Rowan Mangan:
Hi, everyone. We have what I think is a pretty cool episode coming up for you today.

Martha Beck:
Yep. Everyone in our Cahoot is going to hear about urgency and different manifestations thereof.

Rowan Mangan:
We’re talking about how there’s a type of urgency that will crush your soul and a type of urgency that will grow your soul, and how to tell the difference. So we hope you really enjoy today’s episode, and we will see you on the other side.

Martha Beck:
Hi, I’m Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered. You know this one. It’s the podcast for people who are trying to figure it out.

Martha Beck:
Yes, both of them. We are trying to figure things out. Maybe we’re the only ones. What are you trying to figure out, Roey?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, why is a longer question. We talk a lot about the pressures of culture on this podcast, Marty, and it’s a very real issue for me. And lately I’ve been very aware that there are certain cultural phenomena that I don’t fully appreciate, and sometimes I think it’s because I am not from America, and sometimes I think I am not from this planet. But I feel like a lot of these issues come out via my relationship with my hairdresser.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Do you ever feel like that? Like that there’s this–it’s sort of funny. It’s a funny relationship because every few weeks I go in there, take care of the old roots.

Martha Beck:
And where else, really, does somebody just caress your head?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it’s nice. It’s intimate. Yeah. I mean that’s kind of a different thing. I think that’s something we might want to explore further on your end. So for me, it’s a place where I chat with someone who is in the culture and I realize that there are expectations that I’m not able to meet. So I was having a conversation with her a while ago and she goes, “Yeah, I broke up with my boyfriend yesterday.” And what I didn’t understand is that it was the day after Valentine’s Day, or it was Valentine’s Day when we were having the conversation. So she just went “yesterday” and I was left with this– I knew there was something about it and all I could say was like, “Wow. That’s recent.” Then it was literally when I was walking out the door that I was like, “Oh right, because of the Valentine’s. Yeah. Okay.” And so this thing got me into big trouble at my most recent haircut, and you’re aware of this, but I don’t know if you’re aware of the context that led up to it. So I’m having a hair crisis basically, and it’s my own fault because I don’t know about culture. So there we were, me and my wonderful hairdresser, Bianca, hashtag besties for life, and I said to her, because it had been a while, I said to her that the back of my hair was giving me mullet energy. It was, it was giving mullet. I was like, it was giving mullet sounds filthy. And she nodded. Everything about mullet is filthy to me. She nodded sagely that I said it was giving mullet. And I thought, cool, we understand each other. I went out of there not realizing that I had had my mullet enhanced, if anything.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah. I actually have seen this.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, you said you would cut it off for me and you haven’t.

Martha Beck:
I think it’s adorable.

Rowan Mangan:
I like– it would fit in a ponytail at this point.

Martha Beck:
You ought to put a little 17th-century dude little ponytail at the nape of your neck.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God. It’s so horrifying. I’ve never had a mullet, but I recently was very grateful to have a younger family member take me aside when I was complaining about this and they said, “Look, here’s the deal, Ro, the young queers are all about the mullets now. That’s a thing that people want.” So when I had said it’s giving me mullet, what she heard was, “Nice work with the mullet, let’s do more of that,” thinking that I was in touch with any sort of culture, queer, youthful, or otherwise. And it’s just like I’m always left guessing about what I’m supposed to think, say, feel, or do about anything, Marty. And as a result, I now have a mullet. That’s all I’m going to going to say about that.

Martha Beck:
And it’s gorgeous. I was confused because I looked up mullet and I don’t know where the term was applied to hair, but it’s a fish, a mullet. A mullet is a kind of fish.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay.

Martha Beck:
So it’s like putting a fish on your head?

Rowan Mangan:
Guess what? Beehive. It’s a thing that bees live in. It’s a hairdo. You’re just going to have to live with that, my darling. What are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
I am trying to figure out how our 3-year-old, who has had two dogs in her life, but not any other pets. Well, the fish, there are fish in the pond in the backyard and she throws rocks at them and says she’s trying to get their attention. But she’s recently become quite obsessed with hamsters, and I don’t think she even sees them on television. I know she has a very rudimentary idea of what a hamster would be because she recently was sitting on my lap and reached down and felt my knobbly kneecaps and babies don’t have kneecaps. They couldn’t crawl around on hard surfaces if had kneecaps. They’ve just got little cartilage in there and you also biologically have passed down to Lila fairly smooth knees. Your knees are smooth. See, if you had knobbly knees like me, you would know to worry about it, but you were born with smooth knees so you never even have to think about it.

Rowan Mangan:
Is this another one of these cultural things that I’m unaware of that some people are smooth-kneed and some people, what is this? I genuinely feel like I’m in a fever dream right now.

Martha Beck:
I’m generally bony. One of my kids once told me I was waving my hands, she goes, “Don’t wave those knuckle cups at me.” I’m just knobbly. I’m just a knobbly person. And so Lila gripped my kneecaps and said, “Whoa, Muffy, you’ve got some hamsters in your knees.” I was like, she thinks hamsters are hard. And then she later told you, “All I’ve ever wanted is a hamster of my own.”

She’s three. You don’t even get to say, “All I’ve ever wanted.”

Rowan Mangan:
Especially when you’ve literally never mentioned the word hamster before that day.

Martha Beck:
Ever. And also she wants a whole hell of a lot of things. From the moment she emerged, she has wanted things. So I think it’s unfair of her to say that all she’s ever wanted is a hamster of her own, but she also thinks I’ve got–

Rowan Mangan:
But Marty, why does she think there’s hamsters in your knees?

Martha Beck:
Because I have hamster-shaped kneecaps. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t think any of this is true.

Martha Beck:
Well ask–

Rowan Mangan:
I feel so lost.

Martha Beck:
Ask the child. From the mouths of babes come the truth. I’ve got hamsters in my knees and she has always wanted one of her own. And I’m a little frightened that I’m going to wake up having my kneecap severed with a sharp rock that she was using to get the attention of the fish or something.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, you two have such a sweet relationship.

Martha Beck:
Yes, it’s peppered with the fear of physical violence, not punitively, just that we’re both rough and ready. Oh, she was singing in the bathtub, “I wash my body with strong heavy vehicles.” It was a song she’d made up and yeah, that’s the kind of kid she is.

Rowan Mangan:
There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in her mind between washing your body with strong heavy vehicles and Muffy, you have–

Martha Beck:
Hamsters in your knees.

Rowan Mangan:
Your kneecaps.

Martha Beck:
She’s in an interesting point in her life. I’m not going to say age because I think it may just be her personality and not her age. I don’t know.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah. 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 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. All right, let’s move on to today’s topic.

Martha Beck:
Roey, what is our actual topic for today?

Rowan Mangan:
So today we are going to discuss–look, every now and again I say it, not often, but sometimes I do say it’s not all about us. I know. Shocking. Shocking. So we have decided to do a BeWild Files episode today.

Martha Beck:
Oh, I love a BeWild Files.

Rowan Mangan:
From you, the listener. And today that lucky listener is Angela. Hi, Angela. And we’re going to hear from her now.

Angela:
Hi, Marty and Ro, this is Angela. Thank you so much for your podcast. I love you both and feel like you’re friends. I wanted to ask you a question about urgency. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the last year. Whether– how you know when to move on urgency as something that is giving you information and wisdom about needing to move quickly, and when you should be suspicious of it as something that’s connected to white supremacy culture. So if you have wisdom on that, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

Martha Beck:
I love this question. I mean, ever since we heard it, we’ve been talking about it. We have all these ideas and I noticed my own, they’re like spasms of urgency and how they put me in different directions. It’s been a great thing to have highlighted in my brain box.

Rowan Mangan:
I just realized that one thing that’s terrible is that I think it’s been about six months since Angela submitted this question. So as far as urgency goes, we’re not really doing great. But nevertheless, the point stands and we think it’s an excellent topic. I just want to as a tiny little side note before we delve right in, if anyone’s wondering about the link that Angela mentions between urgency and white supremacy, there is some really, really cool stuff that you can read about this. It’s a really legitimate comparison to make. And I just dug out a quote from Dr. Barbara Holmes who has a book called Race and the Cosmos, and she says, just to give a sense of what that link is, she says, “I agree that the social situation is urgent, but frantic responses to resilient problems will not solve anything.” So that’s just part of the flavor of what, but read more about it because it’s super interesting stuff.

Martha Beck:
“Frantic responses to resilient problems.” Wow. That’s like a description of my life, but my life is not nearly as fascinating as Dr. Barbara Holmes. So everybody go read her book. In the meantime, to go from the sublime to the ridiculous, I’ve been thinking there are basically two different kinds of urgency. I’ve felt them both over the many weeks since Angela sent in her question. And it seems to me that there are two kinds of urgency. One is the urgency that comes from a cultural context, and it’s a pressure on the individual to do something that serves the system. So it’s very routinized usually:”You have to do this now!” and it requires culture to exist. And when it does exist and it pressures people into doing things, it then builds up the culture and makes it more resilient, the problems more resilient.

Rowan Mangan:
So in a way, the culture is built of urgency. That’s the substance that it’s made of. And that’s so fascinating and I think we all probably have some experience of that quality of urgency when it belongs to the system. I was thinking about last week, the other day I got myself into quite a froth, like genuinely I was bordering on a panic attack about work, about a workload situation, not coping. I was really, really, really overwhelmed because I had a lot to do and it was all due that day. It was a deadline situation. Deadlines are going to be an interesting part of this conversation, I think. I hadn’t had enough sleep. There was kid stuff happening unexpectedly. There was personal stuff happening and it just felt like all the demands, and I went trumping along to where Marty was: “Ugh, I can’t.”

Martha Beck:
You were upset.

Rowan Mangan:
I was. I was in that place where I was like, “I just can’t. I just can’t. I just can’t. It’s not possible.” And then Marty asked me an amazing question, and I’ll never forget this, Marty, you said to me, “What is it that you have to do that is driving you to panic that is due today?”

Martha Beck:
That’s a useful question.

Rowan Mangan:
And I said to her that, look, the thing that is driving me to panic in this moment is that my deadline is for making a video for our colleagues about suggestions I have for an update to the brand with which we put out quotes by you on your social media. And she’s like, “You need to tell people how something could look differently at some time?” I’m like, “Yes! I have– hmm. Good point.”

Martha Beck:
And the real-world impact is that there’s a slightly different look to some of the quotes we put out online.

Rowan Mangan:
And it was such a fascinating moment to just zoom out and feel, “Oh right. So this doesn’t matter so much, actually.”

Martha Beck:
It doesn’t.

Rowan Mangan:
Interesting, interesting. And it was fun because you brought me back to real priorities and it was very helpful. Thanks for that.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So you were in that intense, what I call false urgency. We’ve been calling it false urgency. The second kind of urgency is something we’re going to hold back so that you’ll be interested in hearing more about it.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a surprise. It’s a surprise if you’re good.

Martha Beck:
Yes. It’s like a hamster. Yes. So you were in this absolute nightmare of urgency over this really, really unimportant thing. Sorry. But it felt unimportant to me and I was thinking about all the stuff that I’ve felt.

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry, correction. Correction. It is important. It wasn’t urgent.

Martha Beck:
Yes. And that’s the whole old saw about “Do the things that are important but not urgent over the things that are urgent but not important.”

Rowan Mangan:
Don’t let the urgent drive out the important. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Exactly. So the urgent, the false urgent things, they come up a lot and I’ve felt them and you’ve felt them. I bet everybody listening to this has felt urgency over things that were really not that urgent, like getting a certain room clean.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I know. Yeah. It’s funny. And I feel like often those false urgencies are created around, they’re sort of abstract, you know, systems, deadlines, and it’s an invented– deadlines that are invented. I mean sometimes, look, if you work for a newspaper and the newspaper is printed and blah, blah, blah. I mean, I’m not saying that there’s no such thing as a deadline, I don’t mean that, but I just feel like that within workplaces and stuff, there can be a sense of urgency created that is a bit arbitrary sometimes. Like, “I’ve got to get the house clean.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I did all my laundry the other day and then not all of it was put away and I was like, “Oh, I can’t do other things! I have to put all the laundry away first!” And then it occurred to me that I could drape some of it over a chair and leave it till, well, sometime in the future because it’s draped over the chair right now as we speak. But it’s not the end of the world.

Rowan Mangan:
I’ve never heard someone complain so much about doing laundry.

Martha Beck:
Well, it felt urgent. What can I say? No, there’s this thing, I mean it’s so interesting the house-cleaning thing because that, I mean, I think about all the ads I saw growing up on TV about where women were shamed for not having this house that was perfectly clean. And I also read a bunch of studies when I was doing sociology that showed that all these labor-saving devices that were supposed to free up women to do other things that were maybe important to them, instead they had raised the level of expectation of how clean everything would be, so the urgency to keep things clean had gotten even bigger. And I like cleanliness, but it can be insane when it’s part of a social role. And I’ve never had an office job like you’ve had. But it seems to me that that gets really completely insane as well with the arbitrary deadlines.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Oh my God. I want to say 19 different things. One of them is how once we get on a roll like that, how insane it can be when we get competitive with urgency like that. Oh my god, so true. That house cleaning example. And now kids, their immune systems are not being developed because they never encounter dirt because they’re living in these weird little hygiene boxes. It’s so strange. But yeah, and just the way that all the weird stuff that we create when we create cultures between people, I can feel urgency about doing something that I think someone else has implied that I should be doing, whether or not they’re thinking that, I can get myself frothing into a lather.

Martha Beck:
A lather. Yes, the same word came to both of us.

Rowan Mangan:
Lather. We have a weird thing with that sometimes. Marty and I have this weird psychic thing with words every now and again, just the same word pops into both our heads. We should talk about it sometimes.

Martha Beck:
We should. I was just going to say that.

Rowan Mangan:
Anyway. Anyway. Yeah. Weird stuff between people often creates false urgency. Boom.

Martha Beck:
For me, if I think someone has made a demand pleasing them, I used to, when you write self-help people write to you about their lives. And I remember people would write it and say things like, “Oh, I’ve had a rough life” or whatever, and I felt so much pressure to fix their lives. And it would be like 10 messages would come in from people I’d never met. And suddenly, oh, they need me to help them. And it became very, very urgent. And finally it was driving me to insane. So I stopped reading my own mail and this was snail mail. And then Karen started reading it and she would confront me with these letters: “Marty, this woman in Guam–

Rowan Mangan:
Boise, Idaho.

Martha Beck:
“This woman in Boise, Idaho is having a really hard time with her husband and you need to make it right!” There was a lot of urgency there.

Rowan Mangan:
A lot. It’s interesting because for you, people tell you that you need to fix their lives and there’s this little messiah complex part of you that totally believes them. And then when Karen gets on board that she also has a you-messiah complex.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
She doesn’t think she’s a messiah, but she does think you are. Many people do, in fairness. I’m not one of them. But anyway, look, all of that, totally agree. I think we know what we’re talking about.

Martha Beck:
So in your job, the culture is after you to get urgent. At home, in relationships all over, there’s this false urgency.

Rowan Mangan:
But as we started talking about this, we realized that there is an urgency that’s true to Angela’s point. And it’s a completely different beast, even though we could still call it urgency. And so we’re calling it creative urgency.

Martha Beck:
And by creative urgency, it’s funny because for me it’s like the urgency of nature. I thought about how, I mean speaking of house cleaning, right before you go into labor, if you’re pregnant and you’re going to have a baby, a lot of people have this urge to clean the house right before the baby’s due. Did you have that?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah. Do you remember I cleaned out? No, it was when I was first pregnant, and I really needed to clean out the fridge.

Martha Beck:
But that’s right, you cleaned out all the food. It was like your body was telling you only certain foods, but then as you got to the end of the pregnancy, you did start cleaning.

Rowan Mangan:
Nesting, yeah.

Martha Beck:
And I really did. I was moving the refrigerator to clean under it. I was pregnant out to there. And the urgency, it felt like, well, it felt natural, but it was creative in the sense that my body, your body, they were creating babies and it’s sort of nature’s urgency. We just watched spring sprung in Pennsylvania and one day there were almost no leaves on the trees. And then the next day everything was exploding with green. And you could feel the animals, the birds right now in the springtime, they’re having their babies and I have to refill my bird feeders like 20 times a day because they are doing things and it feels urgent, but creative. And then I was thinking.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s so cool the way that they call that pregnant thing, that cleaning up when you’re pregnant, they call it nesting because it’s such a literal comparison to I need to furnish a soft and pleasant space for this creature that’s coming. And yeah, you can see it just so directly with the birdies.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it feels very animal. And by that I mean that as a compliment. People used to say women are closer to nature because they’re the ones that have all these biological changes and that makes them less than the men who have pure intellect and feel no urgency.

Rowan Mangan:
Pure testosterone.

Martha Beck:
Except the urgency toward money. Anyway, so there’s this nature’s urgency and then it translates straight across for me into art, creativity, the creativity of the arts and letters and all the things we make.

Rowan Mangan:
Talk about art toad. Because art toad is an urgent creature who dwells within you next to your knee hamsters.

Martha Beck:
From the time I was little and could grip a pencil in my knuckle cups. That’s what she called them, I didn’t make it up. That’s what she said. It wasn’t my fault. I drew and drew and drew and drew and then I stopped drawing when I got older and there were more urgent things to do, like cleaning the oil spots off the road in front of our house. And so I learned to be good. And the urgency of book deadlines, the urgency of coaching, all those things, they were okay. They were great. But then I wrote this book that talked about anxiety and how it’s the opposite, not just of calm, but of creativity. And I decided–

Rowan Mangan:
Just recently, it’s her new one.

Martha Beck:
Yes, and I may have said this before, but I gave myself a month to just rev up the right hemisphere of my brain, which is where I thought this creative impulse might live based on science.

Rowan Mangan:
Based on what everyone says.

Martha Beck:
Based on everything everybody said. So I gave myself a whole month to just do right-hemisphere things and that meant art, drawing, painting. And then I thought, I’ll see where I go from there. And what happened was that given a full month to play, the part of me that was like three years old and wanted to draw all the time, it rose up, and it reminded me of The Wind in the Willows where Mr. Toad is obsessed with driving a motor car. Cars were very– and he’s so obsessed that he steals cars and they end up putting him in prison and then he disguises himself as a washerwoman and he gets out. And then there are people who go by in a motor car and he asks for a ride. He’s still dressed as a washerwoman. And then he asks if he can drive the car and he’s being very timid and nice and pretending to be the washer woman.

And they let him drive the car. And as soon as he starts to drive, the mania takes him and he whips off his wig and he goes, “Haha, washerwoman, indeed! I am the fabulous Toad! You’ll see what driving really is!” And he goes completely nuts with this car, drives it around at a very frantic speed until he drives it into a hedge. But he’s literally insane with joy. That is what happened to me when I started to draw for a whole month, Art Toad got out of its cage and it won’t go back in. Oh yeah. Oh my goodness. The need to draw and paint is so urgent to me that it is almost like the need to breathe. And it’s strange.

Rowan Mangan:
It is strange. And it’s so interesting how it often does go against those social norms if we’re talking about culture is built with false urgency, true urgency often won’t make sense to our cultural part, which is why you need to have a toad to carry it. The toad is like, “I don’t care. I am going to draw and paint.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah. But no, it wouldn’t have, I would’ve crunched him back down if you had not said this urgency must be respected. And you said, “Get up every morning, you get to draw and paint until 11 o’clock, you get up at whatever time you want, but we will take care of everything, work, child, everything till 11 and you get to draw and paint every morning.”

Rowan Mangan:
Because once in a while we uncover something that feels both urgent and important and that is what this art is for you. And you’re a new person since you’ve been doing this. It’s amazing.

Martha Beck:
I still can’t quite believe it’s true, but it is like I’ve been trying to breathe through a gag or something and it’s been taken out and I can just breathe and most of the stuff I make is crap and I throw it away, but I keep learning and it still feels urgent, but there’s a container for it. So the panic, there used to be a panic that I would not have a container for my urgency. I wouldn’t.

Rowan Mangan:
So you had false urgency about not being able to house the object of your real urgency. That’s interesting.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And every day I get up and I am so besotted with this whole thing. I mean just everything about it, it just feeds every bit of me. But I still keep thinking, “But what’s urgent? Okay, who needs me? Uh-oh, Lila’s crying. I probably should go down there. Oh gosh, I should really edit my book more or all these things. What’s urgent? What’s urgent? What’s so urgent I can’t be the Art Toad?”

Rowan Mangan:
Not all the time, though, because I think sometimes you do get lost in it and it becomes everything and you stop thinking that. You switch off that part of you that is subject to false urgency. And I feel like there’s something.

Martha Beck:
I’m not in control, really. I mean I lose time, I go completely into it. I’m unaware of anything but the joy of the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, sort of the force is working with me. And then I’ll drop in and go, “Oh, oh! Social urgency. What am I looking–?” I’m really still not balancing it very easily.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it’s an interesting process to watch. We’ll have to keep checking in with the listeners and telling them about how you go with this ongoing experiment. It’s super interesting. I just wonder, I feel like there’s something here about what you’re describing as flow is that very commonly sided, Mihaly–

Martha Beck:
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Rowan Mangan:
Where time disappears and everything. But I just wonder because we talk more about neurodivergency now and since our episode “The Other Butterflies” and one of the superpowers of neurodivergency is often hyper focus. And I am just exploring this myself right now. So it’s very different from your spectacular world-class art. But I started doing beading because I like it. And I bead the little needle and I bead my little beads and it’s so– audio medium, audio medium.

Martha Beck:
I was just showing the bracelets to people who may possibly see the pictures.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, I’m so sorry.

Martha Beck:
It felt urgent. Okay, all right.

Rowan Mangan:
Anyway, so I experience this when I go into my own little Beading Toad self where time disappears and I stay up very late and I don’t care. I just don’t care because I’m so, and there’s something so present about it. It’s very rare for me even in meditation to feel as present as I do when I’m doing this little task that is only about beauty and is very, it’s not inspired and yet it inspires me. And I just feel like there’s some really deep wisdom here in this state that we’re describing about the role of art in our lives.

Martha Beck:
I agree. There’s one thing I got to say about this, that beads– one of our friends, Kate, hi Kate, I was telling her about your beading and she said, “Here’s the thing, you could dig up an Egyptian tomb from 5,000 years ago and there would be beads in it, and you could get something from the Aztecs and there would be beads in it and there would be the same kinds. There would be no real difference.” People have been doing this, there must be urgency.

Rowan Mangan:
And no one needed it. We were joking about how beading is making these things that are both precious and pointless. Like that. And that’s what they were doing in Egypt and that’s what they were doing is making something that everyone knows is both precious and pointless. And maybe that’s what all art is, and maybe that’s what all real urgency is, but we’re going to figure this all out right after this.

So Angela was asking us how to know when we need to move on urgency as something that has information for us and when to be suspicious of it as a kind of tool or weapon of the culture. So Marty, how do we decide what urgent really means and how do we discern creative urgency from false urgency?

Martha Beck:
I think that the key, you can feel it. And the key point is that false urgency comes from fear. In fact, it’s actually kind of a form of fear. Fear that, “Oh! I gotta get this done!” And often it’s only triggered by interactions with other people like advertisers, your bosses, government. They can create false urgency by triggering anxiety: “If you don’t do this, something bad will happen!” The moment we’re in anxiety urgency, we’re out of creativity urgency, and they don’t feel the same. Creativity urgency, when you go with it, is nourishing and you find yourself making things. And the other one is draining and you’re doing things for other people that they think is desirable or beautiful but not yourself. So it’s kind of the difference between crushed down by a heavy load and being almost like a rocket being lifted up by the explosion of rocket fuel towards something that you love.

Rowan Mangan:
For me, there’s a focus on the thing itself and not, if I think about that work panic I was having the other day, it was like, “I’ve got to get this done. What is it? It doesn’t matter. It’s got to be done. It’s got to be behind me, the thing, the urgent, urgent thing.” And whereas when I’m doing something driven by my creative urgency, it’s all about that thing. It’s not this huge wall ahead of me, it just is. It’s just being lost in a really, really profound present moment.

Martha Beck:
With this one little thing, whatever it is. It could be beads, it could be a painting, it could be–

Rowan Mangan:
But it also could be life changes that people go through. And I wonder if this is maybe where Angela was sort of going with it. If you feel an urgency to move house, move to another part of the country, or another country.

Martha Beck:
Or just to travel for its own sake, which I know you’ve felt a lot.

Rowan Mangan:
And so how would you, if it was about moving or travel– travel I don’t think works as well, but moving house, how would you decide whether moving houses is creative urgency or false?

Martha Beck:
Are you moving out of a sense of anxiety because you want to have a better house that will please people or you need to be in the place like the part of town that’s prestigious or someone wants you to move? Versus, do you love the place to which you are going? Does it feel like an expansion of your soul to go on from one place that was home, to another place that will be home? If it feels like a push and you’re doing it for other people and you feel drained by it, that urgency, I’d say, is the false urgency. And that sense of “Ahh!” like when we moved here. I moved to California with the feeling of expansion and then I moved away from California to Pennsylvania with the same feeling of, “Oh! It’s the next adventure!” Right? It was urgent, but it wasn’t draining. It was exciting.

Rowan Mangan:
What’s fascinating, if we imagine these two types of urgency as two states of being, almost, what’s interesting is that when you’re in the culture’s urgency, you are not actually available to respond fluidly and spontaneously to creative urgency when it strikes because you build all these inflexible structures around you within cultural, false, social, fake urgency. So before we can even step into responding to our creative urgency, we need to sort of relax and step back a bit from the false urgency or we won’t recognize the real thing when it comes.

Martha Beck:
That’s really true. If you are living a life driven by false urgency, don’t look for creativity urgency because you won’t be able to feel it. Pull back first, get to a place where you’re not urgent at all, and then see what comes up from inside. Because I think the culture’s investment in us is to steal our creativity urgency by pushing us into anxiety to produce what it wants. So what that means is if you get some space and you allow that creativity to arise within you, it’s going to take courage to serve that creative urgency. And you’ve been showing, I mean it sounds so stupid, but I get frightened that I’m doing the wrong thing painting every day. It takes courage to keep going when I’ve so internalized the culture’s models of what I’m supposed to be doing.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s true. It does take courage. It really takes courage. So that’s a sign you’re on the right track, right? You have to be brave to keep doing it.

Martha Beck:
I just want to point out that other people are using courage to do much harder things. “I’m so brave, I just do watercolors all day.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I mean it’s fair the point you’re making, but it’s also a truth–we have to exercise courage on all kinds of levels. And I just want to say in answer to Angela’s question, maybe one way to think about it is the feeling of true urgency is that you’re drawn toward the thing and it’s pulling you toward it. You’re not having to push past it like me with my brand updates.

Martha Beck:
So true. And for me, there’s this feeling of going into light and delight. And it sounds trivial to do beads, to do watercolors, to do songs and dances or whatever it is, but I don’t think it is. There’s this wonderful poem, “The Brief for the Defense” by Jack Gilbert where he talks about the awful things in the world. And then he says, “We actually have to follow the things that give us delight in order to give significance to human life in general and to give freedom to people who have suffered and are suffering.” And he says, I think this is how I want to go forward with my own creativity urgency. He says, “We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight, not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of the world.” And it’s like all that, the ruthless furnace of pressure to do other things. And we need to push it aside and step into our own delight.

Rowan Mangan:
And when we can do that, we know that we’ll be able to… stay wild.

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For more of us, Martha’s on Instagram, themarthabeck. She’s on Facebook, The Martha Beck, and she’s on Twitter, marthabeck. Her website is, MarthaBeck.com. And me, I too am on Instagram. Rowan_Mangan. I’m on Facebook as Rowan Mangan. And I’m on Twitter as RowanMangan. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI.