84 - Audrey Lin

A hill overlooking Golden Gate Bridge

I grew up in the US with parents who were immigrants from Taiwan. At college exposed to a lot of social issues and was introduced to a group that would gather once a week and sit in silence and then have dinner together. There was like a groundedness and a contentedness, and there was something I couldn't place my finger on, but there was something I wanted to learn from that. And as I got to know people, I learned a lot of them volunteered with this group called ServiceSpace. They started this experiment called Karma kitchen, which was a pay-it-forward restaurant all run by volunteers. A little experiment in generosity. And so I started volunteering with them and realised that as I started to spend my days trying to make other people's days, the stories in my head started changing, and that was changing the way I was showing up in the world. Whether it's in a restaurant where you're welcoming strangers or if it's a news portal where you're hearing about the beautiful things people are doing every day, suddenly, those walls that used to be up when I walked around in the world, they kind of dissolved a little bit.

Any place of stillness

The spark in peoples eyes