Martha Beck:
Hello, Bewildered Cahootniks. Today’s episode is about treasure hunts.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it was inspired by our recent discovery of a secret society, a game that’s being played right under our noses, all over the world.

Martha Beck:
Literally true. And we asked what it would mean to live our whole lives like this, and so far we’ve found it’s pretty wild.

Rowan Mangan:
You know: This is the podcast for people like you, like me, like Marty Beck, who are trying to figure it out.

Martha Beck:
Yes, indeed. And you know what? I’m going to jump in and say what I’ve been trying to figure out.

Rowan Mangan:
Tell me. I want to know, please.

Martha Beck:
I have been trying to figure out how to stop thinking in metaphors so extensive that people nearly die before I get to the end of them. At the end of the day, we were talking and I had had a large amount of caffeine and I was into it and I was saying to you—remember, we were in the car—it’s the gymnasium of life and you’ve got to hold your form when you do the heavy lift of parenting and you’ve got to increase the reps of kindness and keep your personal excesses in the locker of—and you just said, “Marty, the caffeine has gone too far, the metaphor will not hold.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. After a while, it starts to kind of be so bloated under its own weight. And so it’s like the metaphor itself is trying to play twister in some way where everything must fit the metaphor. So whatever the initial metaphor was, it grows extra cogs and arms and legs and yeah, I mean it’s a skill that you have, but I guess a strength exaggerated becomes a weakness.

Martha Beck:
So it does. So it does. I’ve got to keep off the hard stuff that is Starbucks coffee. And nothing against it, by the way, just saying.

Rowan Mangan:
Not that we’re advertising them, either.

Martha Beck:
Neither way. However, I do notice that when I partake, my metaphors grow to really embarrassing lengths.

Rowan Mangan:
Unprecedented complexity.

Martha Beck:
I’m going to try to stop that. So what are you trying to figure out?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, something has happened to me recently, Marty. And what’s especially unusual about this thing is that it’s something I’m into that you’re not into. I know. And this doesn’t often happen to us, does it?

Martha Beck:
No! With my ADD I can get interested in anything you’re interested in.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s true, actually. You do have this way of just glomming on, but maybe we’re both just interested in interesting things most of the time. But this is an exception. And you went away, and I cheated on you with our beloved Ray, our Pilates instructor, and instead of doing mat Pilates with you and Ray—you were away, and so I took myself down, toddled on down to the Pilates studio and had my first experience on what is known as the Reformer, which just sounds like the sequel to the Terminator, but not Terminator 2, a different one.

Martha Beck:
It’s this kinky German exercise thing. Joe Pilates. He made his machine, and I’ve heard tell of it, but I know not of it. I stick to my mat. And what are you doing? Actually, I was on one once and I nearly threw up.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. She gets—

Martha Beck:
What are you doing there?

Rowan Mangan:
She gets seasick. Well, it was so funny. I was nervous because anything to do with exercise makes me nervous because I’m deeply uncoordinated. And so I went to the studio for the first time, and actually it was quite creepy because, so there’s all these devices in this room, which are, do look, it has to be said, vaguely like medieval torture devices, right? Indeed. There’s just no way around that. That’s what they look like. And then I don’t know if listeners will understand what I’m talking about when I say, do you remember the first moment that Clarice Starling encounters Hannibal Lecter in the prison? And she’s been walking along with all these horrible rah-rah and they say terrible things about bits of her they can smell and things. And then she gets to him and he’s just standing there, and he’s— it’s hard to say exactly what’s so creepy about it, but it’s one of the most haunt-your-dreams creepy images you’ll ever see. And I will put that in the show notes.

Martha Beck:
I remember it. I do remember it.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, he’s like standing there all pleasant like he’s greeting her at a dinner party or something, but it’s not overdone and his hands are at his side. Anyway, that’s how Ray was standing amidst the sea of Reformers. As I walked into the room, and I was ready to run, quite honestly, I was ready to run. I was terrified. But…I loved it. It was like I just kept saying, “Ray, this is play equipment. This is so fun.” You go and you can’t really mess it up. That’s the thing. I mean, you probably could if you didn’t have Ray standing over you going, “No, no, no.” But you’re sliding. You’re sliding along a thing and there’s springs that bring you back to where you’re meant to be, and I just, oh, I love it. I love it.

Martha Beck:
Ro and Ray together on the medieval torture devices. I’m really jealous.

Rowan Mangan:
Ha ha.

Martha Beck:
I must never go away ever again.

Rowan Mangan:
You must not. But luckily we’ve got lots of new mutual hobbies that we’re going to talk about today, aren’t we?

Martha Beck:
Oh yes, we do, in fact. We do indeed. Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ll be right back with more Bewildered. We don’t say this enough. We are so glad you’re a Bewildered listener and we’re hoping you might want to go to the next level with us. By which I mean if you rate and review the podcast, it helps new people find us so we can keep Bewildering new souls. And you know how much we love that. Ratings are very much appreciated. Obviously the more stars you give us, the more appreciation is forthcoming. Reviews are quite simply heaven. And we read everyone and exclaim over them and we just love you all.

Rowan Mangan:
So we were thinking of talking on this episode about: Life is a treasure hunt. Now bear with us, okay? I know, it sounds a bit out there and I will, as a little spoiler, let you know: It’s a metaphor. But I’m going to keep a really close eye on Marty and I don’t think she’s had caffeine today.

Martha Beck:
No, but I have some right next to me in case I need to go the metaphor three more rounds. Okay, so here is the story.

Rowan Mangan:
Tell us a story.

Martha Beck:
Picture, if you will, I will paint for you a word picture.

Rowan Mangan:
Beautiful.

Martha Beck:
Roey’s at an appointment. I have driven her because she couldn’t function well that day. I can’t remember why.

Rowan Mangan:
It could have been any number of reasons. I think I hadn’t slept.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, that was it. Yeah, that’s always it, actually, these days with our 3-year-old. Anyway, I’m waiting for Ro to come out of her appointment and I’m walking along this, it was just some sort of municipal grass strip by the road and there were these river rocks in it and a wall.

Rowan Mangan:
Marty, it were a vacant lot.

Martha Beck:
Okay, that will do. And I thought, I will walk along this wall and think about the fact that if this wall were a thousand feet in the air, I would be very frightened and fall down. But since it’s pretty much on ground level, I can walk on it without a problem. So I was thinking about that metaphor when suddenly something in my head went, “What?” Because as I had walked past the river rocks, one rock, it was just kind of the wrong color. And the thing that struck me was some rocks have white rings in them or colored rings because of different sedimentation that solidifies, and this rock had those, but they were crisscrossed, and that’s not possible. So far as I know. All the geologists out there listening, because I’m sure we have a vast geology listenership.

Rowan Mangan:
We’re big in the geology community.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, the Cahoot contains a whole geological thing. Anyway, you’re out there going, “Yes, sedimentation lines can be crisscrossed.” Well, I didn’t know that and I still don’t.

Rowan Mangan:
I love that you’re telling this story worried about geologists and with absolutely no insight into how utterly nerdy you sound yourself, you little boffin.

Martha Beck:
But I’m used to being hated as a nerd. I’m not used to being hated by geologists.

Rowan Mangan:
You’re loved as a nerd.

Martha Beck:
All right, anyway, I stopped, I doubled back. I went to pick up the rock. I thought at the very least, I’ve got to look this up and show it to Lila. And as I picked it up, I realized: This is no rock. It didn’t have the right weight, it didn’t have the right feel. It felt light and hollow like an egg. And it had been painted with those lines. And I was like, what is this? And I turned it over. And in the bottom of it, Roey, was a little sliding trap door. Yes. And I opened it and inside the trapdoor, it was hollow, made out of clay or something. I don’t know.

Rowan Mangan:
It sounds like one of those things that people hide their spare key in. Was it that kind of genre of item?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, but it was smaller, it was tiny. So I slid it open and inside it was a metal canister with a little lid, just tiny, like an inch long, an inch and a half maybe. And I sincerely thought I had discovered a drug drop. I thought somebody was going to put pure meth in this or something.

Rowan Mangan:
A tiny, tiny, tiny little bit of meth.

Martha Beck:
I don’t know from doses of drugs. I don’t take them as often as I would like. No, I thought this has something diabolical in it. So I was kind of nervous about taking off the lid, but I did. I took it off and inside was a tiny roll of paper.

Rowan Mangan:
Amazing.

Martha Beck:
I took it out, I unrolled it and it had all these names and dates on it, going back to like 2017, I think it was.

Rowan Mangan:
All the while back to 2017.

Martha Beck:
Yes. The primordial times when dinosaurs roamed the earth in 2017.

Rowan Mangan:
What’s really funny about this story is that, I don’t know, I wouldn’t like to guess the percentage of our Cahootniks who know exactly what’s going on in this story. Some of our family members, when you were starting to tell it with all the dramatic—and they were like, “Mm-hmm. Yeah.”

Martha Beck:
Well it was a thrill for this one, I can tell you. This particular Cahootnik who knows nothing of the world except that sedimentation lines typically only go in one direction. Anyway, at the top it said, “Sign below, put the date, and then go register your find at Geocache.com.” So I took pictures of it, then I put my name on it and the date, and I rolled it back up and I put the canister back and I put the trap door back and I put the rock-that-wasn’t-a-rock back. And I thought I had discovered something mind-blowing and unknown.

Rowan Mangan:
You had!

Martha Beck:
For me it was. It was wonderful. It was thrilling.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I mean it is because it’s about treasure, buried treasure.

Martha Beck:
Treasure hunt, treasure hunt, treasure hunt. And then I showed it to you.

Rowan Mangan:
And we got very excited.

Martha Beck:
This is one reason I love you so very much that I was like, “Look at this!” And Karen is like, “That’s very nice, sweetheart.” And you’re like, “Whaaat?” Let’s go!” It’s like Karen is the mom and we’re the kids. “Can we take our bikes and go look for another one?”

Rowan Mangan:
And we were just like, Marty—well, I was just like, Marty, let’s from now on, build out entire personalities around geocaching.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Okay. So we should, for those who may not be quite as on-the-ball as we now are, say what “geocaching” is.

Rowan Mangan:
So geocaching is like when you’re in a video game and you find something and then that’s the whole thing. But it’s like instead of being in a video game, it’s in real life. And so people hide things in, just around everywhere.

Martha Beck:
Just randomly.

Rowan Mangan:
In your pharmacy, near the baseball field. Oval field? The baseball, sports place, the place of baseball. The hills, the dales, the riverbeds, and tree stumps, that’s a big one. And there is an app is what it comes down to. I think in the old days you had to use special GPS machines.

Martha Beck:
Map coordinates.

Rowan Mangan:
But now our phones can do it all. And sometimes they write clues. And one of the clues was really hard, actually, I still haven’t solved that one. But it was all to do with naval vessel numbers spelling out the longitude and latitude of, but most of them aren’t like that. They’re just like, “Here’s your clue: Tree stump.”

Martha Beck:
Tree stump. We were so obsessed with it. I had this cough. We had come down with something and we needed medication. I was actually threatened with hospitalization. And we went to the pharmacy to get our prescriptions and they were not ready yet.

Rowan Mangan:
They’re like, can you come back in 15 minutes? And we’re like, can we?

Martha Beck:
We’re like, “Hack, hack, cough, cough, sneeze, sneeze. Sure.” Because then we pulled out our phones and we looked at our geocaching apps and sure enough, right near the pharmacy was a dot, a green dot. And we went to it.

Rowan Mangan:
We went to that dot.

Martha Beck:
And Roey did find a tiny brown canister stuck into a knot in an evergreen tree where the trunk was exactly the same color of brown. And it was stuck in there with pine sap. And it was a triumph. A triumph.

Rowan Mangan:
It is analog dopamine. It’s like haptics in your phone or your watch or whatever, when it just is like “Da-da-da, you’ve done something good” and you go, “Mmm!” It’s like you find the thing and you go, “Mmm!”

Martha Beck:
And we were at death’s door, and we were still like, “Oh my God, we found a canister with a note in it.”

Rowan Mangan:
The other thing, it must be said, about spontaneously deciding to go geocaching in a regular part of your day in warm weather is that you’re generally not equipped for the poison ivy. And we’ve had to learn that one the hard way a couple of times now. Me in my Birkenstocks.

Martha Beck:
The ticks, I mean we have risked our lives and abandoned our dignity for this crazy new hobby that the kids have been doing for 80 years.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my gosh. And so since there’s this, we just park outside housing developments and start crawling around the sign to the housing development. And Marty at one point just started climbing under bushes, just literally climbing under bushes on the ground. In thick bushes. I couldn’t see her anymore. And she’s like, “I wonder if this is it? Oh no, it’s just a used condom. I think I’ve got a tick on the back of my neck. Can you pull it off?”

Martha Beck:
Oh God. But you know, that’s what we have to do to find things.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s the price we pay for finding pointless things that make us happy.

Martha Beck:
Right? That as much as the medication, I’m sure, brought us back from the brink, the very brink.

Rowan Mangan:
The very brink. So what we’ve discovered, or at least what we’re alleging, is that one way to find life’s treasures—like purpose, happiness, love, community—is to be a treasure hunter. Right? That’s what we’re alleging.

Martha Beck:
That is what we’re alleging. And the reason we need to allege it is that we really don’t learn it growing up. And again, here we have the nature-versus-culture schism. Because nature by its nature—that’s quotable—is a treasure hunt. It is meant to be explored and investigated. And every small child, every creature is always poking in the bushes to see what that thing is in there. All of us as little kids have an investigator mindset. That’s our nature. But culturally, we are taught to be not in an investigative mindset, but in a task mindset. Passively.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah like instead of, “I wonder what that is,” it’s “I will do this, I will do this, I will do this for it has been assigned.”

Martha Beck:
“What must I do next?” Ding-ding-ding. “What must I do next? Absolutely sir. Please, may I have another?” Do your job, blah, blah, blah. Investigator mindset is gone. And I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m obsessed with this NASA study that was commissioned in the sixties—here we go again with it—to find creative geniuses. And 2% of adults tested as creative geniuses. And these were people that they were testing who were educated like scientists and stuff. And still only 2%, but then somebody thought to test little kids and 98% of them tested as creative geniuses. And I think it’s because they’re still living life as a treasure hunt. They’re still out there exploring and going, “What’s under there?” It’s not a strange thing to see a little kid crawl under a bush in the dirt. It is just strange to see a middle-aged woman doing it.

Rowan Mangan:
Marty, did anyone check to see whether the 2% of children who weren’t testing as creative geniuses all grew up to join NASA and be tested for creative genius as adults? Did you think of that? Has that been controlled for?

Martha Beck:
I do not believe that study has been done. My work is cut out for me.

Rowan Mangan:
I just have to say I have heard, I mean it’s a great piece of research, but I must admit that from time to time, I rue the day that I went running into you brandishing my little iPhone, showing you the Instagram reel that mentioned that study for the first time because my Lord, it has—

Martha Beck:
I have taken so much credit for finding that when in fact you were the geocache girl who dashed around with your little camera reading your little Instagram where they put wonderful things all the time where I can’t go because I literally get so interested I can’t leave.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
I’m interested in everything.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a cool thing about you. I love it. So the school system is saying, “Don’t be curious. Receive knowledge.” And we’ve talked before quite a lot about school as a heavy brainwashing function for the culture. Not to sound too conspiracy theorist, it’s just true. And I was thinking about, because we have a three-year-old and we’re weirdos, we’re sort of thinking about what do we want to do with education? Do we want to mix it up a bit? So I spent some time reading about unschooling and the philosophy of unschooling. And it’s so interesting to me because it’s so revolutionary and countercultural because it’s basically saying to kids, “I believe that you are intrinsically an investigator.” And that instead of saying, “I will decide what you need to learn and here, receive it, take it on board, be the blank slate onto which, what is it the tabula rasa, onto which education is—

Martha Beck:
We write our formulae.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. What interests you? Follow that, follow that, follow that. And what if that’s education? Let them seek out the knowledge. And I feel like that maybe that way of—that’s an educational philosophy, but maybe we could take it further. Maybe we could extend the metaphor.

Martha Beck:
Extend the metaphor. Where’s the caffeine? Isn’t it interesting when we grow up, all the books we read are about the detectives, the investigators, and we never say, “Why is she so obsessed with this case?” No, we just accept that this person we’re reading about has to know who killed that unknown person. We identify so hard with investigators, but we don’t become investigators.

Rowan Mangan:
So in that vein, what are some ways that we can start looking for treasure in normal life, everyday life, if treasures are consistently fulfilling day, lifetime? And where are the clues that will bring us closer to it? Martha Beck, take it away.

Martha Beck:
Well, here’s the thing. When I saw that rock and I did a double take at the fake rock, that was a one-in-a-trillion chance. I mean that I happened to be walking in a vacant lot where I think is far from where any people had walked for a very long time. And I happened to see it out of the corner of my eye. It happened to get my attention. That just, most people learn about geocaching and then they go and look for one and then they find it. I found it before I knew what it was. That’s a once-in-a-lifetime accident. And yet the people I’ve coached always expect— because they’ve been trained into a passive mindset— that everything has to come to them this way. It will just appear. And this is the people who get a little too heavily, I think, into the manifestation thing. I will focus on something and focus on something and I’ll be sitting in my living room the whole time, and it will happen. Well, I’m all about focusing on it, but you go where the imagination takes you. The bit that’s taken out of us at some time during our childhood is the part that says, and I love it in—have you read Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, Rudyard Kipling’s book, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi or story. It’s about a mongoose named Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, and his life motto is “Run and find out.” And he’s always just running around finding out. And that little Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is taken out of us somewhere. “Don’t run and find out, don’t get under that bush. What are you doing with your face in the dirt? You could get a tick.” So it’s not like we have to be taught to be investigators—there’s a reason we love detective shows. But we have to relearn to be Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, to be run-and-find-out people: alert, interested, looking for clues, not expecting something to drop into our laps fully formed without our having to do anything. So we have to, first of all, take on this investigator mindset where we are looking for something anomalous or something that matches our interests in some way.

Rowan Mangan:
Which isn’t to say that we’re not just going about every day doing our shopping and paying our bills and trying to get our kid to sleep or whatever, just off the top of my head, but there is I think a quality of alertness, like you say, that we can cultivate. So you were talking about the little cache that I found in the tree, and we knew we were somewhere in the vicinity of this thing, but it was mini-mini. Tiny. It was an inch by, I dunno, a quarter of an inch?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, like half a centimeter or something.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, tiny. So because I knew I was looking for it, I was in that sort of alert and it’s like you’re looking for the pattern interrupt. And I’m scanning the tree. I mean it could have been buried, it could have been on the ground, it could have been under the leaves. But I was scanning and I was scanning the bark of the tree and there was a little pattern interrupt that stopped my eyes scanning. So it’s like when does the texture change in the landscape around you? When is there something that makes you go, “Huh.” Like Marty with the sedimentation lines on the rock.

Martha Beck:
Or the cat that goes by twice in The Matrix, yeah. And you know what’s interesting? I’ll throw out a little clue here. You can’t see that if your eyes are sharp, if you’re staring. If you’re staring, which most of us do when we’re trying to look hard, we actually narrow the scope of our attention, and our vision actually grows narrower and less able to notice pattern interrupts. So if you can make your eyes soft, which I wasn’t doing, I couldn’t believe you saw that thing. I was staring. You were just gazing. Just like taking it in.

Rowan Mangan:
You know why? Because I have so much experience scrolling social media, which you can’t do because when—

Martha Beck:
Because I stare at it!

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, because when you try to look at social media like, “What’s that? What’s that? Is that a real monkey? Who’s that? Is that—who is that girl you told me about once?”

Martha Beck:
That’s exactly quoting me.

Rowan Mangan:
But—this is a terrible metaphor. I think I’ve had too much coffee already. The absent-minded soft-focus scroll I use for Instagram was exactly what equipped me to scroll the environment, the natural environment.

Martha Beck:
It’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
And that’s why social media is a good thing, ladies and gentlemen. Yay.

Martha Beck:
Well it sure worked for you. And for me, that relaxation that allows you to scroll things, it’s very, very difficult for me. And I have a diagnosis to back me up because I had my brain mapped, I’ve said this before, and the brain mappers did tell me you have ADHD. And I was like, “Really? What’s that?” And they said, “You have an attention, an interest-based attention system.” I said, “Does that mean I get interest on everything I’m interested in?” They said, “No, it means you pay attention to what things that you find interesting.”

Rowan Mangan:
You poor thing.

Martha Beck:
I know. I was like, “Uh-huh, and?” And they’re like, “And then you get too focused on things that you really like to learn about.” I was like, “When do we get to the disability part?” And they’re like, “That’s the disability. You need to learn to pay attention to what is appropriate, not what interests you.”

Rowan Mangan:
“Here’s some Adderall, that should help.”

Martha Beck:
“That should help.” And I literally laughed out loud, thinking they were joking and then I was like, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You’re telling me that—how do other people’s attention systems work? Are they just equally interested in everything? How do they know what to do?”

Rowan Mangan:
They do what they’re told.

Martha Beck:
Exactly! That’s what he said. “They do what’s optimal for their situation.” And I was like, Oh, I feel the bars of the cage closing around me right now. I have a straight jacket on, I’m leaving. And they said, “We’re sure you had a terrible time in school because of this, and we can help you for just a few thousand dollars.” And I decided it was way too obnoxious to tell them I had three Harvard degrees—drink. But here’s the thing, I didn’t notice it because I happened to be innately interested in school. So it was like winning the lottery. I have ADHD and I’m interested in school.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, you won the school lottery. You didn’t win the Instagram lottery.

Martha Beck:
Yes, and I didn’t win the life lottery either because I can’t follow a tax form or because it doesn’t interest me. It’s not that I’m intellectually incapable of doing those numbers. If I had something that was interesting about it, then I could learn it, but I just am not interested.

Rowan Mangan:
I want to say something.

Martha Beck:
Please do.

Rowan Mangan:
About those doctors saying “optimal.” And I hear that word and I recoil and there’s other words like it that I hear out and about in the culture, and sometimes honestly, it’s from people that I really respect, but “optimizing,” “maximizing,” making everything “maximum productivity.” “Efficiency.” I think we think that we, or I think some of us think that when we are doing that, we’re giving ourselves, and I mean that like our souls, our full, complete, true nature something, but I think it’s a crock of shit because I think nine times out of ten when you’re doing that, you are making yourself more available to do what you’re told. And if you will never gaze out the window for 20 minutes and achieve nothing, I just feel like those 20 minutes are going to go to “the man” in some way. I’ve got nothing to back that up. But it’s like something about that mentality, and you would say left-hemisphere control, all of that, it frightens me.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, yeah, it is. It’s scary. I love Mary Oliver in one of her poems, saying, “I must keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to pay attention.” And she was talking about doing this outside too.

Rowan Mangan:
Mary Oliver did not know a fricking thing about maximizing productivity. And I saw this book, I can never stop laughing about this. Mary Oliver is such a genius poet, God, I mean just so wonderful in so many ways. And I bought one of her books once, one of her collections and there was a big sticker on it and it said, “America’s bestselling poet.” And I thought it was going to say like, “Prize for the most, blah, blah, blah.” Anyway, Mary Oliver: best.

Martha Beck:
Best. She optimized, man. She monetized that shit. Yeah, that’s what makes it real.

Rowan Mangan:
“All we need to do is stand still and learn to be astonished. And that is how we will maximize our productivity.”

Martha Beck:
Productivity! So Roey, what if we retro-engineered our lives with this whole concept in mind and we decided we’re gearing ourselves away from optimization, the social optimization and toward the investigatory mindset, toward curiosity? I was thinking about this. The first thing I do after I get up and meditate and stuff in the morning as I look at my calendar and I think, “What do I have to do today? What have I got to do today?” All these imperatives. And I was thinking, By the way, I think Mary Oliver would’ve been a hell of a geocacher, just telling you that. Little poems on geocache strips. Sorry.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my god, can you imagine finding that?

Martha Beck:
Oh my god, I bet there’s one somewhere. Let’s go.

Rowan Mangan:
You know what? We should do those. Let’s not just do a little log book. Let’s write little poems.

Martha Beck:
Oh, let’s leave little poems all over the landscape. Oh, this is fabulous. Like a chicken laying eggs. Anyway, if I dared to get up in the morning and say, “What’s the most interesting thing? What makes me curious?” and put those things down first and then look to the things that I have to do—go to the doctor, get your meds, find a tiny canister in a pine tree—then maybe my life would look really different. I mean, I’m willing to take the challenge I’m thinking about.

Rowan Mangan:
So to return to my unschooling analogy, I genuinely think that if we open our days with “What is lighting me up today?” and disclaimer: I know we have jobs, we have shit to do. I know. I know, I know. So just put that aside for a second. We’re hypothesizing. So if we did that— no to-do list, no kids, nothing, it’s fine—we wake up, we go, “What am I curious about today? What am I excited about today?” I will not be told that I won’t actually effectively get more done following my curiosity and my passion and my excitement from one thing to another than if I sit there in class and have someone recite times tables or historical battle dates or something at me. That’s bullshit. And one of the things that they say a lot with where people get stressed out about, “Oh, but they won’t learn if they don’t go to school.” And I know this isn’t what we’re talking about, but is how much do you learn at school? So little. So little.

Actually we are not taking that much in. If you think back of the things that you really remember from school, they are only the things that set you alight. That’s true. So what if it was all just the things that set you alight? Because I can’t do my times tables, but boy, do I remember writing an essay about Queen Maeve in ancient island, goddess, named our daughter after her. And so yeah, the motivation factor actually leads us, pulls us forward, instead of having this idea that we’re this vessel that needs to be filled. So for us and how do we do this with our lives? It’s like the way that geocaching is a way to kind of gamify walking in nature. Let’s make it into a game and reinvent our relationship with the landscape around us, which by the way is completely happening in our area because every time I pass somewhere that we’ve looked or found one of these little canisters is a special place to me now. And I have this completely. So what if we gamify everything? We keep scanning for patent interrupts. And what if we just pretend that what if it was all laid out as a treasure hunt? What if it is? I mean, I don’t know if we’ve talked about this on Bewildered before, but we throw around the idea all the time about, you can see if you look at Plato’s shadows on the cave wall or whatever it is, the idea of life as a simulation or life as a video game, sorry, I should let you unpack that properly. But what if we play that it has all been mapped out for us. So it’s not a case of inventing something, it’s about uncovering a clue that has been laid for you.

Martha Beck:
So this metaphor within a metaphor within a metaphor is that we live in a world that looks real to us and it’s real. It’s real, and in Plato’s case, there are shadows on the wall and people who’d only ever seen those shadows and they thought it was the whole world and the shadows are real. But then somebody gets out of the cave and goes out and there are three-dimensional objects and bright light and they come back and they’re saying, “This isn’t the only reality. There’s more.” And everyone thinks they’re insane and tries to kill them. Plato was saying that thousands of years ago, and there are still people going, “Oh my god, you guys, there’s a realer reality.” And from outside the smaller reality, which is real, but only in a limited sense, you can see the causal relationships between things very differently. And I actually kind of believe that. I’m going to cough. After living as many decades as I have, I can look back and it really seems impossible and absurd to me and not parsimonious at all to say that nothing was leaving a trail of clues for me. There was always something that pulled my interest to a certain thing in a certain way that took me places. I now feel I was meant to go places I was deeply, deeply grateful to go. And it was like somebody had been out there leaving the clues for me and then putting them on the app and saying, “Go check your app.” And thinking about it that way as a game makes it really enjoyable.

Rowan Mangan:
And you don’t have to think about this stuff with the same part of your mind that does your taxes. It doesn’t have to be a literal part of your mind that plays with this. It’s like can you do with your brain what you do with your eyes when you’re scanning the tree trunk and just be like, “This is a fun thing to play with.” Just stay in game mode. Stay in play.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And you do it with your imagination. Liz was telling us about speaking to a group where one of the audience members said, “I can’t imagine living anywhere but Michigan.” And she was like, she can’t imagine living anywhere in Michigan? Our imaginations are so throttled by the limitations placed on us that our imaginations are never put into wild mode, wild and wooly and anything goes. Look for the things that catch your attention and your imagination. If you can set your imagination free to go roaming out around you, it’s going to pick up some serious little clues. It’s going to find you some treasure.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. Okay, this is what it feels like to me. I am here on this planet for a limited time. I want to decorate my time with experiences that feel interesting, delightful, challenging, yummy. And each of those things is both the clue and the accrual or conglomeration of the clues equals a wonderful life to me.

Martha Beck:
I love that concept of decorating your time the way youwould put beautiful things on the wall. And here’s the thing, the clues that take you through life if you play this way, they don’t have to be big and mind-blowing. I mean geocaching, what you find is just a little piece of paper, but it’s the joy of the hunt and the joy of the find and the connection with the other people who have left the clues. These are the things that start to light me up when you talk this way. And I was thinking about how, I mean, here’s something that’s a little bit of a clue for me in my life about what makes it fun. And it’s Lila, our three-year-old has, it’s summertime as we’re recording this, and she has developed this habit of going outside, looking around and then running back inside to me and saying, “Muffy, Muffy, I found a bug. Let’s go figure out what it is.” So I have an app, another app called Seek. Again, not doing advertising necessarily, but I love this app. And you take it out and you take a picture of anything that is alive or was alive. And it will tell you, “This is a northern short-tailed shrew.” Here I thought it was a boll—It’s always a short-tailed, northern short-tailed shrew. No, but we have found grapevine beetles and garter snakes and wine berries. You just point and click at everything. And it’s Lila wanting my attention and wanting the fun. I mean, she’s in full investigator mode. So when she gets me out there and I get to reawaken my investigator mode and I have my little app and I can tell her this is what it is, and then we take the picture back and show you and show Karen. And it’s like this big celebration of living in this incredible world and being able to greet each creature by its name. And it’s playful and it’s just, we’re at the same intellectual level, Lila and I. And so this little game of identifying bugs itself is part of the treasure and a clue that could take me somewhere else and it could take Lila somewhere else. Heaven knows where it’s going to take her. Right?

Rowan Mangan:
And we have to be careful that we don’t immediately do go into the cultural language of “She likes bugs, she’s going to become an entomologist” or something. God, it’s so amazing having a little kid and seeing how often anything they express interest in is converted to a career. Yes, that is absolutely fascinating.

Martha Beck:
“You told a joke, you should be a comedian.”” You like to bug. You should be an entomologist.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s wild. But I also want to say, I think if there is a moral to this episode at all, it really must be: If it’s worth doing, there’s probably a good app for it because that seems to be where we’re going. So you only get the clue for the next step forward. And we did that—the Way Stations episode was kind of about that. But the next step has to be an end in itself. It can’t be like, “Well, I’ll go through four years of graduate school and hate it so that I can la-la-la.” No, it has to be delicious. All the way to heaven is heaven. God, I’m so good at back-referencing our old episodes. It’s always like we never have anything new to say. So it’s cheating to use any clue as just a stepping stone because this is all about using our interest-based brains. Right, Marty?

Martha Beck:
Right. And you may be guessing the whole time what the clue after the next clue will be or the ultimate destination as if there ever were one. I remember signing up to learn Mandarin as a 17-year-old and thinking, “Oh, this is because,” and I actually wrote this down in my journal or something, “I am going to learn to read Chinese and go be a comparative literature expert in Chinese and European literature.” Oh god. Oh, I’m so sorry. Oh, sorry, past self, you were a complete moron. Anyway, what I could never have expected was, and now I see it as a necessary causal chain. I had to learn Chinese because I had to learn about Chinese philosophy so that I could learn about Taoism, which completely revolutionized my inner life in a way I cannot even describe to you. It was literally like an earthquake inside my body and my brain when I glommed onto Taoism. Had no idea it existed when I signed up for Mandarin class. And I was making up destinations that were never supposed to be. And I could not have imagined the absolute enormity and beauty of where it was really going to take me.

Rowan Mangan:
Costa Rica.

Martha Beck:
Oh yes.

Rowan Mangan:
We had a completely irrational obsession with going to Costa Rica. Yes, we really wanted to, we were gonna, there was a pandemic, then we picked it up again. We’re doing our retreats down there every year. We’re so excited. But we went down there to check out this retreat center, and there were about five different things that happened that week in the connections that we made with people who all happened to cross our paths that week that set us on a new direction. And it’s absolutely insane. I mean, the sleep ladies, the sleep ladies, as we refer to them, Marty thinks they refer to themselves as the sleep ladies. They do not. They are professional women who are brilliant medical people, brilliant at helping people sleep better. Sleepworks, we love them.

Martha Beck:
Completely changed my life.

Rowan Mangan:
And it was a big deal for me. It was absolutely foundationally life-changing for Marty because she went to Costa Rica not expecting to meet Canadian sleep experts. But there it is. And actually as we record this, one of the sleep ladies is actually hanging out in New York and staying with us at our apartment there. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Crisscross all these little, the spider web of life intersecting at different little neurons.

Rowan Mangan:
Neurons.

Martha Beck:
And another thing that happened, there were so many little wonders that just dropped into our laps as we— they didn’t drop into our laps before we went. We had to go there. But the place where you and I met physically was in South Africa at Londolozi at this beautiful, wonderful game preserve where we go every year. And that is part of the world we consider to be another home. And we were so excited to discover Costa Rica as another home and as if to remind us that we can have as many homes as we like, we got onto the plane and I never ever read the in-flight magazine ever, ever. I don’t even do the crossword, but Lila was with us and she pulled the magazine out of the little compartment on the seat in front of us, and she opened the magazine to a full-page two spread page, two- page spread, showing a herd of elephants in a beautiful, beautiful setting. And there was a Land Rover, a jeep full of people watching the elephants from very close and sitting in the driver’s seat was our friend—now I’m blanking on her name—Jess. And tracking the elephants was our friend, and it was Londolozi and it was people we knew. And the headline across the top just said, “You belong here.” And it wasn’t to say, ‘You don’t belong in Costa Rica, you don’t belong in America.” It was saying, “You belong in all these places.” You can’t tell me our higher selves aren’t dropping us clues when stuff like that goes down.

Rowan Mangan:
Totally. Totally. All right, so we’ve got all that. How do we come to our senses?

Martha Beck:
We better talk about it in a minute.

Rowan Mangan:
So what is the Bewildered way when it comes to the treasure hunt of life?

Martha Beck:
So the first thing is to just sit and reassert your identity and say, “I am not a person waiting for tasks to be done. I am an investigator whose job it is to run and find out things that light me up.”

Rowan Mangan:
I want to go see the cool shit.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, there you go. That’s it. And then stay in, I think of it as a persistent mind state of curiosity where you’re just always looking around to see what’s interesting, what makes you do a double take, what makes you look under rocks and under bushes and in pages and on your feed. Just always be an investigator. That’s the first thing.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Notice the double takes that you do. Notice the things that make you go, “Hmm.” Things that make you go, “Hmm.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah. That’s a song. I didn’t know it was a song. You played it for me.

Rowan Mangan:
I did.

Martha Beck:
And it was wonderful. And I, for one, am going to stop when I get my calendar out and say, “Oh, what do I have to do?” I’m going to stop and say, “Wait, where’s the treasure? Where’s what interests me and what lights me up?” And let me do that first. Or at least put it in my list of things to do in the day first, and the tasks can happen. What are you laughing about?

Rowan Mangan:
I hear, because I hear our team, our work team quaking in their boots going, “Oh shit, they’re going to do one of these again.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah. This is kind of how I live already. But hey, not enough of a good thing. You can never have too much of a good thing.

Rowan Mangan:
So did you already say the where-is-the-treasure bit?

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry. Sorry. Scott just cut out that last bit. I missed it. It’s the Helen Keller quote that we like to bandy about: “Life is a daring adventure or nothing.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And the key there is “daring.” Because it may not seem like a risk to notice what interests you, but we do meet opposition when we decide to organize our day that way. And we need to be brave. And we’ll have people who try to sour it for us: “What are you doing?” Because they don’t get to do it and they feel angry when other people do it because secretly they want to as well.

Rowan Mangan:
They do get to, they can, but they’re in a cultural mindset so they feel like they don’t get to.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, they feel like they don’t get to. So when somebody tries to diss you for living this way as an investigator, just remember sometimes to feel good you’re going to look weird, and you can always return to the folks who get you like our beloved Cahootniks right here.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, you all.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And there you can get replenishment, inspiration, share your Geocache finds.

Rowan Mangan:
And who knows what treasures we’ll find together if we…

Martha Beck and Rowan Mangan:
…Stay wild!

Rowan Mangan:
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word WILD to 570-873-0144. We’re also on Instagram. Our handle is @bewilderedpodcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI. And remember, if you’re having fun, please rate and review and stay wild.