Living Your Legacy

Kristin Maxwell:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind. I am your host, Kristin Maxwell. In this show, we explore the process of transformation and give you tools and strategies that you can use to transform your own life. Today I am excited to be talking to Carew Papritz. Carew is the author of The Legacy Letters, which is a multiple award-winning book that captures a dying father’s letters to his unseen children, children he’ll never meet. As a Renaissance man with an adventurous heart, Carew says he has an undying curiosity to see and explore the world. From his background, you can tell that he actually lives into this. He’s got a background that extends from working as a backcountry ski guide, a river guide, to writing on war as a freelance journalist, to graduating from UCLA film school and working on films in Hollywood, to working as a cowboy, to becoming an award-winning author. Anyway, he is creating a legacy. It’ll be fun to talk to him today. Carew, welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind.

Kristin Maxwell:

That’s lovely. I’m just going to ask. I’m kind of going sideways with this. But the conscious love of people, what would you say that is? How do you experience that?

Carew Papritz:

Another probably part to your question, your original question, was when, in the writing of my book, The Legacy Letters, here I was working as a cowboy out on this ranch, and I was the only person out there. I was the soul ranch as it were, far from anybody. You couldn’t see a light to save your life. 

That’s how isolated I was. As a result, in the writing of the book, it was a very powerful experience over a period of five years. I would work as a cowboy during the day and write late at night into the wee hours of the morning. I felt very naked to myself and to the universe. So I think another part I was able to take when I came sort of back into the world and back into book signings and back into life was taking these words that were written with such openness.

I was so amazed at how people wanted to open up to me because of those words. As an author, you’re always, “Oh, that’s very, very nice.” At a certain point, I began to realize I was less an author and more of a messenger or a conduit for these people to open up. And extraordinary moments, constant moments where people were saying, “Your book affected me in this way or this way or this way,” or “Your words did that.” Gosh, what a perfect storm of my love of people combined with this.  What do you want to call it? This nakedness, I guess, is a great, powerful word, that they were just willing to open up to me. They’re like, “Wow, you did this through your words. We’re going to say the same thing in like back to you.” Extraordinary moments, one after the other.

Kristin Maxwell:

There’s some way in which when you are open when you give or show up in such an open way, it creates, I guess, that space for other people to tap into that openness themselves, to experience it.

Carew Papritz:

It’s almost such a simple formula, right? I mean, do unto others as they do unto you. It’s like, well, if you’re open to others, others will be open unto you. I think therein lies the secret sauce of humanity right there, combined with civility and putting out that sense of wanting to love your fellow human being. And they get it. People know when they’re being loved.

Kristin Maxwell:

But what I’m laughing at a little bit, it’s like all you have to do is just be open to others. The problem is we have so much stuff that we lay on top of ourselves that shut us down. You have to remember to be open, almost, and to pull those things back.

Carew Papritz:

I think that’s part of that whole mindfulness movement that’s come about, which is interesting because to throw out mindfulness is very, very easy, but to actually make it a habit, that’s probably one of the things that I’ve been really trying to do. Well, I’ve been doing it for years, but I still have to do it every day. I mean, if I go to sleep at night, take a moment and say, “Hey, what am I thankful for today?” Just a brief 15 seconds. Hey, this was good. And then you wake up in the morning and you start off with this. All right. How am I going to approach this day? Or even during the middle of the day, I also like to say things like taking natural timeouts. People say, “What’s a natural timeout?” I go, “Well, look, what’s this, if we’re so caught up in our lives, we’re so caught up in the pandemic or with the politics of what’s on, you know what the great thing is? We’ve got nature’s solace in our DNA.”

I feel like nature calms us down and puts things into immediate perspective. Sometimes when I’m stewing around or flitting around or whatever, I’ll stop, and look up at the sky. If you listen, birds are everywhere. You just go, “Oh, thank you.” I love crows. To be in a Safeway parking lot or a grocery store parking lot, So it’s like, “Look, oh, thank you. Thank you for reminding me to look at you and remember this is okay. Life’s okay. You’re talking to me.” Waking up in the morning, looking at the sunrise, all these things, these tiny timeouts, I think the natural, additive effect of doing that throughout the day really brings a nice sense of calm and perspective to the universe.

Kristin Maxwell:

That’s awesome. It’s really funny because I was interviewing somebody yesterday, and, really, the way he described it was he would go to a city and look at everything that’s around you and all the people, and I’m like, “Wow,” because I do that with nature.

Carew Papritz:

I agree. 

Kristin Maxwell:

Anyway, very fun. Okay. We do need to take a break. Before we do, where can people go to learn, to find your book and more about what you do, because you do all kinds of fun and interesting things which we’ll get into more, but where can they find you?

Carew Papritz:

Really fun is, well, of course, TheLegacyLetters.com, and all that fun stuff I do, a lot of it’s on YouTube. If you go to CarewTube or look up Carew on YouTube, Carew Papritz, you’ll find all these different things that we can talk about, all these first-ever book signings and I Love To Read video series. And, of course, the beast, Amazon, that’s without saying. Or support your local bookstores. Ask them to order a copy. That’s a great way to go.

Kristin Maxwell:

Yes. Awesome. Thank you. We are going to take a break. When we come back, we’re going to talk some more about living a life that’s a legacy. Hang on.

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