Since I got back to Estonia last week, I've been completely hooked on TED Talks. Others watch tv in the evening, I watch TED Talks. When I started my marathon, I actually wrote in my notebook all the talks that I had watched but now I've given it up, it would be just pages and pages of names and titles. Anyway, I wanted to share a top 5 list of my favourite talks:

My all time favourites are two talks by Dr Brene Brown: The Power of Vulnerability and Listening to Shame. Actually, it was M.J. who made me watch them about a month and a half ago. I absolutely loved them. We watched them over and over again, talked about them, and then went back and watched them again. It came to the point where we started using phrases from these talks in our own conversations, phrases like 'It was a freakin' spiritual awakening' and 'no family stuff, no childhood ****, just give me strategies' and 'vulnerability hangover' and such. The truth is (and I know exactly how big these words sound), these talks changed my life. Quite literally. They have changed my perception, my views, and they have also changed my actions. I've had to pick myself up and make myself vulnerable and be true to my inmost being and say words that I wouldn't have had courage for if I hadn't heard Dr Brown's talks. And yes, it has led to a vulnerability hangover, but at the same time I believe that vulnerability is a strength and absolutely essential to wholehearted living. And I'm determined to live wholeheartedly.

Next talk that I've loved is Bryan Stevenson's We Need to Talk About an Injustice. It's a beautiful-beautiful speech by a lawyer who fights against poverty and injustice and racial inequality and who has sat at the feet of Rosa Parks (!!!) and who helps youngsters who are in prison. Oh, and when he comes to the 'moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice' bit (one can't imagine a serious talk on this topic without these words), I feel like getting up and applauding. Which the audience does in the end, by the way. A wonderful talk indeed.

And then Elizabeth Gilbert and her Your Elusive Creative Genius. She's the Eat Pray Love lady and she talks about the struggle one has when she discovers that at the age of 40 it is possible that her greatest work as a writer is already behind her. And how to cope with it. Very moving insight to the life of a creative person. But the most beautiful bit comes in the very end when she talks about dancers and the divine power that a dancer gets every now and then. And how the job of that dancer, even if the divine moment is gone, is to show up the next day and to do his thing again and again. And then, maybe, one day, something divine happens again. I've thought about it a lot in the context of my own sermon writing and preaching. And Mrs Gilbert has spoken words of encouragement into my heart again.

And then I think it's Clay Shirky's Institutions vs Collaboration. I remember a conversation about church and institutionalisation that U. and G. had a month ago when we were sitting in a coffee shop in Cambridge. It all came back to me when watching this talk as this guy has something very profound to say about the ways things work or no longer work in this world. If I could, I would make all the church leaders out there watch this talk and to seriously think about it. Because I feel that when Mr Shirky says that 'when an institution faces a problem, its goal immediately shifts from the nominal goal to self-preservation', there's no other institution that has fallen in this pit more often than church. Some serious truth in this talk.

If it was up to me, I would make it compulsory for everyone to watch these talks. Starting with my friends, of course. :)