story is woven in as the place where all of this becomes credible in my experience and tested in my experience, so that for me, a way of life or a way of being that can survive these deep tests is worthy. It shows its rigor and its robustness in the story that I weave through. What does it mean to face uncertainty in a really deep way? So each chapter, there’s 10 chapters that are about different parts of life where we struggle, and those really have deep questions I think and practices. So I try to say, “Here are some practices that can help you reconnect to that sense of perspective.”
That perspective is really important and we lose perspective all the time. So the book is a lot about how to reorient to a grateful perspective, and the questions, I hope they are as good as the ones that are moving you here. There’s a lot of questions. There’s at least 100 questions in there.
LB:
I love questions.
KN:
I am so glad you love questions, I do too. They’re meant to be sources of inspiration for reflection.
LB:
Yeah, I love that. I love questions. I think it’s honoring the inner wisdom of someone when you ask a question, and I so, so enjoy that.
KN:
Thank you.
LB:
I would also like to ask, for the people listening, is there something that you do when you wake up in the morning? Because I really do think that how one starts one’s day just sets us up for how we are in the world, and I’m wondering if part of the grateful living, there is a practice, there is something that you do when you open your eyes each day that you could share.
KN:
Yes. I agree. David Whyte, the poet, has said something like, basically, “The office of prayer is most open at a new dawn.” So into all of our lives … I’ve probably completely wrecked the quote, but it’s something to that spirit…that basically we’re most able to touch divinity, and I call that the liminal space. So when we first wake up, liminality, and we’re in that very ethereal space of not quite awake and not still asleep, and we also resist a lot of things that happen in there like, “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The mind wants to jump in and “I’m really frustrated to have to be awake.”
So part of Wake Up Grateful is a practice, which is really to just linger in that liminality. The invitation is to not do anything yet, but to actually take, even if it’s only 30 seconds, when you notice that you’re awake, notice what you’re grateful for before anything has happened yet. So that gratitude becomes situated as being able to be in advance, it’s a preexisting condition. It already exists just in the first breath. It exists in the body that’s able to even move and the heart that is still beating, in the eyes that are able to open, in our senses that are able to attune us to the space where we are. The breath that warms our nostrils and that nourishes our body.
So to take literally 30 seconds or 30 minutes and just remain in bed in that liminal state noticing what there is to be grateful for before anything has yet happened. That helps us orient to gratitude as unconditional. As long as we’re alive, it doesn’t require the things happening to us and for us and that we make happen that we think gratitude is connected to. So it helps to uncouple it from those expectations and occurrences and lands it in the real experience of simply being alive, again another day. So there’s so much to be grateful for, and to work with that inquiry first thing in the morning is a really beautiful gift, a way to orient yourself to “Look at how my legs can move me off this bed.” If they can, not everybody’s can…
That’s also the awareness of privilege. It’s a privilege to have a body that moves, not everybody’s body can get them out of bed. It’s a privilege to have eyes that can open and see, not everyone has eyes that can open and see. It’s a privilege to be able to love. So locating ourself inside the privileges that exist in our very being without condition is the sustainable place to orient our lives to gratefulness. That’s available to us, especially first thing in the morning I think.
LB:
Yeah. Wow, thank you. Thank you for that. I feel my heart is really just softened and opened during that. Yeah, thank you for that.
KN:
You’re welcome. Thank you. Such a joy to talk to you, Luke.
LB:
Yeah. Yeah, likewise. I guess my last question would just be, when’s your book out, Kristi? When can I buy your book?
KN:
It’s crazy that people can pre-order it already. Thank you for asking. It is on sale in November, it was supposed to come out in September and then literally COVID, this whole COVID-19 pandemic changed the schedule of a lot of things. So it’s going to be a really different book launch, because the opportunity to gather with people and go meet people and sign books or whatever people do typically, that’s not going to be available. So I hope for more online opportunities like this. This is so rich and meaningful to me. Wake Up Grateful, and it’s my name or whatever, you can Google that and it’s available all over the place as a pre-order right now, and then on November 23rd it’s actually available in stores.
LB:
Great. I guess I’m trying to finish conversations with reflections at the moment, as I think it’s nice to reflect.
KN:
Beautiful.
LB:
What can I reflect on? Reflect on the joy of pausing and connecting with someone before starting a conversation, like we did, just to really meet that person without words. I’m very grateful for that. Extremely grateful for the questions you have asked that have opened up places and spaces in me, and the thought that gratefulness can be regardless of outer conditions. I really, really, how that’s landed in me very deeply. So that’s my reflections from our conversation.
KN:
So beautiful. I’ll reflect to you that your capacity for presence and for attunement is extraordinary and is a real blessing to be in connection with. I feel you so here and so heart opened and a real deep space between us. It’s really an honor to sit with people who are so capable of their own reflection and listening and asking and inquiring. You have that really fully expressed, so thank you.
LB:
Thank you, Kristi. I’ve so enjoyed it, so enjoyed that.
KN:
Thank you, me too, Luke. I wish… Someday we will meet hopefully in person.
LB:
Yeah, that would be absolutely lovely. Thanks very much for listening. If this episode moved you in any way and you’d like to share, or if you’d like to request a guest that has deeply inspired you, then I’d love to hear from you at [email protected]. This episode and the lovely music was produced and editing by Ivan Lupaka, who you can also follow @IvanTheDJ on Instagram and social media. Thanks, take care.
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