Martha Beck:
Yeah. So what are you trying to figure out, Roey?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, Marty. It’s a funny thing to be this person in this body and this brain.

Martha Beck:
Funny ha-ha or funny oh dear?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, a bit of both. Bit of both. Yesterday I had an experience that I cannot quite explain. I guess you could call it metaphysical.

Martha Beck:
Ooh.

Rowan Mangan:
You could call it just retail.

Martha Beck:
Okay. Metaphysical retail. I’m liking where this is going.

Rowan Mangan:
It was retail. But for me, it was metaphysical. It was metaphysical.

Martha Beck:
I hear you.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So I had to buy gravel and I’d love to tell you why. I would love to tell you why.

Martha Beck:
I thought it was going to be something where you got the most beautiful body-shaping underwear and had a metaphysical, came to love yourself because of it, and gravel is what I hear?

Rowan Mangan:
I had to get some gravel. Now, one thing I’ll tell you about gravel, it’s quite heavy.

Martha Beck:
You think?

Rowan Mangan:
And we have this thing where we try not to order online things that are going to inconvenience someone else in their day.

Martha Beck:
It’s true. But we fail.

Rowan Mangan:
We fail. But nevertheless, I was determined. And so I took myself off on a little…

Martha Beck:
Gravel-hunting expedition?

Rowan Mangan:
On a gallivant, a gravel gallivant.

Martha Beck:
Gravel foraging.

Rowan Mangan:
To the garden center.

Martha Beck:
Ah. That’s crack for you.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh boy. Oh dear. Oh dear.

Martha Beck:
You know what crack is made out of? Rocks. They call them rocks. And now you’re buying gravel? This is getting dangerous.

Rowan Mangan:
So all I needed was gravel. And I’d love to tell you why. Because our chickens are nearly big enough to move to their outside coop and run, which is a very big moment for our family. Bittersweet. You know, they grow up so fast.

Martha Beck:
There are chickens everywhere, y’all. It is wall-to-wall chickens at our house.

Rowan Mangan:
There’s a lot of chickens. Yeah. But they’re getting ready to move outside. And this is a great responsibility for me because outside where the foxes live, all the things that want to eat our little chickens…

Martha Beck:
They do. Everything wants to eat a chicken. We want to eat a chicken.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. I mean, case in point.

Martha Beck:
I feel so guilty, sitting within view of this brooder box that you got with all these chickens running around, eating chicken.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. But you know they’d eat chicken given half a chance.

Martha Beck:
All the vegetarians out there are going, yep.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, so they will go outside, and things will try to eat them. And I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, I’m something of a chicken influencer-to-be.

Martha Beck:
It has come up.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So I’m trying to get my amazing run all beautiful, but here’s another piece of information. We live on a hill.

Martha Beck:
Really?

Rowan Mangan:
Now, if you live on a hill, and you want a chicken run to be—that’s made out of metal—

Martha Beck:
So many of our listeners will.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. Yeah. They will.

Martha Beck:
They have this exact problem.

Rowan Mangan:
You think you’re joking. They will.

Martha Beck:
They’re living on hills. They’re wanting chickens and chicken runs.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a universal issue.

Martha Beck:
That’s right.

Rowan Mangan:
So there’s an upside and a downside, and I mean that quite literally in the sense of a hillside. I need gravel on the downside because I’m scared that something’s going to come under the run and eat the chickens.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah, they can come up. They can come down.

Rowan Mangan:
So I had to go to Adam’s—sorry, they’re not a sponsor—Garden Center.

Martha Beck:
Oh, I thought you meant our son, Adam.

Rowan Mangan:
No, no.

Martha Beck:
I thought, Adam has a garden center? He’s kept that well hidden.

Rowan Mangan:
And still won’t sponsor us. Selfish. And so I went off and I just—Marty, something came over me.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Tell me something I wouldn’t predict. That place is, you can’t go in there. It’s like Aladdin’s cave for you.

Rowan Mangan:
It was so exciting. I mean, there were Bluebird boxes.

Martha Beck:
What? Wait, now you’ve got me going.

Rowan Mangan:
Right? I walked up and down the aisles, Marty, and I thought one cart is not going do the job here.

Martha Beck:
What have you done with our finances, Rowan Mangan?

Rowan Mangan:
Ohhh, nothing good. Nothing good.

Martha Beck:
We’ve spent our entire fortune on bluebird boxes, and I’d do it again! I would.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s like one of those things that you famously hear about Wall Street tycoons going down because of an unhealthy attachment to bluebird boxes. There was 30% off Adirondack chairs.

Martha Beck:
I though you were going to say Adderall. I’m really going down a drug track here.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. Adderall. I guess it’s just my energy.

Martha Beck:
Wait, stop. Go back. Adirondack chairs. How many did you buy, Ro?

Rowan Mangan:
Only one.

Martha Beck:
Good.

Rowan Mangan:
But it turned out to be significantly bigger than the space in our car.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Those things are huge. They’re made for sasquatches. I think they’re basically made to lure sasquatch in.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, it worked on me. And let me tell you, this chair is a rocking chair. It’s a rocking Adirondack chair.

Martha Beck:
Oh, my.

Rowan Mangan:
Have you ever heard of anything quite so marvelous?

Martha Beck:
No.

Rowan Mangan:
So I got it. It’s plastic also, which is ugly, but—

Martha Beck:
That sounds horrifying.

Rowan Mangan:
Very convenient.

Martha Beck:
That sounds like the ultimate cheap toy. Cheap? I wish. Notice the pause.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s delightful.

Martha Beck:
It is.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s 30% off. So I got my one cart and I’m like, “I’ll have to come back for this Adirondack rocker.” And then I found a cooler.

Martha Beck:
Oh! Okay, just a cooler. I thought you meant you found a cooler Adirondack chair. I am not tracking well today, but I’m having a good time.

Rowan Mangan:
Me too. And that’s the main thing.

Martha Beck:
Keep talking, then.

Rowan Mangan:
I ended up at the outdoor garden center cash register situation. I had—guys, I mean, the succulents. I mean, succulents—I get a lot of natural light. Do you know? That’s where succulents thrive.

Martha Beck:
You had to buy more succulents?

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t have any succulents.

Martha Beck:
I spend a lot of time cleaning your succulents.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, my succulent. But that’s not mine anymore because I put it in a communal space. Now it’s ours.

Martha Beck:
Where I can groom it. This is starting to make succulent sound oddly dirty.

Rowan Mangan:
Succulent.

Martha Beck:
I know. It is. And it’s like a word you would choose to be gross: succulent.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I also got some cacti.

Martha Beck:
Oh, God.

Rowan Mangan:
And I got a Monstera plant and some…

Martha Beck:
This gardening thing of yours has gotten really out of control, Ro. I’m not even kidding.

Rowan Mangan:
But it all culminated with the cooler, the Adirondack rocker, the—and then I forgot about the gravel. And then I had to say, “Sorry, I need to get gravel.” And she’s like—

Martha Beck:
800 tons of gravel.

Rowan Mangan:
She’s like, “It’s out there. Take a photo of the barcode and tell me which one it is.”

Martha Beck:
Nobody’s dragging that thing around, right?

Rowan Mangan:
She did not want me to, no, she wanted nothing to do with it. So I found myself the gravel that I wanted. It was going to be very good gravel. Took a photo. Came back. She then put the gravel through separately. And then I had the car and the Adirondack.

Martha Beck:
We do not have a large car.

Rowan Mangan:
No. And I mean, I learned a lot about the dimensions of our car. I put the car in different places. At one point—

Martha Beck:
Do you know that doesn’t change the interior space?

Rowan Mangan:
At one point, I drove off with the back door open. And there was this old man sitting in a car in the parking lot, just watching me and eating his lunch, sitting in his car. And it must have been like 35 minutes I spent with the turning it. And because actually when you’ve got a one-piece Adirondack-shaped rocker—

Martha Beck:
That’s an awkward shape to put in a small car.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s awkward, but it also, there are so many possibilities. Everything that didn’t work gave me an idea for something that might. So eventually, after a very long time, the guy had finished his lunch. He was smoking fags. He was fine. He was having a blast. I made his day. I had the Adirondack chair in. I got the succulents. I got the cooler. I drove off. The back door was open, but luckily my car made me aware of that.

Martha Beck:
Was the gravel in there yet?

Rowan Mangan:
So about the gravel. I didn’t remember to get the gravel, but boy, have I ever got us an Adirondack chair.

Martha Beck:
We paid for the gravel?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, we paid for the gravel.

Martha Beck:
You have to go get the gravel.

Rowan Mangan:
It was only 6.99.

Martha Beck:
Was it a handful of gravel?

Rowan Mangan:
It was a bag.

Martha Beck:
Okay. All right. This is not unlike the time you told me in the dead of winter that you’d just ordered live bees in the mail. You always present me with new and interesting challenges, Roey.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Keeps me on my toes.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s called Metaphysical Retail with Ro.

Martha Beck:
Well, now I’m—what I got from that story is crack and Adderall.

Rowan Mangan:
Crack and Adderall.

Martha Beck:
Get ’em at the garden store.

Rowan Mangan:
What are you trying to figure out, Marty?

Martha Beck:
Well, it’s related, sort of. We have turkeys that live in our forest, right? And they make sounds.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, yes.

Martha Beck:
Not so much now in the summer, but in the winter and the spring, they made a lot of sounds.

Rowan Mangan:
I wonder why that was. Were they just cold?

Martha Beck:
I don’t know. They would strut around and fight each other and whatnot. Anyway, they’re very—ah, turkeys, I could do a whole series of podcasts on turkeys, and I don’t even know anything much about them. Just stuff I’ve looked at. They are fascinating creatures. Anyway, you know werewolves?

Rowan Mangan:
Yep.

Martha Beck:
No. You think it’s a non-sequitur, but it’s not. And may I just put in a parenthetical statement that the other day I was doing something with Lila and I said something like—

Rowan Mangan:
Our daughter, Lila.

Martha Beck:
Our daughter Lila. Five going on six, going on 17. And I said something like, “You really should wash that apple before you eat it,” or something. And she looked at it and she went, “Eh, I’m part wolf,” and just kept eating, which I like about a child. Anyway, she is definitely part wolf, but she’s not a werewolf because she doesn’t turn into a wolf at the full moon. But I think there’s someone that I know—will remain nameless—who is a were-turkey.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh!

Martha Beck:
No, no. No specifics. But you’ve met this person. And here’s the thing, I think there are were-turkeys among us because they make the sound of turkeys when you don’t see them and you just hear them and they’re like [screeches]. And the way it comes across when they’re in their human persona is that they laugh when they’re nervous.

Rowan Mangan:
Ah, yes.

Martha Beck:
But they don’t laugh in a jolly, inspiring way. They laugh in a way that makes you afraid.

Rowan Mangan:
I know. I do feel afraid.

Martha Beck:
I mean, the thing is, I can’t really do it into the microphone without blowing out our listeners’ ears, but it does that. It’s [screeches]. Well, I know this person now who laughs when she’s nervous, and she’s really nervous a lot, apparently. I think she laughs when she’s nervous. Either that, or she’s just bursting out with turkey calls for no reason.

Rowan Mangan:
She’s just amused in a very shrill way.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, but it reminds me of a study I once read on laughter. And these two scientists went to the mall and sneaked around the mall writing down times that people laughed and what made them laugh.

Rowan Mangan:
That is the creepiest shit I have ever heard pretending to be a study.

Martha Beck:
I know. It really made me want to be a social scientist.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
But what they found is that people don’t laugh at jokes as much as they laugh at just ordinary statements, and they included this one: “Do you have a rubber band?” This apparently was a knee slapper at the mall. And their point was, we associate laughter with humor, but it’s actually more associated with bringing your nervous system down from anxiety into regulation. But the weird turkey people, they’re on a different wavelength. They’re trying to bring down anxiety from a very high place. And that’s why I think they actually morph into turkeys. And maybe even when you’re not looking, they just do it behind your back. Because I’m afraid of this person because of the velocity and the volume, the magnitude of the turkey calls coming out of their face all the time. And the other day I surprised them. I went into an office where they were, and they were surprised. And I was like, “I’m sorry, I need a rubber band.” I didn’t say that, but I could have. And Ro, the gales of laughter, the shrieking intensity of the turkey calls was so terrifying. It haunts me still. And now I’m afraid of this person, deeply afraid. And I also think that the turkeys going [screeches] in our forest in the winter are actually people in the daytime. At nighttime, they turn into turkeys. And now that I think of it, I mean, werewolves are a bit more frightening than were-turkeys because wolves will eat you. But turkeys would if they could. I don’t even know what I’m talking about. I’m trying to figure this out, Ro.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, no, there’s a lot to work with.

Martha Beck:
All I know is that I don’t know how to deal with this person. I think they’re a were-turkey. I’m afraid of turkeys now. And how does one deal in polite society with the whole were-turkey phenomenon? What I did—what do you do when there’s that laughter coming at you? What? I ask you, what do you do?

Rowan Mangan:
I’ll answer your question with a question.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
Do you remember the other night when I felt very weird, and the only thing that made me feel better was to go [vocalizes]?

Martha Beck:
I’ve been trying to forget it, but yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
So I think that’s related.

Martha Beck:
They bit you. They pecked you. They pecked you. They crept in and pecked you in the night and now you’re a were-turkey. Or is that vampires?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
See, there’s a lot to figure out.

Rowan Mangan:
I think we’ll take this one offline and maybe come circle around again next podcast.

Martha Beck:
I think that’s a good idea. But if our listeners out there know anything that wards off a were-turkey or how to not be afraid—because what I did was I ended up shrieking with false laughter in response. And it was two people shrieking with false laughter in a closed office.

Rowan Mangan:
That might’ve been its mating call.

Martha Beck:
Oh God. It was a person. But I don’t know how people mate. I don’t know what they do in those singles bars. Do they have calls?

Rowan Mangan:
They’re called ringtones, okay?

Martha Beck:
Oh God, this has gone on way too long. Let’s make a podcast.

Rowan Mangan:
Hi there. I’m Ro and I’ll be your podcaster for today. Do you know how to tip your podcaster? It’s actually pretty easy. You can rate our pod with lots of stars—all your stars. You can review it with your best superlatives. You can even subscribe or follow Bewildered so you’ll never miss an episode. Then of course, if you’re ready to go all in, our paid online community is called Wilder: A Sanctuary for the Bewildered. And I can honestly say it’s one of the few true sanctuaries online. You can go to wildercommunity.com to check it out. Rate, review, subscribe, join, and y’all have a great day now.

Martha Beck:
What are we talking about in actual podcast terms today?

Rowan Mangan:
In podcast terms, I can only say, let me put this in podcast terms. We’re talking about me.

Martha Beck:
Oh, you.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Everyone—that’s a subject that’s on everyone’s mind.

Rowan Mangan:
Right? It’s just like the chicken run thing. So I had a thought this morning, and I wish to discuss it with you, Drew, and our listeners.

Martha Beck:
All right then.

Rowan Mangan:
So here goes. I now do morning pages in the morning.

Martha Beck:
Can I just explain to those of you—

Rowan Mangan:
No, everyone knows what it means.

Martha Beck:
They don’t. Julia Cameron’s amazing book, The Artist’s Way, recommends writing three pages, longhand stream of consciousness, every morning. It brings up your creativity no matter what you want to do with it.

Rowan Mangan:
I do morning pages and it’s very instructive. And this morning I was coming to terms with the fact that I come to terms with most days of my life, which is there are more things that I need to/want to do than there are time, units of energy, spoons, years of human life.

Martha Beck:
It’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
And so on. And that I think is a constant for most of us. Maybe not everyone.

Martha Beck:
I think everybody has more to do than they can do.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know.

Martha Beck:
I don’t know.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know.

Martha Beck:
I think that’s the prevailing feeling, though.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, it certainly is my prevailing feeling.

Martha Beck:
Me too.

Rowan Mangan:
So I thought, given that—I love a given that—given that we are likely to, much of our life, find ourselves with more to do than we have time to do it. How then to choose what to do. And what I am starting to learn is I do better when I decide on the day. Let’s say that.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
And what I mean is that there are some things that I can’t not do that I have to do.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
Then there are places where there is wiggle room.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah? In the wiggle-room places—this is so radical. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to break this down enough for our listeners to be able to follow or you. If I really want to do something and I have some wiggle room, I put the want-to-do in the wiggle-room space. And so far, what I’m finding is that the things I don’t feel like doing today, another day, I will feel like doing them in the wiggle room.

Martha Beck:
You think?

Rowan Mangan:
And so thus am I learning to steer my way through my days, but I can’t make a plan. And this is where culture comes in. I can’t make a plan that says, “During this period of life, my focus is this.” Or in the next quarter or whatever. It just won’t work that way. And even saying this month, this season, all of that, when it comes to how to figure out how to navigate the terrain of our own days, I feel like it’s got to be that day that you decide.

Martha Beck:
Do you think it’s always been like this?

Rowan Mangan:
For me or for everyone?

Martha Beck:
Well, for everyone, because I actually think this is an increasing trend.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, interesting.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I mean, there’s always been more to do than anybody could do. Anybody who’s like agrarian cultures, there’s so much to do. I don’t know, maybe hunter-gatherers don’t feel that way. There’s a whole four-hour work week kind of thing. If you read anthropology, it’s only when we started planting stuff—

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Martha Beck:
It’s no coincidence you’re obsessed with gardening. People who garden have more to do than they can do, but so does everybody else. So does everybody else. So I used to find that for myself and the people I know that I talk to, there were these seasons of life or, while I’m in graduate school, or when I’m building my empire, versus now I’m in midlife and now I’m—it’s not happening that way anymore. The phases of life are all getting jumbled up.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. Okay. This is so interesting because this is kind of my hunch coming into this conversation is that I feel like I am being challenged to come back to the most present of present and the most embodied of embodied in such tiny increments these days.

Martha Beck:
Huh.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s just like you’ve got to steer from the right now.

Martha Beck:
Interesting. There’s something called chaos theory in mathematics, and I first read about it—

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, I’ve seen Jurassic Park.

Martha Beck:
Michael Crighton was brilliant at learning something about a science thing and then writing books that made people feel like they understood it.

Rowan Mangan:
I know. That’s what I feel.

Martha Beck:
He did a great job of that. But there was this book called Chaos by James Gleick that was out that I think inspired Jurassic Park, but it was a little bit more in depth. And I was obsessed with it. I loved it so much. I still do. Anyway, it was years and years ago. So I was thinking about it the other day and I went online and I said, “What’s the latest on chaos theory? What have they figured out since then?”

Rowan Mangan:
“I’m a serious scholar, so just give me the serious scoop.”

Martha Beck:
I’m not a serious—

Rowan Mangan:
“What’s the latest? What’s the latest?”

Martha Beck:
It will tell you!

Rowan Mangan:
I know.

Martha Beck:
And it’s probably lying, but who cares? No. They had this most beautiful illustration video. They—

Rowan Mangan:
Was there a velociraptor?

Martha Beck:
The velociraptor was holding the camera. No. So when I read the book Chaos, they basically just decided, turbulent systems, okay—if you have water that’s all going down the drain and it’s all whirling down one drain, it’s acting basically like one thing. But if you turn on the tap and then open up another plug that has all these different sources of velocity, and so the directions become chaotic, that’s a chaotic system. And it basically said 20 years ago, there’s no way to calculate this. It’s impossible. But I thought with computers doubling their capacity every 10 minutes these days, what happens? And they said, actually, they’ve been able to track more turbulence. So they took this bucket of white paint and they poured some black paint into it, just a dot.

And then they started to stir it. And what happens is this beautiful marbling effect. And as they stirred it, part of it got gray, but parts of it became these beautiful little patterns. And they said, “This is what happens in a turbulent system. You can’t really track any overall trend at all, but you can track these little microsystems of order.” And they were visually beautiful. So what I think is happening is there are so many different conflicting forces on our lives these days. I mean, just when I grew up, there were three TV channels. We didn’t have to choose the one that was like our politics or anything. There were three: Deal with it. Everything’s so much more complicated. And so things are getting weird and chaotic and we can’t really track those, but the microsystems are forming. And when you say that, it’s like you get up and the whole day is too—this season of your life is too chaotic to track, but then you notice this beautiful little system of order that wants to be beautiful that day.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
And it’s a really different way. There’s no way of saying, “I’m going to put this on a grid,” right? “I’m going to map this out over a month’s time, hours per day. Stamp, stamp, stamp. Do it.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Doesn’t work anymore. And these patterns are not things that are rigid. They create predictable, beautiful, repetitive iterations, but they’re always different.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And yet I imagine that if you then zoom way out and you’re looking down at the tin of paint, the whole is kind of going to be beautiful, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
The whole is going to be beautiful and that includes the chaos and it includes the tiny, beautiful points of order. And this is almost like what I feel like I’m being asked to trust in my life is that this little pocket of order in which I just want to play in the garden, and then this little pocket of order over here where I genuinely want to do the DIY project or I need to do the taxes or something, it does come round that all of that amidst the chaos of life overall, these little pockets of “I want to” and that makes a beautiful whole.

Martha Beck:
Probably. But we could only deal with it on a really localized thing. I have a question. Do you ever really want, is there going to be a day when you say, “Taxes, that makes me feel good today”?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I’m going to say there’s a mode—taxes is a bad example because there’s a time component where you don’t have the option— but imagine that taxes is something you’ve always got to do. Yeah. There’s a mode that I have that comes upon me where I find that kind of exacting detail stuff very satisfying. So yeah, I mean, I think so. I think this is what I’m operating on and this is kind of what I’m bringing, the question I’m bringing, because when my left hemisphere even wants to pretend, my culture part of my brain wants to pretend that it’s being nature, it’s like Om shanti balance, balance, balance, balance.

Martha Beck:
Right.

Rowan Mangan:
But what I think I am starting to believe is that an enforced balance is just another trick. It’s not balance at all if it is pre—

Martha Beck:
Determined?

Rowan Mangan:
Pre-planned.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. In advance rather than going where the heat is on the day.

Martha Beck:
So are we supposing, even hypothetically, that no planning at all is the way to go forward?

Rowan Mangan:
So wiggle room.

Martha Beck:
Ah.

Rowan Mangan:
Wiggle room in the day. The little pockets of nice in the big paint swirls.

Martha Beck:
The chaos.

Rowan Mangan:
The chaos of the day includes you’ve got to make the lunch and drive the kid to camp, right? For example. So I’m talking about the little spaces where we find them, whether that’s right after you drop the kid or last thing at night or whatever.

Martha Beck:
Okay. So if, as I like to believe, we’re moving to a different phase of human culture—

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah!

Martha Beck:
Yeah. We have this mechanical ideal that we’ve been working on for the last few hundred years, and it’s all about charting things out. I remember I had a friend in high school whose parents, he was the oldest of 10 children, and they decided to control all their children by printing out time grids for a week in advance in 15-minute increments. And the children had to fill out for the full week ahead every single thing they were going to be doing every 15 minutes.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
Including how long they were going to stay in the shower.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
And my friend, the oldest of the children in this family, ended up faking illness and reporting to the emergency room at the hospital so that he just had a place to go at night where they couldn’t get him. It was like the more they tried to control these children, the more the children could not tolerate it. And I almost feel like, I mean, that’s a really extreme case, but it is sort of the logical extreme of how we’ve been socialized.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And then we do it to ourselves as we’ve learned it.

Martha Beck:
Exactly. And maybe you’re kind of detoxing from that.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. But I’m so interested in the idea that maybe when our society was a little bit more predictable or this planet before technology went completely bananas, in those times there was much more predictability and therefore the kind of fractal pattern of chaos was much more contained. And so you could. I’m just basing this entirely on Jurassic Park at this point.

Martha Beck:
There’s something you’re describing here and it’s not just this point in our culture, but it’s many cultures. So Confucianism, people don’t always know this, it was not a religion or even really a philosophy. It was a set of rules and it was rigid as crap.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. And that’s not how we think of Confucianism at all.

Martha Beck:
No, it is not “Confucius says” and then they quote Lao Tzu who was on the other team. Anyway, oh my God, it was so rigid. And you had to learn the analects of Confucius and then the top scholar in each family, they’d send their oldest son or sometimes they’d have a daughter who faked being male to go to the exams. And I have been to these places in China, all these little booths, ancient, like 5,000 years old made of stones with little phonebooth-sized cells in them with a rock for a desk and a rock for a seat and a hook in the ceiling where you were supposed to tie your hair. And they would go in and they would take this test that lasted for four days and it had to be exactly according to the rules. And whoever was the best at being exactly according to the rules would be able to move upward socially. And people went mad in those places and they ran screaming.

Rowan Mangan:
I would say so.

Martha Beck:
And elsewhere in China, people were going, “Fuck this. Let’s do Taoism.” Which, literally, the Tao means “the way” and it’s all flow. It’s like the river flows, you flow with it, that’s the way it is. And the ridiculous—what Confucianism did is pushed everything more and more into the left hemisphere until people went, “Nooo!” And then another thing I was thinking about, Karen and I just did a puzzle of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. And I’ve been painting a lot, but my style is so different from his. So putting together this puzzle brushstroke by brushstroke almost, I’d never looked so closely at a painting. And I realized that the rigid rules of painting in the classical style got more and more and more exacting until the impressionists just went [vocalizes explosion], and Van Gogh just went, “I’m putting down the paint that feels right in a given place.” It’s kind of the same.

It’s this feeling that we’ve been pushed to the point of rigidity where something natural wants to just blow up like a volcano and start making some beautiful pattern in the sky.

Rowan Mangan:
Do you think it’s that the rules of painting got so extreme that everyone was just like, “I want to break free,” or do you think that there’s a way in which in mastering those that someone like a painter like van Gogh could then transcend and make something new and impressionism isn’t just a reaction to, but a new thing?

Martha Beck:
I’m sitting here very, very anxious right now because I know nothing about art history. So I know there are art historians out there going, “They were not rigid. What are you talking about?”

Rowan Mangan:
In Marty’s mind, you, our listeners, are just sitting there waiting to get mad at her.

Martha Beck:
I’ll be attacked online for not knowing enough art history. It’s a plague, I tell you. I don’t know, but I do know that—

Rowan Mangan:
No, but what do you think? What do you feel?

Martha Beck:
What I do know is what the critics said when the impressionists started exhibiting. And one of the things was “You can see their brushstrokes.” And I know from painting that getting rid of those brushstrokes, that is a tricky thing in oil. And you have to be very, very exacting. And my style tends to be exact—very, very intensely precise. And I’m putting together this puzzle going, “I have got to start following the flow of the paint. This is ridiculous. I’m trying so hard to control this substance.” And the substance is trying to talk back to me about what new thing we can create. I tend to replicate things that are realistic. But look at what third thing can happen if the part of you that wants to blow the rules out of the box and the part of you that still wants to paint—so the still wanting to paint is the, “I have my things to do,” and the “Let’s see what happens” is the wiggle room you’re talking about. And these forms come out of that that are sort of, it’s like an evolutionary leap forward almost.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. This is what I want to say is that you know in the I Ching how if you, it’s like you do your reading, it’s like an ancient oracle kind of thing.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
And you do your six lines and there’s two trigrams that make up the hexagram. And if one of the trigrams is the most extreme form of one energy, you convert it into its opposite as the next kind of step. So you read it as it is and then it converts, so when it reaches it, the energy reaches its extreme, the extreme of yin, it will turn to yang or whatever. And so what I wonder is, does it take the extremity of Confucianism to create Taoism? Is that like an essential ingredient is to go too far in the other direction in order to pull back the bow string enough to fly forward?

Martha Beck:
It’s entertaining.

Rowan Mangan:
And don’t say no because I’m really into this idea.

Martha Beck:
No, it’s very entertaining to think this way because then a lot of the things you could look and say, “Why were we so restrictive? Oh, we’ve wasted our lives.” But in fact, all of it is part of like “Now I will be the one who is most free because I was the one who was most captive.”

Rowan Mangan:
I did those taxes for humanity.

Martha Beck:
Now I’m doing creative taxes. I’m doing billowing numbers that please the way I think.

Rowan Mangan:
They feel like they add up even if they don’t.

Martha Beck:
If they want me to add, I say, “Add yourselves, bastards.” It’s the impressionist Sudman tax accountant. Here’s what I think. The more rigid a system is, it comes from what I call “the pyramid”: the need for the leaders of a culture, from the leading lights, the powermongers in a culture to force everyone else to be constrained by what they want because it helps build. So the reason I often go on and on about how the school system that I went to and you went to as a child, they were created to make factory workers. So instead of teaching a kid under a tree the way they were doing in Africa, they lined up kids.

Rowan Mangan:
In some parts of Africa.

Martha Beck:
Well, no, all over Africa, there are traditions of children being taught by the elders under a tree.

Rowan Mangan:
Also, going to repressive schools. Both.

Martha Beck:
But I’m talking about during the industrial revolution.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m just saying: More than one thing.

Martha Beck:
I know, but I don’t think there were repressive schools in Africa during the industrial revolution.

Rowan Mangan:
I think you’ll find if you take a good look at the Rhodesia and South Africa of it all, they would’ve still been—

Martha Beck:
Oh, but they were European imposed.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Still in Africa.

Martha Beck:
Yeah but you actually make my point because the—

Rowan Mangan:
Exception proves the rule.

Martha Beck:
No, no, because the obsession with control drove colonization. They wanted to plunder, pillage, rape, control. And if you’re a minority trying to hold sway, govern and exploit a larger population, you become very rigid.

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. “You better punch the clock when I say you punch the clock, and if you don’t, you will be punished. And here’s the punishment.” And it becomes more and more legislative, more and more oppressive, and more and more systematized in a very sterile way.

Rowan Mangan:
Until some sort of critical mass is reached, or what do we think happens? There’s some sort of atomic spark?

Martha Beck:
I think it may be analogous to the way atoms change from one element to another, which is the definition of—

Rowan Mangan:
Adam’s, the garden center?

Martha Beck:
No, Adam, our son.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay.

Martha Beck:
He changes from one element to another.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s sort of true.

Martha Beck:
One day I went in and he was pure argon. It was wild.

Rowan Mangan:
Atoms.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, atoms. Yeah. I think this is right. All the scientists out there with their notebooks going, “You fucking idiot.”

Rowan Mangan:
“I knew I’d get you on this one day, Beck.”

Martha Beck:
But basically if you push enough energy into an atom, yeah, it holds its structure as like, I don’t know, hydrogen. And then you push enough energy into it. It fills up as much as it can absorb that energy. And then when it can, it goes poof! and becomes helium. I think that’s the technical way to describe it. Yeah. If you push enough energy in, it ultimately has to have this leap into a totally different state of matter.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s the perfect thing.

Martha Beck:
So the pressure and the energy of that is a predecessor, perhaps a necessary predecessor to the quantum leap into something else.

Rowan Mangan:
Because here’s what I wonder. If we are just chilling, doing more or less what we want to all the time, and all room is wiggle room as it were—

Martha Beck:
Whoa. Wait, wait, wait. No, no. Repeat please. Just for my benefit, if not the listeners’. All room is wiggle room? You know what that means? Wiggle room. I’m going to wiggle all day long.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a very serious podcast. We’re just kind of doing our thing, right? Hunter-gatherers. Enjoying life, chilling. Then we’re like, “Oh my God, agriculture surplus.” We’ve been there. We’ve done this. And maybe this is where we are, actually, is we’re at the logical—the moment where the dawn of agriculture comes full circle and gets too much.

Martha Beck:
Could be.

Rowan Mangan:
Like we’ve got too much shit at this point. And so the surplus is out of control. But if we were still just, I don’t know, maybe where the quantum leap that happens next has required all this repressiveness politically and all this—

Martha Beck:
So interesting.

Rowan Mangan:
—crazy, unfettered materialism and all of it. Not that I’m saying it’s good, but it’s a nicer way of thinking about the whole thing is maybe we’re just pulling back the bow string to let go and… boing!

Martha Beck:
So what does this mean for you as you sit down to do your daily chores? What are we really talking about here for the listener? Okay. Let me just answer my own question a little bit. I think everybody to some extent has absorbed this restrictive, repressive, very highly controlled way of filling time with work or with action of some kind.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
And it ain’t wiggling. We are not given a lot of time to wiggle.

Rowan Mangan:
No.

Martha Beck:
And people have a little bit of wiggle room and they’re trying to create beauty in the wiggles.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
So is that where you are now that you have your repressive schedule, but then you create beauty in the wiggles?

Rowan Mangan:
Where I am is that I feel as though the winds of change or the tailwind that if we were boats would direct us to a certain extent. It’s very confusing in my metaphor brain. I’m doing my best. The winds do not stay steady. And so with the wiggle room that exists, we have to be super wiggly, like wigglier than anyone has maybe ever been before because—and maybe it’s wiggling because of the atoms jiggling.

Martha Beck:
They’re really getting lost.

Rowan Mangan:
The element is turning into the other element.

Martha Beck:
Oh, they don’t—

Rowan Mangan:
And so that’s why we’re wiggling so hard.

Martha Beck:
Because we’re about to—

Rowan Mangan:
We’re about to—

Martha Beck:
Become Sasquatch or something. We can sit in the Adirondack chairs.

Rowan Mangan:
I think we’ve solved it.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I don’t know. I really like the idea that the phenomenon that I’m experiencing as I trust, as I lean into another day, will hold the thing that I don’t feel like doing today in my wiggle room, is to trust that I’m being directed, that there’s a guidance system going on. And so when you say this may be something that didn’t used to be this way, that pings really hard for me. And yeah, I think that in the same way that you talk about negative space in art or something, I think the fact that camp starts at nine, therefore I’m leaving the house at 20 to nine and getting back at 20 past, that those things in my day do create the container for the wiggling in the wiggle room. And so in that way, the one requires the other to a certain extent because otherwise we’re just like, “Hey, we’re chill,” but we’re not making exciting things because—

Martha Beck:
We’re not moving forward? So you need the framework structure to move forward, but the wiggle room is where you go a little wild and do things that you just feel like doing that day instead of planning?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
And then your whole life becomes completely unpredictable at that point, which is what I love.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And I feel like there’s a tendency that we sometimes have to—and in some ways it’s actually countercultural to say “this season of my life” right? Like, that’s all nice—nature, seasons. But like, “Oh, my kids are small. Well, there’s not a lot of wiggle room in that part.” But where there are periods of time that are like this decade or this five years, you know, my five-year plan, this sort of time, what if that is entirely too big a chunk to think in?

Martha Beck:
I think it is. I don’t think you can go there anymore.

Rowan Mangan:
What if I am super all about the fact that I’m perimenopausal and having night sweats yesterday, and today I’ve never felt better and I’m going to go take a class.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I love this because I do think that all the so-called seasons of life, like the life segments, let’s call them life segments.

Rowan Mangan:
Segments. That’s a better term.

Martha Beck:
So I have a segment when I’m going to school and I have a segment when I’m establishing myself in my marriage and I have a segment or then I get divorced and that’s a segment and I learn to—and I buy a red sports car, whatever. I think all the segments are culture-based. I think the segments are bullshit. And I like what you said about “I feel bad one day and then the next day I feel better” because I have that experience with aging. Everybody’s like, “Well, now you can what? Learn to play golf or something.” I feel like more wildly pulled around to do things I love and to wiggle than I’ve ever felt. I feel wilder and more free and more like doing something brand new than I did when I was 15.

When I was 15, I was trying to make all the right moves. I was trying to do it all “right” so that my life would play out the way I wanted. And now I’m just like, “Life schmife. I’m going after the were-turkeys in the forest.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And I love the idea that it’s not about where you are individually in the years you’ve accrued or whatever, which is an individualistic, much more left-hemisphere-driven kind of worldview as well. We’re all just having this individual experience. And it makes it more like, oh my God, we’re all alive in this moment where things are—it’s unprecedented times. But no one knows what tomorrow is—for all of us—so why pretend? Why perform as though we can know what tomorrow will be for me? And by tomorrow I mean the five-year plan.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. The five-year plan is utterly unknowable. And I will say people are like, “Well, things are worse than they’ve ever been.” Not really. You want to go back to the Depression, the Black Plague? Things have always been rough, but they have never been this unpredictable. They really have never been this unpredictable, which is a wonderful thing. And as you’re talking, I’m thinking about chaos being a rule of nature. And what I’m seeing is there are patterns sketched out by humans, and those do create some kind of a framework for us. But there is also a pattern and an order created by something that is too complex for the human mind to calculate.

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
I think I’ve told this Taoist story before, probably more than once on this podcast, but it’s worth saying. These Confucian scholars, rule bound, rule bound, they’re walking by a huge waterfall, some of the Yellow River in China, massive waterfalls. And they see a body in the whitewater and they think, “Oh, we have to give it a proper burial. How are we going to get in there and get this body?” But the rules say, “We have to get the body out.” And they’re debating what to do. And this little old man pops out of the water and dries himself off and heads off down the road. And they run after him say, “How did you do that? How did you survive?” And he said, “It’s really easy. You just go up when the water goes up and you go down when the water goes down.” So he’s in a chaotic system and the structure he’s agreeing to is the structure created by nature.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, I love that.

Martha Beck:
And basically, the Confucians can’t cope with it because they’re looking for rules using a mind that is fundamentally unable to conceive of the patterns that govern nature and movement through nature. Wiggles, one might say.

Rowan Mangan:
You could say.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So basically I think we’ve come to a time, I agree, we’ve come to a time of chaos and change so rapid and unpredictable that our regimented minds and our regimented schedules and our regimented ways of thinking what the segments of our life must be or should be or will be, they’re all off the table. And the only thing on the table is: Go up when the water goes up, go down when the water goes down.

Rowan Mangan:
I see it. I am obsessed with a woman called Nicole Hemenway.

Martha Beck:
This is the time you choose to break this to me? Right in the middle—

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry, honey. I couldn’t hold it in. I’m just going up when the water goes up and the water is really going up. I’m obsessed with her Substack and she has a recent essay, won’t be recent by the time this comes out, which is called “Making Sense Is the Cage We Must Play Our Way Out of,” which is kind of quite close to this. And I just love this one sentence, the whole thing you’ve just got to get on her Substack, which is called The Turning Mind. And I just need to read you that “There is nothing more human than to be haunted by an ever present, achy, painful longing for anywhere, any when, any who, anything other than the insane abundance available to us here and now. Nothing more human than to forget that everything that happens happens in the vast pregnant infinity of the present moment. And nothing is more divine than to remember.”

Martha Beck:
Okay. You can sleep with her.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you.

Martha Beck:
Totally.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you. So this idea that all abundance is to be found in the vast pregnant infinity of the present moment, and all scarcity is to be found in the imaginary future that we never reach is a good enough reason, when you’re designing your day, to wiggle.

Martha Beck:
Well, and you know me with my metaphysical obsessions when she says “there’s nothing more divine than to remember,” basically when you look at your daily schedule and you go, “I’m going to get the kid to camp. After that, I’m just going to go up when the water goes up,” you’re basically inviting the divine into your life to make of it what it will.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s pencil in the hand of God stuff. “Make me a pencil in the hand of God.” It’s the—

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And then have really, really tight little lines.

Rowan Mangan:
And then do perfect calligraphy. Yeah. No, but it is. It’s that “I’m available to the day and whatever the day has in mind for me, let me do it” because going up when the water goes up and going down when the water comes down is actually—it tends to feel really good.

Martha Beck:
I like that. And when you said “I’m available to the day,” it reminded me of the biblical passage “sufficient unto the day as the evil thereof.” The only phrase involving the word “evil” that ever felt weirdly comforting to me, even as a child, I remember, “Oh, that feels good.” But it’s basically saying, “Whatever joy is available here, whatever part of me is divine will go toward it. And whatever is difficult, whatever is divine in me will deal with it here and now.” And that really is, those are the two sides of going up when the water goes up and down, when the water goes down. Surrendering to bliss on one hand and surrendering to whatever you have to deal with, even if it’s hard on that day. If you’ve got both of those and they’re both a state of surrender to the flow, I have a sense that your life would turn out exactly how it’s meant to.

Rowan Mangan:
Me too. Me too.

Martha Beck:
Huh. So to summarize, which I think I need to do, we treated this episode as a “go up when the water goes up, go down when the water goes down” episode. Basically it was all wiggle room.

Rowan Mangan:
Wiggle.

Martha Beck:
And I wiggled around ferociously and my fact checking, I’m not even going to do it because I can’t face the shame. But we came to many conclusions and drew many analogies.

Rowan Mangan:
We did.

Martha Beck:
It was a feast of mixed metaphors.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, I love those. Delicious.

Martha Beck:
Because that’s what it was. And what we came to in the end was if you know what you want to do in your life, and you let go of needing any segments to match anything that has ever gone, any part of your life, you don’t have to have parts of your life that are defined by anything you’re culturally acquainted with. The periods of life that you’re meant to have—no, no. They’re all disappearing into chaos. But there are these little places of freedom and pattern that are emerging from some divine design, and the way you find those is to relax toward what is joyful and surrender.

Rowan Mangan:
I think it was in the Bible that it said, “Sufficient unto the day are the wiggles thereof.”

Martha Beck:
That was Jesus’ sermon on the mountain. “Blessed are the wiggly for they shall—”

Rowan Mangan:
They shall always wiggle.

Martha Beck:
They wiggle and they don’t fall down.

Rowan Mangan:
And if we just keep wiggling, guys.

Martha Beck:
Keep wiggling because—is it that time, yeah? It’s how we…

Rowan Mangan and Martha Beck:
Stay wild.

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.

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.